Talk:Central Intelligence Agency

1956 Bruce-Lovett Report

The section has minimal value and is not encyclopedic. I propose to delete it. Richard Jensen 06:57, 16 May 2008 (CDT)

Now, I'm a new editor, but one of the differences I see between WP and CZ is that more of the author's experience comes through. Certainly, and I'm not objecting to this because it is a useful difference, I see evaluations and judgments of personalities, in historical context, in your work. It is a Good Thing (TM) that, in material clearly coming from your experience and research, you described Mao as willing to bring catastrophe to China, or Omar Bradley as weak and vacillating. WP would demand a secondary source for that.

I see value in the Bruce-Lovett report precisely in the confusion it shows. Now, there is no question that the CIA has done unwise and outright illegal things, although sometimes at the orders of the White House. Gottlieb's work approved in channels strikes me as some of the worst that could be considered rogue, or Casey's actions, clearly in violation of the Boland Amendment, but with his role really that of an individual rather than DCI.

This article had a fairly substantial edit before even coming up; it's definitely not the WP version. As it was, I spent 6 months or so at WP, bringing down the tinfoil-hat quality and looking more inside the Agency, to help people better understand its actual culture, giving a context for evaluating actions.

As you may have noticed, I have another article on Directors of Central Intelligence, which goes less into the individual biographies and more into the role they played in Agency culture. Perhaps a compromise here would be moving not just the Bruce-Lovett report, but the other major reports, into that section, redirecting it into more of an article on cultural and organizational influences on how the Agency developed its operating mode.

The Bruce-Lovett report, I believe, is historically significant because, in a slightly humorous way, it is a vivid example of how informal policy guidance, and internal/external review, could be in the fifties. I freely admit that I wrote with slight tongue in cheek, but in no way changing or inventing facts, or injecting substantive opinion.

I do not think it should be deleted. Now, I will be doing substantial additional editing here, to get out what were a number of WP political compromises with conspiracy theorists. To me, the Bruce-Lovett history is extremely relevant to people assuming a Secret Government cabal, when the reality may have been far more one of tolerance of individuals, and a lack of a review system. What does it say about a Presidential review process when an apparently significant report can't even be found? Howard C. Berkowitz 08:26, 16 May 2008 (CDT)

Encyclopedias have to start with the big picture, and leave the minutiae for last. The Bruce Lovett report section is full of tedious detail about trivial matters and yet gets more coverage than the Bay of Pigs or any other episode! There are no serious historical facts in the section that readers need to know. This is a general article about the MAIN EVENTS in CIA history, so let's please start with the main events. I dread the though that some poor student will think the report is somehow important just because it is in CZ. We have a rule that CZ material has to be "edited mercilessly" and in my opinion that means it does not make the cut.Richard Jensen 08:33, 16 May 2008 (CDT)

On "Mao as willing to bring catastrophe to China" that was a main assumption of US intelligence, but it was wrong. Later episodes such as the Great leap forward and the near-nuclear attack by BOTH the US and USSR on China, and the cultural revolution were not available to analysts in 1950-- nor was Mao's quote to the effect that after a nuclear attack there would be hundreds of millions of Chinese left. Richard Jensen 08:36, 16 May 2008 (CDT)

On Bradley as weak and vacillating-- that's pretty standard history: "Both Chairman Omar Bradley and Army Chief of Staff J. Lawton Collins seem weak and unwilling to confront MacArthur," Weintrab assessment; Bradford Lee's refers to "several months of vacillation" Reader's Companion Military History p 276 Richard Jensen 08:48, 16 May 2008 (CDT)

Actually, the article was not written to be a timeline of "main events in CIA history". I have no objection to such an article, as long as it is on topic and not going off into theories that neither have sources nor circumstantial evidence.

The title is "Central Intelligence Agency". I wrote it with the intention of understanding an organization. Discussing events get rather tricky, and the Bay of Pigs is an excellent example of that. Of course, the CIA was deeply involved in the Bay of Pigs, but even moving to that invasion site, and not providing the support the JCS had recommended in the Eisenhower Administration, and then cutting the JCS out of the planning loop, came as a result of decisions in the Kennedy White House.

One of the most common problems in CIA articles is they look at the organization in isolation, rather than as part of the U.S. government. Any serious discussion of the Bay of Pigs has to look, at the very least, about the JCS role and non-role, and about the roles of both Presidents and advisors in the Eisenhower and Kennedy Administrations. It has to set the post-Batista activities in the context of the Cold War doctrines then in force. It is very much not a CIA-only story. There should be an article in it, but there should be a mention of CIA relationships, and then a hyperlink to the main Bay of Pigs article.

It is not, incidentally, correct to say there was no mention of the Bay of Pigs. The section on organization of clandestine services, unless text got accidentally deleted, uses the released organizational structure as a basis for project organization, especially a sensitive one like this, which bypassed a good deal of review structure.

In six months of cleaning up CIA articles at WP, one of the things that greatly improved objectivity was revising a then massive, 300K-plus article, into a hierarchy of subtopics. One subset of subtopic articles dealt, in chronological manner, with timelines, on a regional basis. One reason I've been withdrawing from WP is the unilateral action in which regional articles -- which dealt both with regional intelligence estimates and with transborder issues -- had 100 percent of the country specific content taken into country specific articles, losing the bigger picture. The consensus, incidentally, had been to create subarticles, branching from the regional articles, on countries where there was a huge amount of material, such as Afghanistan, Cuba, Laos, the Soviet Union, and Vietnam.

I cannot stress strongly enough that my experience shows me that CIA, just like U.S. military history, has to be put into a framework of multiple articles to make sense. Monolithic CIA articles, especially that become timelines rather than giving background, tend to collapse into confusion.

If you have concerns about presenting such material, let's discuss the structure of an appropriate set of articles. Retitle this article if you will, but don't try to make it a timeline of activiities. That's not what it was written to be. Howard C. Berkowitz 08:56, 16 May 2008 (CDT)

People come to CZ for highly factual information. The Bruce-Lovett supposed "report" is it ever existed was a historical document from a half-century ago and real or fake it does not deal with the 21st century. No one has a copy, we have only very short snippets (from Schlesinger) and together with the non-professional tone it has the earmarks of a hoax, as multiple archives have found no record that it every existed. That makes for a very poor basis on which to understand the agency. As for multiple articles, yes indeed, but the main CIA article has to cover the main events and structures. So we start from the top and work down, and mercilessly drop minor, peripheral topics. Maybe they can go elsewhere. The Bruce-Lovell stuff/hoax is not good for anything in CZ, I fear. As for the Bay of Pigs, it certainly needs its own article, and it certainly needs a paragraph or two in this article. The historian does not much use timelines -- that is a teaching device to help kids. You see a lot on Wikipedia, which is written by those kids. but very little at CZ. Our history mould be conceptually much deeper and based on solid scholarship, which is why I keep adding bibliographies. Richard Jensen 09:17, 16 May 2008 (CDT)

I must get to some work-related things, but I will elaborate on the reasons on why I believe Bruce-Lovett is appropriate in a discussion of reports in general.

We may have different ideas on what the main events and structures may be. I have no problem in moving all of the external reports to a separate article, where I have more room to elaborate on why the Bruce-Lovett matter is historically significant, as well as other material I did not think fit into the WP article. ...said Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 10:56, 16 May 2008

Without having the time to research this deeply, I did find a couple of US Govt web sites (one for the Center for the Study of Intelligence, whom I think of pretty well), here and here, and while they concede they don't have a copy, they don't talk about it in terms they would use for something that had a good chance of being a hoax. Of course, those documents I linked to are more than 10 years old now, and perhaps opinions have changed in the interim. J. Noel Chiappa 11:27, 16 May 2008 (CDT)

I would like to make two suggestions. The first is that you try to find an uninvolved History Editor or Politics Editor to mediate this issue. The second is that you try your best--please--to put aside your idiosyncratic notions of the requirements of encyclopedia articles, and attend to the actual requirements of CZ's encyclopedia articles, especially as articulated in CZ:Neutrality Policy. That policy requires that, if there is a significant portion of CIA experts for whom the alleged report in question has any credibility, we must include information about it. It also requires that, if other experts believe it may not exist, we report their views as well. In general, if the matter is controversial, then CZ presents the various opposed views and does not take a stand itself. If the question is merely whether we should quote a report at length of which many informed people doubt the credibility, I would suggest that we carefully frame the issue as described, and perhaps put the quotations in a footnote. I leave that up to you--I'm just saying that you should try to reach a compromise position. CZ is not the place to fight ideological battles; it is a place for truly fair-minded people simply to characterize other people's ideological battles. (I can dream, can't I?) --Larry Sanger 12:23, 16 May 2008 (CDT)

I'm happy to say there is no ideology involved here. It's an issue of reliability regarding a government report that no one has seen (except Schlesinger, who lost his notes). Schelsinger said the report was ignored and had zero impact, so it's going to be hard for someone to claim at had an impact. Eisenhower, for example, never saw it. Bruce, the supposed coauthor, never saved a copy (although he saved all his important papers.) So we have: 1) very low reliability (re was it genuine); 2) low historical importance. That's the formula, in my opinion , for being unencyclopedic. Richard Jensen 12:42, 16 May 2008 (CDT)

Can we approach this in a collaborative manner?

It may seem a minor point, but in six months or so of working with this material, I found that a two-column format worked much better for this lengthy a list. You changed it to 1 column. I changed that back.

As far as the books you just put in, frankly, I dislike putting in long lists of books, with no narrative on why they are important, or inline citations to them, in the main article. In point of fact, many of the books you added are cited inline, while others are cited in other CIA articles, not all of which have been brought from WP, or written anew because they clashed with WP politics.

For example, you will find that many of things you put down as "primary sources", such as the directors' autobiographies, are already present in the article, which certainly can be improved, on the impacts of directors.

I do not agree to dumping in large numbers of references, not cited inline, and then moving them as an annotated bibliography at some future and undefined time. What is wrong with putting them in a bibliography now, and adding notes about their significance for those that are not already cited in the article?

I find it quite distracting to have extensive inline citations, and then to duplicate some of the same material in a bibliography, a bibliography that does not contain other sources that are now inline. This confuses the reader.

I want to move that added reading list now to the bibliography section, certainly not keeping it until a source-by-source comparison is made to what is in the inline citations. While I've read many of the books on the list, I haven't read them all, just as I doubt you've read every citation I've used. I don't know why some of these sources are significant, or not. That is the value of having an annotated bibliography rather than a dump into the main article.

As a courtesy, I would ask that you hold off more substantial changes until this evening. While I had hesitated to do so, I will bring over a good deal more material from WP, mostly my edits, that address some of your concerns such as "timeline". The real world intrudes; I have a personally important conference call at 1:30 to 3:30 or so Eastern US time, and I have preparation to do for it. I am happy to work collaboratively on the CIA material, rather than on getting into revert wars, but I can't spend much more time for the next few hours.

I also have sandbox material at WP that should come here, dealing with such matters as CIA and clandestine&covert activity oversight.

I believe it would better illustrate the context for this specific article if I bring over the main sub-articles that work with it. Do note, incidentally, that I have a separate, CIA-agnostic series of articles on the techniques of intelligence. Such things as cognitive traps for intelligence analysis, for example, speak to failures in intelligence analysis. I do have specific additional source material to add to the series on intelligence analysis, but want to think about, and discuss, the right placement for some of the more recent research in analysis of conflicting information. Howard C. Berkowitz 09:24, 16 May 2008 (CDT)

re Bibliography. A serious bibliography is essential if users are going to do work on the CIA--for example write an undergraduate termpaper. I think terms like "dumping" do a disservice when a professional historian evaluates books (by reading the reviews in the scholarly journals) and considers them suitable for a bibliography. I reject 9 out of 10 possible items for every one selected. As for the separate bibliog page, that indeed is where they will go when the project is further along. Meanwhile it's easier to have them here so I can add links --I trust no one is annoyed by their presence. As for annotations, I have annotated some and other folks can please annotate the others. A great feature of amazon and questia is that they give reviews and excerpts that are much more helpful than a one-sentence annotation. As for the two column format for footnotes, that works fine for me. Richard Jensen 10:18, 16 May 2008 (CDT)

Actually, I am annoyed by the presence of the large inline bibliographies, as long as they do not correspond to inline citations. Their sheer size is visually distracting. They belong in the bibliography subpage, with only those associated with inline citations in the main article.

May I ask, most courteously, if you would mind if I ripped into the pure formatting and prose, let alone content, of articles of yours, without explanation and discussion? As I understand CZ, the WP bold-revert-discuss model is not desired here. The model is discuss, identify consensus as well as different views that should both be covered, and then edit. Howard C. Berkowitz 10:56, 16 May 2008 (CDT)

Huge deletions not justified

Richard, you seem to be deleting huge sections of text without adequate discussion. Just because you personally don't think it fits the article is not sufficient. The author may wish to move it further down the article, trim it up, export it to another article, etc. Using quotes for Schlesinger, regarding this period of history, seems as valid as quoting anyone else from that era. I suggest we need the opinions of additional editors regarding this article. An article for CIA can be very large because it is a very large organization with a storied past, and including interesting tidbits makes articles more enjoyable to read. David E. Volk 09:27, 16 May 2008 (CDT)

After edit conflict

It seems to me that there are a number of inter-related issues here. First, to what extent the article should be an overview of the CIA today, how much of its history should be covered here, whether material on the bureacratic/etc culture should be here, etc. Second, there's this whole issue of the Bruce-Lovett report, whether it's real or not, etc - probably an article in itself, if there's evidence both ways. (I, alas, know more about the counter-intelligence side of things than the intelligence side, so I am unfamiliar with this report.) Third, how to proceed in creating the article (in a process sense).

At this point, I can only suggest that discussion here, before launching into writing text, would probably be of benefit. "The CIA" is a sprawling subject, and even people who know a lot about it may well know only some parts of the elephant, not the whole.

A few specific points:

• Big bibliographies are good - especially if they are organized and annotated (labour so many works pass over, but which thereby pass up a chance to pass on a great deal of value to beginning researchers). We have a standard /Bibliography subpage as part of the cluster, so let's use it. Listing a few of the very best overview sources at the foot of this page, as Further reading guidance to the beginners, or those who have only a modest level of interest, is always a good move, too.
• The history of the CIA can only be covered in a cursory way in a the basic CIA article. So it has to be a high-level view, and a relatively brief one. I can see a value to separate histories of the CIA's operations by region, as well as a history of the organization as a bureacratic (in the technical sense) entity.
• Ditto for the CIA culture; let's give a brief, high-level view here, and have a more detailed article elsewhere if there's enough material to warrant it.

Hope this helps... J. Noel Chiappa 10:15, 16 May 2008 (CDT)

the Bruce-Lovett report does not exist--everyone agrees on that. Furthermore no one at the time ever reported seeing it or acting on it. It and should not be covered in this article because it fails the reliability test-- keeping in mind the CZ warns on every edit page: If you don't want your writing to be edited mercilessly and redistributed at will, then don't submit it here. The excerpt I deleted is mostly about the nonexistence of the report, and not about the CIA. Richard Jensen 10:09, 16 May 2008 (CDT)

We inherited that exact text from Wikipedia. We should probably change it. J. Noel Chiappa 10:19, 16 May 2008 (CDT)

See my remarks above about bold-revert-discuss as opposed to post-discuss-edit. Howard C. Berkowitz 10:56, 16 May 2008 (CDT)

Additional context for the background of this article

Let me give the original hierarchy of sub-articles that this topped, at Wikipedia. Some have been retitled. There were additional subtopics spun off into articles, which I shall mention briefly

The original geographic divisions, arranged by region/country/date or subtopic/date, were:

• CIA Activities by Region: Americas
• CIA Activities by Region: Africa (includes subsaharan Africa)
• CIA Activities by Region: Asia-Pacific:
• CIA Activities by Region: Near East, North Africa, South and Southwest Asia
• CIA Activities by Region: Russia and Europe

The initial set of transnational sub-articles are:

• CIA Activities by Transnational Topic: Terrorism
• CIA Activities by Transnational Topic: Arms Control, WMD, and Proliferation
• CIA Activities by Transnational Topic: Crime and Illicit Drug Trade
• CIA Activities by Transnational Topic: Health and Economy
• CIA Activities by Transnational Topic: Human Rights

I've moved over here separate articles on U.S. intelligence involvement with Nazi and Japanese war criminals. They are not part of this hierarchy because much of the immediate postwar events happened before the CIA was formed in 1947, and certainly before the DCI got clear authority, in 1952, over clandestine and covert activities. Obviously, some of these relationships continued under the CIA.

There are articles, not yet moved, about CIA influence on public opinion (worldwide) and other topics, as well as topics on intelligence not specific to CIA. Here is some information on things in that hierarchy, some of which has been ported here, some of which has been renamed:

A comment at the time While I have no current connection with the security and intelligence world, I follow developments as best as I can, and have either massively revised or created some articles on intelligence. Having worked on some extensive articles on some of the more technical branches of intelligence, it's been suggested I write an "overarching article" tying collection disciplines together with the intelligence cycle, which is now Intelligence cycle management. This became the hierarchy starting with Intelligence cycle management As I work on this, I'm reminded of the trial, under the Official Secrets Act, of a British intelligence officer. Asked by the judge if he had likened the Secret Service to a Marx Brothers movie, he responded, more or less, "No, my Lord. I said that compared to the Secret Service, a Marx Brothers movie was pellucid reality."

Working draft of matrix view of US intelligence community: User:Hcberkowitz/Sandbox-ICmatrix

Note there is overlap with Special Operations. things are proposals are italics; I may have working drafts

Several of the key articles are published at WP, and some have been ported, with changes, to CZ, starting with

Intelligence cycle management

Intelligence collection management

SIGINT+

Electro-optical MASINT

Nuclear MASINT

Geophysical MASINT

Radar MASINT should true imaging radar move to IMINT?

Radiofrequency MASINT

Materials MASINT

Human-source intelligence

Clandestine human-source intelligence strong tie-in with counterintelligence

Special reconnaissance also a special operations technique

Special reconnaissance organizations

Clandestine human-source intelligence operational techniques

Clandestine human-source intelligence recruiting

Clandestine human-source intelligence and covert action (also see Direct action (military))

Clandestine cell system

OSINT$

TECHINT$ (the article exists, but has expanded, not necessarily cleanly, into national-level scientific and technical intelligence (S&TI) and economic intelligence. With the latter two, as with TECHINT, the problem is that they have aspects of both collection and analysis. I think they are more analysis, but haven't decided a good way to describe their collection requirements

medical intelligence (if it doesn't go under intelligence organizations) As for TECHINT, there are collection and analysis aspects.

IMINT$

Should imaging radar move here, but not, for example, tracking radar used to determine missile performance? Anything from electro-optical MASINT? My basic rule: IMINT forms pictures, quasi-imaging MASINT gives graphs or property-by-pixel tables'

Intelligence analysis management

Intelligence analysis

Cognitive traps for intelligence analysis

US intelligence community A-Space

financial intelligence

economic intelligence, which I'm probably not qualified to write

medical intelligence if it doesn't go elsewhere

Intelligence dissemination management

Intelligence cycle security

Counterintelligence

Counterintelligence failures*

Counter-intelligence and counterterror organizations* (fairly unhappy with what's around)

Articles marked with * either are split out from other lengthy articles and expanded, or of assorted short articles of the class I call "glue", as necessary to connect other articles or provide context, such as Echelons above Corps.

Force multiplication is another tricky one, which then feeds into network-centric warfare as well as takes from John Boyd and the various Special Forces ancestors/

+ articles have daughter articles, some I wrote and some that existed; some merging is probably called for. $ denotes contributions but no major rewrite.

and, with help from others, trying to deal with what are increasingly forced lists. When is an organization "counterintelligence" versus "counterterror"? Howard C. Berkowitz 10:56, 16 May 2008 (CDT)

Location of bibliography

Richard, bibliographies belong on Bibliography subpages. Please do not request that others leave them on the article page: we place our bibliographies on subpages. If you dislike this policy, you may, like anyone else, use existing processes to propose a change to the policy. --Larry Sanger 12:34, 16 May 2008 (CDT)

How do we resynchronize this?

I've had the chance to look at the current article, and also to review the revision history. When Richard said "I propose to delete it [the Bruce-Lovett report", I read that as a proposal -- not that it was already deleted.

I now discover, in the history, that while nothing whatsoever went on the talk page, the outsourcing section is gone. Yes, there was an edit summary, but the next edit, deleting and replacing more content that I had yesterday, overlaid that edit summary in the watchlist. That's not the only deletion.

Further, content on 3 Image and reputation

   * 3.1 Abuses of CIA authority, 1970s-1990s

4 Since 1980

   * 4.1 2004, DCI takes over CIA top-level functions

and more content went in. It happens that some of these topics, such as the Phoenix program, are discussed in much greater detail in the geographic subarticle, CIA Activities in Asia-Pacific, that haven't yet been brought in.

It is not accidental that much of the controversial material, such as assassinations, moved to subarticles at WP. Over a period of about eight months, it was no longer necessary to have a tinfoil hat to read the main article, the article was no longer breaking browsers at 300K plus, and there were pointers to articles that gave a more balanced view of controversies. Some of the new material added, talking about Dulles' motivation, would have been more appropriate in the article, which is here, on the influences of individual directors.

I'll try to say this diplomatically, but I don't even know where to start editing this article, without reverting back to my original post, which only was created about 13 hours ago. There had been a structure that reflected involving other articles, and also that had been tested to be as neutral as possible on some of the controversy.

I request that Richard save his additions, and, after having done so, we revert back to the article I posted less than 24 hours ago. Once that is done, we can discuss changes, which may be quite useful, but I cannot consider it useful to make major changes to the article headings, add terse and possibly oversimplified explanations of such controversies as assassinations, and not leave a permanent comment on the talk page of what was done. When the change log and the edit summaries are the only things that even hint as disagreement, I don't know where even to start in forming an article based on consensus, a consensus that may well involve people with direct expertise on some of the topics.

I'd also like to get feedback on whether I should quickly move the WP versions of the subarticles mentioned in the outline above, and, yes, draft articles in my WP sandbox about such things as oversight of clandestine and covert operations. At present, I'm faced with content here with which I don't always agree, and that is independent of other articles intended to explain it.

What does the community advise? Howard C. Berkowitz 14:05, 16 May 2008 (CDT)

well I hope Howard does not see this as a confrontational exercise, and let me say I admire his terrific work. CZ is collaboration and no author owns an article or has control over it. We have other authors here and they do things like add new material, new references, and new subheadings, and dropping materials that fail the CZ reliability test. (The outsourcing section was based on rumor, rather than government or scholarly documents.) Now if Howard has changes to suggest to the text I added on a variety of topics he can certainly bring that up right here. In my opinion the article that Howard gave us yesterday needed much more information on historical issues that explain why the CIA is so controversial, as opposed to details like the names of all the various routine offices. As for subheadings, they are there of course to sumamrize in half a line the content of the unit that follows, so I can't see why they upset Howard, unless it's his original schema that is getting altered. Howard seems to think of the CIA package as multiple overlapping integrated articles all written and controlled by himself. That is the definition of a book signed by one author. Each CZ article has to stand on its own bottom and be self contained for the reader, especially an overview of a major controversial agency like the CIA.Richard Jensen 14:55, 16 May 2008 (CDT)

I suggest, sir, that you are not qualified to judge what I think, or that I am proposing that I be in total control of the material. Rather than be in total control, I helped organize an Intelligence Task Force within the Wikipedia Military History Project. Over a period of a number of months, I had extensive discussion to build a consensus that could accomodate many viewpoints.

Each CZ article has to stand on its own bottom and be self contained for the reader, especially an overview of a major controversial agency like the CIA.

If that is indeed the case, why does CZ, as opposed to WP, have a formalized "related article" section? Why are there ongoing discussions -- not arguments -- about cluster design and the appropriate use of subpages?

It's rather difficult to respond to your allegations about outsourcing when you've removed all material on it, without any prior mention, much less a proposal, on the talk page. Since I had not intended for this article not to develop at CZ, I suddenly discovered missing material, and only found out that you had removed it by going through the change log. Since successive change summaries wipe out earlier ones that otherwise would appear in the watchlist, there was no immediately obvious explanation of why the material was gone.

Since the outsourcing section included a reference to a report Congress had required of the DNI, I find it hard to say that the material there was purely speculative. With the intelligence community, journalism, and sources such as Steven Aftergood's Secrecy News at the Federation of American Scientists, are the only sources available -- academia has no special access and government may not issue articles.

It had been my intention, which you could have discovered merely by asking me, to move the outsourcing section, along with the In-Q-Tel activity, into an article about commercial involvement in intelligence activities -- which, in many forms, has been a routine part of the IC for decades. The U-2 and satellites were not built in-house at any intelligence agency.

Some new trends, which have raised concern, are the involvement of contractors in operations. Within the framework of a separate article, which I'm actively drafting in a word processor, is material that comes from something I can't consider other than a hard-core government source: the Taguba Report on Abu Ghraib, which identified that two interrogators attached to "OGA", a common euphemism for CIA, were not actually CIA officers but contractors employed by CACI.

There is a wide spectrum of outsourced activity. It can include research contracts to not-for-profit enterprises such as the MITRE Corporation. It's quite common to go through the Commerce Business Daily and find solicitations for research contracts for intelligence agencies, requiring employees cleared for TS/SCI. Other contracts, which I consider perfectly reasonable, is for linguist support. There have been problems with contractors, in Iraq, in more operational roles, and the Department of Defense now has legislative authority to enforce the Uniformed Code of Military Justice with its contractors. State and CIA, however, are in a much more gray zone. This is an area that would welcome participation from multiple authors and editors: recognition of a need for cooperative research, not a unilateral decision by one editor to delete it, without any discussion, because it was "unencyclopedic" and "speculative."

Since I claim no psychic abilities, I cannot know what you dislike about schemas I have used, but I certaintly don't understand yours or what you choose to prioritize. Given a subject as complex as CIA specifically and US intelligence generally, I see it as positive to discuss schemas, perhaps in a forum or special page rather than on an article page. Since you have not raised your intended deletions here before doing them, in a less-than-24-hour period, you certainly have not given indication that you would like to get consensus on a schema. Howard C. Berkowitz 15:31, 16 May 2008 (CDT)

my 2 cents

One method people have successfully (and unsuccessfully) used in the past is to move the whole document to the talk page, and then edit by paragraph and move back into the main page in increments. This is a drastic step however. Perhaps an easier solution is to give Howard a week or so to work on the article, and then have others give their opinions and arguments and come to some agreement. Another option is the sandbox.

I do note that the article needs some copyediting in a variety of places, and in addition, the table of contents lists failures but no successes. I know success from the CIA doesn't get as much press as failures, but we can probably find some material to make it more balanced in this respect. Since I expect Howard to be editing vigourously over the next few days, I won't do any copyedits until I see a slowdown in activity, unless Howard says go for it. David E. Volk 15:03, 16 May 2008 (CDT)

Thank you, David. I confess that I should have fixed one of the compromises needed at WP but not here. Some of the contributors, who quite explicitly described CIA as an evil organization that should be abolished, and regarded it as a purely operational rather than a collection and analysis agency as well, were unwilling to agree to the subarticle structure unless some failures were on the main page.

Successes, especially in analysis and collection systems, were detailed, along with catastrophic failures, in the regional subarticles I haven't yet moved. I would rather not have successes or failures on the main page, but have these all in articles where they can be examined in a specific context (e.g., the chronological history in some country).

I suppose I didn't expect no-notice major revisions in less than 24 hours after posting, or the only "intend to delete", which I saw as an invitation to discussion, to be an after-the-fact notice of deletion. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. I suppose I should have brought the entire schema and entire set of articles at once, so, when allegations are made that something was missing, I could point to where the material existed, and then discuss if it should move. Howard C. Berkowitz 15:31, 16 May 2008 (CDT)

for the record I posted the intention-to-delete note before I deleted it. I also went through all the footnotes of the outsourcing section, which is based on op-eds and scare stories by novelists (not on serious journalism), and discovered most of the footnotes refer to the Pentagon, not the CIA. We really can't criticize the CIA for Pentagon cost overruns. So that small section was not encyclopedic by CZ standards. I have a lot of sympathy for Howard for his hard work and for the %$#^& he got at Wikipedia (the same ^^%$#* that brought many of us here to CZ.) But a one-author "book" (with multiple chapters) on the CIA is not how we do things at CZ. Everyone pitches in and makes additions. Important events (Iran, Guatemala, Bay of Pigs, cultural subsidies, Soviet Estimates, domestic spying, 9-11, etc) have to be covered briefly in the main CIA article--which is all most people will ever read. Howard should appreciate that there are real historians here who have worked on these topics for decades (I taught National Security issues to cadets at West Point back in the 1980s, where I worked with fellow professor Stansfield Turner). I acted, furthermore, after consulting a friend who is a leading historian of intelligence agencies, with several books. Richard Jensen 16:00, 16 May 2008 (CDT)

Unfortunately, it isn't always possible to discuss all of one's experience in intelligence. You worked with one Director of Central Intelligence, I worked with one Director of the National Security Agency. You are still claiming I want to write a one-author book, with no evidence other than your own suppositions. Yes, I have recommended a schema, if for no other reason that it explains the relationship of content I may import from WP.

It is my position that there should be a schema, and I fervently disagree that all articles can be self-contained. I am more than delighted, however, to discuss revisions to a schema, and work with others in doing articles under one. There are areas of the world of which I know very little. I have quite a bit of experience with analytical methodologies, and with some, but by no means all, technical collection disciplines.

Since you have deleted much of the sub-schema implicit in this article's headings, it would not be psychic to suspect you do not like my organization, as is your right. Why not, before putting in more material, post your proposed schema, even for this article, on the talk page? Right now, I can't really work on this article, because the sub-schema has changed so much, with assumptions to which I have no access, I don't know where to start. Given that you have deleted large amounts of text, with no discussion, I am hesitant to contribute when it may be swept away in hours.

I agree with your statement:

Everyone pitches in and makes additions.

By all means, add material to supplement; things agreed to be inaccurate, whether you or I wrote them, always can be deleted. Everyone, however, cannot leap in and make deletions without discussion, or the article will be such a moving target that no one can reasonably edit. Howard C. Berkowitz 16:12, 16 May 2008 (CDT)

I have on several occasions complained about the lack of discussion surrounding major changes to articles. That is what the Talk pages are for, and it is grossly impolite to delete or significantly change large chunks of text without trying to reach agreement. There is never only one way to present material, and since CZ is a collaborative project the shape of each article has to be reached through a process. Sole authorship is not a good preparation for such collaboration -- regardless of academic quality. Please, everyone, bear this in mind (and not only for this article). Martin Baldwin-Edwards 16:18, 16 May 2008 (CDT)

Constable notice

Please refresh your collective memories concerning Professionalism and deletion or reversion of large amounts of text as unprofessional behaviors. Also notice that there is a proposed revision on the table. I intend to follow current policy. --D. Matt Innis 16:31, 16 May 2008 (CDT)

My own two cents

I have no particular interest in the on-going argument above, but I *have* looked at the first three paragraphs of the article and I find them to be badly written, really badly organized, and full of jargon and "inside baseball" sort of talk. Maybe they tell the average reader who drops in here to find out about the CIA in general what he is looking for, but I seriously doubt it. I could do a complete rewrite of it, but I'm not going to bother if I get imprecations hurled at me from both sides and/or arbitrary deletions without prior discussion. Hayford Peirce 16:45, 16 May 2008 (CDT)

I'd welcome it; I have no personal ego investment in that text. The lead of this article, to some extent, reflected WP compromises between CIA-as-essence-of-evil and you-dirty-terrorist views. My concerns are much more with the overall schema, some of the less introductory material, and things that I believe are complex enough to deserve separate articles. Some of the deleted material, however, deserved discussion and multiple opinions. Howard C. Berkowitz 16:51, 16 May 2008 (CDT)

I used to read a lot of spy novels, and even a couple of now-old non-fiction books about the stuff, so I still have a vague interest in but no particular knowledge of today's CIA. (I wish we could get novelist and one-time CIA-man Charles McCarry to write the article!) But I don't see why the first couple of paragraphs couldn't say something along the lines of:

• The CIA is an American intelligence agency that was founded in 1947 as a successor to the wartime OSS with the initial intention of so-and-so. Over the years it became thus-and-such. In a major reorganization in 2005 in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 2001, it blah blah blah.

In other words, why not a general overview of what the dratted agency actually used to be and has now become. Unless there are some unreconstructed WP cretins lurking here in CZ with powerful agendas of their own regarding the CIA, I don't see why anything any of us writes should be controversial at all. At some point we, ie, someone other than I, can list the more obvious failures, and, possibly, the more obvious successes. There must be dozens of people here at CZ who, like me, are essentially neutral about the CIA, but who are perfectly capable of making general editorial changes and additions just to make an existing article flow more smoothly. Hayford Peirce 17:04, 16 May 2008 (CDT)

Just for information, you might want to look at clandestine human-source intelligence and covert action, which chronicles some of the complexities and arguments about what the successor to the OSS should and should not be. How about this:

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was formed in 1947, by the National Security Act of 1947 from the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Originally, it was intended as an analytic and coordination organization, without the clandestine human-source intelligence or covert action capabilities of the wartime OSS. The clandestine and covert functions were put in separate agencies, which was less than ideal; these missions came under the CIA in 1952. President Harry S Truman was concerned with the danger of forming an "American Gestapo" [cite available]

From its creation, the CIA produced a wide range of intelligence analysis studies for government policymakers. Its clandestine human-source intelligence collection -- espionage and other activities -- contributed to the various sources of information that went into analysis done by its own personnel and that of other U.S. and allied intelligence agencies. Far more controversial, however, was its covert action role, which included black propaganda, subversion, political warfare, sabotage, and other actions of which the U.S. government could deny knowledge. Some of these capabilities were used to overthrow governments and other missions that, in hindsight, may not have been in the long-term interest of the United States.

Until 2004, the Director of Central Intelligence headed both the CIA and the United States intelligence community (IC). Partially as a result of reconmmendations from the 9/11 Commission and the WMD Commission for Iraq (cites and exact names to be added), the IC-wide function was transferred to a newly created Director of National Intelligence, with the DCI renamed the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. CIA remained responsible for a wide range of analysis functions, as well as being the central human-source intelligence organization of the U.S. government, sharing covert action with military organizations.

The success and failure area, as I've mentioned, would be, IMHO, better off in separate articles, that could deal with particular matters in context. These articles certainly could be linked from the main page, although would have to be in some hierarchical schema to avoid hundreds of links -- some of those links, for example, represent very successful intelligence collection and analysis.

I don't see it as an overwhelming problem for a reader to be able to take a clear link to a sub-article. Howard C. Berkowitz 17:52, 16 May 2008 (CDT)

I'd say that it was only about 16,000 times better than what currently exists!!!! Geez! Was all of the other stuff because of WP-wars? Amazing! If so, then that opening ought to become a poster child for what's wrong with WP. As for your other comments, I don't see anything wrong with doing things as you propose. All of CZ, at the moment, however, is discussing and reconsidering this whole subpage, related articles, and sub-article business, so I really can't give any suggestions or advice here. So -- just forge ahead! Hayford Peirce 17:58, 16 May 2008 (CDT)