CONCERNING PROFESSIONAL (UNCLASSIFIED) PUBLICATION BY CIA EMPLOYEES AND THEIR IDENTITY AS AUTHORS.

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP68B00432R000500010037-0
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: S
• Document Page Count: 4
• Document Creation Date: December 9, 2016
• Document Release Date: September 13, 2000
• Sequence Number: 37
• Publication Date: March 25, 1966
• Content Type: MEMO

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SUBJECT: Concerning professional (unclassified)
publication by CIA employees and their
identity as authors.
1. The following discussion assumes:
a) that there is and will continue to be a
sizeable class of professional employees who
are overt (i.e. have no "cover" except CIA)
and for whom no covert assignment is planned
or desired, and
b) that this class includes the majority of
those in the Agency who are engaged in apply-
ing disciplines which are common to government
intelligence and to the academic world.
2. In principle there is a distinction between the
employee as a specialist in his own right and the
employee as an officer who applies his specialty in
the service of the Agency and the government. The
distinction is not that between what the employee
knows as a specialist and what he knows as an
officer of CIA, but rather between his knowledge
considered as a potential and the use he makes of
his knowledge considered as an actual application.
3. A consultant, for example, is a specialist
in his own right. He accepts restrictions on that
use of his knowledge which he makes in response to
Agency request. To increase his knowledge for the
Agency's purpose the consultant is given classified
information and he is expected to observe security
regulations governing the use of it for any other
purpose. Obviously he can and does use the informa-
tion so obtained as background and guidance for
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other purposes. He cannot help it. There is no
acceptable way of erasing from a healthy mind what
it has learned, except by the mind's own forgetfulness.
If the classified information gained by the consultant
is important - and unique - his mind will be all the
more tenacious in retaining it for future use, if only
in consultation with himself. And if he cannot
remember where and how he learned it, he cannot be
called trustworthy, even though of good character and
intention. There are normal`mental procedures for
incorporating classified information: generalization,
adjustment and revision, coupled at times with false
but plausible attribution. In other words the
consultant has the mind's own natural devices which
are similar to the practices of the Clandestine
Service - or to that practice so distastefully and
mistakenly called "sanitization".
4 The difference between a specialist in CIA's
employ and a consultant is one of degree of use
but not of kind qua specialist. Consultants can
have an advantage over their fellow specialists in
CIA. The latter have full-time jobs applying their
knowledge to government needs, whereas a "consultant"
can in fact work full-time under contract for the
government and at the same time publish practically
all of his work. Frequently these consultants are
free lance entrepreneurs in the vast new business
of research-catering for which the government provides
essential ingredients, recipes and high pay. In
addition, it is taken for granted that consultants
have the right to publish their manuscripts once
certified against the revelation of classified
information. Policy is not at issue as a rule because
the sponsor disavows responsibility for or commit-
ment to the findings and conclusions of the
published work. Some forms of this activity
would give pause, as, for example, a full-time
consulting specialist in international relations
who ran a daily newspaper column on current events.
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5. The distinction between the Agency employee
as a specialist in his own right and as an official
of CIA means that there are applications of his
knowledge in which he can speak or write as represent-
ing himself and not the Agency. That he ;not only
can, 15t may, has been demonstrated by our practice
."7 the past. In all cases, however, he has met
two basic conditions of security and policy, one
involving the security of classified information and
the other the protection of the Agency.
a) Security of information tends to restrict
public expression to description and analysis
which can be documented from unclassified or
declassified information. (Important materials
have been declassified for scholars, e.g., the
Tibetan and Fukien documents).
b) Policy (protection of the Agency) normally
restricts the subject and its treatment to
matters which are not controversial issues of
U.S. policy. As in their private-public lives
employees must not bring discredit to the
Agency by unfavorable notice to themselves.
Discredit could come from work of poor quality
and judgment or from the accusation against the
Agency of waging political war:EF re:- over issues
of U.S. policy. In either case, at present,
the Agency is protected only if the identity of
the employee with CIA can be successfully con-
cealed.
6. Of the two conditions, security of information
and security of the Agency's reputation, it is the
second which is the more difficult to judge in
practice. The work should meet a standard of quality
at least as high as that in the open world of scholars
and writers and it should constitute a contribution
to its subject without making the author an advocate
or apologist in public debate. But these criteria
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are too general to be helpful. The academic sponsor
or publisher takes care of the question of quality
by his own determination of whether the manuscript
submitted meets his standards for publication. The
question for the Agency remains that of avoiding
open pit falls of controversy over U.S. policy,
The experienced analyst who writes for publication
knows how to protect himself - and the Agency - from
injury.
7, The Agency's attitude towarsd professional
publications by its employees does not differ in one
essential respect from that of any institution whose
employees perform for learned and public audiences.
It is one of pride in quality - integrity, objectivity,
and intelligence in the common or broader sense -
whether the authors are authorized to identify them-
selves as CIA employees or not. It can be assumed,
however, that the authors are already known as CIA
employees to at least a few and can be identified
for a larger public by any newspaper reporter who
takes the trouble to try to find out.
S. In conclusion, the Agency's first concern
is of course with the quality of its analysts, whether
they publish, or not. If they do publish, however,
and command the respect of learned and sophisticated
members of the professional audience (respect is necessary
not agreement), then the Agency's concern about the
identification of the author as an employee of CIA
becomes secondary. The risk to its own reputation is an
acceptable one, because it stands to gain, not lose,
when a reputable scholar is known to be in its employ.
The risk to reputation, such as it may be, is run by
the employee as a specialist in his own right and by
his publisher or academic sponsor, who for reasons of
their own policies may not want public identification
with CIA. A consultant may have the same problem of
judgment. 25X1A
Chief, DDI/Research Staff
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