FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE COLLECTION REQUIREMENTS - THE INSPECTOR GENERAL'S SURVEY

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP86B00269R001100040005-0
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: T
• Document Page Count: 95
• Document Creation Date: December 19, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 6, 2006
• Sequence Number: 5
• Publication Date: December 1, 1966
• Content Type: STUDY

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Top Secret
FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE
COLLECTION REQUIREMENTS
The Inspector General's Survey
December
1966
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Top Secret
FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE
COLLECTION REQUIREMENTS
The Inspector General's Survey
December
1966
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 THE INSPECTOR GENERAL'S SURVEY
DECEMBER
1966
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 Principal Findings
Chapter I Introduction
Chapter II The Problem of Priorities
Chapter III Requirements for Collection by Human Sources
A. Long-Range Formal Requirements
B. Short-Range Specific Requirements
Chapter IV Collection Guidance
A. The Role of the Collection Guidance Staff (CGS)
B. The Current Intelligence Reporting List (CIRL)
C. Collection Guides
D. Guidance to the Domestic Contact Service (DCS)
E. Operational Support
F. Evaluation
Chapter V Some Problems of Requirements for SIGINT Collection
A. General Observations
B. Bridging the Gap Between Analyst and COMINT Collector
C. Duplication Between COMINT and Human-Source
Requirements in the Free World
D. Evaluation of COMINT
E. Quality of ELINT Product
I G. Operational Support to ELINT Collection
Chapter VI Requirements for Overhead Imagery
A. What We Collect
B. What We Can Use
C. What the U. S. Government Needs
Chapter VII The Information Explosion
Chapter VIII Responsibilities of Management
Annex A Charter of the Collection Guidance Staff
Annex B Requirements for SIGINT Collection
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PRINCIPAL FINDINGS
1. CIA is collecting too much information- -more than it can use
properly, probably far more than the Government needs. Like the rest
of the intelligence community it makes up for not collecting enough of the
right kind of information on the most important targets by flooding the
system with secondary matter.
Z. The quantity of information is degrading the quality of our
finished intelligence.
3. The Information Explosion has already gotten out of hand, yet
CIA and the community are developing ways to intensify it. Its deleterious
effects will certainly intensify as well., unless it is brought under rigorous
control.
4. We find that these excesses are a direct consequence of our several
independent requirements systems, whose defects have these principal
causes:
a. No one has ever defined what the Government truly needs
from the intelligence community, either as to fundamental require-
ments for U. S. policy or as to what can be put to best use by the
producers and readers of finished intelligence. The closest thing
to a definition has been the Priority National Intelligence Objectives,
a lamentably defective document which amounts to a ritual justifi-
cation of every kind of activity anybody believes to be desirable.
The community and CIA make their own assumptions as to what is
needed, and then do not challenge these assumptions sufficiently.
b. CIA's requirements for collection of information are a
catagogue of all the subjects individual consumers all over the
community have said they would like to know about. They are an
undiscriminated mixture of crucial and trivial, appropriate and
irrelevant, and are altogether too numerous for effective action,
either of collection or of production.
c. Management at all levels has allowed this proliferation
of requirements to go almost wholly unchecked.
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d. Resources for collection, especially technical collection,
greatly outweigh resources for production.
e. There is too little useful communication between originators
of requirements and those whose function it is to satisfy them.
f. The community has just begun to rationalize requirements,
collection, and production as between various systems.
5. At the same time we find that a number of efforts in the field of
collection guidance show encouraging signs of progress. These include
especially the work of the Collection Guidance Staff, and comprise not
only collection guidance as narrowly defined, but operational support by the
production analysts to the collectors and recent improvements in evaluations.
We find the gradually growing ability of CIA to tailor such guidance to the
capabilities of human sources to be far more valuable than any aspect of
the formal requirements process as currently managed. In the quanti-
tatively more productive fields of technical collection, however, the
community must first learn to tailor its requirements to its capabilities
for exploitation, and then devise means for limiting both to what the U. S.
Government truly needs.
6. Wherever possible we have made precise recommendations, as
for a complete overhaul of the IPC List, which is supposed to govern the
collection of information by the Clandestine Services, and for the handling
of ad hoc "numbered" requirements for collection by human sources
generally. Elsewhere we have had to be less specific, as in suggesting
means by which CIA could lead the community into a drastic revision of
the Priority National Intelligence Objectives- -means which ought to involve
the collective managerial judgment of CIA in determining what we are in
business for.
7. But the most important problem of all the is Atitate appetite
which has caused the Information Explosion--would be beyond the capacity
of any team of three inspectors to solve even if they were polymaths. We
are unable to judge which or how many among all the thousands of collection
requirements are valid; we can only observe the effects of unbridled excess.
The disease is gluttony, and a hundred bureaucratic pills to relieve the
Agency's chronic indigestion would not cure it. The will power will have
to be supplied by Agency management in a long series of individual decisions,
many of them now unforeseeable, at many levels and probably over several
years. We have nowhere recommended spending more money, hiring more
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people, or giving away Agency functions; even if these become necessary
it is first essential to reduce requirements.
8. The necessity for restraint is unlikely to be imposed on the
community from above, except in gross terms of budgets and ceilings.
It is unlikely to be recognized by the intelligence community outside CIA,
for the military habit of compiling encyclopedic requirements is too
deeply ingrained. (But we argue at several points that the potential
influence of CIA on the community's requirements as a whole is con-
siderably greater than it has yet attempted to exert. ) It is unlikely to
come from inside.GIJA below the upper levels, because the analysts who
originate requirements are long since habituated to asking for too much
and are not themselves in a position to make the hard managerial choices
which the general excess requires.
9. The excesses of the requirements systems and some of their
more important consequences are documented in great detail in our study,
sometimes almost to the point of stupefaction. Our best hope is that the
necessity for restraint will gradually percolate downward and outward
over time. To that end we solicit the earnest attention of the Deputy
Directors and their principal subordinates, both line and staff, to the
evidence we have compiled. Specific or general, our study and recom-
mendations argue for the adoption, at all appropriate levels of CIA, of
the following guidelines for action on requirements for collection of
information:
Define what we, as an Agency, believe the Government
needs from the intelligence community.
Challenge the community's and our own past assumptions
as to what is needed.
Identify the most important gaps that can be realistically
stated in terms of collection requirements and production goals.
Arrange these gaps in terms of collection and production
priorities.
Reduce the volume of requirements in order to gain more
effective collection and production action.
Train the analysts to write fewer and better requirements.
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Discriminate between the important and the trivial.
Adjust requirements on the several collection systems
so that they complement and support each other.
Record requirements that are levied orally.
Do not allow collection requirements to exceed the
capabilities of the processors and the analysts.
Make validation and coordination of requirements
systematic.
Review outstanding requirements periodically.
Improve feedback from collectors to analysts and
vice versa.
Systematize operational support.
Analyze the problem thoroughly--in terms of needs,
priorities, and capabilities for processing and analysis--
before committing the Agency to a new collection effort.
Improve guidance by evaluating what has already been
collected.
Stop trying to cover the whole world comprehensively
and superficially.
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1. In the American intelligence effort the word requirements is
surrounded by confusion, artificial complexity, and bureaucratic bumbling.
,It could be defined to encompass all needs for all types of activity, of
(, ollection, analysis, and production, of CIA and of the whole community.
In order to concentrate on those aspects where study might most fruitfully
lead to recommendations for improvement, we have defined the subject
narrowly as requirements levied on or by CIA for collection of information.
In the case of SIGINT and overhead reconnaissance, however, the strong
impact of community action on CIA has caused us to discuss requirements
in these fields in a community context.
2. Even within the narrow definition the word requirements contains
elements of at least five distinct types of relationship between those who
express needs for information and those whose job it is to satisfy them.
We distinguish these five as priorities,"requirements," collection guidance,
operational support, and evaluations. These relationships vary widely with
the means and difficulty of collection. The first two we consider mostly
sterile formalities, but we regard the last three together as demonstrating
that the Agency is beginning to make real progress in tailoring its needs
and capabilities to one another, and as holding out high hope for future
progress. In the study which follows we shall discuss these five elements
of the problem in detail as they apply to the various types of collection.
3. First, both chronologically and in intended importance, is the pro-
)lem of priorities. Does DCID No. 1/3, "Priority National Intelligence
Objectives, " satisfy the community's need to assure itself and higher authority
that we are all working on the most important problems, rather than dis-
sipating much of our effort on what is merely interesting and fairly useful?
We believe it does not. We also believe that no other device serves this
purpose, that the word priorities has long since lost all meaning, and that
it is up to management to restore that meaning. Efforts by committees,
c ompilations, mechanical approaches, have repeatedly degenerated into
l-orse-trading designed to keep everybody happy by making everything look
like Priority A-1. What does provide some assurance of concentrating on
t'-le true priorities of collection, within limits and inevitably with some time
lag, is the accumulating experience of the collectors, combining a trained
sense of what is important with a pragmatic knowledge of what will work.
Where this asset may go astray, out of habit or narrowness of vision, it is
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only executive decision which can define priorities and make them stick.
Such definition needs more analysis and support by the production elements
of CIA than it has traditionally received.
4. In Chapter II we recommend that CIA managers, beginning with the
chiefs of the substantive divisions and offices, formulate their views on the
proper content of DCID No. 1/2 ("Comprehensive National Intelligence
Objectives") and DCID No. 1/3 (the PNIOs) to the end that CIA can develop
an Agency position on them and then take the lead in persuading USIB to
revise them. We also recommend that the PNIOs be limited to questions
affecting our national survival and be explicitly so defined, so that all other
valid intelligence questions, of whatever local or temporary importance,
will be recognized as aspects of our normal work.
5. In its narrowest sense of specific needs for acquiring information,
the word requirements has at least six meanings, often contradictory and
always confusing. Its indiscriminate use over many years has created a
false impression of system and order, with elaborate machine records and
other bookkeeping devices wh ich have the effect of emphasizing quantity at
the expense of quality and of concealing the absence of creative managerial
supervision. The bulk of the work of handling requirements is left to staffs
which inevitably have more influence over the mechanics of the system than
over its content, and to committees in which every member inevitably has
an ax to grind; ultimately it depends on the widely varying work habits of
hundreds of individual analysts. The result is a haphazard agglomeration of
things people would like to know. Each specific requirement is allowed to
seem equally important with all others except those few to which manage-
ment has deliberately given a special push. Almost all lack directive force,
since they originate outside the chain of command, so that the most basic
meaning of the word--an obligation to act--is not among the six in common
usage. For most types of requirements there is no satisfactory method of
confirming that the question was worth asking, nor for validating the appro-
priateness of collecting information to answer it by this or that specific
means. We are still in the earliest stages of an ability to correlate require-
ments among all the different systems of collection. Requirements officers
have worked earnestly for years to make the disconnected systems run
smoothly, and have made some progress in reducing redundancy, triviality,
and busy work, but until management itself takes a strong hand in identifying,
refining, validating, and enforcing requirements the system will consist
to a disquieting degree of requirements officers talking to each other.
The dialogue we need to develop, far beyond what we now have, is between
producers and collectors.
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6. We have found no evidence that any intelligence failure could be
attributed to lack of requirements. We believe on the contrary that some
deficiencies in intelligence arise from asking too many questions too often,
diffusing the effort of both collectors and producers, and foundering in the
ocean of information that results. The post-mortem on the missile crisis
>f 1962 pointed clearly to this conclusion. The shrill urgency of require-
ments on the Soviet military build-up produced a flood of low-level reporting
)n Cuba, almost all of it unsatisfactory, that diverted attention from the
.'eti, reports which later on turned out to have been good, The multiplicity
of requirements reinforces the numbers racket, our natural weakness for
measuring our effectiveness by, the number of reports produced.
7. The six distinct usages of the word requirements are:
a. The encyclopedic. Ever since World War II, when
requirements were called "Essential Elements of Information,"
the military approach to the problem has been to ask for every-
thing about everything. It is best exemplified by the current
DIA Manual, which, after devoting one thick volume to the
bureaucratic rules for collecting and reporting, devotes another
to a catalogue of requirements on all the countries in the
world, and then fills volumes of collection guides with scores of
chapters which spell out the details desired. The manual is
designed with extreme military thoroughness for use by people
who have had little intelligence training or experience, so that
they can report information literally by the numbers--i. e.
keyed both to the Intelligence Subject Code and to a specified
structure of priorities combining three levels of importance
with three levels of urgency of response, lA through 3C. (It
used to be 5 x 5, IA through 5E.) It does not discriminate
among the vastly different systems of collection. And though
the collection guides are impressive handbooks on what we
already know, a prudent Defense attache will take the require-
ments volume as an instruction to report everything. For CIA,
which receives numerous copies, the manual is a catalogue of
requests, not requirements, but its existence is a powerful
stimulus to the belief that once you have codified every need,
the problem is mostly solved; all that remains is for everybody
to carry out orders. The encyclopedic: approach puts both judg-
ment and gumption in a straitjacket.
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b. Formal long-term guidance. This differs only in scale
and time span from the encyclopedic.
(1) The most conspicuous example inside CIA is the
IPG List published by USIB's Interagency Clandestine
Collection Priorities Committee (IPC) to govern the col-
lection of the Clandestine Services. Its comprehensiveness
long ago extinguished all meaning from the word priority
along with its intended relevance to the PNIOs. It blurs
or ignores the distinction between what we know and what
we still lack, and the importance of its subjects varies
wildly among the hundreds of questions which fill a thick
book. It is always under revision but large sections are
out of date for months or years, and the effort to confine
it to subjects appropriate only for clandestine collection,
as required by DCID No. 5/5, has never been successful.
In Chapter III we recommend a revision of the DCID, and
a complete overhaul of the IPC List. Meanwhile, the DDP
does have his own generally effective instrument for formal
long-term guidance- -effective because it is usually tailored
to reality, has directive force, and excludes the trivial.
This is the Related Mission Directive to each station.
(3) The long-term objectives for the Agency's use of
overhead reconnaissance are fixed basically by the capa-
bilities designed into the vehicles and by guidance provided
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by USIB in its review of the recommendations of its
Committee on Overhead Reconnaissance (COMOR).
Requirements for collection by this means receive
elaborate and detailed managerial scrutiny; we find,
however, that the community achieves vast and efficient
collection at the expense of optimum exploitation. Even
more important, for some years neither collection nor
exploitation has, in our view, been subjected to sufficiently
rigorous examination and limitation in terms of the
Government's irreducible requirements for information
from overhead reconnaissance.
c. The third type of specific requirements is the kind levied
by individual analysts anywhere in the community. Along with the
three remaining types it is managed by a formal ad hoc numbered
requirements system; in the absence of strong executive control
:,.ere are some of its principal characteristics:
(1) The number of specific requirements on the books for
collection by the Clandestine Services I las supple- 25X1
ments to the IPC Lists and other devices, runs well over 900,
though analysts have levied hundreds more informally with-
out registering them with the Collection Guidance Staff (CGS)
or the requirements officers of the FI Staff. The effort to
keep track of them requires several systems of bookkeeping
and machine runs, only partially compatible; long debates
whether a given requirement duplicates something in the IPC
List or some other requirement; Aesopian language about
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"acceptance" or "rejection"; bureaucratic fiddling with
expiration dates and renewals, and much pompous and
sterile correspondence. In short it takes so much bureau-
cratic formalism to keep the numbered- requirements
system working smoothly that it is fatally easy to lose sight
of what it is for: to improve collection. And all this
despite the observable fact that hard-working and intel-
ligent requirements officers, especially in CGS, the FI
Staff, and some of the area divisions of the Clandestine
Services, have brought more judgment and order into
the system ,.rear by year.
(2) The system also produces tiresome controversy
whether one customer is favored over another (e. g. , the
Air Force over OSI), derogatory comparisons between
collectors I I and much
puerile grousing about the other fellow's lack of coopera-
tion and understanding, along with building of paper records
to prove it. In general it perpetuates the anachronistic
tribal divisions within CIA which in other respects we have
all gone a long way to overcome. Two of our recommenda-
tions concern resolving the anomalous position of CGS as
a spokesman for both the DDI and the DDS&T, and rotation
of officers between CGS and FI. Both these recommenda-
tions can be expected to arouse strong opposition; the
stronger it is the more it will verify our conclusion that
something needs doing soon to correct the tribal situation--
if not by the means we propose, then by some other. If
for example CGS and its opposite numbers in FI cannot air
their differences frankly and adjust what each finds so
irritating in the other, then their supervisors ought to do
it for them. No one can claim that CGS and FI get along
well now, or that it doesn't matter; the situation not only
damages the whole formal requirements system but ham-
pers the development of fruitful collection guidance, which
is far more important. The same is true to a lesser
degree of the tribal division between CGS and the offices
of the DDS&1, and of the tendency of the area divisions to
b~rpass the FI Staff,
(3) What goes into the system is governed much more
b,.' the work habits of analysts and even of whole organiza-
tions than !.:r rational determination of the Government's
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needs for information. This is proved by the sharp con-
trast between the Pentagon, which recently had 316 require-
ments outstanding against CIA collection, and the Department
of State, which had only 39. Within CIA, OSI levies many
more specific requirements than all the offices of the DDI put
together. One OSI analyst wrote 52 requirements in 1965;
hundreds of analysts in other offices wrote none.
Many of those who levy requirements could not prove
that the information they desire is not already available,
because filling out a form asking a collector to collect is
often easier than hard digging in the files and in libraries;
it also passes the buck. The apparent motive for some
requirements is self-protection: to build an impressive
record exculpating the analyst from any responsibility for
failure by proving that he has asked all the right questions
over and over again. At the other extreme there is no way
of telling whether the analysts who write no requirements
do not need to do so or are neglecting one of their possible
functions out of ignorance.
Most written requirements are simple requests for
information, without explanation why or discrimination as
to relative importance or urgency among the items requested.
Most are submitted without validation at any level above
the author, so that there is no confirmation that the need is
real and no basis for comparing one need with another.
Altogether the number and nature of requirements
bear no relation either to the importance of the subject or
to the size of the gaps in our information about it.
All this argues for much closer managerial supervision
of requirements. We recommend in Chapter VIII that the
chief of every substantive division under the DDI and the
DDS&T be made responsible for regularly reviewing all the
requirements levied by his division and still current, and
for validating each one submitted henceforth; that the chief
of every substantive office make himself generally familiar
with the stated requirements of his divisions, with special
attention to the proper identification of priorities and gaps.
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We also recommend that each office make sure its analysts
are trained in the proper preparation of requirements,
proper use of the facilities and skills of the Collection
Guidance Staff, and development of useful contacts with
the collectors through these facilities.
d. The fourth type of specific requirement is that produced
in response to the NIP, or Notice of Intelligence Potential. This
is a highly effective instrument for alerting any appro- 25X1
priate element of the community that a specific collection oppor-
tunity exists. It has its counterparts in the Defector Committee's
formal notices about the knowledge ability of newly acquired defectors,
and in the highly selective informal solicitation of briefs for certain
agents and other operations of the Clandestine Services. The system
works smoothly, and the Agency has developed considerable skill
in reacting quickly to such opportunities. There could and ought
to be considerably more solicitation of briefs by the Clandestine
Services against known collection capabilities, but otherwise this
type of requirement needs little supervision because it involves no
large outlay of time and money for uncertain results of doubtful value.
In this respect the solicited requirement is far superior to the other
elements of the ad hoc, numbered-requirement system with which
it is lumped together. Accordingly we recommend strong concen-
tration upon the solicited requirement as the best kind for improving
collection, and far less reliance on the other kinds whose stale
formalities clog the system.
e. A fifth type of paper work called requirements is in fact
a request to process information already collected. It ought to be
removed from the numbered-requirements system and called by
another name. Here the typical case concerns specific types of
readout by NPIC and the Imagery Analysis Division (IAD). The
managerial problem concerns both the question whether a given
job is worth doing and the adjustment of available man-hours to
the work load requested. In passing we note that the Clandestine
Services place a greater number of specific "support" require-
ments on various elements subordinate to the DDI (especially IAD)
and the DDS&T, for the processing of information already col-
lected, than the other two place on them for collection of information.
f. The sixth type of request called a requirement is in reality
a kind of work order, for example for IAD to produce duplicates
of photographs, make up briefing boards, etc. --a function which
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amounts to 15% of its work load. Handling such actions in the
numbered-requirements system, as if they were comparable
in nature and difficulty with requirements for espionage, illustrates
why elaborate statistics on requirements and actions to satisfy
them are likely to conceal the true gravity of the collection-require-
ments problem.
8, Characteristic of all these methods of stating needs for information
is he fact that simply asking the question is never enough. It must be pre-
sented in a certain way, different for each type of collection, which permits
the collector to figure out what action on his part might answer it. The
clearest demonstration of the point is in SIGINT: an ELINT collection officer
must translate a requirement for the characteristics of a type of radar, say,
into a tasking order which sends a particular airplane with specified equip-
ment and an appropriately trained operator aboard to a specific spot on the
globe. Target lists for overhead reconnaissance are no better than waste-
paper until orbits, camera-on-time, and other operational details are computed.
So much is obvious, but what is not generally recognized is that the same
principle applies to collection by human beings. The IPC List, which sets
the tore and pattern for all such requirements, tells the collector for
example that we need "design specifications and performance data" on a
wide variety of Soviet weapons and delivery vehicles. This is a completely
futile statement until it is broken down into what we know and what we don't,
wl'at gaps are crucial, and how and where the answers might be found. To
learn these things the collector needs all the help he can get, especially in
the technical field, and this means drastically increased communication
with the experts for whose use he is collecting the information. Without
such help in all those fields in which the collector is not himself a past
master, formal requirements are lifeless, self-deceiving hypocrisies.
9. Another characteristic of the requirements process as it applies
to all collection systems is that it is necessary to become accustomed to
several varieties of group patois. In moving from one area of inquiry to
another one crosses an isogloss; the dialects on either side of the line have
large areas of mutual unintelligibility. For this report we have tried to
find a linguistic common denominator, though some stubborn granules of
jargon are bound to remain. We have tried to concentrate on generally
understood meaning, rather than rigid definition, and have resisted (not
alw?.vay:-s successfully) the temptation to impose arbitrary definitions of our
own. if we have thus walked away from the semantics problem we have
done so by design, believing that efforts to legislate language are bound
to fail.
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10. Still another problem of formulating requirements is that the
community has not mastered the art, and necessity, of generalizing. The
tendency to ask for everything possibly relevant is even more pronounced
in general requirements than in the specific ones; this is an inadvertent
but natural result of trying to make each general requirement brief. One
sinipl" raises the level of abstraction, and the collector is allowed to
believe that every report or document or intercept or photograph which
bears even remotely on the subject will. be of value. The extremu;ly high
level of abstraction which characterizes the [PC List is one of its most
serious defects, especially on military matters. But even overhead imagery,
for w-b.ich the collection requirements are so carefully tailored, is subjected
to he same difficulty in the exploitation phase.
Here in a nutshell is an essential element of the whole requirements problem:
sensible communication 'etween the analyst and those who must supply him
with information, founded in a true understanding of their interacting pro-
b_lems. Our study persuades us that careful management and training can
bring t-.-.e Agency much closer to that ideal.
11. After this generally melancholy recital of the defects of priorities
and formal requirements, it is a pleasure to turn to more cheerful subjects.
The Agency's record with respect to the other types of relationship between
collectors and their customers is far brighter and more hopeful. A good
thi-ig too, because it is by developing our skills at collection guidance,
operational support, and evaluations (all treated in our Chapter IV) that
we can best improve collection.
12. All three of these subjects are related aspects of the same
furction: the application of the expert's insight, imagination, and initiative
to the problems of the collector. What is usually distinguished as collection
guidance is well exemplified by the Current [ntelligence Reporting List
(GIRL), which is published by CGS in seven volumes, each of about a
hu. d;*e,' pages. covering one area of the world and revised every four
m(nt;cns. It is by all odds the most widely used material of its kind that
we k -ow of. Our stations overseas consult and respect it, and Foreign
Se -vice officers point out that they receive no such comprehensive but
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explicit compilation of questions of interest from the Department of State.
It is the best over-all guidance available
13. Unfortunately its compilation is rather haphazard, because of
the difficulty of cajoling contributions from analysts, and its presentation
is niechanccal and repetitious because of the pressure of deadlines. But
in the CTRL the Collection Guidance Staff is clearly onto a good thing.
More cooperation from analysts, more or better background information
in nian-; cases, less recital of questions to which the answers are either
esscntia]1\7 unknowable or should be sought in research rather than col-
lectio-r_, and the product would be unbeatable.
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of nollection for that isolated fact it is uniquely equipped to acquire, an
integration of the tribes, and a joint fixing of focus. That would be a far
cr, from reliance on the sterotyped one-to-one correlation between opera-
tions and large general needs which still appears to govern much of our
thinking, especially about clandestine operations.
20. Our fifth type of relationship is evaluations. By this is generally
meant assessment of raw information produced by human sources on a given
subject or area in terms of its relationship to the facts, and to needs,
priorities, and requirements. Its logical result is improved guidance to
the collector. Unfortunately the necessity for critical, intensive evaluation
of SIGINT has been recognized only during the past few years, partly because
by its nature SIGINT was assumed to be accurate information and therefore
valaable, while other information was relegated to a lower status by being
called "collateral.'' At any rate rising costs, declining readability, tech-
nical change, and an inexorable need to choose among alternatives have all
made it clear that we must intensify our critical evaluation of SIGINT, and
the community has set about devising a method. It has not yet faced the
roughly similar necessity for evaluating the total product of overhead recon-
naissance, or of any important large aspect of it. Any ability to evaluate
all our collection together, even on a single subject, is still far beyond us,
but it begins to look as if the development of techniques for applying standards
of cost-effectiveness will come to have a steadily larger place in our planning.
21. CIA has no system for evaluation as the DIA does. Assessments
are performed in independent isolation throughout the Agency and at various
levels. Since 1959 the Fl Staff, for example, has produced some 87 studies
of reporting from or about individual countries. Recent studies show a high
degree of skill which must make them among the DDP's most effective tools
for improving field collection and reporting. Within his area divisions, down
to the country desk, similar assessment is a daily function, spanning the
range from the product of a single project to that of an entire division.
22. The CGS has made a promising beginning on an evaluation pro-
gram, and is finding useful ways to combine its machine-records facilities
and its links w ith production offices in this field. We believe that the CGS
has learned some lessons about the evaluation process which would be of
valte even to the experienced old hands of the Clandestine Services, and we
have recommended closer relations between CGS and FI Staff's Require-
ments and Evaluations Branch which should produce a fruitful interchange
of experience and skills. Throughout this study we argue for strong
managerial attention to priorities and requirements; an essential adjunct
to toil attention is the development in CGS of steadily more informative
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correlations between these priorities and requirements and what is actually
collected to satisfy them. Such a development will require not only more
and more skill in blending machine records and human judgments, but in
particular more skill in correlating the yields from all the different modes
of collection--human and technical, written and oral, overt and clandestine.
We believe that CGS can help CIA management determine what is redundant,
marginal, or inappropriate in the requirements it levies upon these widely
disparate systems. At the same time it will go on being necessary for the
collectors to evaluate their own products so long as the guidance now reaching
them from outside their own ranks is so imperfectly tailored to operational
realities. We believe that evaluation programs must be improved wherever
the skill and will exist, but that CGS should be generally cognizant of all
such programs in the Agency, both to maximize their value and to prevent
the analysts from being unnecessarily burdened with uncoordinated and
repetitive requests.
23. Throughout the processes for formulating requirements and col-
lection guidance we have seen a need for greatly increased and more
systematic feedback from the collectors to the analysts. Lack of feedback
is a principal reason that requirements, especially for the Clandestine
Services, are unreal and impractical; we propose a kind of dialogue which
will both give the analyst the information he deserves as to the chances his
needs will be met, and lessen pointless pressures on the collector. Simi-
larly-, we believe that if the FI Staff made available to its CIA customers,
through CGS, sanitized versions of its own evaluations, as showing which
collection gaps have relevance for Clandestine Services operations, it
could gradually train the analysts to express their needs with some degree
of practical realism. Here as elsewhere the trick will be to (a) foster
greatly increased communication at all levels and by all means formal
and informal, (b) keep sufficient track of this communication to focus and
manac-e it, and yet (c) at the same time not discourage gumption and ima-
ginative initiative. That is a tall order, but not trying to fill it will mean
flo zr.de.ring in a constantly more expensive diffusion of effort.
24. All the relationships we have been discussing have a long
histor_'-; each has been looked at separately many times in the past. One
of he negative virtues of this study is that we have spared the reader
mar.}- pages of history by throwing out great chunks of earlier drafts, but
reminding him of two earlier studies may help to emphasize the point
that mere diagnosis and good intentions will get us nowhere:
a. In 1960 the Joint Study Group on Foreign Intelligence
Activities of the United States Government devoted about a sixth
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of its long report to cataloguing the deficiencies of the community's
requirements systems and to recommending sweeping changes.
The criticisms a--e for the most part still valid today.
b. In 1962 the Requirements Facility Study Group, operating
out of OCR, published a report which was influential in the creation
of the Collection Guidance Staff under the DDI. It identified and con-
centrated on six problems with requirements: overlap and duplication,
security barriers, lack of adequate collection analysis and planning,
misuse of priorities, unrealistic and duplicative collection uides,
and a weak and ineffective system for evaluating information reports.
It does not detract from the many achievements of CGS and others
to say that most of these problems are still with us and have been
ioined by others which reflect the growing complexity and size of
U. S. intelligence.
25. Such historical notes inspire caution: No one should look to this
present study for instant remedies to age-old problems. The best to be
'roped is that its recommendations, suggestions, and challenges to old
assumptions will gradually over time encourage useful new approaches.
In particular we hope that this study will cause its readers to challenge
and then reshape the assumption which underlay the CIA Long Range Plan
of 1965: that CIA "must be allowed to grow to meet ever increasing demands
from t-,-.e Government for intelligence on a world that becomes constantly
more complex, " and that if the Government reaches a conscious decision
that th.e Agency should not expand to the degree that we propose, then it
must relieve the Agency of some of these responsibilities. "
26. What we argue for is not expansion but redefinition and refine-
ment of our functions. It is to this conclusion that a survey of collection
requirements leads. CIA's conception of its job causes it to require too
muc' , then to collect too much, publish too much, try to read too much--
and end icy understanding too little. It is clear that the community has
too nia_r,, collection requirements so long as there is no restraint imposed
workable standards of validation, but there is a larger cause for anxiety.
The constant emphasis on quantity of collection, most noticeable in the
most expensive modes of collection where the quantity of material collected
appears to justify the outlandish cost, is in our view certain to degrade the
quality of our finished intelligence. Our discussion of the Information
Explosion treats it gloomily as a phenomenon already much larger than
a ma -'s hand, and argues for the judgment that it is already making our
finishes: intelligence steadily more superficial.
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Z7. It is for that reason that this study has what is probably an unusually
cantankerous tone. It would be unwarranted and regrettable if any reader
inte^preted any of our many criticisms as an attack on any person or group
or an imputation of negligence, incompetence, or stupidity. Some of the fer-
vor of the criticisms reflects a high opinion of CIA's ability to improve, but
mostly it reflects the gloom induced by this, the Agency's first effort to look
at all its collection requirements as a single enormous whole. Our analyses
and recommendations reject much of the traditional wisdom and attitudes,
but ce are not saying that our own wisdom is superior or that we would have
avoided the excesses we criticize. What we are saying is that our look at
all collection requirements together causes us to argue for considerable
charge, greater than any of the many earlier studies of isolated aspects of
the -problem have proposed.
29. In the end our study boils down to two hopes: that the working
level of CIA can achieve much closer communication across the tribal
boundaries, and that management--especially at the level of division and
office- -can exert much closer control and influence upon the content and the
mechanics of the requirements system. But underlying these hopes is the
conviction that CIA must, in the interest of U. S. security, redefine its own
job, narrowly- enough to focus all our collectively great abilities upon
quality of intelligence, not quantity. We believe that the best definition of
the -unction of CIA and American intelligence can only come from the
senor American intelligence officer and his immediate lieutenants, and hope
that this analysis of one aspect of it can somewhat clarify the problem.
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1. In the intelligence vocabulary the most abused and perverted word,
and therefore the least respected, is the word priority. Through the years
thousands of man-hours have gone into defining, listing, and revising
priorities in one document after another. We believe this study will demon-
strate that the effort to establish priorities has not only failed to achieve
its professed purpose but in many ways has positively damaged American
intelligence.
2. The word priority has kept some meaning when it has been applied
to a specific activity by managers responsible for that activity, as in tasking
a single overhead reconnaissance mission or instructing a station chief by
means of the Related Mission Directive. But the effort to set priorities has
been a conspicuous failure when it has purported to govern the activity of
the community as a whole, as in DCID No. 1/3 (Priority National Intelligence
Objectives--PNIOs), or to speak for the community, as in the IPC List
intended to guide the collection activities of the Clandestine Services. We
ha-, e uncovered no convincing evidence that a single man-hour or dollar
would have been spent differently on collection if that kind of effort had
never been made.
3. The very concept of priority, as forcing a choice among alter-
natives. has been meaningless for years. USIB's directive on the subject
has no directive force, and the only use anyone makes of it is to cite some
phrase to prove that his own activity is crucial to the national security.
The language of the directive makes this very easy for nearly everybody to
do.
4. It was not always so. The DC I's obligation to establish and pub-
lish national intelligence objectives, both comprehensive and priority, has
been explicit in the NSCIDs since 1947. The first list of seven PNIOs,
issued in September 1950, rigorously excluded all subjects (even the Korean
War) xhich did not bear directly on the overriding, long-range question
of Soviet capabilities and intentions against the U. S. --in short, on our
national survival. In 1952 the same list of seven items was reissued with
no change except that "Soviet" became "the USSR and its Satellites (including
Communist China). " An eighth was added in 1953, but it too concerned the
survival of the U.S. All these lists conveyed a sense not of priority merely,
but of real urgency.
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5. In 1954 the dam broke. The single page of Objectives was
expanded to four, with three levels of priority and 38 items. From then
on the lists got longer and longer, by descending to such matters as
"anti-American sentiment in Iceland." In 1962 the list contained 51
Objectives which strung together hundreds of individual questions by
semLcolons and blanket allusions to "European Satellites, " "international
Communist f-ont organizations, " "Latin American governments and peoples,
"the situation in Asia, " etc. There were now four levels of priority,
requiring four specified degrees of effort: maximum, intensive, major,
and, at the bottom, priority. (" 'When I use a word, P said Humpty Dumpty,
it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.' ") By
themselves the nine items in the first two categories would have amounted
to a statement of real and defensible priorities. But the third and fourth
contained 42 Objectives embodying hundreds of individual questions in
specific: references to 48 countries by name and blanket allusions to most
others .
6. Acting on its ad hoc committee's report entitled "Revitalization
of the PNIOs, " USIB in 1963 boiled down these 51 Objectives to ten, by
corn Dining eight or nine in some cases into one, and by retreating into
even larger generalities. The annual list for 1965 directed priority atten-
tion to all Communist countries, all the countries of Latin America and
Africa and Southeast Asia and the Middle East, and all non-Bloc countries
interested in nuclear energy and advanced weapons. It identified "for
priority treatment" some 25 countries by name, plus the Arab states,
"Communist parties throughout the world, " etc. , and even so found room
for four specific allusions to Cuba.
7. Meanwhile, the ad hoc committee had pointed out that USIB had
no mechanism for implementing its directive. The PNIOs of 1963-65
were therefore prefaced with what amounted to an elaborate disavowal of
responsibility, beginning:
".... This Directive is but a first step toward determina-
tion of the priority, if any, to be accorded to particular
collection requirements by particular systems of collection."
The real job of determining what needs collecting was assigned to unspecified
"research personnel," who were admonished to take four specific further
steps towards the establishment of priority requirements for collection.
To the best of our knowledge this admonition has never been heeded by
anybody in any way which would give DCID No. 1/3 directive force. And
the decision what priority to give to collecting against these requirements
was bucked to ''responsible collection authorities. "
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8. One of the many defects of this format was its advertisement
of USIB's inability to enforce action on its own priorities, though NSCID
No. I requires only that a DCID identify PNIOs and that they be issued
for general intelligence guidance. " Another defect was the almost
exclusive emphasis on collection, the most decentralized function of the
community, rather than on production, which USIB is in a better position
to influence. The most centralized function of all, and most responsive
to the demands of USIB, is that of National Estimates; yet, as Mr. Bross
pointed out in a memorandum two years ago, any correlation between the
PNIOs and USIB's scheduling of most estimates is so tenuous as to be
coincidental. Thus not even USIB takes the PNIOs seriously except when
they are presented for the periodic ritual revision. The fact that on
1 July 1966 USIB excised two of their worst defects and deleted four
Objectives which had gone unchallenged for years,, in an action which took
about thirty seconds, points at least as much to lack of interest as to con-
vict.or. that the changes were improvements.
9. Do the PNIOs serve any useful purpose at all? Two are some-
times alleged, and unconvincingly: that they do in fact influence action,
and that, even if they don't, they at least forestall criticism.
10. On the first score, of all the many senior officers of CIA who
have had repeatedly to work on the PNIOs, we have found none who claims
for them either validity or utility. Long or short, specific or hopelessly
general, the PNIOs have always been the product of haggling among the con-
flicting vested interests of the community, and since 1954 have always had
the effect of ratifying those interests by including something for everybody.
11. In this connection it is important to note that the lists have not
expressed the unhampered judgment of the Board of National Estimates,
whi::h, except in 1963 when the ad hoc committee fixed the recent format,
has been responsible for drafting and coordinating them. It is safe to say
that any list which did represent the Board's judgment would not be accept-
able to USIB, as not giving sufficient emphasis to some interest of one or
more members. Four times a year the Board is torn between an urge to
improve the PNIOs and the necessity to get them through USIB. Since it
must quickly turn its attention to many other matters where its judgments
make more diffe rence, the Board has naturally given far less critical
attention to what looks like a pointless mechanical exercise than it gives
to any estimate however minor. USIB in turn gives only perfunctory atten-
tion to the PNIOs except when someone feels his vested interest has been
slighted.
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12. The two best evidences that the PNIOs make no practical dif-
ference are found in the community's actions on Communist China and on
Soviet research and development. The PN[Os have given Communist China
all but equal top-billing with the Soviet Union ever since 1954. Of the 51
Objectives of 1962, no fewer than 25 relate to China equally with the Soviet
Union, or to China exclusively, or to China's relations with other named
countries and areas down to and including Albania. But neither the size,
the scope, nor the intensity of the American intelligence effort against
China has ever reflected this degree of emphasis. General Reynolds's
"Report or. China Entelligence, " dated 14 October 1965, makes clear how
little has been accomplished towards solving the China problem by the
mere declaration of priorities and proliferation of requirements, and
how much more depends on managerial action with respect to allocation of
resources. money, slots, recruitment, training, etc.
13. Even so, one of General Reynolds's interesting findings is that
the c ommunity has collected more information I I on
some important subjects, I
than it has resources with which to exploit
it. To us this is a consequence of the community's persistent tendency to
regard priorities and requirements as primarily problems of collection,
with far less regard for the ultimate utility of the material collected. Thus
until collection and production are brought into balance, collection is allowed
to s( em an end in itself. Another of General Reynolds's findings is that if
the , ornmunity hired all the Sinologists emerging from the universities for
the next several years, it would still not have enough to do all the jobs it
has dentified as essential. So remote from reality have our priorities
been allowed to become.
14. Similarly. Soviet research and development have received great
emphasis in the PNIOs for many years. In the days when the PNIOs had
three jr four levels of priority, R&D always appeared in the top level and
elsexhere, the lists are replete with references to future Soviet capabilities
in nuclear energy, advanced weapons, space, biological and chemical war-
fare, etc. Specific requirements likewise have been so familiar for years
that when Admiral Raborn asked each military service to list its needs for
information on Soviet R&D, nothing new emerged. Yet the effort to concen-
trate attention on R&D for priority collection action, as requiring special
emphasis over and above our general effort on the Soviet Union's current
capabilities, is of only recent date.
15. Until they are drastically reformed, the PNIOs will remain a
deac letter, a means of evading the necessity for hard thought and hard
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choices, and a reproach to the common sense of the community. It is
precisely the lack of interest by management, at several levels both
inside and outside CIA, which allowed the PNIOs to degenerate into vacuity,
and it will take the interest of management to give them any force and
effe,:t.
16. Meanwhile the PNIOs will go on being cited as justification for
continuing or expanding any and all activities, though never for diminishing
or abolishing them when their priority declines. (Any proposal for deleting
an Objective does raise fears among a few upper-middle officers--as hap-
pened again only recently--that it will bring a cut in their budgets, but the
record suggests that their fears are unfounded.)
17. This citation of the PNIOs to ratify some activity appears to rest
on toe untenable assumption that the existence of some Objective, however
worthy in itself, guarantees the appropriateness of the means proposed for
achieving it. The "Planning Assumptions, Goals, and Objectives, " issued
in January 1966 by the Office of Planning, Programming and Budgeting,
contain some twenty references to priorities and more to requirements, as
if they had been properly identified, tested, and validated. Only two of
these references mention the PNIOs as such, but most other references to
''priority national intelligence requirements'and similar phrases assume
that the fundamental intelligence needs of the U. S. Government have been
defined and agreed and are beyond challenge. They have not been, and they
are not.
18. It is true, however, that one of the Goals is "to define priority
intelligence needs" with respect to production of intelligence. This is a
way of saying that the PNIOs have never fulfilled the function emphatically
ass gned to them by NSCID No. 1:
"... the establishment of specific priorities for the
production of national and other intelligence and for
collection and other activities in support thereof.
(Underlining supplied.)
19. Some priorities and requirements have indeed been defined and
agreed up to a certain level of authority--by USIB itself with respect to
certain aspects of the technical collection methods, considered as single
isolated systems, and separately by committees like JAEIC and GMAIC
within their respective fields. But many of the decisions are left to com-
mittees and subcommittees and groups of specialists who naturally feel
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that their own interests are of overriding importance, and who inevitably
push for expansion of programs to satisfy them. The community has
achieved only the primitive beginnings of a capability to correlate one
system of collection with another, so that each can concentrate on filling
the crucial gaps it is uniquely equipped to fill, and it has not even begun to
distinguish between what is essential and what is merely desirable. The
net product of our present approach to collection is an emphasis on quantity
for quantity's sake. Hence the Information Explosion, and the failure of
exploitation to keep pace with collection.
20. This study will present several recommendations designed to
involve responsible authority at appropriate levels in fixing priorities,
validating requirements, identifying and concentrating on gaps in collection,
and narrowing the disparity between collection and production. We believe
that these are inalienable functions of management, not to be delegated to
standing committees of necessarily narrow purview or to staffs which must
necessarily devote more attention to the workings of the requirements
system than to its content. Since the PNIOs are the fountainhead from which
many actions are expected or assumed to flow, we believe that making them
effective will be a start towards the other reforms needed.
21. Another justification usually given for the PNIOs is equally remote
from reality: that they serve the strictly political, prudential purpose of
assuring higher authority and interested outsiders that the community knows
what the most important problems are.
22. The PNIOs have always purported to be valid for planning purposes
for a long period into the future; recently they have specified five years.
Yet their record for predicting future U.S. intelligence interests is dismal.
They have consistently failed to identify in advance those local problems
which in the event commanded overriding attention from the community.
Here are some examples:
a. The PNIOs published on 30 September 1958 contained
48 Priority Objectives of which only these two, among the 16 labeled
Third Priority, mentioned Latin America:
"m. Militant nationalism in Latin America, in-
cluding the European dependencies and the West
Indies Federation, with particular respect to anti-
U.S. sentiment, Communist exploitation of that
sentiment, and Bloc political and economic pene-
tration; the availability to the U. S. of strategic
materials.
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"n. The stability and policies of the govern-
ments of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile,
Guatemala, and Venezuela. "
At that moment the Cuban revolution was in high gear and Castro
was within three months of controlling the country. We did begin
to catch up with the headlines in the next version, when Castro
had been in power for 17 months, by mentioning him in the last of
11 Third Priority Objectives of 24 May 1960:
"k. Political disturbances and social unrest
affecting the stability of the governments of the
Caribbean area, with particular reference to the
stability, internal policy, and international acti-
vities of the Castro regime in Cuba. "
From then on Castro moved steadily upward in the lists, especially
after he proclaimed himself a Marxist-Leninist in December 1961.
By early 1964 the PNIOs contained five references to Cuba and
Castro (plus two in the concurrent quarterly supplement), and only
this reference to all the rest of Latin America:
"7. The reactions of Latin American governments
and peoples to developments in and with respect to
Cuba; the vulnerabilities of particular countries
/which countries ?/ to subversion and to Communist
political penetration. "
This was the priority in effect at the time of the revolution in Brazil.
As recently as June 1966 we were operating under PNIOs which men-
tioned "Cuban strategic military forces" in the same breath with
those of the USSR and Communist China.
b. If it were possible to be usefully specific in advance, the
PNIOs of August 1963 would have contained some reference to the
internal political situation in South Vietnam, which had been deteri-
orating since the disturbances in Hue on 8 May and was to lead to
the assassination of Diem and his brother in November. Instead, the
PNIOs sandwiched a vague allusion to Southeast Asia in between
other vague allusions to Latin America and the Arab States, and the
accompanying quarterly supplement defined the special interest in
Southeast Asia over the next six months in these words:
"4. Southeast Asia. The situation in Laos is
already the object of intense intelligence interest.
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Within that context, the relative influence
of the USSR, Communist China, and North
Vietnam on that situation and the intentions
of each are matters of critical current impor-
tance. A critical situation may also develop,
within the next six months, regarding the
establishment of Malaysia and Indonesian
opposition thereto.''
The PNIOs of 1956-62 were more emphatic with respect to North
Vietnam than any PNIOs since.
c. The PNIOs of 1962, which found room for 48 countries
including Nepal and Albania, do not mention the Dominican Republic.
Neither do those of 1963 or 1964, nor the quarterly supplements of
January and March 1965. But after the Marines landed, ZOWIE!
d. Every issue of the PNIOs from 1954 through 1965 warned
people to watch out for Arab-Israeli hostilities. This was a useful
prediction in 1956, so it went on being repeated. The version of
June 1965 repeated it--but did not warn of trouble between Pakistan
and India, where war broke out a few weeks later. This omission
was remedied in the next quarterly supplement, by which time the
war was over. Such subjects were removed from the annual PNIOs
of 1966; both the July and the September supplements call attention
to the Yemen rather than to the Arab-Israeli problem.
e. In 1958 USIB appended detailed annexes to the PNIOs
which were formulated by its special committees and covered
economics, scientific and technical targets, atomic energy, guided
missiles, and international Communism, all with three levels of
priority. The one on atomic energy showed interest in the possible
development of nuclear weapons ut did not mention China.
The one on international Communism listed the Communist parties
of West Germany and Japan under Priority II, dealt with the Viet
Minh under Priority III but at greater length, and foresaw no threat
to Cuba or to any part of Africa south of the Maghreb. The effort
of USIB committees to draft special annexes to the PNIOs was then
abandoned as unprofitable.
23. It is nevertheless clear that all these failures to anticipate intel-
ligence interests correctly have made as little difference in self-protection
as in affecting action. The reason is not surprising: The policy-makers
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have always had so many other and more effective means of exerting their
influence on intelligence policy, and the community has so many better ways
of responding to that influence, that the PNIOs long ago got lost in the
shuffle. Even those who must study the practices of the community and
recommend improvements have found attention to a host of other subjects
more worthwhile. The PNIOs do not even come close to reflecting the
actual attention paid by the community to potential crisis situations, often
far in advance, but nobody seems to have noticed the discrepancy. Accord-
ingly we ought to get over the notion that the PNIOs serve a crudely prudential
purpose.
24. One more point before we suggest improvements: A grave defect
of the PNIOs has been their unwillingness to face the certainty of change.
They constantly look backward, not forward. They have encouraged the
con-munity to assume that the threat of world domination by international
Communism is of the same kind, and can be expressed in the same language,
as it was a decade ago, and have accepted only slow and grudging recognition
of the vast diversity and multiplicity of developments in Asia, Latin America,
and Africa since 1960. The continuing effort to link almost all our concerns
to the single subject of Communism has distorted our understanding of events
which the Communists have been no more able, and in many cases less able,
to influence than we have. The PNIOs have always treated the countries of
Eastern Europe as if they were all alike and equally subject to the domination
of Moscow into the indefinite future, as they were 10 and 15 years ago. The
PNIOs first acknowledged the Sino-Soviet dispute in 1962, when it had been
under way for years, and the rather patronizing allusion to it survives
unchanged in 1966.
25. Similarly, the PNIOs reacted to the missile crisis of 1962 by
harping on the way Castro threatened the security of the United States, long
after his power to do us harm had visibly diminished. They usually express
our interest in the stability of various governments in terms of their sus-
ceptibility to take-over by the Communists; three of the four Objectives
recently deleted, on Afria, Latin America, and Southeast Asia, all. had this
simplistic purpose. This stock Cold-War approach hinders objective study
of non-Communist events such as the recent revolutions of Brazil, Algeria,
Nigeria; and Argentina, and produces simple amazement when anti-
Communist events redound to our advantage, as in Ghana and Indonesia.
Of course the PNIOs did not invent this paranoid view of history, but they
help perpetuate it, along with a petrifaction of attitudes and a high cost to
American foreign policy.
26. Proper PNIOs addressed to the gut questions of national survival,
together with imaginative, forward-looking requirements stated elsewhere
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on all other important subjects, would help us broaden our world view
past the notion that all our troubles are caused by Communist ideology
and conspiracy. We could then intensify our study of other important
questions- -such as great-power politics, anticolonial nationalism in
Africa, anti-American nationalism in Latin America, the problems of
population and food and economic development in all the backward countries--
on their own merits, not merely as skirmishes in the Cold War. In short,
we need to inculcate in the community a sense of history and the process
of historical change, and the PNIOs impede such an effort.
27. We have telegraphed our punch: The PNIOs should concern
themselves exclusively with national survival, as they did until 1954, and
should be explicitly so defined. Such PNIOs would be obvious statements
which define the prime function of all the foreign intelligence systems that
have ever existed. Their value would lie in their emphatic exclusiveness;
the, would not teach anybody anything he didn't already know, but would
remind us all of the fundamental reason for our existence, by forcing a
distinction between the enduring questions of national security and those
matters which, however important at a given moment, are nevertheless
transitory, local, and secondary? The list should be short, specific, and
unequivocal. It should not be exclusively military, but discussions of
politics, economics, and technology should be cast in terms of Real-
politik not ideology,
28, Such a list might, if mishandled, perpetuate the Cold-War
app:?oach we are anxious to get rid of. To prevent this, two other actions
are needed:
a. Revising and strengthening DCID No. 1/2, "Comprehensive
National Intelligence Objectives, " a vague, feeble document to which
no one has paid any serious attention for twelve years. (The current
version, dated 1958, repeated verbatim the text of 1954.) A good
revision would give some meaning to the now largely ritual preamble
to the PNIOs:
"This listing of priority objectives presupposes
that the bulk of the intelligence required for the
formulation and execution of national security policy
will be the product of normal intelligence collection
and research in response to the list of Comprehen-
sive National Intelligence Objectives set forth in
DC ID No. 1 /2. "
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The mere action of forcing the community to review DCID No. 1/2
would be a salutary reminder of its intended place in the scheme
of things.
b. Developing a CIA position on the proper content of both
112 and 1/3, and on CIA policy with respect to their use. The pro-
cess should include submission of draft proposals by the individual
offices of the DDI and the DDS&T and by the FI Staff of the DDP;
production of a single draft of each DCID by an ad hoc CIA committee
chaired by the Deputy Director for Intelligence; and formal proposal
of the results by CIA to USIB for coordination and adoption. Thence-
forth the Board of National Estimates might be made responsible for
future revisions as needed, as it is for the PNIOs at present. Or the
function might be assigned to the DCI's Deputy for National Intel-
ligence Programs Evaluation (NIPE), who has a far closer connection
with the use to which the PNIOs should be put. In either case it is
important to involve the whole Agency at least once in the process of
revision, to the end that CIA management can thereby bring into
more practical, realistic focus the requirements systems which
ultimately derive from these DCIDs. It is also important to establish
an Agency position before relegating the subject to consideration by
any instrument of USIB.
(a) The Deputy Director for Intelligence chair an ad hoc
committee of senior representatives of the production and col-
lection components of CIA to develop a firm, authoritative CIA
position with respect to the proper content of DCID No. 1/2,
"Comprehensive National Intelligence Objectives, " and DCID
No. 1/3, "Priority National Intelligence Objectives."
(b) This committee prepare a revision of DCID No. 1/3,
for proposal by CIA to USIB, which will contain a short list of
specific, unequivocal Objectives defined as those questions upon
which our national survival depends.
(c) The committee prepare such a revision of DCID No.
1/2, for proposal by CIA to USIB, as will appropriately cover
other subjects of proper concern to intelligence which do not
affect our national survival.
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29. The Agency will need to take a position on two questions respecting
the issuance and format of the PNIOs:
a. How often should they be revised? NSCID No. 1 says
only "from time to time and on a current basis. " In 1963 USIB
interpreted the first phrase to mean annually, and the second to
justify adding a quarterly supplement looking only some six
months into the future. If the list were confined to questions of
national survival it would by its nature not be subject to frequent
change; USIB might be persuaded to return to its earlier more
flexible rule that the PNIOs would be revised "annually or on the
request" of any of its members. Abandoning a strict schedule
would not only save many man-hours, especially among super-
grades, but would guarantee far more attention at various levels
whenever a revision did take place; there would be nothing per-
functory or mechanical in the process.
b. Do the extremely short-range quarterly supplements
serve any useful purpose? We believe they do not. They are not
a revision of the PNIOs "on a current basis" because they address
only potential changes in various situations, "which may justify
some augmentation of effort,'' rather than any inherent importance
or priority. They still try to predict the future, and are as cer-
tain to fail as the PNIOs have always been. This effort to predict
is surely unnecessary, since there is no sign that the supple-
ments have the slightest effect on the community's actions. (One
recent case showed that including an item in the supplement
brought no results whatever; this was an item in January 1966 on
potential resistance to Communism in the Far East, in connection
with a USIB request for an estimate on the subject. Both PNIOs
and world-wide requirements by various agencies did not together
produce a single item of usable information, and USIB withdrew
the request.) They are also still too broad; the supplement of
July 1966 alludes to 28 countries by name. It would take some
doing, but USIB might be persuaded that these supplements are
not useful, or that at least they should be produced at greater inter-
vals, say semiannually.
30. It might be objected that the supplements are a useful place to
ask questions of special current interest. A recent supplement added two
such questions at the urgent request of General Carroll and Ambassador
Harriman; they concerned U.S. prisoners in enemy hands in Indochina and
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We would argue that such questions would be better handled,
and receive far more special attention, if they were made the subjects of
separate action by USIB rather than buried in the supplements.
The Agency position include, for presentation to USIB,
proposals that USIB rescind its requirement for a strict annual
schedule for revising DCID No. 1/3 ', and that USIB abolish
the quarterly supplements to DCID No. 1/3 as serving no
necessary or even useful purpose.
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It is recommended that: No. 9
The Deputy Director for Intelligence, in coordination
with the Deputy Director for Plans, arrange for the regular
exchange of officers between the Requirements and Evaluation
Branch of the Intelligence Group of the Foreign Intelligence
Staff and the Human Resources Group of the Collection
Guidance Staff.
B. The Current Intelligence Reporting List (GIRL)
7. One of the better known activities of CGS is preparation and
issuance of the CIRL. After some initial skepticism we have come to
consider the GIRL the most useful single medium of collection guidance
produced in the community. It has faults, but most of them can be corrected.
Ti is distributed throughout the community in the U.S. and abroad. It is issued
in regional editions, each of which is revised every four months and pub-
1,-,1it-H in ximatel this number of copies:
8. Each issue has around 100 pages. The GIRL's content and purpose
are described in the following excerpts from its "Foreword":
"It includes contributions by country desk officers
and other intelligence analysts of CIA. Contributions
to the GIRL by analysts in other agencies of the
Washington intelligence community are invited and
may be submitted orally or in writing.
"The GIRL is designed to point up specific information
needed on significant intelligence problems of current
concern (during the 4-month time period of each GIRL).
The requirements and background paragraphs are based
upon the situation prevailing as of the middle of the
month preceding the date of publication. Consideration
is given to the need for revision of CIRL sections where
emergency situations arise which affect the needs for
intelligence information on specific countries or areas
between the scheduled dates for production of the GIRL."
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"The GIRL contents reflect the intelligence objectives
stated in the Quarterly Supplement to the Priority
National Intelligence Objectives and the major intel-
ligence deficiencies noted in Post-Mortems of
appropriate National Intelligence Estimates (NIE's).
The information needs expressed by the GIRL reflect,
as a whole, intelligence interests beyond the capability
of any single collection facility. The collectors them-
selves are best suited to determine which of these
information needs can be fulfilled by their respective
reporting capabilities. The List is intended as a
guide to reporting and is a complement to specific
instructions levied on collectors through their own
channels. "
That last sentence is a correct description of the GIRL's function; but it
is inaccurate to speak of "requirements" in connection with the GIRL except
in the loosest sense of the term. GIRL items are not requirements for
action. Nor are they usually expressions of intelligence needs whose ful-
fillment is vital to U.S. security. Rather, the GIRL is a collection of
questions of current interest to individual intelligence analysts and for
w'; ich answers are requested if a means already exists for acquiring them.
This is an important and useful function, and the GIRL is the only medium
in the community which performs it.
9. Yet the GIRL has no official status in the community or even in CIA.
It is issued solely under the authority of the CGS, under its charter for the
management of collection guidance programs. It has no official sponsorship
by directorate or other higher authority. As a staff, the CGS is empowered
only to request, not to require, the submission of contributions from ana-
l-tical offices. Before CGS was formed, OCI published a Periodic Reporting
List; the CGS inherited this activity, first making it representative of all
analytical units under the DDI and later broadening its content to include
S&T contributions.
10. The CGS attempts to make the GIRL a comprehensive and current
statement of the information needs of the analytical offices. The items
chosen often partly duplicate ad hoc requirements. CGS considers this
practice useful because it gives added publicity to the analyst's needs and
increases the chances that they may be fulfilled, but it runs counter to the
even more useful concept expressed by CGS officers that the GIRL can and
should decrease the number of ad hoc requirements.
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11. We consider the following types of requests inappropriate for
the GIRL:
a. Questions directed to a known reporting source,
whether stimulated by a current report or in response to a
Notice of Intelligence Potential (NIP).
b. Detailed guidance that is more appropriate for a
separate handbook.
c. Questions on broad, general subjects such as, for
example, insurgency in Communist countries.
d. Continuing requirements, answers to which cannot
reasonably be expected within a period of months and which
might be more appropriate for inclusion in, for example, an
IPC List.
But these are not hard and fast rules for exclusion. A question addressed
to a known source might sometimes be properly included in the GIRL in the
hope of getting confirmatory or supplementary information or of finding a
new source. It is not easy to draw the line on continuing requirements:
to balance, for example, the Agency's continuing interest in the health of
Haile Selassie or General Franco against the utility of repeating the point
in issue after issue.
12. In some quarters the GIRL is regarded with derision because it
devotes much space to very hard intelligence questions
To the casehardened operator, it was a wish
book or a letter to Santa Claus. Very few such questions will ever get
answered by being printed in the GIRL, and they must compete for reader-
ship with more diverting literature. Much of the work that goes into them
is probably fruitless. We suggest that the editors could inject more reality
into the GIRL and make it more respected if they would throw out all the
impossible questions, or at least boil them down to brief statements of
areas of interest. It has been suggested that CGS eliminate the denied-area
sections altogether. We do not agree, as we have found good evidence that
t'iey are useful in the field. But we think the difficult, long-range questions
might be better handled in collection guides of the kind we discuss later on.
The GIRL might then confine itself to references to such guides, to new back-
ground information; and to questions which have arisen since the guides were
published.
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13. The GIRL attempts to be all things to all human collectors by
asking for every bit of information which could conceivably be of interest
to anyone in the intelligence business. Its sheer bulk dismays some analysts,
who fear that their questions will be buried. This bulk may not be so appa-
rent, however, to the field collector who receives only sections which his
headquarters considers pertinent to his area and mission. Nevertheless,
the GIRL is far too voluminous. This is partly because CGS, in order to
placate the analysts on whom it must depend for voluntary contributions,
obligingly lists the same questions about country after country instead of
putting the recurring questions for a given subject or area in one place
where they belong. If questions applicable to more than one country were
assembled in general sections about well defined geographic areas, the
individual country listings could concentrate on specific matters and thus
become more persuasive to the collector. This is a simple editorial defect
and one easily corrected in the interests of consolidation and general tidiness.
14. The CIRL has been criticized for including obvious questions
which insult the intelligence of the experienced collector. The publishers
reply that it is intended to guide not only the experienced field operator but
also the newly arrived military attache with no previous exposure either to
the area or to intelligence collection. They also cite the analyst's fear that
if the obvious questions are not asked the reports he needs will not be forth-
coming. Nevertheless, there appears to be no need for items of this type:
Report indications of unrest or the likelihood of a coup. "
15. The CIRL makes no attempt to assign priorities, though occa-
sionally such expressions of analyst concern as "urgently needed" or
' highest priority" are allowed to remain in the text. It would be impractical
to try to indicate priorities among so many hundreds of questions. Further-
more, the CGS must rely on persuasion to induce analysts to contribute, and
to keep them happy it refrains from assigning a higher degree of importance
to one contribution than to another. Thus a question about "the principal
modes of artistic expression and entertainment" among the inhabitants of
Costa Rica receives the same kind of billing as one about Soviet weaponry.
16. In spite of attempts to keep it current, many questions and back-
ground items appear unchanged in issue after issue. This is not necessarily
'Lad. A question may be none the less current or valid for having been
unanswered for a long time, unless changing circumstances have made it
cut of date. But the mingling of old and new material reduces the novelty
and freshness of a collection guide which is supposed to be current and pro-
~?ably makes it less attractive and even less useful to the collector.
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17. The CGS has recognized this and has recently begun to use
asterisks to show the number of GIRL issues in which an item has pre-
viously appeared. Many items have five asterisks. By this device the
CGS hopes to do two things:
a. Draw the analyst's attention to items which might
be eliminated or restated in current terms.
b. Distinguish, for the collector's benefit, between
long-standing information gaps and those more recently apparent.
18. It is too early to judge the success of this device, though the CGS
has already had some favorable comment from field collectors. If its use-
fulness is proved, a logical next step would be to separate the long-lived
questions from the fresh ones, either in the GIRL itself or in a separate
semiannual or annual publication. In the latter case a question might be
automatically transferred to the new publication after appearing in two
successive GIRL issues.
19. Minor editorial defects in the GIRL could be detailed at length.
They would mainly concern clarity, organization, and balance. Some im-
perfections and inconsistencies are bound to appear in a document which is
rapidly pieced together by a small editorial staff from many unrelated con-
tributions, and they probably detract little from its usefulness. The pub-
lishers of the GIRL are competent to improve it and are constantly seeking
ways to do so.
20. CGS has trouble wheedling contributions out of OCI analysts, but
OCI's input to the GIRL bulks larger than that of any other office and is kept
more up to date. (OCI makes little use of the ad hoc numbered requirements
system.) The S&T Directorate has increased its contributions in recent
months, mainly to the issues covering denied areas
21. Lacking formal recognition by CIA or by the directorate which
pays its bills, the GIRL naturally has no status in the intelligence community
except what it can achieve on its own merits. CGS regularly goes through
the motions of requesting contributions from the Defense and State Depart-
ments but with little success. Nevertheless CGS has been able to stimulate
DIA interest in the GIRL by using it as a medium for wider dissemination
of some of the ad hoc requirements levied by DIA on CIA collectors. It has
also persuaded DIA to increase its distribution of the GIRL to military
attaches and to cite the GIRL in some of its reporting. The State Depart-
ment also distributes the GIRL widely but has declined to take part in
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producing it. In October 196b CGS was much encouraged, however, when
it received a contribution and critique from a deputy assistant secretary
in State's Bureau of African Affairs. The latest GIRL for Africa was already
at the printer's, and CGS called it back for revision.
22. The question naturally arises whether such a voluminous guidance
document, lacking any executive sanction or directive force, has any effect
on field collection action. We questioned Clandestine Services officers
recently returned from field stations. They were all familiar with the CIRL
and had found it useful in various ways:
a. At small stations and bases it serves as an indicator
of the range of intelligence interests current in Washington.
g. It supplements guidance received through the chain
of command, especially on economic, scientific, and technical
questions. Recent emphasis on science and technology in Com-
munist countries has been especially valuable.
23. A senior officer of extensive field experience, who is now the
FI chief of an area division, said the CIRL was more helpful to the working
level in the field than any other guidance document.
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25. The reports and requirements chief of an area division said
that some parts of the GIRL were excellent and that he customarily called
these to the attention of field stations. He also said the GIRL's utility for
the Clandestine Services depended on many factors, including suitability
of individual points for clandestine exploitation, availability of information
through other media, and, last but not least, the outlook of the contributing
analyst. "
26. The outlook of the contributing anal;Tst" comes through loud and
clear in the GIRL, mostly undiluted by coordination or committee action, as
GIRL items are usually not coordinated above the analytic branch. This can
be a. vice or a virtue, or both, depending on whether one thinks in terms of
systematic arrangement, analyst enthusiasm, or the effect on the collector.
27. For systematic arrangement it is a vice. An ORR question with
strong political overtones (e. g. , trade relations between a South Amercian
country and the Bloc) may not be coordinated with the OCI desk concerned
with that country's political affairs, and therefore different aspects of the
same problem may be pointlessly scattered under separate GIRL headings.
28. From the standpoint of analyst enthusiasm it is a virtue. There
is no other printed medium through which the analyst can speak directly to
the collector, outside the chain of command, and enlist his interest and
sympathy in helping him to solve his problems.
29. To the collector it is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, the
GIRL widens his horizons beyond the collection responsibilities imposed by
his chain of command and stimulates his imagination. On the other hand,
he must interpret the parochial view of the analyst in terms of his own
mission and operational environment.
31. The Foreign Documents Division (FDD) of OCR makes extensive
use of the GIRL in assigning reading and translating tasks. The Foreign
Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) sends it to all field bureaus, where
it is read for background and for guidance to monitors. It is, in fact, the
principal vehicle through which CGS provides guidance to the FDD and the
FBIS.
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32. The evidence is persuasive that the GIRL is extensively used and
appreciated by collectors. Especially notable is the fact that, although it
is primarily addressed to overt collectors, divisions and stations of the
Clandestine Services are finding it an effective tool. There is no doubt that
the GIRL is playing an important role in collection guidance.
33 This role could be made even more effective if the DDI and the
DDS&T would state what the GIRL is for and why it exists--that it is the
autl-oritative CIA listing of current interests in the kind of information
believed to be obtainable from human sources, publications, and broadcasts.
Suc',i a definition should increase the analysts' respect for the medium and
induce them to submit better and more regular contributions, especially if
the. are made to understand that this is the only appropriate means for making
their interests known to a variety of sources. It should arouse the collectors
to respond more readily to the GIRL. It should also provide the impetus
for editorial improvements and for more aggressive use of the GIRL in the
elimination of some requirements now issued individually.
The Deputy Director for Intelligence, in coordination
with the Deputy Director for Science and Technology, issue
a notice explaining the status and use of the GIRL.
34. Coordination of all GIRL items above the branch level is probably
impractical because there are so many of them.. But if the GIRL is to
merit the kind of recognition we have just proposed the most important items
should be coordinated. First they have to be selected, and this brings up
again the vexing problem of priorities.
35. We believe it should be possible for directorates, or at least
offices, to select, for publication in each issue of the GIRL, the ten or
fifteen most important current needs that fall within their respective pur-
views And we believe that such selection and emphasis would be a positive
stimulus to collectors.
The Deputy Director for Intelligence, in coordination
with the Deputy Director for Science and Technology, direct
the preparation for each issue of the GIRL of a preface iden-
tifying the most important needs listed therein.
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36. The background statements are important to collectors. They
should be coordinated with special care, and should be given particular
attention by management in OCI in order to ensure that they are accurate
and up-to-date presentations of the intelligence base on a given country or
problem, In some cases National Intelligence Surveys might well be used
or adapted for this purpose, or at least cited. The background statements
offer an excellent opportunity, especially for OCI, to inform the collector
directly of the Washington customer's viewpoint on field situations. We
believe that CGS should not be obliged to write the background statements,
as is now generally the case, but that they should be made a regular respon-
sibilityv of OCI management and that a regular program should be set up
for their production.
The Deputy Director for Intelligence direct the
Director of Current Intelligence to assume responsibility
for the regular production of background statements for
the GIRL.
37. Because the GIRL is not often cited in reporting, the considerable
use made of it in the field may not be sufficiently known to contributing
analysts, We do not suggest imposing this duty on field reporters, but
the analysts need and deserve feedback from their CIRL input. Through its
machine records the CGS is devising new methods of comparing reporting
with requirements. Possibly ways can be developed for using these tech-
nigr,es to demonstrate to the analysts that their GIRL contributions are
inspiring collection action.
38. As we saw in Chapter III, it is not always possible to draw a
fine line between the guidance media sent, respectively, to overt and clan-
destine collectors. Hence there is a good deal of overlap between the GIRL
and the IPC List. The latter is more general than the GIRL, is intended
to be valid for a longer period, and is community-coordinated guidance for
the planning of clandestine collection operations. In many instances the
GIRL supplies useful current background and guidance that supplements
the IPC List, and some of this is being noted and used by Clandestine Ser-
vices divisions and stations. Although the GIRL is mainly directed to overt
collectors, the CGS might well exploit the subject overlap and the Clandes-
tine Services' readiness to make use of the GIRL by doing the following:
a. Correlate each new GIRL with corresponding IPC
listings with a view to supplementing the latter with specific
current guidance.
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b. Prepare for the Clandestine Services a key to
each new GIRL indicating new guidance that may be helpful
in working against IPC targets.
39, We avoid making specific recommendations about the editorial
content and format of the GIRL, but we sum up our suggestions as follows:
a. Eliminate the obvious questions.
b. Eliminate the impossible questions.
c. Enhance the document's freshness and currency
by separating the long-standing questions from the new ones,
d. Group together the questions that apply to many
countries; prune and consolidate.
e. For the benefit of the Clandestine Services, cor-
relate the GIRL with the IPC List.
40, The GIRL needs and deserves to have more work done on it both
in CGS and in the analytic offices. We believe that the latter will quickly
devote more attention to it as soon as it is accorded the status of directorate
recognition and its usefulness to collectors is made known to analysts and
the_r supervisors. For CGS it is a matter of allotting the necessary man-
hours, perhaps even at the expense of other tasks. We believe this should
be done.
41, The kind of document we discuss here has been variously called
guide, brief, handbook, manual, or aid. We favor no one of these terms
and use ''guide'' merely for convenience. The category could be interpreted
to include almost any documents, available to collectors, which indicate
gaps on which collection is desired. CGS has scores of collection guides
on file. Most of them are out of date and merely taking up space. But one
42. The bulk of the assemblage, however, consists of the old ency-
clooedic type of guide, characteristic of the traditional military approach
to intelligence collection and formerly produced in large numbers by CIA.
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These have now gone out of fashion here, and for good reasons. They
tended to be subject-oriented and analyst-oriented. Instead of pointing out
the important gaps and suggesting where the answers might be found, they
asked every possible question. For this reason the labor necessary to pro-
duce them was vast and the effort required to keep them up to date was
comparable to the maintenance of a National Intelligence Survey. Further-
more, they were little used and typically ended up in bottom safe-drawers
all over the world.
43. This dismal history has damaged the collection-guide concept.
Guides are generally unwanted, little used, and seldom produced. There
is no regularly managed program for their issuance. They just happen,
when somebody gets a bright idea or when the need for one becomes unmis-
takable.
44. We believe that a collection-guide program is needed to round out
the requirements system, as a complement to the GIRL and the ad hoc
requirements. Guides should be oriented to intelligence problems or to
collection opportunities rather than to subjects. They should provide the
collector with analytical advice rather than an analyst's shopping list.
The , should be confined to a few important subjects--whether a dozen or
--carefully chosen by the substantive offices. Such a program should
involve both analysts and collectors, working together as a team, with CGS
as a catalyst.
45. Unfortunately, CGS more often plays the lonely role of missionary.
Recent attempts at getting out collection guides have been somewhat dis-
couraging. The example which follows illustrates the roadblocks that have
to be surmounted. It also shows how the need for a collection guide became
onl.,- slowly- and painfully apparent because none of the people responsible
for generating requirements were thinking in those terms.
46, During our survey we found that requirements on the SA-2 missile
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taking into account what had already been learned about the SA-2 from
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96. Among the criteria for evaluating reporting are: relevance to
intelligence needs as expressed in current guidance, reliability, complete-
ness, and timeliness. In seeking evaluations the collector must identify
tre analyst most competent to tell him these things in much the same way
as the analyst, in writing a requirement, must identify the collector best
able to answer his question. This is simple enough if a single evaluation
is sought and the report in question cites a requirement number. It is
lc ss simple when evaluation is sought of Clandestine Services reports,
most of which do not cite requirement numbers, or of groups of reports
from any collector on a given area or on a given subject. In such cases the
luck of a coordinated program, linking analyst and collector in a regular
f .s'"pion, makes it difficult to track down the persons most able to give the
needed answers.
97. There is no regular way of ensuring that all the right analysts
are brought into the process. There is no managed way to keep the analyst
from being assailed by a series of uncoordinated, ad hoc requests from
individual collectors, and such repeated demands on the analyst's time may
produce hostility or indifference and dilute the effectiveness of evaluations.
98. The CGS recently set a task force to studying this problem. Its
report states:
"... the problem of evaluation may be viewed as the
reverse side of the coin of the collection guidance
process. Virtually all of our efforts in collection
guidance are directed toward bringing some order to
the business of validating and expressing the intel-
ligence information needs of production analysts to
the collector. It is possible that similar efforts are
in order to validate and express the evaluation needs
of the collectors (and others) to the production ana-
lyst in order that these needs, also, be serviced in an
orderly and meaningful fashion.''
99. Although duplication of effort is reasonably well managed in the
requirements field, there is no mechanism to avoid it in the evaluation pro-
cess, such as a regular method of covering several related collector pro-
blems in one request. Also there is no way to ensure that the product of
:cn evaluation effort requested by one collector is shared with others who
might find it useful. A central repository of evaluation requests and a
central file of analyst evaluations would bring some order into this disarray,
and we believe this to be a proper function of the CGS Registry.
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100, The evaluation process is further complicated by subjective
factors, among them: (a) the semantic problem of intergroup communi-
cation, of asking the right questions in the right context and of correctly
interpreting the answers; (b) the reluctance of some evaluators to give
a frank appraisal for fear of impairing a potentially useful channel.
103. There is no formal provision for the establishment of an evalu-
~%tion function in the substantive directorates of CIA, although CGS is directed
to ''assess the effectiveness of collection systems.'(See Annex A.) Initia-
tive mainly devolves upon the collector. We see nothing improper in this.
But when collection guidance develops from evaluation and is not coordinated
with the management of substantive directorates, as the ultimate fountain
Of collection requirements, there is danger that collection activity will get
out of phase with intelligence production programming.
104. The machine-controlled data on collection requirements and
?eporting which CGS has been accumulating in the last few years give much
~nromise for use in evaluation studies. They will be even more useful as
CGS finds ways to include evaluations themselves in its machine listings.
It is already possible to relate any desired grouping of reports to outstanding
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requirements, and vice versa. In a series of interesting pilot projects
CGS is beginning to find ways to answer such questions as these: (a) How
does a given group of reports--whether by area, subject, time span, or
s ource - - stack up against existing recorded guidance ? (b) How well is
a given group of requirements answered by current reporting?
105. Two approaches are being explored. One of these concerns
the evaluation of all raw information pertaining to a subject or area in order
tc (a) identify aspects in which reporting was deficient, (b) identify needs
w .ich could have been satisfied by open literature, and (c) identify needs
w rich are being satisfied by reporting. The other concerns evaluation of
all reporting from a particular collector or system during a given period
it order to bring out the collector's strengths and weaknesses and to identify
marginal or worthless reporting.
106. CGS is attempting to develop a systematic program for applying
sampling techniques to groups of reports selected on the basis of priority.
As it gains experience, CGS hopes to be able to maintain current evaluations
for individual collectors and also to provide assessments of the effective-
ness of major components of information collection. This effort is in its
infanc ,- and needs nourishment, but its progress is promising. It is one of
the most encouraging developments we have noted in our study of the col-
lection guidance process.
107. The CGS task force report cited earlier lists three modest goals
,,v`~ich should be achieved by a systematic evaluation program:
a. Reduction of the time and energy expended by analysts
in answering uncoordinated, ad hoc requests;
b. Enhancement of the usefulness, timeliness, and sig-
nificance of evaluations;
c. Provision for more complete exploitation of evaluations.
108. We believe that the systematic, machine-supported program
which the CGS Registry is now developing will help achieve these goals, and
we believe that this program should have the enthusiastic support of
management.
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1. The Long Range Plan of 1965 is based on the unquestioned
assumption that CIA ''must be allowed to grow to meet ever increasing
demands from the Government for intelligence on a world that becomes
constantly more complex.'' This proposition is repeated in a dozen ways
which all add up to endorsement of the belief that the more facts we
collect the better we do our job of safeguarding American security. It
could be distilled into an Orwellian slogan: MORE IS BETTER.
2. We have first to recognize that a bias in favor of amassing
indefinitely expanding quantities of information characterizes American
society far more than any other that ever existed. We are hypnotized by
statistics of every conceivable degree of trustworthiness, relevance, and
importance. Nowhere outside America is there so great a tyranny of
information over all the other factors affecting judgment--the tyranny
of the public opinion poll, market research, television ratings. Never
mind aberrations like the election of 1948 and the Edsel automobile;
these merely prove that what we needed was more facts.
3. Given its brief, intense history, it was inevitable that the intelli-
gence community would embody this American bias in its most extreme
form. In particular, two important factors have intensified our search
for more and more facts. One is the course of events during the decade
after World War II, in which our ignorance of many fundamental foreign
problems encouraged a kind of national paranoia that persists into the
present. The other is the way in which the two dominant segments of the
intelligence community- -the military and the academic- -reinforce each
other's lifelong practice of treating the amassing of information as more
important than theory, speculation, or hard-thought analysis. Thus MORE
IS BETTER has been an article of faith with us from the beginning.
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5. In our view the assumption that MORE IS BETTER is now a
dangerous anachronism, and ought to receive the community's most
rigorous and skeptical analysis. The reason is the Information Explosion.
The Long Range Plan of 1965 correctly says: It is abundantly clear at
this time that our ability to process and analyze raw information has not
kept pace with our collection capability.'' The Plan alludes to needs for
increases in CIA personnel 25X1
It points out that these figures
require further study, but the implication that an increase of this magnitude
would enable CIA to use properly what is now being collected impresses us
as unduly optimistic.
6. At the same time the community goes on making plans for ever
larger explosions. A current study of one single aspect of the intelligence
function--early warning--holds out the hope, or threat, of the following
expansions of our ability to acquire raw data:
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7. It s clear that these and other developments can produce better
information on some specific problems than we now have, and the need for
this is not questioned. The bone of contention is quantity, and the problem
whether we can control it in such a way as to recognize and isolate and
correctly interpret (particularly with respect to enemy intentions) the
would provide. The community's record with
respect to the exploitation of current collection inspires anxiety that we
are creating worse problems than we are solving; not merely of finding
the manpower to read out the new information, in itself a great problem
no matter how much we automate, but of developing the judgment and
discrimination to sift out the crucial facts and assess them correctly.
Automation and other technical improvements will bring the handling of
data under progressively better control (as to quantity) at the working
levels of the intelligence process, but the total product of these and other
quantum-jump systems can only increase the work load of policy-makers
from the President down who are already overworked. We must move
quickly to bring that product under control.
8. After several pages of describing future prospects for quantum
jumps in collection, the study Just cited has only this to say about their
effects on analysis, estimative judgments, and determination of policy on.
the basis of the information collected:
One clear conclusion is inescapable: the investments
I will require comparable
investments in means of exploitation and analysis. The
technical revolution in information collection, epitomized
Citations and quotations are frcm the third draft of the study on early
warning.
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10. The passage quoted above says that the technical revolution in
information collection is only just beginning to be felt. It is our conviction,
and the source of our anxiety, that the Information Explosion has been with
us for years and that our patchwork efforts to cope with it have concealed
the true disparity between collection and end use. The community already
holds warehouses full of unexploited SIGINT tapes and miles of photographic
film only superficially examined, though both are known to contain useful
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information on our two top targets.f
I "e
explosion in written communications was under way long before we were
born; it is tempting to date bureaucracy's affinity for it from the Franco-
Prussian War, when during the siege of Paris a Frenchman escaped to
Tours by balloon and
"... set up the first microphotography unit ever to be
employed in war. Government dispatches in Tours
were reduced to a minute size, printed on feathery
collodion membranes, then rolled into a pellicle; so
that one pigeon could carry up to 40, 000 dispatches...
On reaching Paris, the dispatches were projected by
magic lantern and transcribed by a battery of clerks.
Sometimes one pigeon-load alone would require a whole
week to decipher and distribute. "*
11. Even during World War Ii Winston. Churchill complained
repeatedly, and in vain, that the I nformation Explosion--i. e. , the quantity
of cable traffic - -had become an intolerable burden and sometimes even a
positive hindrance to prosecution of the war. Later we ourselves used
to try to keep down the volume to save money, but Churchill's objection
_? Alistair Horne, The Fall of Paris, New York, 1965, P. 128.
For example, a memorandum to the Foreign Secretary, "I feel that
this is an evil which ought to be checked. Ministers and Ambassadors
abroad seem to think that the bigger the volume of their reports home,
the better is their task discharged. I try to read all these telegrams,
and I think the volume grows from day to day.'' (The Second World
War, III, 723. ) To General Ismay and others: "I see no need for these
long and pointless telegrams, and it is becoming quite impossible to
conduct military operations when. everything has to be spread about the
Departments and around the world like this.'' (Ibid. , p. 724. ) And
again to the Foreign Secretary: "The telegrams seem to be growing
longer and longer. ...I quite understand they all want to help the war
by increasing their output. In fact, they clog and hamper." (Ibid.,
IV, 864.)
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was more to the point: The greatest cost of our cable traffic is the time it
takes thousands of people to keep abreast of it. Yet in response to perpetual
demand for more and quicker communication, impressive technical advances
have brought this increase in the cable traffic processed by CIA Head-
quarters Signal Center over the years:
1950
1955
1960
1965
12. In this context the phrase "Information Explosion" has little
to do with exploitable raw intelligence data, because the number of
published CS reports has changed remarkably little over the years and
in 1965 amounted to But it has everything to do with the
way intelligence officers at all levels spend their time, hours which cannot
be expanded with the expansion of reading matter. Some of this increase
in Commo capabilities must have improved the quality and speed of our
reporting and that of other agencies, and in particular improved the respon-
siveness of our operations; much of the time spent working on 0 cables
at both ends must formerly have been. spent on pouched dispatches. But
we doubt that these changes explain the 28-fold expansion of the system.
13. The greatest jump in our cable traffic, almost 0 from
1960 to 1965, illustrates how a system, developed to meet some important
need, acquires a life of its own whether the urgency persists or not. For
''Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion."
Parkinson illustrated his discovery by some statistics drawn from the
British Navy and Colonial Office. Between 1914 and 1928 the Admiralty
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14, And now our Cable Secretariat, the National Military Command
Center, and others are looking for ways to cope with what the early-warning
study calls
". . . the sizeable increases expected in both message
volumes and numbers of electrical transmissions
over the next few years--perhaps as much as 8 to
10% a year. They are also experimenting with remote
print-out of the messages at the analysts' locations
and with electronic storage for extended periods and
retrieval by cathode ray tube display as well as hard
copy. As communications centers expand in capacity,
message handling down the line to the analyst will
come under heavy pressure to go automatic too.''
But the capacity of each recipient of all those cables will remain exactly
what it was before: what he can read and absorb and act on in a day.
Unless, of course, he has to spend more time looking at pictures. The
total capacity of all recipients together has theoretically increased by
some of the few percentage points which reflect CIA personnel increases
(outside NPIC) since 1950, but any effort to prove this would have to take
into account the facts that cables go to many more readers than the
pouches used to, that we must read increasing numbers of State and
Defense cables in addition to our own, and that cables must compete
increasingly with the products of other compilations of material.
^(continued from Page VII - 6)
bureaucracy grew 78. 45% while the number of capital ships in commission
declined by 67. 74% and the number of officers and men declined by 31. 5%.
Between 1935 and 1954, while Great Britain was losing most of the colonies
it had accumulated over the past two centuries, the Colonial Office grew
from 372 bodies to 1661. It should be emphasized that the parallel
suggested here reflects not upon Commc but upon the work habits of its
users. Something of the same point could be made with respect to the way
we sought out things for the U-2 to do after May 1960, when it was no
longer usable to meet the urgent need for which it had been created.
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15. The effect of overhead reconnaissance on the collective work
load is impossible to measure, so that more attention is naturally paid
to backlogs and shortages of manpower in NPIC than to the ability of the
substantive producers to use the NPIC product adequately. We can only
concur in a recent general description of the problem which points out
that the explosion affects the processors, producers, and consumers of
photographic intelligence and cites these reasons:
". . . the increased use of our ever-improving
reconnaissance capabilities, and increased
dependency on photography as other sources of
intelligence become relatively less productive,
and a general widening of interests into areas
previously neglected or ignored by intelligence.
(Emphasis added. )
In consequence,
"Volumes currently processed are many times
the 1960 volumes. For example, during fiscal
year 1965 an excess of of film
was exposed over Cuba and Vietnam alone."
16, The im act of SIGINT traffic on collective work load is also
incalculable,
17. We are now receiving open literature at the rate of 1, 600, 000
items a year (114, 500 copies of books, 270, 600 of journals, and the
remainder of newspapers). "This a threefold increase over 1950. By
1970 the figure will be two million.'' In the fields of science and
technology and "sociology," the figure rose from 16, 000 individual
titles in 1950 to 46, 000 in 1966. According to the Foreign Documents
Quotations and most statistics in paragraphs 15-24 are from Paul
Borel's Controlling Intelligence Information, written for presentation
to the Intelligence Methods Conference in London in September 1966.
The opinions based on them here are far more pessimistic than Borel's.
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Division (FDD), the number of pages it screened annually rose from
28, 000, 000 in 1961 to above 38, 000, 000 in 1965, and the resultant
production of new reading matter rose from 210, 000 pages to 760, 000.
Much of the take is abstracted and compressed:
''Information of intelligence value is selected by
these analysts and prepared in the form of extract
translations for publication in daily and weekly area
and topic reports. This service goes a long way
toward shielding the user from the flood of available
open source materials which bear on his area of
assignment. In one daily issue, FDD's current
report on Eastern Europe may alone contain as
many as 70 sources in eight languages. To gain
greater timeliness in this service, we are experi-
menting with direct on-site press exploitation at
overseas points.'(Emphasis added. )
Or in other words, we are looking for ways to speed up the flood we
must be shielded from. Meanwhile the USIB Committee on Documentation
19. Even so, CIA has been working on schemes to increase the
quantity of such material many times. One project, which still has bugs
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in it, will some day make it possible for the processing of overt materials
from publications and broadcasts to be limited only by the speed with which
translators can dictate their translations onto tapes, because other stages
ending with computer printout will be automated. If automatic machine
translation ever becomes practicable, our ability to process overt foreign
information--i. e. , put it on paper in English--will jump from millions of
words per day to hundreds of millions. If we apply analogous techniques
to "exploiting" all foreign television, a medium we shall have to take
steadily more into account, we shall create the opportunity for another
quantum jump. By that time, for any evidence we can see to the contrary,
new projects for enormous expansion of technical collection of information
of all kinds will have required more and more warehouses for the storage
of more and more miles of tapes and films.
20. Meanwhile, Borel says "our total receipts of raw and finished
intelligence documents have shown little variation over the years The
high water mark was reached in 1963 with a receipt figure of 25X1
individual documents. " Two factors make this high figure weigh especially
heavily in the collection work load. One is the special way these documents
compete with each other and with all unclassified material for attention.
Analysts must not only read as much raw information as possible but must
also read one another's finished products. It can be argued indeed that
they are one another's best customers, rather than the policy-makers who
cannot conceivably keep up with the flow. And the other factor, obviously
related to the first, is the way the number of copies of our classified
documents keeps growing. Cables are often published in from 35 to 50
copies, sometimes in more than 100, and many of these copies are circu-
lated to dozens or scores of readers. In addition, the prevalence of office
copying -machines "has encouraged secondary reproduction by recipient
offices to absurd proportions" --not just of cables, and no matter what
security restraints we put on this practice.
21. The most vivid illustration of all this proliferation is afforded
by the Office of Current Intelligence. With almost the same number of
authorized personnel as in 1955, OCI in 1965 succeeded in handling more
than twice as many incoming items, and in producing 2-1/2 times as many
of its own. But the total effect on all its customers' IN-boxes together
was much greater: Measured in "impressions" (number of pages x number
of copies per page), OCI annual production jumped in those ten years more
than 400%, Much of this flow is accounted
for by publishing the OUI Weekly Summary, which averages 28 pages in a
press run of 1570 copies of the Secret version and of 545 copies of the
code-word version called Weekly Review. OCI Special Reports go to 1646
Imp LFCR V'P
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of the recipients of these two weeklies; thus, on 28 October 1646, a
productivity of 16, 460 impressions was achieved by an essay, ten pages
long counting the cover and a full-page map, which was entitled 'Trends
in the Lesser Antilles."
22. Whatever the eventual benefits of automation, it is bound to
increase the need for discipline. So far, in some ways, it has made the
problem worse: "We see instances where basic input data is replicated,
reformatted, resorted, to the point where the output volume exceeds input
by perhaps 100 times." This is an excess which experience will no doubt
correct. Yet in all that we have heard of the prospects for automating
the intelligence community, there is still overwhelming emphasis on
quantity and speed and far too little on the more important factors of
quality and relevance."
After pages of travelogue ("St. Lucia... in 1962 opened its first luxury
beach hotel"), this report delivers the message that the mayor of a town in
Martinique was a Communist until the late 1940s, the mayor of a town in
Guadeloupe still is, and in certain unlikely circumstances the Communists
might reverse the steady decline they have been undergoing for nearly 20
years. We are informed that this and two other recent Special Reports were
published because the DCI had told OCI to keep an eye on the West Indies.
But we would argue that there is an important difference between keeping
track of a subject and publishing a pointless essay in many hundreds of
copies.
OCI publications are not usually so pointless. But managers throughout
CIA justify a good many such pieces of research and publication on the
ground that they keep up the analyst's morale, especially if his area is
quiet and dull. The same excuse is given by the Clandestine Services for
publishing raw reports known to be of marginal value or none. We consider
this excuse unworthy of a serious effort to produce good national intelli-
gence, and an important cause of the Information Explosion.
Note the criteria implicit in the following progress report by USIB-'s
Committee on Documentation: "Significant advances in the products and
services provided by the DIA ADPS Center were again made in FY-66.
For example, the Automated Intelligence File (AIF), a worldwide data
base of finished installations intelligence, continued to grow very rapidly.
entities described in the AIF. From the AIF are derived such important
products as the Target Data Inventory, Basic Encyclopedia (B. E. ),
Contingency Planning Facilities Lists (CPFL), Airplane and Seaplane
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23. This defect cannot be remedied by the automators; they are in
any case so devoted to hardware that they have invented a subtle deni-
gration, probably unintentional, of the programming (and' by extension
the thought that precedes programming) which determines the use to which
the hardware will be put. In their jargon this is software. The remedy
will have to be supplied by management: a workable definition of the
function of U. S. intelligence. *-
24. Otherwise automation will accomplish the instant retrieval of
everything, no matter what, and infinite permutations of googols of binary
bits, no matter how trivial. One of the many functions of CHIVE will be
to "search the literature" and produce all the books, documents, reports,
etc. , on a given subject. What does the analyst do when the truckload is
delivered at the door ? Or when it is automated into another truckload of
electronic printout? That is his worry. Some electronics people obscure
the crucial limitation upon the system with another jargon phrase,
''individual channel capacity, " and change the subject. Yet there is no
0 Our views on this point are influenced by the development of
for the Clandestine Services years ago. It became clear that great techno-
logical advances in storage and retrieval would have done more harm than
good if we had not first insisted upon drastically higher standards for what
was to be stored and retrieved. Automation therefore began with a new and
more rigorous definition of the purposes the information was to serve, a
severe purge of accumulated irrelevancies, and a program of education and
regulation throughout the Clandestine Services designed to acquaint all
users of information both with the advantages of automation and with the
necessity for self-discipline which these advantages imposed. The problem
the whole community now faces of what to automate is many times more
difficult than the one attacked by Ibecause it means redefining
the function of U. S. intelligence altogether, and the need for rigorous
standards of quality and relevance is correspondingly greater.
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Stations of the World (ASSOTW), Sino-Soviet Missile Order of Battle (MOB),
Future Strategic Target Lists (FSTL), and Priority Reconnaissance
Objective Lists (PROL). On 4 February 1.966, USIB adopted the identi-
fication procedures used in the AIF as a standard installation identification
system for the entire U. S. Intelligence Community, with DIA acting as
executive agent for the system.' (CODIB Eighth Annual Report to USIB,
17 October 1966, Appendix C, pp. 2f. ) In short, the function of automation
is evidently to justify and intensify the kind of excesses of ccllection which
we have analysed in Chapter VI and elsewhere.
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doubt that if its function is properly defined, automation can accomplish
many more marvels of the kind which caused a Soviet planning official to
say that. CIA understood the Soviet economy better than the Soviet govern-
ment did. The biggest problem is managerial "software."
25. Given all these grisly statistics we would go far beyond Borel's
comment: "All. in all a significant part of the information problem is of
our own creation." He draws this conclusion only with respect to our
manufacture and distribution of classified documents, themselves only
a fraction of the "20 thousand individual series, in ten. million issues,
published in 150 million copies, " which a survey of information inven-
tories and flows estimated that the community produces or handles every
year. In our view this problem is almost entirely of the community's
own creation, not imposed from outside, and is a product of the way it
has allowed its own "requirements, " both for collection and for production,
to proliferate unchecked. There would be a rough justice in blaming the
analysts for their own plight, because collectively they have stated require-
ments for everything under the sun. But it is more to the point to emphasize
that management has allowed this to happen.
26. We believe that the sum total. of all our requirements, and the
Information Explosion they have caused to be created, are severely
detrimental to the American intelligence effort. In the long run it is,aaot
the crude question of work load which matters most, nor even the point
that each item uses up customers' time and attention which cannot be given
to any other item, so that each of our products must receive steadily less.
What matters most is the question whether this quantity of information is
degrading the quality of all our work. It is the earnest conviction of those
of us who have studied CIA's requirements systems as a whole, and thought
of their effect on our work, that this is already happening, and can only
grow worse with each large new accretion. It is impossible to prove or
disprove this thesis, least of all by our customary reliance on statistics.
It has probably applied least where in the past it has mattered most--for
example, the community could hardly have given more intense attention
to Soviet military capabilities. But. in many other important matters we
believe that the community's attention is becoming steadily more
superficial: that we cannot apply to the available information the depth of
analysis it requires for accurate judgments. In addition to those we have
suggested elsewhere, we offer these further indications, of course debata-
ble but worth considering:
a. The quantity of information on the Sin.o-Soviet dispute,
especially of official statements from both sides published by
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and the Sovietologists are
equally swamped in the flood of broadcast and other information
on the USSR, and it is far beyond the capacity of either to study
in depth the behavior of the two governments together. One
solution is hiring more people, since we are especially short of
Chinese experts. Another is transferring people away from
attention to problems like ''any indications, however indirect,
of Somali involvement in Eritrean dissidence'(an IPC target),
and onto important matters. But surely the quickest practical
change would be even greater selectivity as to what we read and
publish. The Sino-Soviet dispute has developed so slowly, with
such infinite repetition of arguments, that we would be better
occupied studying its underlying causes than in looking for
Byzantine subtleties in the latest several thousand words of
diatribe. Our compartmented, current-events approach kept
many people from even acknowledging the seriousness of the
dispute until it had been going on for several years. Of course
somebody must skim and screen as much as possible, but our
current handling of available reading matter makes skimmers
of us all.
b. As for China itself, I
Ito res a owe e
current internal upheaval in Uftina. mon s before events drew
our attention to it. Perhaps greater selectivity would have
passed over these indications, perhaps not; at any rate turning
analysts into skimmers produced the same result as if the
indications had not been published. When we get down to
discussing the meaning of this upheaval, our preoccupation
with current events can only bolster the view that, since
Communists and their governments are pretty much alike,
this must be a Communist phenomenon to which some past
power struggle in Russia probably offers a reliable basis
for judgment. The extent to which it. must also be a peculiarly
Chinese phenomenon gets lost in the welter of headlines and
daily bulletins.
STATOTHR
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Board of National Estimates and USIB. Yet when the Communist
roof caved in three weeks later, events uncovered counterforces
so vast and violent that their nature ought to have been suspected.
The massacre of hundreds of thousands of Communists must have
had a motivation, a basis in a peculiarly Indonesian mixture of
politics and economics and religion and social institutions, which
our preoccupation with surface facts and current events kept us
from even imagining.
d. So with our approach to the Communist threat throughout
the underdeveloped world. Each group of experts is so busy
keeping up with quantities of current information on its own field
that there is no time for deeper study and comparison. When we
consider the Communist threat to, say, black Africa we can only
bring together experts on Africa, experts on international Commu-
ism, and experts on Russia and China, none of whom can be
deeply enough versed in the fields of the others, and add up their
anxieties instead of discriminating among them. When we do this
in turn to each potential Communist threat around the world, we
end up with a worst-case view of total Communist capabilities
which is greatly at variance with observable developments over
the past ten years.
e. For lack of deeper study we deceive outselves by applying
the narrowly economic concept of ''underdeveloped countries'' to
forms of society which have been. highly developed for centuries,
but along lines too alien to our own for us to understand. We
therefore apply much the same standards of intelligence interest
to most ''underdeveloped countries'' as if they were all pretty
much alike, at least in their susceptibility to the attractions of
Communism; as if where the Communists try hardest they are
most certain to succeed. This neglects the emotional impact of
concepts like colonialism, nationalism, various forms of
xenophobia, racial and tribal animosities, and the search for a
national identity; some of these concepts we ignore as empty
slogans in the Cold War, and some we fail to see as obstacles
to any foreign ideology. In particular this approach neglects
the social force of ancient religions. We usually mention in
passing the impact of Islam or Buddhism, which varies widely
from country to country, as no doubt interesting but not crucial.
We are alarmed by the intense effort the Communists have been
putting for years into subverting the Muslim world, but we never
seem to ask ourselves why they have so little to show for it.
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And for a long time we treated the Buddhist leaders of South Vietnam
as merely a set of particularly devious politicians. Yet when Muslims
run amok in Java and Hindus in Bali, and Buddhist monks and nuns
immolate themselves in South Vietnam, these oriental religions
must have more political and social force than our Cold-War simplifi-
cations take into account. The history and nature of religion in
China might help explain why China is now Communist and southern
Asia is not--just as in Russia the Communists subverted to their
own purposes the xenophobia, messianic zeal, and autocracy
inculcated for centuries by Russian Orthodoxy, but have had no
such advantage elsewhere in Europe. At any rate our black-and-
white simplicities have been much too simple.
f. A more specific example of damaging superficiality concerns
one aspect of the Vietnamese War. Faced month after month with
a lack of hard information from the scene, our experts had to
develop alternative bases for judgment, and these came inevitably
to include more and more statistics and extrapolations, unreliable
as these were known to be. One consequence was that our estimate
of the daily logistic requirements of the North Vietnamese Army and
the Viet Gong was extrapolated from American logistic requirements
with adjustments according to various untestable assumptions. A
So far have our wor-R-To-aE an wor a i s,
reinforcing each other, led us away from using what the collectors
are in business to collect.
g. Meanwhile, in our effort to treat intelligence and policy
as two quite separate entities, we pay too little attention to the way
in which our own intelligence views affect the events themselves:
the question, for example, whether American policy based on our
view of the Communist threat does not increase the appeal of
Communism and thereby intensify the threat. In the cases of
See The Icon and the Axe, a brilliant new analysis of the effect o
Russian history upon Russian ideology, by James H. Billington,
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Indonesia and Ghana we were fortunate, because the peoples rose
up and checked the threat for reasons of their own, not ours. But
what about Cuba? Did American policy, based on a worst-case
view expressed repeatedly by the intelligence community from
1959 on, cause Castro, with little effective help from Cuban
Communists or even (until later) from the Soviet Union, to convert
Cuba to a communist state?
27. To some readers these observations will seem remote from
the subject of collection requirements, but we believe that they are closely
connected. What we characterize here as superficialities are an amalgam
of preconceptions, simplifications, and work load which are dominated by
the belief that we must try to cover the whole world. The Long Range
Plan does not question its own explicit assumption that the "security
interests of the United States have expanded to include virtually every
inhabited spot on earth. " The whole range of our stated requirements
from the PNIOs down to the most trivial item has justified such an
assumption and made our superficiality inevitable. But it is absolutely
essential that we do question it from now on. In the meantime we must
recognize that we do not understand the Asians and Africans and Latin
Americans; so long as our study is given largely to the surface events
of the moment, understanding them will be an unduly long, slow, expensive
process. This is an urgent reason for bringing the Information Explosion
under control and freeing time for deeper study of fewer subjects.
28. None of this highly negative recital should be read as ridiculing
our spectacular technical achievements, or denying that they have provided
crucial answers to some crucial questions, or arguing that we do not need
better information. But it does point to the necessity for the most earnest
consideration of the following propositions:
a. We are already collecting far more information than we can
satisfactorily use. What makes this alarming is not the quantity of
photographic film that receives only superficial scanning or of
SIGINT tapes that are not exploited at all; this kind of waste might
be tolerable, even unavoidable, if only we could be confident that
what we do use we use to the best of our collectively great abilities.
The real cause for concern is the danger to the quality of our
finished intelligence.
b. It is not the proper function of this Agency to know every-
thing about everything, even about all locally important develop-
ments in politics, economics, military affairs, and technology
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around the world. The same problem which faces us in converting
mountains of data into finished intelligence also faces the Executive
Branch in putting our finished intelligence to proper use--time to
study it, competition from other claims to attention, varied habits
of thought and work. But a farther inhibition operates against full
use of our finished intelligence however perfectly we analyze and
interpret the data. We devote much attention to problems on which
the Executive Branch knows it is either unable or unwilling to take
action. Both Secretary McNamara and Secretary Rusk, the former
with particularly persuasive force, have recently emphasized that
the U. S. cannot reform and police the whole world; this means to
us that much of our intelligence might as well not have been produced
for any practical difference it made. Yet we tell ourselves to act
as if every collectible scrap of information and finished intelligence
on all foreign developments were essential to the national interest.
This is to multiply the Pearl Harbor syndrome by the jigsaw theory
(that little scrap might be the missing piece) and get mediocrity.
It will take changing a great many attitudes inside the intelligence
community to bring it about, but we would like to hope for a time
when we can be more sure of ourselves, and right, about a few
important matters of which Indonesia is one example, and less
anxious about beating the newspapers to one more coup in Syria or
some other non-country.
c. As the only alternative to indefinite expansion, the Long
Range Plan says that if the Government reaches a conscious decision
that the Agency should not expand to the degree that we propose, then
it must relieve the Agency of some of these responsibilities.'' The
implication that everything we do is the result of some specific re-
sponsibility laid on us by higher authority is dubious. We would
argue rather that the size and multiplicity of our work are to a
considerable degree a result of our own interpretation of broad and
vague guidelines, and that much of what we consider our specific
responsibilities is either self-imposed or responsive to no higher
authority than the management of the intelligence community itself--
the U. S. Intelligence Board. Witness the PNIOs, which originally
were to receive executive scrutiny by the National Security Council
but did not to any effective degree, and long ago came to represent
the community talking to itself. In this way traditions arising out
of our own past reactions tc events take on the deceptive appearance
of fundamental imperatives.
d. Thus one of our most important functions is educating the
policy-makers to ask the right questions and to know what useful
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answers they can rightfully expect from intelligence. Not that our
judgment of what is important is superior to theirs, but that it is
an important ingredient of their own capacity to make judgments,
and that our view of what it is practical for us to do to help them
is better based in operational and analytical experience.
e. It follows that it is up to us to redefine our own jobs. Keenly
aware that the community and CIA have habituated the Executive
Branch to certain high expectations, and that it would take diplomatic
skill and assiduity of a high order to revise them, we nevertheless
believe that the effort is worth making. Its first aim would be to
educate the policy-makers to an understanding that we would serve
their own interest better if we could concentrate our effort on the
crucial problems rather than try to cover the whole world compre-
hensively--and superficially--in the way that has been assumed to be
essential ever since the Bogotazo of 1948. There could be two
improvements: better judgments, and less competition of secondary
matters for attention. Its second aim would be to educate manage-
ment within the intelligence community to the necessity for concen-
trating on the fundamentals and letting the incidentals go. Without
such education no possible combination of regulations, USIB reso-
lutions, systems analyses, and deliberations of boards, panels,
and committees will bring the Information. Explosion under adequate
control.
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1. In large measure, the threat of the Information Explosion and the
mischief it is already working are results of deficiencies in the require-
ments process which have been detailed in earlier chapters. Some of
these problems we have been able to attack with specific recommendations.
Others will yield only to continuous vigilance by the management of sub-
stantive offices and divisions. Let us briefly sum up these deficiencies:
a. Validation is haphazard and unsystematic.
b. Coordination is imperfect.
c. There is too little communication between analyst
and collector in terms of (1) tailoring the requirement to a
specific collection capability; (2) informing the analyst of the
status of his requirement; (3) providing the collector with an
evaluation of his response; and (4) furnishing him with regular
operational support.
d. Requirements are issued without due regard for
processing and analytical capabilities.
e. Large numbers of informal requirements and informal
evaluation requests elude the attention of management and are
unavailable to serve as bases for its judgment or decision.
f. Requirements are not systematically and regularly
reviewed in relation to intelligence production programs.
g. Analysts are not well informed about the requirements
process.
h. The crucial intelligence gaps are not systematically
identified and arranged in accordance with definite collection
and production prioi?it.i.es. The system is cluttered with inci-
dentals and trivialities which detract attention from the
important matters and degrade the quality of our product.
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2. We conclude that the chief of each substantive division should
be assigned the following responsibilities:
a. He should validate all requirements coming from
his division, certifying that the information is needed to fill
a gap in the national intelligence, is not already available,
and is not likely to be collected by a mechanism other than
the one to which the requirement is addressed.
b. He should stimulate personal communication between
his analysts and representatives of appropriate collection
mechanisms both before and after a requirement is written
and delivered in order that: (1) analysts may learn better
how to word their requirements in a manner appropriate to
the mechanism; (2) analysts may supply prompt and efficient
operational support; and (3) analyst and collector may work
together as a team, with prompt feedback from the latter and
prompt evaluation from the former.
c. He should be prepared to certify that the analytical
resources of his division are sufficient to deal with the fore-
seeable answers to all questions being asked by it at any one
time and to produce useful finished intelligence therefrom.
d. He should ensure that informal. requirements and
evaluation requests are recorded as soon as possible for
purposes of managerial control.
e. He should review all requirements issued ley the
division at least twice a year to ensure that they are up to
date, that they concentrate on the most important gaps in
the division's information, and that they are receiving
attention in accordance with the relative priorities among
the various subjects within the division's competence.
f. He should ensure that analysts are fully informed
about all elements of the collection requirements system,
how they relate to one another, and how they are related to
the division's work.
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It is recommended that: No. 24
The Deputy Director for Intelligence and the
Deputy Director for Science and Technology instruct
the chiefs of their substantive divisions to assume the
responsibilities described above.
3. We conclude that the director of each substantive office should
be assigned the following responsibilities:
a. He should keep himself generally aware of all the
requirements levied by his office, as to type, quantity,
appropriateness to the various collection mechanisms, and
expected effects upon the work loads and production schedules
of his office.
b. He should set priorities among the gaps in informa-
tion which most affect the work of his office and discuss these
priorities with representatives of the various collection
mechanisms.
c. He should keep sufficient watch on the requirements
of his office, as expressed either by his divisions or by USIB
committees, to be able to assure himself and higher authority
that his most important gaps have been clearly identified and
expressed in practical terms to the collectors. Among other
things this means assuring himself that methods appropriate
to his office have been devised for screening out the trivial,
the impractical, and the inappropriate.
d. He should compile, not less often than twice a year,
an extremely brief list of the most important gaps so identi-
fied, and arranged in order of their importance to his office.
This list could serve the double purpose of keeping top manage-
ment systematically informed and c,f forcing the chain of
command below it to give hard thought to hard subjects now
often sloughed off onto committees and into catch-all catalogues.
e. He should use the knowledge of gaps thus acquired to
develop the ability of his office to cooperate with the collectors
in the fields of collection guidance and operational support; as
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distinct from the mere listing of requirements or gaps.
This would especially mean encouraging subordinates
to propose practical suggestions for acquiring the infor-
mation desired.
It is recommended that: No. 25
The Deputy Director for Intelligence and the Deputy
Director for Science and Technology instruct the directors
of their substantive offices to assume the responsibilities
outlined above.
4. We have tried to show that the management of collection guidance
for human sources is rather disorderly. We doubt that setting up a USIB
committee, along the lines of those governing technical collection, would
reduce the confusion. The establishment of CGS has provided a helpful
centralizing force within CIA, and subsequent experience has shown the
value of central supervision. Before its creation there existed no group
of people with intimate knowledge of what had been asked for, let alone
what had already been collected. We believe that CGS should be given
strong CIA support in its dual role as manager of requirements and as
broker for both the requesters and those who do the collecting. It needs
to have enough cognizance of what is going on among the various collectors
so that no two of them are asked to do precisely the same job without
good reason.
5. CGS already has a wealth of experience and people who per-
sonally know both the requesters and the collectors. In addition, it is
already engaged in the following activities in the human-source field
which have a community impact:
a. Its Human Resources Group (HRG) participates in
the State Department's Current Economic Reporting Program.
b. HRG furnishes the Washington coordinator for the
Travel Folder Program.
c. HRG briefs military attaches and evaluates much of
their reporting.
d. CGS furnishes the CIA member and alternate for the
IPC. The alternate is chief of HRG.
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e. HRG publishes the Current Intelligence Reporting
List, which is used throughout the community.
f. CGS furnishes the secretariat for the Critical
Collection Problems Committee and can advise that com-
mittee on the human-source collection role in critical
problems.
g. CGS can ensure that human-source requirements do
not duplicate those for technical collection and that the several
systems complement and support each other.
h. CGS has a store of machine data on requirements
which is getting better all the time and is already giving
excellent support to the generators of requirements, the
substantive offices and the USIB committees, as well as to
collectors.
6. There are limits to what CGS can accomplish. It cannot change
overnight the military habit of writing requirements on anything and
everything and sending them to everybody. But the force of example and
gentle evangelism may do some good in time. Meanwhile CGS is already
doing a great deal to create a more orderly system. With the Information
Explosion threatening to bury us all in an increasing proliferation of
questions and answers, and with some elements of the community and of
the Agency apparently viewing this dull prospect with resignation rather
than dismay, we believe CGS can and should be doing much more.
7. We have found a great deal of healthy self-examination already
going on in the technical collection fields, especially SIGINT. Similar
scrutiny is being applied only in piecemeal fashion to human-source
collection. We believe that CGS is uniquely equipped to apply it--with
some authority in CIA and by persuasion and example in the rest of the
community--but it will need strong executive backing to do the job. Now
more than ever before there is a pressing need for a central require-
ments control mechanism. We conclude that the upper management of
CIA should do everything possible to fortify this function. Although
several of our other recommendations have touched on this matter, we
believe a further general one is in order.
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It is recommended that: No. 26
The Deputy Director for Intelligence furnish all
necessary support to the Collection Guidance Staff in
its efforts to:
a. Mitigate the deleterious effects of the
Information Explosion that are already being felt.
b. Apply strict selective criteria to all
foreign intelligence requirements in order to
prevent the Information Explosion from getting
completely out of hand.
c. Introduce progressively more order and
system into human-source requirements.
8. We believe that the conclusions and recommendations of this
study, insofar as they are approved and adopted, will have a quicker
and more beneficial effect on the requirements system if they are brought
directly to the attention of analysts, not only through the chain of command,
out in briefings by CGS officers with the assistance of representatives
of the Clandestine Services. The briefings should include
an explanation of the proper use of each element in the requirements
system and of the inter-related functions and responsibilities of the
CGS, the analysts, and the collectors.
It is recommended that: No. 27
The Deputy Director for Intelligence, in coordina-
tion with the Deputy Director for Science and Technology
and the Deputy Director for Plans, arrange briefings on
the collection guidance system for analysts in the Agency's
intelligence production offices.
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DD/I NOTICE
COP Y
DD/I N-1-130-20
No. 1-130-20
6 May 1964
THE COLLECTION GUIDANCE STAFF
OF THE DD/I-,:-
Mission: The Collection Guidance Staff (CGS) is the central mechanism
for coordinating all-source information requirements and levying them on
collectors in support of the DD/I's mission to correlate and evaluate intelli-
gence relating to the national security.
1. CGS will collaborate with DD/I production analysts in identifying
information gaps and translating these identifications into substantive all-
source collection guidance, acting on request for DD/S&T as well. **
2. CSG will be the channel for processing and passing to collectors
ail requirements related to national intelligence production, assigning proper
priorities, eliminating duplication and avoiding competition for collection
resources among production offices.
3. CGS will review progress in collection for DD/I substantive needs
and assess.ithe.effect:iveness of collection systems.
4. CGS will maintain the Agency's central registry for recording and
retrieving all requirements for substantive information and other tasking
requests or program requirements placed by Agency components on collectors
which might affect collection priorities.
"This statement of the mission and functions of the Collection Guidance Staff
in the Directorate of Intelligence is an extension of portions of DDI N 1-130-16
(10 June 1963), and specifically supersedes para 2 thereof.
**Special relationship of CGS to DDS&T is set forth in an Annex (dated 6 May
1964) to DDCI's directive of 30 Oct. 1963: Relationships between DDI and
DDS& T.
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5. CGS will provide staff support for the DD/I, and on request
for other components, in developing and coordinating Agency positions
on collection problems, and will appear at USIB and other interdepart-
mental committees where collection guidance is to be discussed.
6. CGS will maintain an Operations Center'"to support the DCI
with salient intelligence and U. S. operational intentions and capabilities
with regard to situations of concern to the Agency. To this end, CSG
will maintain Agency representation at NMCC and the State Operations
Center and will insure coordination on this role with DD/P and other
Agency components.
/ s / Ray. S. Clingy
RAY S. CLINE
Deppuby Director (Intelligence)
The Operations Center was placed under the executive direction of
AD/CI effective November 1964.
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COP Y
6 May 1964
SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP OF THE
DDI COLLECTION GUIDANCE STAFF
TO THE DDS&T*
The Collection Guidance Staff will be the central registry of all require-
ments for the collection of intelligence information (as distinct from tasking
or programming) and will assist analysts as requested in preparing and levying
requirements on collection media, and collectors in clarifying requirements
from analysts. In carrying out this mission the Collection Guidance Staff will
not interfere with direct analyst-collector contacts on technical matters.
1. CGS will maintain the central registry of all requirements including
those served on Agency collection offices. It will also serve as a repository
for other tasking requests for program requirements placed by Agency com-
ponents on collectors which might affect current collection priorities.
2. CGS will be responsible for processing (as distinct from tasking or
programming) Agency requirements on collection media of other agencies and
departments. It will review all such requirements to insure that undesirable
duplication does not exist, and where such duplication is found, will take
appropriate steps to unify the particular requirements.
3. As requested CGS will provide staff support to analytical elements
on requirement matters.
4. CGS will provide Agency representation at NMCC and State Operations
Center, and will insure coordination in this context with DDP and other
Agency components.
5. CGS will maintain an operations center to support the DCI with
salient intelligence on situations of concern to the Agency and related U. S.
military operational deployment plans and intentions.
This Annex to the DDCI's directive of 30 October 1963, Relationships
between DDI and DDS&T, supplements the role of CGS in the DDI as set
forth in DDI Notice N 1-130-20, dated 6 May 1964: The Collection Guidance
Staff of the DDI.
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