A SENIOR SCHOOL FOR THE AGENCY

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP80-00308A000100010021-4
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: S
• Document Page Count: 5
• Document Creation Date: December 9, 2016
• Document Release Date: July 10, 2000
• Sequence Number: 21
• Publication Date: October 8, 1970
• Content Type: MF

0 I~ ti l Dirt-556
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1,73
I appreciate seeing your draft of comments on my proposal for
senior training. I'm sorry to have cause,i a pre-mature birth of your
proposal but as you noted, our purposes are somewhat different. I
was following a thread. which has-been winding through the Executive
Director-Comptroller/Deputies meetings for over a year. Hence, my
decision to address my proposal to Colonel White for consideration as
an extension of the inter-Directorate exchange effort rather than as
a training device per se.
Hugh:
MEMORANDUM FOR: Director of Training
SUBJECT : A Senior School. for the Agency
Assuming that the usual time and work pressures would. make two
courses infeasible--an argument .1 don't accept necessarily--some
combination of your ideas and. mine would. be desirable. What I want
to accomplish could. not be done in the presence of non-Agency people.
A possible solution would be a course structure which provided for a
(two-week?) piece at the end solely for Agency officers. My original
suggestion was four weeks but tw would. have been in large what you
are proposing on the community level.
I am left with one real concern. Though you are not specific,
your language suggests you contemplate a course of several weeks--
perhaps months--duration. It follows that only a few from each agency
would. be enrolled. (more could. not be spared.) and. presumably only one
or at most two cycles a year. This would not provide for the numbers
I had. in mind.. It might, though, cover as many as the Director and. his
senior officers think necessary. This numbers problem is something we
in OP are studying now--how many and. when for orderly succession?
Let none of this suggest I don't endorse the idea of a senior
seminar in intelligence. The combination of increasing demands and
continuing constraints makes critical the improvement of inter-Agency
understanding and, hopefully, more efficient use of community assets.
25X1A
Robert S. Wattles
Director of Personnel
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A Proposal for the Office of Training
A. The need
1. For many years OTR has been a. good tradecraft college.
2. Now it is time to broaden an(,;: deepen its function:
Without neglecting the how of intelligence, start concentrating
on the what and the-Y;
3. Reason: American interests in the outside world are undergoing
rapid and profound change. This change is likely to accelerate
over the next ten years.
That means that American foreign ,policy is also in for profound
change.
And that means that Intelligence will also change, to a greater
degree than we are yet prepared to cope with.
We should now add to OTR some of the functions of a graduate school -
With some of the overtones of the Institute for Advanced Study
at Princeton.
And some of the product of those -think-tanks like Stanford Research
.Institute and the Institute fo:' Defense Analyses - though with
greater relevance and vastly less expense than characterize
such outside outfits.
a. A place to study the functions of intelligence.
1) Especially the connections bei:ween collection and production,
between human and t-echnical resources, between minimum
essential requirements and the nice-to-know.
2) Methods of evaluation for accuracy, relevance to policy needs,
validation of past judgments and approaches. (A serious
analytical history of military estimates on the Soviet
Union would be salutary. So would a validation study of
the JIIRG Report, some three years after its adoption
in 1966.)
3) Methods of analysis e.g., the tyranny of dubious statistics
over intelligence udgments and the validity of feeding
these judgments into Pentagon computers for planning
purposes. (One crying need is for a hard look at the
institutionalized delusions of the National Intelligence
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Projections for Planning. Everyone knows they are
phony, but when all the ;aces have been ground into
impressive tabulations they are treated like con-
firmations strong as Holy Write)
b. A place to assign long-range substantive problems. E.g. -
1) World-wide problems which will have important long-range
effects on both US interests and the role of US Intel-
ligence in helping understand those effects - especially
the problems of population and food, world trade, monetary
systems.
2) Some typical examples from Latin America:
a) The political and social role of the military establish-
ments.
b) The political and social. role of the Catholic Church.
c) The political and social role of the oligarchies.
d) The long-range economic outlook.
e) The effect of rising anti-US nationalism.
3) Similar subjects from other parts of the world, especially
the backward parts. For example, why did every Indonesian
expert in the US Covernment assume in September 1965 the total
absence of any internal force capable of preventing a Com-
munist takeover of Indonesia?
c. A place to keep track of research projects of general interest,
both to attract a maximum of useful contributions and to avoid
duplication. Perhaps the academic custom of occasionally 25X1A
issuing a list of works in progress would be useful. 25X1A
d. A place to support the researches of NIPE into communit problems -
e.g., the Report on the Middle East and the Report
on Early 1 arn ing.
e. A place to develop connections with the scholarly world, with
the aim of winning eventual quasi-public awareness of the
conscientiousness and accuracy of intelligence research.
(And incidentally of educating the public to get over the
notion that intelligence equals espionage and covert action
and no more.)
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B. The method
1. Upgrade OTR into an Institute of Intelligence,-on a recognizable par
with the Foreign Service Tn`stitute.
2. Create a Division of Studies.
a. Not permanently staffed by all the experts necessary to do the
types of long-range research suggested above, but so organized
as tot
1) Stimulate, facilitate, and keep track of such research as it
may be carried out all over the outfit.
2) Provide a temporary haven where experienced senior officers.
can profitably spend a few weeks or months (e.g. between
assignments) studying some specific problem, uninterrupted
by current manageri.al responsibilities, meetings, and
telephones. Not a disposal device or a ti1PA leaf-raking
project,,it could be useful only if it were seen as a serious
opportunity by the directorates. Subjects for study might
emerge from discussion of some problem at the DCI's morning
meeting, or be proposed by others. For example, a senior
African expert might study all our Estimates on Black
Africa and contribute to answering the question-whether we'
are estimating on the right subjects with the,right emphasis.
3) Bring experts on a given problem together from time to time
in order a) to assure that the Agency's great assets in
these fields are most usefully marshaled, and b). ta;hplp
break down the lingering tribalism that still keeps the
Agency's tribes unnecessarily isolated from one another.
(At present the two principal devices serving this purpose
are the Mid-Career Course in OTR and the rather brief in-
house discussions of early drafts of Estimates. More cross-
fertilization is needed.)
,Specifically, conduct "graduate seminars" of people carefully
selected from all over the Agency, to meet for two or three 25X1A
days at on a specific program of
related topics a having to o with, say, the US interest
in Cuba, or the Soviet interest in the subcontinent of Asia,
or the long-range utility of Comint or computers.
Set a high standard fear scholarly discipline in depth and
accuracy of research, and in strength and clarity of
presentation.
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6) Facilitate the publication of worthy products of this research.
For some time to come this would mean publication within
the intelligence conu:iunity, but We ought also to prepare
for the day when it will be politically possible to allow 25X1A
Agency scholars to publish outside the community such worthy
works as recent long study of-anti-US nationalism
in Latin America. Until that day comes we ought to give such
studies far more accurate editing and more respectable physical
production than they sometimes receive nowadays. Such publi-
cation would be a reward for work well done; it could be made
into an attractive incentive for doing work of real and fairly
lasting value, and gradually lessen our present practice of
;publishing some ephemera for morale purposes.
7) Specifically, make better use of Studies in Intelligence for
:identifying appropriate subject s an`'i?puUfis 1ng su is as
far as possible.
8) Look for ways of involving some of the Career Trainees in such
a program, perhaps as temporary research assistants to old
hands involved in research projects. Objectives:
a) A kind of on-the-job training.
b) A way of interesting the Career Trainees in the long-range
problems of intelligence.
c) Identifying any special aptitudes they have, and giving
them an earlier sense of participation in the intelligence
process than they can get from classroom training alone.
3. In short, provide a vehicle to the DCI ,and the directorates for
carrying out those kinds of research into the current and pros-
pective problems of functi.ons,methods, and substance which they
themselves identify as needing attention. Nothing proposed here
would be intended to diminish either the jurisdiction or the
responsibilities of management as presently constituted. The
proposal looks rather toward the development of a center for
scholarship which each senior manager could use as he saw fit and
to the degree he was willing to support its serious objectives.
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