Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
The Central Intelligence Agency, known informally as the Agency and the Company, is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States, officially tasked with gathering, processing, and analyzing national security information from around the world, primarily through the use of human intelligence (HUMINT). As a principal member of the United States Intelligence Community (IC), the CIA reports to the Director of National Intelligence and is primarily focused on providing intelligence for the President and Cabinet of the United States.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Intelligence_Agency]
My family and I visited the CIA HQ several times because we needed a laundry list of vaccinations. Bad move to maintain cover.
Background
The CIA evokes images of clandestine activity, spies hiding in corners and covert overthrow of unfriendly government regimes. However, when Truman established the organization in 1947, he envisioned something much different -- a sort of daily newspaper, informing him of developments around the world that could impact American policy. Yet even during Truman’s own presidency, the CIA did evolve to become much more than a news agency for the President as covert operations began in earnest early in the agency’s history.
[https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/education/presidential-inquiries/establishment-cia]
I have visited the Truman Library, and it is chock-full of documents and memorabilia.
Harry S. Truman Library
500 W. U.S. Highway 24
Independence, Missouri 64050-1798
1-800-833-1225
816-268-8200
FAX (816) 268-8296;
When my mother was a little girl, her mother (my grandmother) took her to Independence, Missouri to see the Truman Library.
Walking out front of the Library was Ex-President Truman doing his daily exercise with no Secret Service.
My mother and my grandmother said hello to Truman and shook his hand.
Amazing small world.
The Buck Stops Here Desk Sign
President Harry S. Truman kept this "The Buck Stops Here" nameplate on his desk when he was President. This artifact is in the museum collection of the Truman Library.
Back Side of Buck Stops Here Sign
Trivia: Most people did not know that the famous “Buck Stops Here” sign was double-sided.
President Harry S. Truman kept this "The Buck Stops Here" nameplate on his desk when he was President. The back side of the sign says, "I'm from Missouri." This artifact is in the museum collection of the Truman Library.
Original CIA Organization Chart from Truman Library
FOIA - A Moving Target
The CIA Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) website is a gold mine of declassified documents that the Agency wants you to know about.
The FOIA Electronic Reading Room is provided as a public service by the Directorate of Digital Innovation's Information Management Services. It has recently been enhanced and updated, and while many of the updates happened behind the scenes, we'd like to highlight several of the changes.
[https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/home]
Years ago, I wrote a “spider” program that incrementally crawled the FOIA website and downloaded the metadata and PDF documents associated with keywords I was interested in, like TSD and MK/ULTRA.
I ran this crawler for a year collecting a database of metadata along with the PDFs, and then CIA FOIA changed everything.
Suddenly the crawler stopped working.
The Agency said they were making “improvements” to their FOIA website for more “transparency” but in reality they dumbed-down the details in the metadata and made the PDFs less searchable.
My crawler never worked again.
Who moved my cheese?
A great book on how to cope with change and how to plan for it, as good as you can.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Moved_My_Cheese%3F]
Reorganizations and Shifting Divisions
Like any large organization, structural change often happens.
One division is here today and gone or morphed tomorrow.
One day TSD is the technical division and the next it is called:
Office of Technical Service (OTS) or
Science and Technology (S&T) or
Directorate of Science and Technology (DS&T) or
Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI)
It makes it hard to keep up.
I think a scorecard like in baseball would be helpful.
But it also makes it hard for our enemies to track…
CIA Books
https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/103622.CIA_Suggested_Reading_List