Documents / FOIA release

(EST Pub Date) the Office of Scientific Intelligence, 1949-68- (Volume Three, Annexes Viii, Ix, and X)

Central Intelligence Agency · 1972-06-01 · 243 pages · text by OCR

This is Volume Three of the CIA Directorate of Science and Technology Historical Series on the Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI), 1949 to 1968, written by Karl H. Weber in June 1972 and approved for release in 2008. It holds three annexes, on OSI publications, OSI's external assistance and contracting program, and OSI's interaction with the National Security Agency. The released text covers production planning, review boards, current intelligence periodicals and future threat forecasting. It does not discuss UFOs.

Open the PDF at page 159 Original source ↗

“Nevers”8 pages

  • p. 10 …of clergy," the criticism that is has never had a generally accepted set of guidelines controlling…
  • p. 46 …The SID has never been restricted in either substantive or geographic area coverage with the exception…
  • p. 56 …As far as can be determined, they have never been coordinated outside of CIA. Early SIMs…
  • p. 61 …OSI participation in OCI publications by the preparation of items within OSI has never been entirely…
  • p. 87 …on the development of a country have never been completely successful and OSI has continued to…
  • p. 104 …Publications in this area, however, never comprised a large
  • p. 137 …It was also clear to them that OSI could never hope to have internally the complete…
  • p. 182 …This policy change was never fully implemented; Office personnel responsible for arranging for contract support frequently…
understand the need to meet deadlines and to produce intelligence-oriented studies rather than detached scholarly reports or extensive catalogues without assessments.

Contracts with industrial R&D firms worked well as long as OSI insisted that the firm appoint a competent project leader to manage the work. Frequently problems arose from the tendency of a firm to use a project leader for other jobs. Contracts with such firms had the advantage, however, of benefitting from technical capabilities of the firm as a whole in that the project leader could call for assistance from a diversified S&T staff of specialists already on the payroll. The effectiveness of academic-type research projects undertaken by non-profit organizations seems to lie somewhere between that of university work and that of industrial firms; non-profit organizations have some of the advantages and disadvantages of each of the other two.

Probably the most effective contracts for the money spent were those with private individuals. Many of the contracted individuals were not only competent technically but frequently had a strong intellectual interest in the subject matter as well as a regard for their personal reputations,

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About this file

FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. The text was read from the page images by an OCR model; expect the odd misread word. 243 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.