Interesting read into the mindset of that time. Remember all those UFO sightings?

The CIA and the U-2 Program 1954-1974

I love this stuff, more so the CIA reads... not the relation to spacemen.

In 1975-76, in the aftermath of Watergate, the American people got a glimpse of what sort of activities had been undertaken by the CIA (and, to a lesser extent, the FBI) in the preceding two or three decades. Even that brief taste was shocking to the public, and some (but only some) of the worst abuses were curbed from that point on.

At this point, 40 years later, I don't think the full range of activities undertaken by the CIA and FBI -- especially activities from the pre-1975 era -- will ever be fully appreciated, not even by historians/academics (much less the general population). But there is a rich "hidden history", still yet-to-be-told, for those who want to know about it. The seamy details of the U-2 program is a typical example of what that history would yield.

(01-29-2015 10:02 AM)Native Georgian Wrote:  In 1975-76, in the aftermath of Watergate, the American people got a glimpse of what sort of activities had been undertaken by the CIA (and, to a lesser extent, the FBI) in the preceding two or three decades. Even that brief taste was shocking to the public, and some (but only some) of the worst abuses were curbed from that point on.
At this point, 40 years later, I don't think the full range of activities undertaken by the CIA and FBI -- especially activities from the pre-1975 era -- will ever be fully appreciated, not even by historians/academics (much less the general population). But there is a rich "hidden history", still yet-to-be-told, for those who want to know about it. The seamy details of the U-2 program is a typical example of what that history would yield.

Intelligence--particularly human intel or humint--is full of seamy details. You succeed by turning people against their country--that's a pretty seamy proposition to begin with.

One aftermath of the 1975-76 curtailment was a provision that the US intel activities would no longer employ disreputable people. But think about it, who other than disreputable people are of any use in spy versus spy operations? How many non-disreputable people are willing to betray their country?

The result of this was pretty much the dismantlement of our humint capability over the next two decades. No problem, as satellites got better and better, we could see everything the Russians and Chinese were doing, so we didn't need no stinking humint, did we?

Then comes 9/11 and we realize that there are some things that satellites can't warn us about. We need humint. But we don't have reliable humint any more. Worse, when we quit dealing with those disreputable people, a lot of them got hung out to die. The ones who didn't remember the ones who did. So now when we try to recreate the information networks that we need, the people we need don't want to work for someone who bailed on their predecessors.

In a lot of ways, we are now flying blind. In a world where asymmetric threats are the principal danger, that's not a good situation. We will continue to have intelligence failures until we fix the problem. And I don't know how to fix it. I hope somebody does.