Last month, outgoing Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper issued new guidance on how the U.S. intelligence community should pivot in response to a crisis.

A “crisis” is defined here as “An event or situation, as determined by the DNI, that threatens U.S. national security interests and requires an expedited shift in national intelligence posture, priorities, and/or emphasis.”

The new guidance explains how that shift in intelligence posture is to be executed.

See Intelligence Community Crisis Management, Intelligence Community Policy Guidance 900.2, December 23, 2016.

Over the past several years, former Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper led an ongoing transformation of information policy in the U.S. intelligence community that stresses information sharing among intelligence agencies based on a common information technology infrastructure.

On his way out the door last week, DNI Clapper signed Intelligence Community Directive 121 on Managing the Intelligence Community Information Environment, dated January 19, 2017.

The goal is for each IC member agency “to make information readily discoverable by and appropriately retrievable to the [entire] IC.”

Although the policy makes allowance for unique individual agency requirements, and acknowledges legal and policy restrictions on sharing of privacy information, a common IC-wide information architecture is otherwise supposed to become the new default for each intelligence community agency.

“IC elements shall first use an IC enterprise approach, which accounts for all IC equities and enhances intelligence integration, for managing the IC IE [Information Environment] before using an IC element-centric solution,” the new directive says.

Further, “IC elements shall […] migrate IC IT capabilities to IC IT SoCCs [Services of Common Concern] as quickly and efficiently as possible.”

Increased sharing of information naturally entails increased vulnerability to compromise of the shared information.

To help mitigate the increased risk, “all personnel accessing the IC IE [must] have unique, identifiable identities, which can be authenticated and have current and accurate attributes for accessing information in accordance with IC policies, guidance, and specifications for identity and access management,” the directive says.

The new IT Enterprise approach has received congressional support and seems likely to continue for the foreseeable future.

But in the current period of turbulence everything is uncertain, including the future of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence itself.

In its report on the FY2017 Intelligence Authorization Act last week, the Senate Intelligence Committee mandated a new review of the roles and missions of the ODNI.

“It has been more than ten years since the Congress established the position of the DNI in the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, building on its predecessor, the Director of Central Intelligence. Given this experience and the evolving security environment, the Committee believes it appropriate to review the DNI’s roles, missions and functions and adapt its authorities, organization and resources as needed,” the new Committee report said.

In the final days and weeks of the Obama Administration, intelligence officials took steps to promote increased transparency and made several noteworthy disclosures of intelligence policy records.

On January 9, DNI James Clapper signed a new version of Intelligence Community Directive 208, now titled “Maximizing the Utility of Analytic Products.” The revised directive notably incorporates new instructions to include transparency as a consideration in preparing intelligence analyses.

Thus, one way of “maximizing utility,” the directive said, is to “Demonstrate Transparency”:

“Analytic products should follow the Principles of Intelligence Transparency for the Intelligence Community, which are intended to facilitate IC decisions on making information publicly available in a manner that enhances public understanding of intelligence activities, while continuing to protect information, including sources and methods, when disclosure would harm national security. The degree to which transparency will be applied depends upon the nature and type of the analytic product.”

Interestingly, the revised directive was issued without any public notice or press release. Though unclassified and published online, it appears to be genuinely inner-directed rather than a mere public relations gesture.

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The Central Intelligence Agency posted more than 12 million declassified pages (930,000 documents) from its CREST archive on the CIA website. The CREST (CIA Records Search Tool) database had previously been accessible only to those researchers who visited the National Archives in person.

By making the records broadly available online, their utility and the benefits of their declassification are multiplied many times over.

Release of the CREST database had been sought by researchers and advocates for many years. It was advocated internally by the CIA Historical Review Panel and the Panel’s chair, Prof. Robert Jervis. It was recently the subject of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the Muckrock news site.

Joseph Lambert, CIA Director of Information Management, said that online access to CREST recently became possible only after technical limitations on the CIA website were “dissolved.” He said that the quality of the online search engine would not be inferior to that on the original CREST system.

One experienced researcher disputed that. Based on an initial survey, “I think it is safe to say that the level of functionality for searching is less than CREST,” the researcher said. From his perspective, “the losses are very significant.” A detailed comparison was not immediately available.

In any case, Mr. Lambert said that newly declassified records, and less redacted versions of previously redacted records, would be periodically added to the online collection.

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Also last week, the CIA released updated guidelines for the collection, retention and dissemination of U.S. person information. The Agency also posted declassified documents concerning its interrogation program, released in response to FOIA litigation by the ACLU.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence released an updated report on counterterrorism strikes outside of areas of active hostilities, a report on equal opportunity and diversity in the Intelligence Community, and a paper on the Domestic Approach to National Intelligence describing the organization of U.S. intelligence. ODNI published the remainder of the captured bin Laden documents that have been declassified, the third annual SIGINT progress report, and three semi-annual reports on compliance with Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

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With the exception of records released in response to litigation or legislation, these moves and these disclosures were voluntary. They seem to represent a realization that increased transparency, though occasionally awkward in the short term, serves the long-term interests of U.S. intelligence.

“Today, whether you are a U.S. citizen or a non-U.S. citizen abroad, you now have more confidence about what the United States does and does not do with regard to signals intelligence collection because of steps this Administration has taken to provide an unprecedented level of transparency regarding these activities,” according to an Obama Administration report on privacy that was briefly published on the White House web site last week.

This posture of increased transparency, if not these specific disclosures, can be easily reversed or abandoned. But an infrastructure of disclosure has been established, along with a pattern of releases, that will generate expectations for the future and a certain momentum that may yet be sustained and developed.

A new report on improving declassification procedures in the U.S. intelligence community implicitly suggests that no such improvements are likely to emerge any time soon.

The report, published yesterday by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in response to congressional direction, is largely devoid of new ideas and instead calls for greater “integration” and “coordination.”

“Improving the declassification process across the Community will require an integrated and multifaceted set of initiatives fully coordinated with organizations that have AD [automatic declassification] programs. No single step will suffice in addressing satisfactorily the areas for improvement that have been identified in this report.”

See Improving the Intelligence Community’s Declassification Process and the Community’s Support to the National Declassification Center, ODNI, December 2016.

The core of the report is in a section entitled “Proposals to Improve the IC’s Declassification Process.” But it does not actually present any declassification policy proposals. Instead, in a near-parody of a government report, it calls for establishment of new working groups to write other reports and generate further recommendations.

Thus, the “Proposal on Process” calls for “a Declassification Improvement Working Group (DIWG) to conduct a zero‐based study of the IC’s AD process and prepare a report–by a specified deadline– that includes recommended actions to increase the program’s effectiveness and efficiency across the Community.”

The “Proposal on Electronic Records” says that “A joint task force […] should be formed to aggressively pursue the identification, development, and validation of technological capabilities — tools and infrastructure — for incorporation in the AD [automatic declassification] process.” (Aggressively!)

This is not helpful. In fact, it is practically a declaration of helplessness.

The new report is lacking in specific actionable proposals that could be evaluated, debated, perhaps modified and ultimately adopted in practice. It does not ask or answer any penetrating questions. Such as:

*  What if agency “equity” in older records, requiring review by those agencies, simply lapsed at some point in time, eliminating the need for such review?

*  What if certain defunct intelligence compartments could be altogether excused from multi-agency referral and review?

*  What if a fixed fraction of agency information security expenditures were routinely and predictably allocated to performing declassification?

*  What if new metrics could be devised to measure the success of declassification programs based on requester demand and disclosure impact, not just on number of pages processed?

*  Fundamentally, what if intelligence community tolerance for risk were recalibrated to facilitate more expeditious declassification of both current and historically valuable records?

Interestingly, the report notes that agencies favor numerous revisions to President Obama’s executive order 13526 on classification policy, so that “updating the E.O. will be a major undertaking.”

But those revisions mainly seem geared toward relaxing existing declassification requirements, not strengthening them. So, for example, IC officials believe they could place increased emphasis on declassifying historical records of broad public interest if they could be assured that other records of lesser interest would not be automatically declassified as they become 25 years old, as the Obama order nominally directs.

At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing yesterday on foreign cyber threats to the U.S., there were several references to the saying that “people who live in glass houses should not throw stones.” The point, made by DNI James Clapper, was that the U.S. should not be too quick to penalize the very espionage practices that U.S. intelligence agencies rely upon, including clandestine collection of information from foreign computer networks.

But perhaps a more pertinent saying would be “It takes a thief to catch a thief.”

U.S. intelligence agencies should be well-equipped to recognize Russian cyber threats and political intervention since they have been tasked for decades to carry out comparable efforts.

A newly disclosed intelligence directive from 1999 addresses “information operations” (IO), which are defined as: “Actions taken to affect adversary information and information systems while defending one’s own information and information systems.”

“Although still evolving, the fundamental concept of IO is to integrate different activities to affect [adversary] decision making processes, information systems, and supporting information infrastructures to achieve specific objectives.”

The elements of information operations may include computer network attack, computer network exploitation, and covert action.

See Director of Central Intelligence Directive 7/3, Information Operations and Intelligence Community Related Activities, effective 01 July 1999.

The directive was declassified (in part) on December 2 by the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel, and was first obtained and published by GovernmentAttic.org.

Earlier this month the Director of National Intelligence asked intelligence community historians to recommend topics in the history of intelligence which, if declassified and disclosed, “would help the public better understand the work of the IC and contribute to a public dialogue surrounding significant historical events.”

DNI James R. Clapper directed that historical topics shall be provided to the DNI for proposed declassification review “on a semi-annual basis.” IC historians are to “collaborate with other public historians or private subject-matter experts to solicit input for such topics,” he wrote in a December 9 memorandum.

In itself, this DNI directive is not a very significant step. It does not make any specific commitments, it is not enforceable, and it does not allocate any new resources. Above all, it does not set forth new criteria for declassification of historical materials. This is a serious omission, since records which qualify for declassification under existing criteria are supposed to be declassified anyway, without the need for a new procedure.

Nevertheless, the latest memorandum adds at least a dash of momentum to a series of steps that have been taken by DNI Clapper to advance intelligence-related transparency, and that cumulatively may help to keep it alive as a topic of policy deliberation. Those other steps include the creation of IC on the Record (where the new memorandum first appeared), the issuance of IC “Transparency Principles,” the creation of an IC Transparency Council, and especially the DNI’s active embrace of the Fundamental Classification Guidance Review process, which should pay dividends in the months and years to come. Meanwhile, “over-classification” has recently been flagged by the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board as an issue requiring the attention of the next Administration.

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These days, intelligence history is not just for historians. One historical topic that is timely and that might be fitting for comprehensive treatment by declassifiers concerns the role of intelligence agencies in tampering with foreign elections.

“The United States cannot in good faith decry what has been done to its decent citizens until it is ready to face what it did so often to the equally decent citizens of other nations,” wrote Ariel Dorfman, referring to the CIA intervention in Chile’s elections in the 1970s (“Now, America, You Know How Chileans Felt,” New York Times, December 16).

“The C.I.A. got its start trying to influence the outcome of Italy’s elections in 1948, as the author Tim Weiner documented in his book ‘Legacy of Ashes,’ in an effort to keep Communists from taking power,” wrote David Sanger, also in the Times. The US went on to interfere in elections in Iran, Guatemala, and Japan, he noted.

In Indonesia, the CIA reportedly made a pornographic film in 1957 featuring an actor disguised as the disfavored leader Sukarno that was intended to embarrass him, according to the 1976 book Portrait of a Cold Warrior by former CIA officer Joseph Burkholder Smith.

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The current classification system “is broken,” wrote Sen. Dianne Feinstein in the Washington Post. It is too complicated, too expensive, and rewards overclassification.

“We… must do what we can to change incentives to further encourage government personnel to classify at the lowest appropriate levels and for the shortest durations,” she wrote. See “How to rethink what’s ‘top secret’ for the Internet age,” December 16.

While official attention to classification policy is most welcome, the fact that a senior legislator like Sen. Feinstein would resort to writing an op-ed on the subject might be understood as a tacit signal that a legislative solution is currently out of reach.

But that is not necessarily true. I suggested some (comparatively) easy incremental steps that Congress could take to begin to combat overclassification in a statement presented at a hearing of the House Oversight and Governmental Reform Committee on December 7.

The Director of National Intelligence shall “review the system by which the Government classifies and declassifies information” and shall “develop recommendations… to make such system a more effective tool… and to support the appropriate declassification of information.”

That’s just one of the many requirements included in the Fiscal Year 2017 Intelligence Authorization Act (in section 708) that was approved by the House of Representatives on November 30, following negotiations with the Senate.

The House and Senate Intelligence Committees also produced an Explanatory Statement that presents extensive “unclassified congressional direction” on all kinds of intelligence policy matters high and low.

The joint Statement, included in the Congressional Record, notably adopts House language on reforming the pre-publication review requirement that current and former intelligence community employees (and certain others) must comply with. The Statement requires the DNI to “issue an IC-wide policy regarding pre-publication review” within 180 days that includes various specified elements that should improve the timeliness, clarity, and fairness of the review process.

The intelligence bill was crafted in response to Obama Administration policies and, in all likelihood, in anticipation of a Hillary Clinton Administration. But assuming that it is enacted into law, it will come into full effect in a Trump Administration of uncertain character and composition.

“There are many unknowns about the incoming administration, particularly how it will utilize and interact with the IC,” said Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), the Ranking Member of the House Intelligence Committee.

“It is now more important than ever that we give the IC the tools it needs to keep us safe and provide the necessary oversight required to ensure that they act in a manner consistent with our values and at all times,” he said on the House floor.

The amount of money appropriated for U.S. intelligence increased in 2016 by about 5 percent to a total of $70.7 billion, up from $66.8 billion the year before.

The total includes FY 2016 appropriations for both the National Intelligence Program (NIP) and the Military Intelligence Program (MIP), which were officially disclosed on October 28, as they have been each year since 2007.

Opponents of intelligence budget disclosure had argued for decades that release of the total budget figures would lead inexorably to further uncontrolled disclosures.

In 1976, former Director of Central Intelligence James Schlesinger told the Church Committee that “One of the problems here is the camel’s nose under the edge of the tent, and I think that that is the fundamental problem in the area. There are very few people who can articulately argue that the publication of those [budget] figures in and of themselves, if it stopped there, would be harmful. The argument is that then the pressure would build up to do something else, that once you have published for example the… budget, that the pressures would build up to reveal the kinds of systems that are being bought for that money, and it is regarded as the first step down a slippery slope for those who worry about those kinds of things.”

But that concern about a “slippery slope” appears to have been refuted in practice, and — aside from unauthorized disclosures — additional budget secrets have been effectively preserved.

In a dispute that pitted member agencies of the U.S. intelligence community against each other, the Central Intelligence Agency claimed that “a questionable intelligence activity” had been carried out in 2014 by agents of the Department of Defense.

But an investigation of the matter by the DoD Inspector General that was partially declassified last week failed to corroborate the CIA claim.

At issue was whether or not an unnamed individual had “conducted unauthorized intelligence activities in Europe on behalf of DoD,” as CIA had alleged.

“We were unable to substantiate the CIA allegation and could not find any evidence that [deleted] traveled to Europe or paid any sources on behalf of the DoD,” the Inspector General concluded.

“We could not find evidence of DoD intelligence tasking,” the IG investigative summary said. “In addition, we verified that [deleted] did not travel to Europe in 2014.”

The IG summary report, which had been classified Secret/Noforn, was partially declassified and released under the Freedom of Information Act last Friday.  See Investigative Results of a Questionable Intelligence Activity (redacted), DoD Inspector General report DODIG-2015-171, September 8, 2015.

Meanwhile, for his part, the alleged DoD culprit “asserts that the CIA fabricated the allegation that [deleted] had been conducting intelligence operations in Europe in order to ensure that [several words deleted] because [deleted] claimed [deleted] had previously identified and revealed analytical flaws within CIA analysis.”

However, that counter-accusation “was outside the scope of our investigation and has been referred to the Intelligence Community Inspector General for review.”

The exact nature of the alleged questionable intelligence activity and the identity of the individual(s) involved were not declassified.

Nor would CIA elaborate on the public record.

“You can say CIA declined to comment,” said CIA spokesperson Ryan Trapani.  “We defer to DOD on the document.”

Organizations give out awards not only in order to recognize individual excellence, but also to advance and reinforce values prized by their sponsors.

So it is both telling and somewhat unexpected that the U.S. intelligence community is creating a new award for certain kinds of dissidents and whistleblowers.

“The intelligence community has […] committed to establishing a National Intelligence Professional Awards program to recognize superior service by an intelligence professional in effectuating change by speaking truth to power, by exemplifying professional integrity, or by reporting wrongdoing through appropriate channels,” according to a new Self-Assessment Report on the Third Open Government National Action Plan that was released by the White House last week.

Professional integrity may be welcome everywhere, but “speaking truth to power” is rarely welcomed by “power.” Often it is not even acknowledged as “truth.” (Apparently, the IC envisions itself here as the domain of truth, and not of power. Or will those who challenge the IC leadership itself be eligible for the new award?) Meanwhile, “reporting wrongdoing” often seems to end badly for the reporter, as the frequency of whistleblower reprisal claims indicates.

Just last week, the DoD Inspector General released a redacted report on a whistleblower reprisal case at the Defense Information School at Fort Meade. According to a summary, “We substantiated the allegation that [name deleted] downgraded Complainant’s FY14 performance appraisal in reprisal for Complainant’s disclosures….”

But perhaps that is the point. Whether or not the IC intends to celebrate its own internal critics, it seems to want to encourage and now incentivize them, providing improved channels for dissent and whistleblowing that will not inevitably be career-enders or needlessly disruptive in other ways.

“ODNI has developed a new training curriculum concerning protections for whistleblowers with access to classified information. ODNI will coordinate the training curriculum with the relevant government departments and agencies. ODNI has met with civil society members to gather input,” the White House report said.

More than a dozen official intelligence awards already exist, as described in Intelligence Community Directive 655, National Intelligence Awards Program, amended February 9, 2012. But none of those existing awards explicitly encompasses “speaking truth to power” or “reporting wrongdoing.”

The House Intelligence Committee receives dozens of whistleblower complaints each year, The Intercept reported last week. The consequences of those complaints, if any, were not disclosed.

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The new White House report on the Third Open Government National Action Plan identified a series of intelligence-related transparency measures that will be taken to “make information regarding foreign intelligence activities more publicly available while continuing to protect such information when disclosure could harm national security.”

So, for example, “ODNI is building out content for the Intelligence.gov website and will launch the site by January 2017.”

More generally, “ODNI has coordinated and participated in ongoing engagement with civil society stakeholders including open government organizations, privacy and civil liberties advocates, community organizations, and academia. Representatives from the intelligence community also regularly participate in public events. ODNI continues to develop avenues to make such engagements a more institutionalized part of the intelligence community’s work.”

The White House report and a companion report on New Open Government Initiatives identified various other incremental steps that are planned or already in progress.

In order to “increase [the] transparency and quality of [U.S.] foreign aid data,” the ForeignAssistance.gov website has recently been established. It is already quite informative, and it is expected to grow in depth and coverage, with several additional agencies contributing new data fields.

Among other initiatives, the U.S. has also been releasing new data related to climate change, and on the Arctic.

“More than 250 high-value, Arctic-related datasets are now easily and openly available. In addition, more than 40 maps, tools, and other resources designed to support climate-resilience efforts in Alaska and the Arctic are also available.”

Publishing such information should be comparatively easy, since doing so does not directly threaten any institutional interests. But it doesn’t happen by itself, and so credit is due to the agencies involved for making it happen.

Public discussion of the Edward Snowden case has mostly been a dialog of the deaf, with defenders and critics largely talking past each other at increasing volume. But the disagreements became sharper and more interesting over the past week.

“Mr. Snowden is not a patriot. He is not a whistleblower. He is a criminal,” wrote the members of the House Intelligence Committee in a startling September 15 letter to the President, urging him not to pardon Snowden, contrary to the urging of human rights groups.

“The public narrative popularized by Snowden and his allies is rife with falsehoods, exaggerations, and crucial omissions,” the House Intelligence Committee wrote in the executive summary of an otherwise classified report on Snowden’s disclosures.

Remarkably, however, the House Committee report itself included numerous false statements and misrepresentations, according to an analysis by Barton Gellman, who had reported on Snowden’s disclosures for the Washington Post.

“The report is not only one-sided, not only incurious, not only contemptuous of fact. It is trifling,” wrote Gellman, who identified several apparent errors and falsehoods in the House Committee summary.

What is perhaps worse than what’s contained in the House document, though, is what is missing from it: Congressional intelligence overseers missed the opportunity to perform any reflection or self-criticism concerning their own role in the Snowden matter.

The fact that U.S. intelligence surveillance policies had to be modified in response to the public controversy over Snowden’s disclosures was a tacit admission that intelligence oversight behind closed doors had failed to fulfill its role up to that point. But since the Committee has been unwilling to admit any such failure, it remains unable to take the initiative to rectify its procedures.

Last week, a coalition of non-governmental organizations proposed various changes to House rules that they said would help to improve the quality of intelligence oversight and make it more responsive to congressional needs and to the public interest.

Meanwhile, several human rights organizations launched a campaign to urge President Obama to pardon Snowden.

“Thanks to his act of conscience, America’s surveillance programs have been subjected to democratic scrutiny, the NSA’s surveillance powers were reined in for the first time in decades, and technology companies around the world are newly invigorated to protect their customers and strengthen our communications infrastructure,” the petition website said. “Snowden should be hailed as a hero. Instead, he is exiled in Moscow, and faces decades in prison under World War One-era charges that treat him like a spy.”

However, aside from that oblique reference to the Espionage Act of 1917, the petition campaign does not acknowledge any defect in Snowden’s conduct or weigh counterarguments. (A somewhat more nuanced defense of a pardon was presented by Tim Edgar in Lawfare. A substantial rebuttal to the pardon proposal was offered by Jack Goldsmith also in Lawfare.)

But of course what complicates the Snowden matter is that his disclosures exceeded the boundaries of “democratic scrutiny” and went well beyond any identifiable “act of conscience.”

“The fact is, many of Snowden’s documents bore no resemblance to whistleblowing as the phrase is broadly understood,” wrote Fred Kaplan in a review of the new Oliver Stone movie about Snowden in Slate. Rather, he said, they represented “an attempt to blow U.S. intelligence operations.”

Advocacy journalist Glenn Greenwald replied with a debater’s point that Snowden is innocent of any such offense since he (Snowden) did not directly disclose anything at all to the public! Instead, he gave documents to newspapers that reported on his material, and those papers are responsible for any inappropriate disclosures.

“Snowden himself never publicly disclosed a single document, so any programs that were revealed were the ultimate doing of news organizations,” according to Greenwald.

In an oddly mercenary argument, he also wrote that it was hypocritical of the Washington Post editorial board to oppose a pardon for Snowden, considering that the Post had gained “untold millions of clicks” from his disclosures, and therefore somehow owed him a debt of loyalty.

But an effort to shift responsibility away from Snowden on to news reporters and editors proves too much. It implies that Snowden is not a whistleblower at all, since he himself didn’t blow any whistles, his journalistic collaborators did.

It seems more sensible to conclude that Snowden is responsible for his own actions as well as for the directly foreseeable consequences of those actions.

In an interesting response to Jack Goldsmith, Marcy Wheeler wrote that it is possible to comprehend — if not to reconcile — the sharply opposing views of the Snowden case if they are understood as a clash between professed American values (such as openness, privacy, and internet freedom) and American interests and actions (such as global surveillance and projection of military power). The former, “cosmopolitan” view presumes, however, that the favored values transcend, and can be sustained apart from, their national and institutional roots.

U.S. covert action in Angola during the Carter Administration is among the topics documented in a new volume of the official Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series that was released yesterday. See Foreign Relations of the United States, 1977–1980, Volume XVI, Southern Africa.

The CIA had secretly intervened in Angola in 1975, during the Ford Administration. But in 1976, Congress enacted legislation known as the Tunney-Javits Clark Amendment to prohibit any such paramilitary involvement in that country, even on a covert basis. (William Blum, an often acerbic critic of U.S. policy, wrote that this was “one of the infrequent occasions in modern times that the US Congress has exercised a direct and pivotal influence upon American foreign policy,” thereby avoiding “the slippery slope to another Vietnam.”)

In the wake of the congressional prohibition, the Carter Administration struggled to determine whether further covert action in Angola was feasible, desirable, or lawful.

Officials settled on a covert propaganda operation to focus on criticizing the Cuban presence in Angola. The new FRUS volume “contains inter-departmental records pertaining to the development and implementation of the covert operation in Angola.”

The new collection details the mechanics of covert propaganda with unusual clarity. “We […] need to get the story out in the open so that our controlled assets can use it,” wrote DCI Stansfield Turner in a 1977 memorandum (document 16).

The effectiveness of legislation as a constraint on CIA covert action was notable, and the new assertiveness of Congress regarding intelligence policy was recognized and largely accepted by intelligence officials. “Before embarking on a covert action program involving direct or indirect paramilitary support, it would be wise to ascertain the sense of Congress.”

“Our previous covert paramilitary support of UNITA in Angola [in 1975] generated a great deal of controversy. Angola may be a poor choice as to the place where we try to engage in some further covert paramilitary action. An abortive attempt to reopen the issue of covert paramilitary support of UNITA–even indirect–could lead to damage to our capability and flexibility to undertake any covert action in the future,” wrote DCI Turner. (document 21)

During the Carter years, there were several innovations in the execution of covert action policy, detailed in the new FRUS volume.

For example, a new category of presidential findings known as “Perspectives” was adopted for “worldwide” or “generic” covert operations, the FRUS editors wrote.

“Perspectives were drafted by the CIA and cleared by the Department of State, so that the CIA could vet the operational feasibility and risks of the program while State could assess the diplomatic risks and verify that the program was consistent with overall foreign policy goals.”

Another covert action document category that was first introduced in the Carter years was the “Memorandum of Notification” (MON).

“MONs were initially used to introduce higher-risk, significantly higher-cost, or more geographically-specific operations under a previously-approved world-wide or general objective outlined in a Perspectives document…. MONs subsequently came to be used for significant changes to any type of [covert action] finding, not just worldwide ones.”

However, “Entirely new covert actions continued to require new presidential findings.”

The Foreign Relations of the United States series, which now includes more than 450 volumes, is produced by the Office of the Historian of the State Department with the oversight of the Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic Documentation. FRUS is required under a 1992 law to present a “thorough, accurate, and reliable documentary record of major United States foreign policy decisions.”

Among other issues concerning Southern Africa, the new FRUS volume notably includes discussion of a suspected South African nuclear weapons test that may have occurred in September 1979.

FRUS Volume on Iran 1953 Still Unreleased

Meanwhile, a long-delayed retrospective FRUS volume on Iran in 1953, based on official Eisenhower Administration records of CIA involvement in the coup against the Mossadegh government, remains held up.

A decision on whether to proceed with publication of the 1953 Iran volume was elevated in the past year to Secretary of State Kerry, who decided to block its release. The logic of his decision is obscure, but presumably it is based on a belief that publication would somehow perturb relations with Iran in an unfavorable way. (A plausible argument could be made that the opposite would more likely be the case, and that an honest reckoning with the past is a prerequisite to improved relations in the future.)

Although many relevant records are thought to have been destroyed and others have already been released, the withheld volume on Iran 1953 includes “a lot of new material,” according to an historian who is familiar with its contents.