Talk:Central Intelligence Agency/Archive 5

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Effects of US intelligence reorganization

When trying to tell what the CIA has or has not done, especially with respect to recent events, do remember that its bureaucratic position has changed. From 1947 (in theory, more like 1952, to 2004, the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) "wore two hats". One was to run the CIA. The other was to coordinate the entire Intelligence Community.

In late 2004, the position of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) was created, and the position of DCI abolished, as well as most of the IC-wide responsibilities, which moved to the office of the DNI. CIA position titles and functions were changed, for a variety of reasons. Most importantly, the head of the CIA is now the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (DCIA).

I've seen some references saying where the CIA did something, where it really happened in the DNI or sometimes the White House/National Security Council. This is not a simple matter to explain CIA activities, since prior to 2004, the National Intelligence Estimates and similar documents, as well as the Presidential/NSC committee action authorizations, could both be under the CIA for a given year. Now, some of this information goes under several agencies.

It's worth noting that the reorganization still left major intelligence analysis function in CIA, as well as the National Clandestine Service, which does both clandestine intelligence gathering and covert action.

I don't have a simple answer moving forward, but I hate to see covert actions alone presented without the directly relevant intelligence estimates and NSC authorization. This is not too much of a problem right now, since the more recent actions are classified, but it is something to consider when discussing things like "budget". Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 16:03, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

Trav, Travb and 68.89.131.187

Hi Trav*,

In some comments above you put forth the idea that I contributed a lot of material to CIA page for the express purpose of forcing a branch for the express purpose of deleting negative information about CIA.

This is incorrect.

The sequence of events for me was as follows:

1. I started reading Tim Weiner's book, and wanted to explore, on a country-by-country basis, exactly what the history of CIA intervention is in that country's local politics.

2. So I started adding detail to CIA page, by geographical region (on the theory that there will be a family of actions related to a particular region) by country (actions focussed on the politics of a particular country) and by date (things change over time).

3. I started getting deletes from someone who evaporated.

4. My edits made the page really big. You complained. Someone else branched it, and another person branched the main page with a spelling error. I did not ask for the branch or contest it. When there was a branch, I put edits appropriate to the branch into the branch. When the branch was undone, I put all my edits into the main page.

5. Howard got involved. He rethought the branches, added 8 which I personally think are well-thought-out, and added his own agenda, which was to emphasize intelligence collection over regime change allegations and flying saucer/mind control/USA spying issues.

6. After adding items for most of the countries listed in Weiner's book (there are 72), I discovered the CIA Operations category. I started going down the items in this category, alphabetically, and entering links to them in the 8 pages in the context Region -> Country -> Date -> Operation. This refinement of categorization is not supplied by the CIA Operations category itself. Howard accused me of focussing on regime change and linking to junk articles. I told him my agenda was to flush out the junk articles by linking to them, where by "junk" I mean something that Howard or someone else thinks is junk. I also asked Howard to be proactive about editing or AfDing junk. Howard's preferred approach is to ignore the junk and not link to it and only put in quotes from government documents or things he has personal experience of.

7. In a couple of cases (one Howard about a CIA Operation JACK wikilink and one by Aldux about Howard’s facts about Chad), assertions were put into Discussion page about something being junk that were not put into Article. I redacted the assertions and put them into Article. I got bitched out by Howard and the other guy. Since then, neither of them has put their assertions into the respective articles.

8. Howard started deleting my in-context wikilinks. One of Howard’s articles got AfD listed. In the AfD discussion the peer comments were that he was unfocussed, spamming government documents, and WP:COAT. Howard also stated as part of his agenda to de-emphasize the issue of regime change. In my response to Howard’s deletions I noted his agenda and the peer criticisms. I predicted to him that over the next year, most of his hard work would get undone by editors such as yourself, to a large extent because his agenda overshadows his very real and strong factual contributions.

9. The predicted onslaught of deletions happened, not in a year’s time, but about a day after I made my prediction. Does that make you, Trav*, the agent of my intuition?

10. You, Trav*, after attempting to delete all of the work done by Howard, myself and others in the last week or so, none of which really eliminated anything on the original CIA page, just redistributed it into a larger context, then accuse me on this page of having an over-arching agenda of whitewashing the CIA page.

11. Do you agree that this is a correct summary of events?

Thanks, Erxnmedia (talk) 18:21, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

I'm not Trav, but I was a participant, and I disagree that you correctly summarized events

My perception of some of those events is a little different.
From your #5, "[Howard's] agenda, which was to emphasize intelligence collection over regime change allegations and flying saucer/mind control/USA spying issues." I disagree. As far as having an agenda, it is to have covert action, which is not necessarily regime chance, in a perspective that includes the intelligence estimates that might have affected the decisionmaking for the action, as well as any higher-level government decisionmaking to take the action. With respect to mind control, that was very real, but some time ago -- declassified documents have shown much of the research was done at Georgetown University hospital, in the Gorman Building whose construction was CIA funded. I happened to have a job in the clinical biochemistry lab there, on a different floor; I had seen the locked doors that turned out to be associated with the program, but just assumed that it was some secretive professor. That being said, I believe that a decent writeup is needed. Sidney Gottlieb was the first-level manager, but there are proposals for projects that show his name, but the approving authority's name is blacked out. I believe an objective discussion of some highly inappropriate human subject research should include reference to the Declaration of Helsinki and other standards for human research. MKULTRA can be blasted in a non-emotional way, comparing it systematically to the accepted standards rather than getting conspiratorial or dramatic. There are other known irregularities, such as keeping some toxins that were supposed to be destroyed -- although, IIRC, they eventually were given to a cancer research lab for legitimate work.
"I also asked Howard to be proactive about editing or AfDing junk. Howard's preferred approach is to ignore the junk and not link to it and only put in quotes from government documents or things he has personal experience of." No, that's not quite my approach. I agree that I see no reason why I should link to things I find implausible. As long as they are in the category:CIA, and preferably MILHIST | intel=yes, interested people may clean them up. I am not dependent on "personal experience" or "government documents", but I can look at other evidence that shows illogic or bad sourcing. There was one article that quoted, IIRC, Smythe, but when I actually read the Smythe article, there was absolutely not a word about the matter being sourced. There was a Gladio-related statement that the CIA trained the British forces, when the historical reality is that British organizations trained the initial OSS people, and that SAS, formed in WWII, can be documented as the model for Delta Force. It is not plausible that Britain needed CIA assistance in something it already could do very well, which can be sourced extensively.
My question to you, Ernxmedia, is that if I see something implausible like the CIA training of what SAS and SIS were quite capable of doing, why should I link to it at all, and spend time fixing that material when there is much better sourced and plausible material that can go into the main article? One of the links to Operation GOLD fails to mention the Operation SILVER that led into it, the recently declassified Clandestine Service History documents (which were expanded after FOIA demands), and the counterstatements from the Russians that they knew about GOLD and used it to supply disinformation? If I'm going to link to GOLD, I want that other relevant information there. I don't think the article should be linked until it's complete.
In #7, you say "I redacted the assertions and put them into Article. I got bitched out by Howard and the other guy. Since then, neither of them has put their assertions into the respective articles." The other guy had raised some reasonable questions of accuracy of material on Chad. We discussed it, I thought appropriately, on the talk page. Neither of us was ready to make the edits to the Chad article until we had checked additional references, which we were going to do on our timetable, not yours.
No "other guy" was involved when I discussed why Operation JACK was questionable. I gave several references in talk, but knew there were additional sources I wanted to use to cross-check, including some non-government sources that are reasonably well respected. I observed that the JACK article had elements that were clearly wrong, claiming that certain organizations ran things before the organizations actually existed. As it was, I had a substantial amount of well-sourced (government and not) material about covert action and clandestine intelligence in the Korean War article. I was not willing to add fragmentary references to JACK until I verified their accuracy, and, if accurate, added the proper context to JACK. You decided, without asking me, to take my talk comments and paste them into the article. I don't think it's WP:OWN when someone says, on a talk page, that they are checking facts and indicate the material on the talk page is not ready for prime time, and additional comments are requested as well as my commitment to do further research.
WRT #8, "Howard also stated as part of his agenda to de-emphasize the issue of regime change. In my response to Howard’s deletions I noted his agenda and the peer criticisms. I predicted to him that over the next year, most of his hard work would get undone by editors such as yourself, to a large extent because his agenda overshadows his very real and strong factual contributions." Bluntly, I think you are twisting words. I did not say I wanted to de-emphasize regime change as such, but to verify allegations of covert action (not identical to regime change), and, when verified, put in the intelligence analysis and White House authorizations that preceded the action. I told you that I was going to do what I found intellectually dishonest, which disagrees with what I can call your agenda. I told you that if material I sourced and put into context got deleted, my life would go on without participating in Wikipedia. Since you raised the point of "agendas", I am of the opinion you are largely interested with coming up with as many examples of inappropriate covert action as possible; you yourself wrote that you were essentially dumping out of Weiner's book and "hoping" someone else would work over those factoids. I put in sourcing requests for several of your insertions, and you said you only had Weiner's book and hoped I would find detail. My response was that sounded like you were giving me assignments to clean up after you, and you had no authority to do that.
I will be interested in Trav's perception of these. Trav, a question: when you looked at the changes, were you aware of some of the exchanges between Erxnmedia and myself? Some were on the article talk page, but others were on user talk pages and may not have shown up on your radar. I gather that you have been getting more and more context of what has happened. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 19:22, 5 January 2008 (UTC)
OK Howard, let me surprise you by agreeing with your version of my version of events. It's good enough for Government work.
I only hope trav* will read the above and recognize that my editing activity was oriented towards increasing information and understanding about CIA activities and not about whitewashing.
Also I don't think you have enough respect for the humble factoid. I'm working on reading Ghost Warriors now. There are hundreds/thousands of names and relationships in Weiner book, and hundreds/thousands of names and relationships in Ghost Warriors, and so on in each significant book you can read on the topic. Netting those names and relationships together is a chore. Trav* accused me of putting in too much information; I touched on maybe 0.5% at most of the detail in Weiner book. The respect I ask for the humble factoid, is that I believe you would never have ended up typing in stuff about Chad if I didn't keep pumping countries and factoidal issues into the article. I typed out the exact list of countries in Weiner's book and the response I got from you, as I read it, was somewhat negative. However when we hung up a framework of many countries, the detail just started to follow. In my own way I was trying to be pragmatic in terms of a strategy to get results quickly, but I see that that strategy is irritating to you for one set of reasons and irritating to trav* for another set of reasons. If I were actually trying to gather intelligence on some area in an operational context, I think I would start exactly as I did, by mapping out all the factoids I had available, finding the network between them, and then refining from there. In that context I would throw the 6 Chad counter-factoids into the basket with the 10 Chad factoids, stare at them, look for more sources, and eliminate the contradictions. I would allow myself an intermediate state where the information on the page is contradictory, but it is all the information I have available at that moment. You only want to put down finished product, and not network to contradictions, which is fine, more Wikipedian, and good on you. Best of luck! Thanks, Erxnmedia (talk) 00:50, 6 January 2008 (UTC)
I appreciate your comments. You might be interested by one of the problems in intelligence agencies themselves: the promotions tend to go faster to the people that collect rather than analyze, so there becomes a tendency for the analysts to become overwhelmed with factoids. Now, in the context of CIA and other agencies, there is quite a bit of work, by no means finished, about computer tools to help the analyst. Given I don't have even those primitive tools, it's harder to deal with lots of raw data.
You have given me an idea, and that may be to take factoids, perhaps from you and others, put them on one of my user pages, and manipulate them to connect the dots. If that connecting takes a sloppy turn, it isn't disrupting the main article. When the draft comes together, than it can be moved into the main article in much cleaner form.
Whether you realize it or not, you are making a very good point about Chad. When an analyst is working on one country or even a region, he or she can try to take all the factoids dealing with that topic. For me, as one person, being faced with seventy-odd countries means information overload. If we could get to a collaborative mode, preferably using some of the same analytic tradecraft, there might be a very productive division of labor.
This is not a solved problem. As you may know, the FBI is an exceptionally decentralized agency, which is fine for law enforcement but not fine for connecting dots in counterespionage or counterterror. The 9/11 Commission observed that if someone had put together factoids that were in at least two offices (Phoenix, and, IIRC, Chicago), the dots might have connected into some semblance of the 9/11 attack plan. The US intelligence community is still struggling with how to do that better, without overload, and especially dealing with the FBI having a culture that is oriented principally to criminal investigation rather than national or international analysis. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 01:36, 6 January 2008 (UTC)
Hi all, I went away for the holidays and came back to find an impressive amount of work done and undone about this page. I've tried to follow the discussion above, but it seem to be a lot of what I found when I looked at it for the first time a few months ago, a lot of arguing and revert wars. I'm not going to make any changes just yet, still reading Tim Weiner's book right now, and may only make some minor adjustments in the future.
In case you are wondering, and this is really why I'm responding here, I am the SPA that Trav* so loudly complained about in the discussions above. To briefly explain, I set out as a new user to help the CIA page under the same complaints incessantly voiced above, the article is too long and unreadable. I admit, my implementation of these good intentions was piss poor. I'll just leave it at that. I didn't want to delete or nullify anything (although the actual deleting was a result of Trav's revert, nothing I did directly, and I still don't see why trav blames me for that, he should have moved things back, rather than revert, this would, I believe, have preserved the new additions) but that's how it came across to some I guess.
Anyway, I'm actually here to defend Trav, oddly enough. I know E has more experience with him (you've certainly been editing this page longer than I have, I think), but I think I should point out, as a victim of Trav's over zealousness, that Trav does mean well, I do think he is willing to work on the article with people, he just get's a little agressive when he's on the defense, and he's a little bit too quick to(and perhaps persistent in) accuse people of POV. But while I do disagree with him on some things (I DON'T think the main article should contain every single operation the CIA has ever done over the past 60 years), I also believe he is doing what he thinks is best. He just needs to work on his methods a little. So anyway, try to accomodate his aggressiveness a little and I think he can be a valuable addition. In my experience, he denounced a lot of the arguments I made and all of the work I did (with reason on the latter) but then ended making a reorganization that was quite in line with what I was originally thinking, even if I didn't voice it correctly at the time.
In this vein, I would also like to congratulate Howard for his patience and persistance on this. I think Howard has got the right idea, and I would like to help in any way I can. As I said, I'm by no means an expert, and a new wikipedian, so definitely not capable of too much just yet, but I'm improving and I would like to use this wiki effort as an opportunity to cut my teeth a little. Howard, E, Trav, any thoughts on how I can help? (Morethan3words (talk) 11:42, 7 January 2008 (UTC))

Covert Action major section: massively POV, and contains substantive errors

Let us say there were no practical restrictions on length of an article. Let us say that the chronological history of the CIA goes in the main article.

Earlier sections of the main article show organizational functions before the NCS and its predecessors, such as the Directorate of Intelligence and the Directorate of Science & Technology. Why would they exist if the agency were totally devoted to covert action? Covert action, incidentally, does not include clandestine intelligence collection, so a large part of what the NCS does is also ignored. This seems incredibly POV, as an attempt to portray CIA as an unsupervised rogue destroyer of countries.

There is also a problem with implying the CIA is the only agency of the US government that has anything to do with changing politics or rule in other countries. Iraq, Panama and Grenada were emphatically regime change, but rather overt in their methods. Overt propaganda from the Voice of America is under the quasi-public Broadcasting Board of Governors, and, earlier, under the US Information Agency of the Department of State, so it seems odd to attribute the broadcasts to Hungary in 1956 as CIA operations.

Another area, incidentally, that is critical, was part of CIA for many years, and has now moved to the DNI is the group (with various names) that prepares National Intelligence Estimates. The fact that the agency did these key documents for many years, as well as the past and recent attempts to interfere with them for political reasons, is as controversial a subject to me as any regime change.

In the history of the organization, the approval authorities for covert action are covered, but there is no mention of CIA having any oversight, or receiving any orders.

There are logical errors in some of the statement. CIA is described as attempting a coup in Albania between 1947 and 1952, a rather long time to be trying to covertly overthrow a government and not be noticed. More to the point, there was no true CIA covert action capability until 1952. Prior to that time, the Office of Policy Coordination was a quasi-autonomous covert action group that drew support from the CIA, but had direct access to the Secretaries of State and Defense.

As to Hungary in 1956, I suggest reading the much more detailed section in the article on the revolt in the CIA Activities in Europe and Soviet Union, with some substantial declassified documents on what capabilities the US, and, for that matter, the political levels of the Soviet Union, actually had in Budapest.

Is there really a consensus that the history of the agency is best expressed solely in terms of covert action, ignoring all other functions, and giving no more than a sentence or two to explain quite complex situations? I suggest looking at the Indonesia section of the CIA Activities in Asia-Pacific, which is hardly a whitewash of either the covert action, covert action approval, intelligence estimation actions. I believe it takes that level of detail to have a full sense of US government destabilization against that country. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 06:18, 6 January 2008 (UTC)

Two Problems - Small Misunderstanding

These are excellent points, and i personally don't have any objection to them. I do, however, think you've needlessly ruffled a few feathers with your editing approach. While the article certainly deserves balance in respect to the agency's internal activities and general organization -- and in this regard i think your suggestions are spot on -- it also clearly demands that the most visible and broad-reaching effects of that activity be clearly stated.

The impasse we currently see on the page is basically the result of two problems; first, the page is becoming so long that it is unwieldy and difficult to maintain as a single topic. Second, there is a disagreement about how to organize the subject matter.

I would suggest that we divide the page into two main sections: the purpose, primary activities, chain-of-command and bureaucratic organization of the CIA, and then a second section dealing with widely acknowledged CIA actions and programs, the participants involved, and the resulting effects on the geopolitical situation.

It's this last part - the geopolitical effects of these actions - where there will be the most disagreement. As for whether the programs existed or not, why they were initiated, and who the participants were: these things are either reliably sourced or not, and there should be little disagreement about their suitability for inclusion. The ultimate effects, however...for instance, it is quite clear that Iran would today not have an Ayatollah in charge if it had not been for the CIA's overthrow of the Iranian democracy and consequent installation of the brutal Shah. Now, i'm not arguing that we should include this particular sentence on my word alone. But there are untold number of political commentators who, over the last three or four decades, have repeatedly and unequivocally made precisely that point, and IMO it would be a travesty if mention is not made.

[Interjected] While it was technically pre-CIA, the failure of the US to work with Ho and a coalition, but instead restoring the French to Indochina and then allowing manipulation of elections and refusing to have the referendum, led to a disastrous situation in Southeast Asia. Suggestion here: Archimedes Patti's (the team leader)'s Why Vietnam? America's Albatross.Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 02:06, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

Even so, the page will remain too large and unwieldy. So perhaps it would be best to give brief -- as in, one or two sentence summaries, or even just referential phrases -- summaries of these activities, and then link them off to other pages. I have no problem with this method. However, if we choose to go down this route then there should be some equally unequivocal language on this page that draws attention to the international objections that many countries have made to CIA covert activity, and those should reference specific examples.

So essentially, my suggestion is to reorganize the page into two main parts:

I: command structure, legal authority, inter- and intra-organizational bureaucratic structure, and CIA organizational authority and methods
II: Acknowledged and/or controversial CIA programs.

I should make reference to II, and if done properly will allow for a more balanced understanding of the organization's activities and its activities. Stone put to sky (talk) 12:52, 6 January 2008 (UTC)

The idea of having the effects of actions, and the perception of them by other countries, is not unreasonable. My concern, and there may be ways to address it, is that when another country claims "CIA" did something, the effect upon them may very well have been not from the CIA alone, but from an overall strategy of the US government. Fully recognizing that some Administrations might have had trouble with regime change in a kindergarten, there have been times when covert action, economic policy, military operations, overt propaganda, and other factors were all applying to a given situation. Vietnam, for all of the irrationality at the highest levels (If you haven't read it, I suggest HR McMaster's Dereliction of Duty), cannot be judged in terms of the Phoenix Program without considering what was being done by the regular military. One cannot judge its decisionmaking without looking at the controversy and manipulation of numbers by, variously, working-level CIA analysts, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Military Assistance Command Vietnam, and the White House. Another recommendation is Sam Adams' War of Numbers, as well as a thorough reading of the Pentagon Papers. The reality, I believe, that the working level analysts at CIA had some of the most realistic assessments of the situation, but they didn't agree with the preconceptions of Johnson and McNamara any more than realistic assessments of Iraq's WMD capability agreed with Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Bush.
All I ask is that even when a country is chanting "CIA! CIA!", that perception indeed should be noted, but if there is reasonable evidence that CIA's action (or even things they didn't do) are part of a overall United States Government policy, that editors do not take the easy way out of treating CIA as the heart of all that is sinister, when they may have been "following orders". There are cases where orders were inappropriate and should have been refused. Simply as a historical example, it may be well to note that the CIA did finally say NO to some of the Watergate, Plumbers Group, and other White House operations. This isn't Republican vs. Democratic; there was a point, during the run-up to the Bay of Pigs, that some CIA personnel should at least have resigned in protest about both illegality and, by the time of the operation, something that almost certainly would result in a bloody defeat for the invasion force. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 02:04, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

Trying a format that might be a compromise

In the CIA Activities in Europe and Russia article, I have had it arranged by country and year. Now, I have subheadings in the year for each kind of action:

  • Clandestine intelligence collection
  • Covert action
  • Gray psychological operations
  • Black psychological operations
  • Intelligence analysis
  • Intelligence estimates
  • Actions against CIA personnel (attacks, indictments)

I may break out technical vs. human collection. Does this satisfy the covert action concerns, since they will have explicit headings, just like my concerns are satisfied when I see the analysis, estimates, and clandestine collection clearly marked.

Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 14:07, 6 January 2008 (UTC)

Within the context of the current article your suggestion is fine. But again, I would suggest that we undertake a dramatic restructuring of the rticle. For instance, I do not believe that the "History of the CIA" portion of the article is useful or necessary to this main stub. Each one of the summaries given under the CIA directors' names would be more appropriate as a short note somewhere else or a long exposition on each directors' page. With the current structure, it is much as if the main controversies and most notable achievements of each of the U.S. presidents were offered up as a summary of U.S. history.

It would be more accurate for us to give summaries and links. But again, the links and summaries should, in addition to expounding on the mundane affairs and successes of the CIA, reflect the controversy that surrounds the agency, as well. That seems to be the biggest concern with many here, and -- after my experiences on a few other pages -- it is one i also share. Stone put to sky (talk) 15:37, 6 January 2008 (UTC)

Let me be sure I understand; I certainly agree drastic restructuring is in order. I certainly have no objection to linking to page(s) dealing with the various directors. I believe, for that specific purpose, there is value to having them in one article, because the transitions from one to another, or the changing relationships successive directors had with Presidents, have significance.
As the article stands today, it comes across as a POV piece overemphasizing covert action to the exclusion of all else, and, ironically, providing so little detail on many of the actions or allegations that, were I not familiar with the subject, would not know why I should follow a link. I am not suggesting controversial actions be deleted, but that they be presented in a fuller context. Such a context includes, first and foremost, the orders given at a White House/NSC level to conduct action, or, in the cases where CIA did act without proper authority, those situations should stand out. Such a context also includes the intelligence analysis that might have motivated a covert action. In some cases, very, very brief notes/links are appropriate to show that an analysis or estimate led to overt action, but, as you point out, we don't want this to turn into a history of the US.
The main article, I think, should contain some of the principles of CIA/intelligence community organization. Unfortunately, the 2004 creation of the DNI, and some of the associated reorganizations, make it very hard for newcomers to understand the flow of who did what at which time. Today, I happened to have finally found a collection of declassified documents from the fifties, which contain what I consider essential definitions (e.g., the various colors of propaganda), the motivation for some of the infrastructure, and much more detail on the Executive Branch oversight mechanism. I've put in the psychological warfare definitions and the original motivation for support bases and airlines, and will put in somewhat more of the background. In passing, I will note there is nothing in the article about Congressional oversight, both what does happen, and some of the proposals for more effective Congressional oversight.
To me, it makes the most sense to link to articles that discuss, in one place, collection activity, covert action, analysis, and oversight. In many cases, these are most easily structured first by geographic area and then by date. In certain other cases, such as human rights, crime/drugs, health and survival, and transnational terrorism, articles dealing with those non-geographic issues in a chronological way makes more sense. Some of the controversial issues, less the things that might be called conspiracy theories, and more the especially complex geopolitical things such as Indonesia, Afghanistan, Southeast Asia, etc., are going to get lengthy. Just as the CIA itself broke its own internal geographic organization by having a current office for Iraq alone, and in the past for Vietnam alone, it may well turn out that some topics may grow to a length, much as happens for campaigns and battles of a war, where more detailed articles logically link from a more general level.
In the world in which CIA lives, there are rarely pure blacks and pure whites, but a spectrum of shades of gray. The agency and its partners are neither Satan Incarnate nor a clean-living James Bond. With some careful thought, I think a structure can emerge where all would agree that the important information is there, neither as a whitewash or a damnation. How can we best move toward that consensus? Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 01:42, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

I think the best way to reach a consensus on this is to write up a clear outline of what sort of re-organization you think would be appropriate. As i've explained already, i think including specific sections dealing with each director is a poor approach. It introduces a lot of extraneous stuff to the article thatwould be appropriate in a broad history but is inappropriate for an encyclopedic treatment. Similarly, the risk we run when condensing the information here is that it turns out a whitewash.

While i agree with you that the actions of the CIA should be placed within the context of the political and military command structure to which they are subject, what i think is also quite important is that those actions by the agency that are clearly contrary to the public image projected by the United States are noteworthy and should be included. Yet even as i write that, i also understand that it would be unfair to emphasize these aspects of the issue over its other activities; as CIA people point out, their successes are never noted for the simple reason that their activities are largely prophylactic, and preventing events from occurring can't exactly be memorialized.

I'll offer up my own outline, first; keep in mind this is very rough -- it's just off the top of my head -- but at least it can serve as a starting point: 

* 1 Organization
     o 1.1 Executive offices
     o 1.2 Directorate of Intelligence
           + 1.2.1 Regional groups
           + 1.2.2 Transnational groups
           + 1.2.3 Support and general units
     o 1.3 National Clandestine Service
           + 1.3.1 Mission Definitions
                 # 1.3.1.1 Covert Action
                 # 1.3.1.2 Clandestine Operation
                 # 1.3.1.3 Psychological Operation
           + 1.3.2 Organization
           + 1.3.3 Approval of Clandestine and Covert Operations
                 # 1.3.3.1 Period of committee supervision and relative autonomy
                 # 1.3.3.2 Increasing control by CIA management
     o 1.4 Directorate of Science and Technology
     o 1.5 Directorate of Support
     o 1.6 Other offices
* 2 Relationship with other US intelligence agencies
* 3 Relationship with foreign intelligence services
* 4 History
     * Overview - 
         *  Intelligence Gathering Prior to the Formation of the CIA
         *  Origins in the OSS
         *  Political climate under Eisenhower:
               *  The Cold War
               *  J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI, and the China Lobby
               *  The Korean War, Nuclear Brinksmanship, and MAD
         *  Transformations under Kennedy and Johnson
         *  From Nixon to Reagan
               *  The Family Jewels
               *  Central America:  from Nixon to Carter
               *  The Mujahideen
               *  Iran/Contra Scandal
         *  From Reagan to Reorganization under Bush
         *  Post 9-11 Controversies
               *  Pre-war Intelligence Failures
               *  Valerie Plame-Wilson
         * Link to List of Directors
     
* 5 Clandestine history
     ...
* 6 Recent controversies
     ...
* 7 Publications
* 8 CIA in fiction and the movies

As you can see from my suggestion, most of the structure of the early article would be kept. I think that the current organization, there, is quite good -- informative, short, to the point -- but i would support a complete re-write of certain sections. For instance, the black/grey/white propaganda categories should be linked to their own respective pages and discussed in detail there, while only a cursory mention plus a link is adequate for this page. I completely agree with your insistence upon a greater clarification of the oversight mechanisms and chain-of-command. These are clearly key aspects of the current organization and it's a shame that more attention hasn't been paid them.

A couple of followup points. The psychological operations pages also need some help, but, as opposed to the often-confused difference between covertness and clandestinity, the black-gray-white definitions are from the actual document that established them for CIA. That can move to a separate page, but I do think it is important to identify when something is the definition used by the organization itself.
There's a slightly broader point, and you may well be touching upon it with your suggestions on history. As you probably know, United States Army Special Forces were created by the Psychological Warfare Division of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, although psychological operations in the military later became much more subordinate to special operations as a command. A similar process took place during and after WWII; covert political action, certainly under Truman, came out of a Psychological Operations Board. There's a fairly recently declassified volume of Foreign Relations of the United States that has an excellent set of documents on the creation of CIA and associated organizations.
I'm certainly not insistent of having every director's history in the main section. IIRC, I put those in to try to balance some other inaccuracies. It is relevant, though, that a general history should indicate when a DCI was especially influential, when a DCI had or did not have the confidence of the Presiden, and perhaps indicating the directors that came through the ranks, as well as special cases such as Casey: a WWII clandestine intelligence officer, and a distinguished one, who then went into law. When he became DCI again, I think he forgot WWII was over.
Have you considered how to organize the more detailed historical material to which there would be links? I absolutely agree that an objective history, focused more on the US politics and policies that caused the agency's priorities and techniques to change over time, should be possible in no more than a page or two. That some of these events led to efforts at regime change is distinct from the regime change itself. I believe the latter needs to be covered, but in more detail and in a separate article. In such articles, however, intelligence analyses and estimates that led to the decision to order the covert action, as well as the covert action itself, need to be treated as a unit. In some cases, the result of the intelligence was not a covert action, but an overt action by military forces, or perhaps economic sanctions, to which there can be links. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 21:13, 7 January 2008 (UTC)
These are all excellent suggestions. I think you'll find, however, that by choosing this particular article to edit you've jumped feet-first into a hotbed of political activism. There is a common undercurrent in Wikipedia that rarely goes acknowledged; certain political cliques join up and try to force changes to a page so that it reflects their own preferred interpretation of the world. On the political pages these folks tend to be ethnic or political chauvinists who rarely welcome inconvenient facts or history (i almost wrote "right wingers", there, but changed it because i think the term is largely meaningless, these days -- there are many on both the right and the left who are in agreement, but for some reason can't get past the labels they've self-identified with). As a result, many obvious and commonly understood realities can become extremely contentious, and no matter how sincere or diligent one might be in tracking down supporting sources such groups will still mercilessly delete whatever it is of your work they disagree with.
One of the most common techniques of these groups is to jump on to a page, add a lot of poorly sourced, fluffy content, and then start deleting relevant and properly sourced material as "superfluous". Then another one of the comrades comes along and deletes the fluff, so that the page is left denuded of the targeted facts.
So a basic consensus has emerged about how people should go about changing pages; basically, on contentious pages people shouldn't delete and shouldn't add without first o.k'ing it with those editors who care enough to stick around and maintain the page. Some of us -- for instance, me -- are rather busy and can't be around 24/7. Others are younger, are students, older, get paid for their work, or are just bored unemployed people, and so stick around a lot.
Let's make a sandbox and start putting down some concrete ideas. See the RFC below for more of my comments on this. Stone put to sky (talk) 18:02, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

Similarly, i support a complete re-write of the "History" section; as it is -- and this is a common problem on Wikipedia -- it's just a mish-mash of a thousand little facts that various people think are important. A history should have a clear "This is where it began, this is what happened next, and this describes the process that led us to where it is now." The current "history" does that quite poorly. I think that if we include a detailed early history, describing the origins of the CIA as (at least in part) a specific reaction by Eisenhower to erode the power of Hoover and the China Lobby -- describing its origins in military special forces -- and attending to the cold war international climate -- then it would be an easy thing to move from there through the next couple of decades. As it develops, such a history section should provide more than enough opportunity for everyone here to touch upon what they consider significant as well as plenty of opportunities for gratuitous linking.

Finally, I support a complete re-write of the last two sections, especially the "covert actions" section, which i consider to be quite as bad as the list of directors. This should be relocated to its own "List" page, and a summary should instead be provided here that describes all of the current material in an evenhanded manner. Certainly, the CIA has been guilty of some horrendous human rights abuses, as well as other mistakes; but the page should also clearly show that the CIA is a f---ing huge organization, and most of what it does is little more than common police work. It should show that its work is an incontrovertibly necessary role in the day-to-day functions of the U.S. government as currently organized, but because of the nature of this work the organization is prone to abuse -- both by people who wish to use it as a political tool against domestic opponents as well as cynical leaders who use its powers to abuse international rivals. Just as there are some evil people who operate under its conscious protection (after E. Howard Hunt do we really need any more proof?), there are also evil people who have used it unethically against rival nations (Kissinger, anyone?). Even so, these failings have been condoned for political reasons, and no matter how fervently one might disagree with them (and in that respect i'm pretty damned fervent), those reasons are not irrational. Stone put to sky (talk) 10:07, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

Oversight and Budget

Without trying to figure out where to put it -- maybe just before internal organization, I'm working on a section that looks at the organizations that, in one way or another, tell the CIA what to do. As with so many other things, the shift of the CIA from having two hats -- heading the intelligence community (now the Office of the DNI) and also two major functions: human intelligence/covert operations, and all-source intelligence analysis. So, while not much changes about the two major functions, the budget is in a different category.

I'd like opinions on where this should go. Most of it, I believe, should be in the main article, because for most covert action, it shows who issued the orders. For the cases where someone in CIA did something on their own, it shows who was not told and may take action.

The fundamental decisions to do covert actions, and risky clandestine intelligence collection, are in a committee at White House level, although sometimes the decisions are made by the President and a very small number of advisors. There is a requirement to notify the Congress of certain operations, although the nature of the notification varies with the sensitivity of the project. For the most sensitive, typically eight members are briefed, without staff and without being allowed to take notes -- not necessarily the best way to do it. At least one proposal is floating around, from Paul Pillar, about setting up a mechanism that would get appropriate professional staff for the most sensitive analysis. After all, the Executive Branch uses experts in planning the proposal.

I've detailed things in the Classified information in the United States, and actually for Special Access Programs rather than the Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) that is the category that holds the most sensitive intelligence. From a Congressional and budget standpoint, there are three general categories: one where "classified activity" shows up as a line item in the budget, one where the money is hidden but the entire relevant committees are briefed on the details, and on the most sensitive, the money is hidden and only the "Big 8" hear about it.

While the law is a little vague, the Executive Branch is simply keeping Congress informed, rather than asking permission. Congress can refuse to appropriate the basic budget, and this actually is being threatened unless appropriate members get all the US knows about the Israeli attack on a Syrian facility.

In principle, Congress could pass, with a veto-proof supermajority, legislation to cut off funding on a specific project, which is more or less what led to Iran-Contra after Congress said that money could not be committed to that purpose. Whenever and wherever Iran-Contra is written up, this is one of those areas where the Presidential and Congressional intent is as important, constitutionally, as the covert action itself.

Budget, of course, is part of oversight. I'll give the total budget, and some indication of how it is allocated. Question: is the history of getting to a point where any budget figures were disclosed appropriate for the main article, or a side page? It is important to understand, broadly, how the money goes, to CIA as well as the larger amount that goes to the military.

Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 17:58, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

Can somebody please show Berkowitz how to make a sandbox? I'd do it, except i myself don't really know how....Stone put to sky (talk) 18:16, 8 January 2008 (UTC)
I know how to make a sandbox, and use them. Even before that, however, for a matter as complex as this, I write it first in a word processor, then put it into a sandbox to try to make sure the wikilinks and references work. It has to go into an article before it's certain all the citations work properly, since the main citation may need to be repositioned in the article.
Are you asking me to create a version for comment in a sandbox before putting up a main version, or something else? The only complication of doing that is that I can ask for the sandbox (actually a supplementary user page) to be deleted if no one else has edited it. I'll have to find out the procedure for getting obsolete user pages deleted if they have been edited by others. Anyone here an admin that knows how to request that?Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 18:22, 8 January 2008 (UTC)
Oh! Heh -- sorry about that, HCB. I was under the impression that your skills were a bit more raw than that. Sure -- i think it would be best for you to post raw content in the sandbox, because i'm sure that there are others here who will want to put the wiki-process to use and work with you to add or shape the final post. I worry that if you go ahead and write up a finished product for posting it'll be discouraging for you to see the long hours of work get changed. Also, i'd suggest that you not worry about the links and such; we can all help out with that, and such detail work is ideally suited for the greater community, anyway. Stone put to sky (talk) 04:56, 9 January 2008 (UTC)
No problem; I'd much rather have someone provide information than assume. The mechanics of sandboxes (actually multiple user pages) isn't that hard, but the challenge here is where to start. For example, people that want the material to address only covert action aren't going to agree with histories that address oversight, intelligence collection, intelligence analysis and estimates, etc.
I won't say it's perfect, because it's not, but I think a good example of what I have in mind is Indonesia in the fifties and sixties, in the Asia-Pacific section. The results were a failed attempt at regime change, assorted analyses, the decision process(oversight) to strengthen non-communist elements, and what appears to be the totally unexpected military purge of the PKI. It's by no means a whitewash, as there were failures, but it also shows there was process and the CIA wasn't running rogue. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 05:33, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

About DCIs...since this issue appears in several places, it's easier to comment here

First, let me say that I don't have any WP:OWN feelings about the listing of directors. I am a little surprised about the reactions it seemed to have generated, so I thought I might explain a bit of why I put in what I considered a short section.

Each of the directors, of course, has an individual article. I have no problem, as some have suggested, of putting in a chronological history; that's what I had been doing in the subsidiary regional/functional articles. That which I wrote about directors was an attempt to capture only the politics and management styles and actions associated with each director. Let me make some informal, nonchronological comments about knowing about certain directors is significant in understanding the behavior of the CIA.

For example, three directors, Dulles, Helms and Colby, came through the ranks, counting OSS. Dulles and Helms were clandestine intelligence collectors, while Colby was on the covert action side. I'll count Casey as half a director, as he was an OSS clandestine intelligence officer running the penetrations into Germany, but didn't stay in CIA, and came to the directorship through a political path. I believe that the OSS/CIA experience of these people affected how they ran things.

Smith is significant in that he was able to force the disparate operations groups into firm CIA control. Given he was Eisenhower's WWII Chief of Staff, he presumably enjoyed a Presidential trust that few other DCIs had.

Turner and Schlesinger were disastrous to morale, and probably caused the loss of a good deal of HUMINT corporate knowledge.

McCone is very interesting to me. If I were to pick the best DCI, it would probably be McCone, who was a manager and engineer, not at all an intelligence specialist. It's also significant that he had a close relationship with JFK, but left because he and LBJ didn't trust one another. It's only speculation, of course, but I believe if he had stayed, he might have injected much more realism into Vietnam. He was known for making sure all sides of an issue were heard. Somewhat surprisingly, I've known people in CIA that said George HW Bush did that as well.

Some DCIs, I will be the first to admit, really didn't do much to put their stamp on the Agency. In a way, it's worth examining Raborn, a very smart man in other contexts who was completely clueless when it came to intelligence. There are lessons from Raborn, Schlesinger, Turner, and, in a very different way, Dulles, about characteristics you do not want in a DCI.

Anyway, I have no problem if the section with the brief bios of directors is cut back, but I really hoep that we don't lose the effects of different management styles, and, especially with Dulles and Casey, when a DCI is more prone to run rogue. Having Dulles' brother as Secretary of State did not help oversight of CIA.Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 02:20, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

I think that summary you just made is an excellent place to start -- it gives a real sense of the changes in character that are relevant to the article without getting bogged down in too much detail. Moreover, it's not anything at all that i myself could ever write. Obviously it's rough, but as a first draft i can't imagine anything better suited to the article. Stone put to sky (talk) 05:02, 9 January 2008 (UTC)
So what about having a short summary as per above and then a main sub-article CIA History by Director? Erxnmedia (talk) 05:11, 9 January 2008 (UTC)
Good. I do want to be sure that this doesn't violate OR, even as an original synthesis. I'll have to look through my sources and see if I can find some that make the comparisons I just made. Let me put it this way -- I don't consider it especially original, but I'm sure some of my information comes from personal conversations.
Not worrying about OR for the moment, I suspect that if there was a real analysis of inappropriate CIA actions, the causes would fall into several categories
  1. The period, mostly in the Truman Administration, when there was relatively little oversight of OSO and OPC, which were administratively attached to CIA but, until Smith forced them into the agency, made many of their own decisions. This is sourced in the Foreign Relations of the United States volume on the development of the intelligence community, 1950-1955.
  2. White House or close advisor (e.g., Robert Kennedy) coming up with a largely emotional decision, such as MONGOOSE against Castro. "Do it because you can". I wouldn't be surprised if there are some Kennedy biographies that address this. Nixon tolerance of people such as Colson, who would not ask permission but use White House authority, as in the Plumbers Unit, the Ellsberg psychiatrist breakin, etc.
  3. Things that came out of a militant anticommunist attitude, especially in the fifties, which were reviewed by the proper authorities, but, in hindsight, were terrible ideas (e.g., Guatemala and Iran). I'd like to find a relatively NPOV source on this. The right kind of source would recognize that the bad ideas came from good intentions, from a mindset we don't have as much today.
  4. Things that a conspiratorial DCI like Casey might want to do, such as Iran-Contra, which resonate with key personnel at the White House level. Woodward's Veil might cover this.
  5. Lower-level people freelancing. While MKULTRA was approved at a top level, I suspect Sidney Gottlieb did quite a few things on his own. I know I've seen documents that reflected this, and also some sources saying a lot of the records were destroyed. I just have to remember where I saw this material.
The really bad things, I suspect, are mostly for reasons 2-5. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 05:22, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

HCB, i just can't tell you what a breath of fresh air it is to deal with a guy like you. You're clearly someone who understands a LOT about military history, but are also not so blinded by the current hype that passes for popular "patriotism" these days that you must turn a blind eye to the abuses and mistakes that have sometimes plagued U.S. history. Thanks a lot for being so reasonable.

@Erxnmedia; Your suggestion is precisely what i had in mind. So consider this an enthusiastic agreement. Stone put to sky (talk) 09:07, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

Nazis and the CIA

Hey guys, I think the section on the CIA's connection to former Nazis can be expanded. Tim Weiner dedicates nearly an entire chapter to it in his book (legacy of ashes). However, given that this article is already massive (too massive IMO), I think what I'll do is create a new article on it and then provide a link to it here. Nonetheless, I wanted to give you all a heads-up that I might change the current wording on the CIA's connection with the Nazis section. Of course I'll welcome any fair critiques thereof. My changes to this article should be fairly minor, so I don't think a sandbox is necessary (plus I don't know how to do a sandbox). (Morethan3words (talk) 04:51, 11 January 2008 (UTC))

Eh. I know what you mean -- the wikipedia User Interface is a labyrinth to me, too. Your idea sounds good, but i would hope that you could figure out the sandbox mechanism and put it to use. Have you checked out Berkowitz' sandbox, yet? I have left some comments in it. I have some information i would like to see included that, like yours, does not reflect well on the agency. I am sensitive, however, to the fact that the agency operates on such a massive scale that it reflects only a small portion of its total activity -- not that i think the effects are trivial, just that i think the article should remain sensitive to that fact. I've been asking Berkowitz what he thinks the best approach would be, and perhaps you should his his sandbox and look over what we're doing there. I think that, for the moment, everyone would be happier that way.
Please don't think i'm trying to eliminate your edits; it's just that we've been talking about big changes to the article, and it would be a shame if you put in a lot of work only to see it all rearranged or shortened in a radical manner.
[Interjected] First, there indeed were some cases where US intelligence protected WWII war criminals. In my personal opinion, the worst of the worst was Shiro Ishii, who commanded the Japanese biological warfare program at Unit 731 in Pingfan, China. He was given immunity in a deal to get his scientific data.
Something to remember here, however, is that Army intelligence did this, not the CIA, because the CIA didn't exist yet. There may be times where it's notable and accurate to have an article on the US protecting war criminals, but remember several things:
  1. The CIA wasn't created until the National Security Act of July 1947.
  2. It did not immediately control clandestine intelligence collection or covert operations. It did not yet have a mention to hand out money without regular review; that happened in 1949.
  3. Clandestine intelligence collection was under the Office of Special Operations and covert action under the Office of Policy Coordination, which were bureaucratic nightmares, loosely attached to the CIA, but being able to bypass the Director and get approval from State or Defense. This evolved until the Agency finally got control, in 1952. Chances are that if a Nazi was protected by someone in the years immediately following WWII, it was either a military intelligence unit or OSO.
  4. Reinhard Gehlen, the director of German military intelligence on the Soviets, indeed did come to work for the US and eventually had a CIA relationship. In 1956, his operation became part of the new West German intelligence service, although the service remained closely allied with CIA. His initial 1945-1946 negotiations, however, couldn't have been with the CIA. Gehlen, in addition, was involved in the bomb plot against Hitler, was a regular military officer, and, while they may exist, I've never heard him accused of war crimes. Others, like Klaus Barbie, both were war criminals and had much less valuable data than Gehlen. One has to look at the dates to tell if it was a CIA action.Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 14:28, 11 January 2008 (UTC)
I think the idea of putting that info on a seperate page is a good idea, except that i'm not sure how you'd name it -- "CIA and the Nazis"? It may be that, with a little work, we'll be able to find a better page-name for the information and be able to include it all there, with an appropriate summary on this article linking to it. What do you think?
[Interjected] May I suggest "US intelligence and WWII War Criminals"? That is broader, obviously picking up true monsters like Ishii (clearly not a Nazi), and also being right on the agency. It's sometimes quite difficult to figure out how US intelligence was responsible for something, especially in the 1945-1952 period. It's also confusing from late 2004 on, when the DNI took away some key CIA factors.
I would suggest looking at http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/frus/truman/c24687.htm, and, in particular, the policy on defectors, which is in the first five or so documents.
My personal view is there should be an article that covers pre-CIA activity, and then any collaboration under the CIA should go under the appropriate country and year. I'm not trying to whitewash anything, but there's a pure question of navigating among articles. If the first mention of some controversy is in a stand-alone article, and not in a geographic/chronological article with a link to the specific one, it may be hard to find.
I'm now working to update TECHINT, first to get the clearly CIA Farewell Dossier into it, and there should be mention of people like Wernher von Braun there--under the military Operation Paperclip, again CIA. Personally, I don't consider von Braun a criminal Nazi, although I believe he was a party member. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 14:28, 11 January 2008 (UTC)
Stone put to sky (talk) 11:57, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

Allegations about Sudan and Darfur

Ernxmedia,

I don't understand, given that I thought there was some consensus on working with a sandbox or subsidiary articles, and not adding to the main article covert action section, that you put in an allegation about Darfur. Your edit note said this was from an "opinion site", but I do not see that as an excuse for apparently cutting and pasting with no checking.

You inserted (I put many of these comments inline),

"In an opinion piece from the website of the anti-globalization organization Centre for Research on Globalization, author Jay Janson writes, in an article entitled "Early CIA Involvement in Darfur Has Gone Unreported"

This source contains major errors. Yes, oil was discovered in 1978 and the Second Sudanese Civil War began five years later. Your source called it "rebellious war" rather than the generally accepted name used in the Wikipedia article for it.

At that point, your source started departing significantly from fact. The major opposition movement, the Sudan People's Liberation Army and Movement (SPLA/SPLM), was a secular African movement opposed to the North's demands for the Arabic language and conversion to Islam.

John Garang, according to Wikipedia, went to he second-level US Infantry Advanced Infantry Officer Course, intended for captains. The School of the Americans reference is inconsistent. SOA and its successors were for Spanish and Portuguese speakers, which Garang was not.

Further, Darfur is not in South Sudan and the SPLA was not fighting for it.

Sorry, this is coming across as conspiracy theory, with the CIA being responsible for any regime change. I don't consider the mere fact that something is on an opinion page justifies putting it into an article, especially the controversial covert action part of the main article.

I thought we had some agreement about working in sandboxes. Why are you adding unchecked conspiracy theory material about regime change to the main page? This "opinion" source is inconsistent after even minor checking, even if one had no knowledge of Sudanese history. Why are you putting in? Why do I need to find the errors in it? Where does the "opinion" piece have any credible evidence of CIA involvement in the Second Sudanese Civil War, which was a completely different war than the Darfur conflict? Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 19:39, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

Hi Howard,
I didn't really insert anything. There was a direct quote from another website sitting there since the 04 Jan edit war, which was also there 3 weeks ago before I started editing the page.
I am carefully going through the stuff that was re-inserted, line-by-line, to establish a concordance with what is in the branch pages. In this case, I discovered that it was a direct cut-and-paste from an opinion website.
For that reason, I added the info that it was a cut-and-paste and put quote boxes around it.
The reason I didn't myself delete it out-of-hand was because I didn't want Trav* to go on another edit rampage until I had demonstrated one-to-one correspondence between his precious contributions and what is in the branch pages.
And now you yell at me!
I have such a headache, I really want to go home!!
I'm not a believer in Sandbox, my preferred procedure is as follows:
  • Establish the ilne-by-line concordance by annotating the main page
  • When the concordance is complete, delete the Covert Ops section in favor of references to the branches
If you and all of cyberspace are opposed to this procedure, then I am happy to leave the CIA main page in the crap state that it is in and go home and sleep off my headache.
Thanks, Erxnmedia (talk) 20:13, 11 January 2008 (UTC)
I can't speak for cyberspace. It was my understanding, however, that at least several people thought that what I might call an "oil spot" approach, getting agreement on some things in a sandbox and then spreading outwards, was a reasonable direction.
It was not my impression that, after things had calmed down and Trav saw what was being done, that he was insistent on things going back just as they were. The subordinate pages are again accessible.
In other words, I thought that there was some consensus not to restore the covert action page to its exact status under Trav, and he was not demanding that after discussion. I'm told he is taking a few days off.
So, as requested, I set up a sandbox for comment. In the meantime, I have been working on some articles such as Farewell Dossier. One of the things I did there was to follow every cited external link until I understood how its content fit into the main article and then put that addition information into the article. If there were contradictions, I checked them. It also became apparent that the TECHINT article was focused only on the tactical, so I updated it to handle national level scientific and technical intelligence. Again, I checked everything I put in, and know there are some things that are needed (e.g., alleged French economic/technology espionage), but I didn't find solid references and, as a consequence, didn't put it in.
This particular entry did trigger a reaction from me, as I happen to follow Sudan quite closely. A few years ago, I had a consulting assignment to look at telecommunications infrastructure there, and I've become fascinated by the country's history. Now, it's unreasonable to expect everyone editing Wikipedia to be subject matter experts on their contributions. It is, I believe, reasonable to expect that if one does change something, there's at least some attempt to be sure it's self-consistent. Saying it came "from an opinion site" doesn't give a free pass; there are opinion sites on any number of absurd theories.
Speaking for myself only, please do not try to restore the covert action section of the main page to Trav's contributions. If that is truly desirable, an admin can get the pre-change material from the archives. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 20:46, 11 January 2008 (UTC)
You don't get it.
The Covert Ops section is exactly what Trav* put in. I am not adding anything new. I am annotating what is there already.
I am doing this out of politeness to insure that no information in it was lost in translation into the branch pages. I am not inserting anything. My only intention in revising the quote that you noticed was to make it clear that it is a text grab from another website. Verbatim text grabs with no quote marks are not allowed in Wikipedia. The Covert Ops page, Trav* version, is full of them. I did not otherwise add any content.
I really don't understand why anybody would be leaving inconsistent content and false information on the CIA main page for weeks and weeks while you change related pages that people don't see directly. Going to Sandbox allows this to happen. Cui bono?
I think that what I am doing is responsible consistent with being polite to a guy who will go on a delete war if you substantially alter what he put in, without first painfully demonstrating that you haven't lost any information by branching. Erxnmedia (talk) 21:01, 11 January 2008 (UTC)
I guess I don't get it. There was considerable discussion with Trav, and I doubt he is going to go off on another delete war. First, I think he accepted good faith in what I and others have been doing, given he hadn't visited the article in a while. Second, an admin indicated that redirects such as was done are not appropriate without a formal RfD, but, even better, would be discussion on the relevant talk pages.
Personally, I have no intention, for politeness or other reasons, to restore text in which I can see verifiable errors, verifiable with other Wiki articles and not OR. In the case of Garang, for example, the biographical article on him said he went to the Advanced Infantry Officers' Course, not the School of the Americas. If one looks at the School of the Americas, the main language is Spanish, with some Portuguese and English. Why would an African officer go there, given he is fluent in English?
If another delete war breaks out, I will solve it in the same way the first one was solved: by appealing both to the deleter and to admins. Honestly, assuming good faith on your part, I have no idea why you are doing this, and wish you wouldn't. Quoting you, "inconsistent and false information on the CIA main page" is exactly what you are reinserting. Qui bono going to a sandbox? The people that benefit are the ones most interested in the article topic, who can work out a consensus on stylistic and research issues before they go into the main page. The sandbox approach is a way to lower tensions that otherwise might appear on the main page. There are masses of incorrect information on the main page, but I have no intention of changing or deleting them until there is more consensus on the overall approach. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 22:08, 11 January 2008 (UTC)
I am not re-inserting entries. The entries are already there on the page. In many cases the entry is a verbatim quote from another website. In these cases I am just indicating that it is a verbatim quote by putting quotes in and adding the assertion that it is a verbatim quote.
If you don't want me to annotate these verbatim text grabs which are, in addition, bogus, then just delete them or delete them after I annotate them.
As these quotes stand, they are already in active violation of Wikipedia policy, because they are direct text grabs without any indication that they are text grabs -- these are copyright violations. The relevant policy is Wikipedia:Suspected copyright violations. Alternatively if you want, I can simply nominate this whole section for speedy deletion, per "Tag blatant copyright infringements for speedy deletion and mark them as such on this list, but do not remove them until they are deleted." Erxnmedia (talk) 22:47, 11 January 2008 (UTC)
Thanks, Erxnmedia (talk) 22:47, 11 January 2008 (UTC)
By the entire section, to what do you refer? Covert action? The whole article? Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 00:13, 12 January 2008 (UTC)
What we had on 4 Jan 08 was well organized. The current page is a shambles. The Covert Ops section is a micro-shambles. My theory after establishing a full concordance, and waiting a few days, is to simply replace the entire Covert Ops section with 5 or 10 "{{" main "|" pointers.
And in defense of my quote-insertions, consider the before and the original source that it was grabbed from:
before
  • 2007. Sudan’s interior minister accused Central Intelligence Agency of smuggling weapons into the troubled region of Darfur. Interior Minister Zubair Bashir Taha addressing a crowd consisting of youth organizations said that the CIA is seeking to “disrupt the demographics of Darfur”. The US special envoy to Darfur Andrew Natsios told reporters in Khartoum last week that Arab groups from neighboring countries were resettling in West Darfur and other lands traditionally belonging to local African tribes.Taha accused the US of being responsible for “prolonging the war in Darfur and the death of thousands of people after the Abuja peace agreement just like they did in Iraq”.
original source
Sudan Tribune
Sudan accuses CIA of smuggling weapons into Darfur
July 27, 2007 (KHARTOUM) — Sudan’s interior minister accused Central Intelligence Agency of smuggling weapons into the troubled region of Darfur.
Interior Minister Zubair Bashir Taha addressing a crowd consisting of youth organizations said that the CIA is seeking to “disrupt the demographics of Darfur”.
The US special envoy to Darfur Andrew Natsios told reporters in Khartoum last week that Arab groups from neighboring countries were resettling in West Darfur and other lands traditionally belonging to local African tribes.
Taha accused the US of being responsible for “prolonging the war in Darfur and the death of thousands of people after the Abuja peace agreement just like they did in Iraq”.
Note that the Before version has no quotes and is simply a grab of half of the entire article. Anyone reading this on Wikipedia deserves to know that it is a simple grab of a lede of an article on a website, and it should be clearly marked what website. Note that the lede says "Khartoum" but Wikipedia says that the website is actually produced in France.
I don't think it would have been responsible to leave it there in it's original form, even out of politeness to some out-of-control youngster who pops in now and then to engage in massive delete wars and to project motives on people he's never met.
Anyway, feel free to revert the above changes or to delete the information altogether. If I find any more of these lede-pulls, I'm just going to mark them with "{{" copyvio and leave it at that. Erxnmedia (talk) 00:49, 12 January 2008 (UTC)
FYI, the Sudan Tribune is indeed a site in France, but I have found it useful as a starting place for information. Some opinion pieces are so obviously POV that I can ignore them. When I take news pieces from there, I crosscheck them, and they may indeed be valid. As you point out, the source should be identified, and, I hope, I never claim something based only on their information, but if I can confirm it with another source, that's another matter.
I think that is an illustrative point for Wikipedia editors; it's certainly a technique of OSINT analysts. To mix metaphors, it's a variant of "trust but verify".
Let me preface this next part by saying I do have a considerable interest in Sudan, which, these days, comes up in US politics. The Sudanese appear to have gotten the al-Qaida people out, but they still seem to have decent intelligence on them. In all of human intelligence, there is the constant question of whether or not to deal with an inherently bad person that may have information you, as a country, need. There's no good answer.
There are a variety of sources saying that Gosh, the intelligence official, has valid information. It's much less clear why CIA would have an interest in Darfur, as Taha claims. There just isn't very much of strategic interest in Darfur. American politicians that talk of major interventions there clearly have not looked at transportation maps, or, perhaps, lack-of-transportation maps. While the CIA has done bad things, it's also a convenient scapegoat. My personal opinion about Taha's claims is that he doesn't give any plausible reasons why CIA would be intervening in Darfur. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 01:06, 12 January 2008 (UTC)


Hey, guys -- we're all good here so far, right? No need to get upset about anything at all, so far -- at least not from my perspective.

@Erxnmedia: No worries on the comments, o.k? It just so happens that one of the things you marked is something Howard pays particularly close attention to and so he quickly noticed the changes in that section. While Howard's got a clear grasp of some things on the site, my guess is that he's not coming at it from an informed Internet-youth standpoint. It looks to me as if the only thing going on here is that Howard misinterpreted a simple notational action as somehow adding content. It's an innocent mistake, and while his words are dry i see nothing in them that i would call accusatory, volatile, or provocative. He was just asking for clarification, that's all. For my part, i really, really hope you stay around. I think we three could make an excellent team to bring this article around into shape.

@Howard: I presume that, by now, you apprehend what Erxn's saying: he didn't really change any of the content, but instead just flagged some of it as problematic and added some reference notes. Correct me if i'm wrong, Howard - please? -- this is an innocent question: it seems as if you're a few years older than i (38), and i myself am right on the edge of the I-tech revolution. I wonder if you know how to use the "history" tab, up top? If you do, then i suggest you check on it -- it makes clear that Erxn didn't add any of the content you're objecting to, but instead just flagged it as problematic. That actually is a BIG help to our project, here, so that when we start on that section we'll be able to note the various sources and declarations quickly and without a lot of confusion. In addition, it's quite ethical wiki-behavior, since others who visit the page will be able to check up on the sources without any trouble (and know that there might be some problems with it). Stone put to sky (talk) 09:00, 12 January 2008 (UTC)

Laughing a bit, I might suggest the I-tech revolution had to have earlier conspirators. I'm 59, programmed my first computer in 1966, was using host-based email and host-to-host networking in 1970. While my major first working with more general networks was in 1972 or so with X.25, I can fairly say that with ARPANET and TCP/IP, I was there, got the T-shirt (it says "Second TCP/IP Interoperability Conference"), and it doesn't fit any more. Shall I continue the conversation in in nroff markup and COBOL, or would you prefer LUA and Perl?
[Interjected] Consider me spanked.  :) Stone put to sky (talk) 10:08, 13 January 2008 (UTC)
I do use history, but I do run into personal objections to some Wiki traditions that strike me as reinventing the wheel. There are areas in networking where I've largely given up editing, since I am tired of correcting the same error again and again, when a novice makes the same learning error I've seen for a couple of decades, and then wants to argue about it -- regardless of the IETF and other authoritative documents that are cited, which are much more authoritative than things here, because they are the actual technical definitions. Still, there's an error in one popular textbook that gets brought up in argument again and again, regardless of what the defining documents say.
Maybe I don't see the relevance of bringing up the reference from an opinion site, when Wikipedia articles alone contradict its POV, as with the Garang and Darfur references. I don't understand how Erxn is not using problematic content when he was posting data about allegations about Sudan, John Garang, and Darfur. They indeed may have been posted earlier, but they were wrong earlier (e.g., Darfur is not in South Sudan as defined by the Power-Sharing Agreement, so Garang and the SPLA/M have nothing significant to do with it. If someone wants to talk about North-South issues and ethnic cleansing of the Dinka and Nuer, that's more relevant, but I have yet to see any evidence of CIA involvement.).
How do you suggest I point to a claim which can be refuted on numerous grounds, leaving almost no content? This is a serious question. I really am not interested in going through a long history of claims and pointing out things like the CIA couldn't have been involved in something that happened in 1946, because it didn't exist. Other US intelligence agencies could indeed have been involved, but the article is about CIA. If the suggestion about having a forking article about the more general issue of US intelligence and WWII war criminals is taken, that would solve a lot of problems. I simply don't see the value of spending time refuting arguments for POV claims, when my time can be spent posting material that is thoroughly sourced in a self-consistent way. Advice, please? Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 09:49, 12 January 2008 (UTC)
My suggestion is this: the page is a mess. It need to be cleaned up. Flagging whatever facts are presented in such a manner as to clarify the source of the content helps that process. Further, you are only one guy -- if you spend your time chasing down facts and getting the bad stuff deleted then you'll never have an opportunity to actually clean up the page. You'll just go from squashing one bug to another and eventually get running in circles.
What i would like to see happen is a fundamental change in page organization take place. In order for that to happen we need to get some material set up to facilitate the transition. If we concentrate on that, then yeah -- some of the incorrect stuff is gonna stay up for a few more days, maybe weeks. But if we get the basic framework correct then it will, in the long run, make it much easier for the day-to-day folks who edit here to get the sources and facts correct. And easier for people to read. And more informative. Y'know what i mean? Stone put to sky (talk) 10:07, 13 January 2008 (UTC)


Proposed Content Fork: "US intelligence and WWII War Criminals"

This is directed primarily at Morethan3words -- do you think this would be a good place for you to start with your CIA/Nazi info? It would be a great page for us to link to from here. Stone put to sky (talk) 09:02, 12 January 2008 (UTC)

With a title such as this, it nicely deals with a couple of issues: war criminals other than Nazis, and war criminals protected by US intelligence agencies other than the US. Assuming there is a regional/chronological section, I could see a note in the sections on Germany and Japan, 1945-1952, saying that other intelligence agencies made deals, which, in some cases, may have involved CIA continuing something already started. They may show up in odd places -- I'm no expert on Klaus Barbie, but the article suggests he may have been involved in some drug trade, which, in turn, may have involved CIA. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 09:49, 12 January 2008 (UTC)
I guess I was planning on concentrating my additions on the scramble that took place shortly after WWII to recruit german officials, scientists, etc. I don't se a problem at all with expanding the article to include those questionable characters that were recruited who didn't happen to be Nazis. However, I don't think it was entirely limited to "war criminals", e.g. the nazi rocket scientists who were recruited after the war. Perhaps a title like "CIA Involvement with the former Axis powers" or something along those lines? This would include German, Japanese, Italian, etc. and not be limited to "war criminals" per se. (Morethan3words (talk) 06:30, 13 January 2008 (UTC))
Ah, realize my title didn't include the good point about CIA's establishment and the intelligence efforts occuring before that. How about "US Intelligence and the former Axis powers"? Also, on a side note, I apologize in advance if I'm not able to answer ever comment right away, sometimes I just can't get on wiki until the weekend or sometime. Anyway, once there's a concensus on the article title, I'll go ahead and create it, and add my content. We can play with the sandbox for the wording in the main article. If you'd still all prefer I make a sandbox for the new article, just let me know and I'll try and figure out how to do that... (Morethan3words (talk) 06:42, 13 January 2008 (UTC))
Well, i think "U.S. Int. and War Criminals" is actually better than "U.S. Int. and the Former Axis Powers". For one thing, the scope and content of a page that deals with a clearly defined concept like criminality is much easier to defend from charges of original research and/or non-notability than a page that is focused on a relationship with former, defeated government powers. Moreover, I think you could include all of the information you allude to under the first heading while also holding the door open for other people to add more content, and it would be an excellent way to resolve a lot of the conflict that's currently occurring on his page. In fact, my guess is that you'll be forced to include it all, since there will undoubtedly be others who will challenge whatever phrase or fact you post to it. F'rfinstance, if i were writing that page i'd start off by noting that "war criminals" is a key concept that is distinct from, say, just cooperation with former enemies, but that some people accused of war crimes aren't necessarily apprehended or are given, quid pro quo, protection from prosecution. Later in the article you could then give examples. That's just my two-cents, though. Stone put to sky (talk) 10:19, 13 January 2008 (UTC)
If you kept the pages short, though, there's no reason why you can't do both and link between them.Stone put to sky (talk) 10:20, 13 January 2008 (UTC)
Okay, let's start with the "War Criminals" and see how that pans out. In the worst case, we can always ask an admin to change the title later, or even merge into a different article if preferred. I'll try and create the article sometime this week, depending on my schedule. (Morethan3words (talk) 08:02, 14 January 2008 (UTC))
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