The Central Intelligence Agency on Thursday released a huge
cache of declassified articles from its in-house
journal "Studies In Intelligence" as a step in settling a lawsuit
from one of its former employees, reports
Steven Aftergood at Secrecy News.
Jeffrey Scudder, who formerly worked in the office overseeing
the agency's historical archive, has battled
the CIA for more than four years to release files of old
operations that he believed should have been made
public years ago, according to The Washington Post.
Now, the agency has released 249 of 419 documents
that remain in dispute, according to Aftergood.
The hundreds of pages were posted to the CIA's official
website, encompassing everything from a profile of
a CIA officer who was with the agency at its formation as
the OSS and stayed over 40 years to an incredible
account from the former deputy director Michael Morell,
who gave the daily intelligence briefing to President
George W. Bush on 9/11, just minutes before the attacks.
We combed through the website and picked out some of
most interesting insights we found.
In 1983, the CIA was
using an artificial intelligence program
to help officers withstand interrogations
Meet The Parents
In what is labeled an "Interrogation of an Alleged CIA Agent,
" one document gives a transcript of a
conversation between Joe Hardesty, a person believed to be
employed by the CIA, and an interrogator
of a foreign government named A.I.
Meet The Parents
It's quite a fascinating conversation that shows how
interrogations can quickly go in circles, with the same
questions continually asked, along with outlandish questions
meant to throw a subject off balance.
Here's a portion:
A.I.: Your employers trust you?
Hardesty: Of course they trust me.
A.I.: Who trusts you?
Hardesty: Worldwide Leasing Inc.
A.I.: They trust you ... of course.
Hardesty: Yes, but why did you ask me here?
A.I.: Why do you figure, Joe?
There are pages and pages of this frustrating conversation
between Joe and A.I., but as the article notes,
Joe "is not out of the woods yet." His interrogator is a
microcomputer using an artificial intelligence
program called Analiza. It has pre-loaded responses,
and eventually, it will become more knowledgeable
about Joe.
At its peak, the NSA employed nearly 100,000 American
cryptologists
NSA An NSA office in the 1960s.
An article written by a former cryptologist for NSA meant
o bridge the gap between signals intelligence
(dealing with technical stuff, codebreaking, radio signals, etc.)
and human intelligence (recruiting and
personally interacting with sources), shows how much
emphasis is given to the spy agency formerly
nicknamed "No Such Agency."
NSA An NSA office in the 1960s.
Dr. Thomas Johnson writes, "back in NSA's heyday, it ran
the largest American intelligence system,
" although he doesn't specify exactly when that was.
"The SIGINT world was huge. At the empire's peak,
almost 100,000 American cryptologists worked at
[redacted] locations."
The CIA officer giving President Bush his daily intelligence
briefing on 9/11 described it as "uneventful"
AP President George W. Bush was informed of the terrorist
US Army An unmodified OH-6 helicopter in flight.
In an account of what should have been a 15-minute
briefing that turned into a 36-hour whirlwind,
former Deputy Director Michael Morell describes giving
the president his intelligence update — known
as the President's Daily Brief — minutes before the 9/11
attacks commenced.
Upon walking into the president's suite in Sarasota, Florida,
Bush put down his newspaper and asked,
"Anything of interest this morning?" Morell then writes,
"on arguably the most important day in
President Bush's tenure, his intelligence briefing was
uneventful."
AP President George W. Bush was informed of the terrorist
attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, while speaking
at a school in Florida.
Four minutes before he finished, American Airlines Flight
11 had turned off its transponder. The first
plane to hit the World Trade Center was thought to be
accidental, but then a second hit, and Bush was
told by Andy Card "America is under attack." Later on
Air Force One, Morell told a congressman on
board: "I would bet every dollar I had that Usama Bin
Laden's Al-Qa'ida organization was responsible."
The CIA developed a "quiet" helicopter in 1970
Long before the world learned of "stealth" helicopters
like those used in the 2011 Osama Bin Laden raid,
the CIA had developed a "quiet" helicopter all the way
back in 1970.
The agency set to modify the OH-6 light observation
helicopter for use in secret infiltration in hostile places.
Surprisingly, "the first test bird was up and flying in
about 60 days, and it was fully operational in about six
months." In March 2008, Air & Space magazine wrote
about one of the aircraft's missions to tap phones in
North Vietnam.
US Army An unmodified OH-6 helicopter in flight.
President Johnson thought the daily intelligence briefing
was "dull" and wanted it "jazzed up"
William Newton gives a fascinating account of what it
was like to write and present the president's daily
intelligence briefing, which gives a down-and-dirty
"what you need to know" for the president.
Unfortunately, it was a bit boring for LBJ.
"To our surprise, he told us that the President
(or, more likely, Bromley Smith — it was never clear which)
felt that the booklets were getting a trifle dull.
Could we jazz them up a bit, without diluting their value as
intelligence? Perhaps we could insert a 'funny' every now
and then."
The youngest recipient of the CIA's Intelligence Star award
was only 14 years old
In May 1966, the 14-year-old daughter of the CIA station
chief in the Congo displayed incredible courage
in confronting a group of burglars who had entered her
bedroom and were planning to harm her.
After they woke her, she "declared in Lingala [the local
language] that he should keep his hands off her.
Pulling on her dressing gown, she faced the armed robbers
and warned them not to harm anyone in the
house."
The robbers were surprised by her confidence and
said they only wanted money. She agreed to help them
find cash but warned that the American Embassy
"had 'secret and magic' ways of identifying people who
harmed Americans."
Later, after her parents were woken up and put into a
corner of the bedroom, the girl's mother talked back
to the robbers in French and told them to leave.
They eventually did, although the robbers were later
captured by police, tried, and executed.
The daughter received the CIA's second-highest award —
the Intelligence Star — for "her quick appraisal
of the situation, calm deportment, knowledge and use of
the local language, exploitation of local lore,
and resolute action," the article says, adding that it
"served her well as a teenager, and they continue
to do so now in her career as a case officer in the
Directorate of Operations."
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