1954 Doolittle Report On Covert Activities
Gen. James Doolittle did an extensive report on covert actions, specifically for President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
The report's first recommendation dealt with personnel. It recommended releasing a large number of current staff that could never be more than mediocre, aggressively recruit new staff with an overall goal of increasing the workforce, and intensify training, with 10% of the covert staff time spent in training. The Director should be nonpolitical.
Security was the next concern, starting with a drive to reduce interim and provisional security clearances. The report strongly endorsed use of the polygraph both for initial recruits and existing staff. Counterespionage needed to be strengthened, and field stations needed both to report on their staff and periodically be inspected. Consolidating the Washington workforce, which was scattered among buildings, into one or a few main buildings was seen as a way of improving the security of classified information.
Coordination in the intelligence community was seen as a problem, especially agreeing on clear understandings between CIA and military intelligence organizations. The overall IC program for eliciting information from defectors needed improvement, with contributions from multiple agencies.
As far as organization and management, the report described the structure of the Directorate of Plans (i.e., the clandestine service) as too complex and in need of simplification. The Inspector General needed an agency-wide mandate. The role of the Operations Coordinating Board, the covert and clandestine oversight staff of the National Security Council needed to be strengthened, with operations clearly approved and guided from the highest levels of government.
The report addressed the classic problem of increasing performance while reducing costs. This meant better review of the budgets of covert and clandestine activities by a Review Board, except for the most sensitive operations. It meant providing the Comptroller with enough information, even if sanitized, to do a thorough job.
Read more about this topic: Official Reports By The US Government On The CIA
Famous quotes containing the words doolittle, report, covert and/or activities:
“Ah, could they know
how violets throw strange fire,
red and purple and gold,
how they glow
gold and purple and red
where her feet tread.”
—Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961)
“Will you see the players well bestowed? Do you hear, let them
be well used, for they are the abstracts and brief chronicles of the time. After your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“This declared indifference, but as I must think, covert real zeal for the spread of slavery, I can not but hate. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world ... and especially because it forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“When mundane, lowly activities are at stake, too much insight is detrimental—far-sightedness errs in immediate concerns.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)