Several CIA Clandestine Services Histories Declassified
The Central Intelligence Agency has recently declassified and released several additional volumes of its coveted Clandestine Services History series. These are official Agency histories prepared for internal use regarding significant episodes in the Agency’s cold war record. Scholarly access to such documents has been sporadic and subject to strict controls.
The following clandestine service history volumes were approved for release in July 2007 following a new declassification review and were recently disclosed (all pdf).
“The Secret War in Korea, June 1950 to June 1952,” March 1964.
“Record of Paramilitary Action Against the Castro Government of Cuba, 17 March 1960 – May 1961,” May 1961.
“The Evolution of Ground Paramilitary Activities at the Staff Level, October 1949-September 1955,” November 1968.
“The Berlin Tunnel Operation, 1952-1956,” 24 June 1968.
The declassified documents were made available on CIA’s useful Freedom of Information Act site at www.foia.cia.gov.
Using the NIST as an example, the Radiation Physics Building (still without the funding to complete its renovation) is crucial to national security and the medical community. If it were to go down (or away), every medical device in the United States that uses radiation would be decertified within 6 months, creating a significant single point of failure that cannot be quickly mitigated.
The federal government can support more proactive, efficient, and cost-effective resiliency planning by certifying predictive models to validate and publicly indicate their quality.
We need a new agency that specializes in uncovering funding opportunities that were overlooked elsewhere. Judging from the history of scientific breakthroughs, the benefits could be quite substantial.
The cost of inaction is not merely economic; it is measured in preventable illness, deaths and diminished livelihoods.