GovernmentExecutive.com

The massive set of declassified documents the State Department released late last month on the intelligence community during the Cold War proves once again the verity of George Santayana's admonition: "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it."

High-level documents contained in State's 867-page report, Foreign Relations of the United States: The Intelligence Community, 1950-1955, indicate that early in its history, the CIA had "grown too rapidly and was plagued by poor management."

Two commissions appointed by President Dwight Eisenhower determined that the CIA's growth "had come at the expense of the agency's intelligence analysts," a conclusion that echoes the 9/11 commission report released in 2004. Eisenhower appointed Air Force Gen. James Doolittle to conduct a study of the CIA in 1954, and in September of that year, Doolittle produced a report whose conclusions and recommendations could easily apply to today's Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The Doolittle report called for an "intensive organizational study" of the CIA, focused on "streamlining functions, clarifying lines of responsibility and authority, reducing overhead, and increasing efficiency and effectiveness." Doolittle also recommended "a greater interchange of information at all working levels between the CIA and the military services regarding their intelligence activities."

ODNI could save itself a lot of money simply by distributing the Doolittle report to the many intelligence agencies it oversees rather than funding a new organizational study, which I am sure is in the works.

A "Sloppy Organization"

Doolittle had a meeting with Eisenhower about the CIA report on Oct. 19, 1954, and according to a memorandum about the conversation, Doolittle said, "The weakness of the CIA is in the organization -- it grew like topsy, [a] sloppy organization."

Eisenhower said at the meeting that he was interested in two changes: "improvements within the CIA itself ... [and] improvement in relationship and better understanding between CIA and the rest of the intelligence communities in government."

Too bad Eisenhower is not around to take over ODNI.

1951-style 'Net attacks

Last year Marine Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the United States-China Economic and Security Review Commission that he had serious concerns that China had the ability to launch cyberattacks against Internet-based systems that could "cause cataclysmic harm if conducted against the United States on a large scale."

In 1951, Robert Hooker, a Foreign Service officer on the State policy planning staff, had similar worries about the capability of the Soviet Union to knock out vital communications used by commerce and government in the United States, according to State papers.

Voice and teletype communications between the United States and Europe was handled by HF radio communications, with trans-Atlantic cables used to carry only telegraph signals. Hooker worried that jamming by the Soviet Union could knock out those vital voice links. (The first trans-Atlantic cable that carried voice calls went into service in 1956, and Telstar, the first communications satellite, began operation in 1962.)

Hooker told his boss, Paul Nitze, director of the State policy planning staff, that Soviet jammers (originally designed to block broadcasts by the Voice of America and other U.S.-backed shortwave stations such as Radio Free Europe) also had been used to block vital radio communications links.

In a memo to Nitze dated March 26, 1951, Hooker said, "The Russian jamming operation seems to us to have clear and serious implications extending beyond the immediate problems of the Voice of America. ... Already there have been deliberate, effective jamming of intercontinental point-to-point transmissions, both United States and British.... If our high-frequency communications were jammed (they could be jammed tomorrow) and the Atlantic cables were cut by submarine action, airmail would be our only means of communications with Europe." (Emphasis added.)

Bernie Skoch, a consultant with Suss Consulting in Jenkintown, Pa., and a retired Air Force general and ham radio operator who spent his entire career in the communications field, said Hooker's assessment of Soviet jamming capabilities contained "a bit of hyperbole."

Skoch added, "HF jamming isn't as easy as some would suggest," though wide band AM or single side band voice calls could suffer from jamming. But, Skoch said, narrow band Morse code (CW) or radio teletype signals (RTTY) could withstand jamming.

"Give me a couple of good CW (or RTTY) operators, a coordinated frequency plan, some benevolence from the ionosphere gods (propagation conditions), and I think modest communications could be maintained under jamming systems of the time," Skoch said.

From Polaroid to the U-2

The declassified State papers also document the key role that Edwin Land, head of Polaroid and inventor of the instant camera, played in the development of the U-2 reconnaissance aircraft, which Defense still uses today.

Land, chairman of the technology capabilities panel of the Office of Defense Mobilization, told CIA director Allen Dulles in a Nov. 5, 1954, memo that aerial photography could be the "most powerful single tool" for acquiring information about the Soviet Union.

Aerial reconnaissance at the time was chancy, because the Air Force did not have planes that could evade Soviet radar, interceptors or missiles. But, Land told Dulles, Lockheed had plans for a "superglider" that could fly above 70,000 feet, and recommended the CIA back development of the aircraft, which later became the U-2.

Land estimated the CIA could fund U-2 development and buy six aircraft for a total of $22 million.

It's amazing what the CIA could buy in 1954 for a sum considered a budget rounding error in 2008.

CIA 'Turned On' Long Before Leary

Timothy Leary, the Harvard professor credited, or reviled, for turning America on in the 1960s to the psychedelic drug LSD, was way behind the CIA in its use of the drug, according to the State documents.

Dulles wrote in a Dec. 3, 1953, memo to Defense Secretary Charles Wilson that the agency had been actively engaged in research for four years on psycho-chemicals, which affect the human mind, including LSD.

The CIA discovered that LSD "produces remarkable mental effects when taken in small doses," Dulles wrote in his memo, which recommended field trials of the drug.

How's this for a conspiracy theory: Maybe the CIA hired Leary to conduct the field trials, and he was a tie-dyed secret agent all along.