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…
f. The research and development aspects of Sino-Soviet Bloc offensive and defensive BW and CW capabilities.

g. The scientific and technological aspects of Soviet capabilities for Arctic warfare and Arctic development.

h. The basic scientific resources of the Sino-Soviet Bloc--the quality of Soviet scientific and engineering manpower and the effectiveness of their utilization.

Since it was felt then that the Office was preoccupied with technical intelligence to the detriment of intelligence on the basic sciences, the Fundamental Sciences Area was established.

In spite of OSI's desire to strengthen production in the basic sciences, depth research production remained about evenly divided between the basic sciences and weapons developments. (See chart in subsection on depth research.) Amid the strongly emphasized weaponry developments, guided missiles were beginning to occupy a prominent place. In 1955, the first national intelligence estimate on guided missiles (NIE-6-54) was published. Contracts with US firms in the guided missile business were established to perform intelligence research. In this period, research on ground weapons was discontinued,

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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.