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)

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)

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)