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.

  • 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…
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find a workable formula, they were finally discontinued in the FY 1962 program. Also priority grouping became unnecessary, for as additional demands were made on OSI, low-priority work had to be cut back to the minimum levels consistent with OSI coverage responsibilities. Currently, all external research projects must be related to high priority Office objectives except those that pertain to the NIS, a low priority obligation that is still being levied on OSI.

When Wheelon became head of OSI in 1963, he attempted to make an official policy of what had actually been a previous practice of keeping a portion of external contracting funds available to take advantage of unanticipated opportunities or meet needs as they occurred. It was realized that many new developments in scientific and technical intelligence simply could not be anticipated. The policy of flexible programming, as it was called, was aimed at avoiding the trap of being forced by annual budgeting procedures to commit all funds too far in advance.

XI. Administrative Problems

By FY 1957, the OSI external support program had grown and began to impose an

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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.