KEEPING TRACK OF DATA MAY BECOME BIG INDUSTRY

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP72-00450R000100260031-0
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 4
• Document Creation Date: November 11, 2016
• Document Release Date: June 4, 1999
• Sequence Number: 31
• Content Type: NSPR

Approved For Release 1999/10/13 : CIA-RDP72-0045OR0001 00260031 -0
T
' T
4LV
rask of Data May Become
ryes
to
the
but
.ert
-Olt, scientistsare at work. in the
in#t,r world . today churning out
new. facts at. a rate that dou-
knowledge every eight years.
sr
tte.
nit-
R,
any
rchard L. Lyons A special House subcom- Rep. Roman C. Pucinski
sorter r
,
.
51ci OF THE MOST trou
blesome problems facing
scientists today is that they
know so much they can't
as - u5;;r1JA yv+'?-.-- (D-Ill.), chairman of the
tiering "the problem heard
the following examples of
we and duplication caused-.
by uncoordinated knowledge:
? An American company
keep track of it. spent over $250,000 and five
years of research in a suc-
A_n estimated half mil;jop, cessful attempt to solve an
Apout one million research
papers are published each
year in. 100,000 technical
journals in many languages.
No central brain exists
to, . k e e p track of all this
aaav W acUs C. n suienilsr ma
-devote months of creative
electronic switching problem
important to military com-
munications, only. to discover
the solution had been pub-
lished six months before it
began work.
? A cloud seeding experi.
ment was made at a cost of
$3 million. The same work
had been done earlier for
$25E,1.1A
.
? One series of United
States ballistic missile tests
w dl d
as
f
The work would not start
from scratch. The U. S.
House study group, said all Patent Office has over 7 mil-
this "results in wasteful dup- lion patents in its files.
a aye
or several
le talent and large amounts of,
months while researchers
ke money seeking an answer at- worked out a special valve,
=red found. Some industries- only to discover the infor-
e follow a rule that if a re mation was available before
,d? search project costs less the research began.
an c
heaper to work our VIP
pany paid over $8 million for
problem in the lab than. to the invention of o
f i
ne o
ts
Plowtorough the literature products before it realized
to find whether it already has someone already had devel-
to be up to 50 per cent of
our current $15 billion effort
in research and develop-
ment." Two-thirds of these
research costs are paid with
Federal funds.
Many scientific groups cata-
logue information w i t h i n
their own fields. Some Eu?
ropean countries, notably
the Soviet Union, have set
up data retrieval. centers.
The job for an all-knowing
Pueinski has introduced a mechanical brain would be
bill to establish a "national to assemble all this and what-
research data processing and ever else is lying around
information retrieval center." o0
The idea is to assemble and Pucinski said he is con.
file on perforated tape for vinced that the need for an
handy reference an index to orderly cataloguing of in.
all the world's scientific in. formation will grow so rapid.
formation. Experts Pucinski ly and become so vital that
borrowed from executive de- within ten years "data proc.
partments estimate it would essing and information re-
cost $100 million to set up trieval will be one of the
the center and $30 million biggest industries in Ameri.
or so a year to keep the data ca 3L.the world."
current. f'T'rhe Congressman said he
If the work of all the first got interested in the
world's scientists could be subject as a possible new in-
assembled, translated, cata- dustry for the Midwest which
logued and kept current, a has lost out on most of the
reseacher could push a but- space work. He hopes the
ton and either find the an- center could be located in the
swer or determine that he Chicago area where he comes
has a job to do, from,
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every time.
It could be true, for the
CIA has .information about
Russia that would shock Mos-
cow. Each month the CIA
uys or otherwise obtains 200,-
000 pieces of literature from
Russia, the European Com'mu-
nist bloc, and Red China: It
has a translating 'computer
that turns Russian into, Eng-
lfsli' J at' 1 he"'rate a of `30,000
words an hour. Nothing 'from
Russia is' too small to interest
the CIA-railroad timetables,
the pig poptilationin the Uk-
raine, what movie Is being
shown in Kiev.
The CIA operates in 'a hig .
ly unorthodox fashion. It lists
its number, in the telephone
book and everybody- knows
that its headquarters are at
Langley, Va. But the CIA has
plenty of secrets and keeps
them well.
Budget Kept Secret
There are perhaps a dozen
men in Washington who know
how much the CIA spends an-
nually, but : the` best. guesses
are between $400 million and
$1 billion. Nowhere in the Fed-
eras budget, will you find any
.money allotted to the CIA.
':`A Each year-the CIA director
appears befd`re small panels
Made up of : senior 'members
of the Senate and House Ap-
propriations Committees. ' He
tells them how much. money
h"e needs; but doesn't have to
explain h'ow, he is going to
spend It. After the Congress-
men O.K. the expenditure, the
money is broken up into small
items and, salted and hidden
tiroughout 'the . Federal budg-
et. An item. for 1000 monkey
wrenches' in the Air Force
budget could well be CIA
money.
'People. who work for the
CIA are divided into "overts"
And "illegals`.", The "overts"
work in the' o ?en, keep regu-
lar office h1ur and the only
restraint .the3 are ` under is
ifemain: a secret
CIA's Operations
'Central Intelligence Agency
{CIA) needed, some inform a-
tion on the manager of a fac-
tory in the Soviet. Union; He
;called. for the., files 'and, some
what to his surprise, found all
possible information about the
man, including the fact that
his mistress had dyed her hair
that they"are forbidden to` dis-
cuss the'.type of work they do
The "illegals fan out across
the world and operate-in the
full, knowledge that it they
are caught, they may forfeit
their lives.. One of the big
battlegrounds of espionage is
Berlin, and the West German
government estimates there
are 12,000 Soviet intelligence
agents there, Nobody has any
precise figures on the CIA
strength in. Berlin, but it, can
be assumed the situation is
well covered.
Becomes a New Man
The first thing that happens
to a man when he`, becomes. a
CIA "illegal" is that he loses
his id
entity,He gets a n
,ew
name, a new birthplace and a
new-.'family ?4f .he is going to
operate in Italy,. he not only
must learn to speak flawless
Italian, ,but in the,,pr,ecise. ac-
cent of the province where he
will ;be 'wdrking. ,
Then he is "paperedi" He Is
equipped' with every sort, of
document',''he could conceiva
bly need in his' new environ-
ment and he is taught how to
manufacture new ones if the
need arises.
The next thing is to arrange
a "drag," : a place where the
agent can leave information
and . be sure it will wind up in
Langley, Va.
The CIA's enemies see it as
a sort of anonymous branch
of the United States Govern.
ment that is .going around
meddling in the internal af-
fairs of both friendly and un-
friendly nations. It is accused
of, .helping make A .complete
botch of .the Bay of Pigs inva-
sion in Cuba and ,the events
leading up to the. pr sent cri=
sis. in South 'Viet-Nan. Some "
persons even.profess. to see a
threat to our own G:OVernn ent
from an organization main-
taining a sort of private army
and operating in secrecy:
Allen Dulles, former CIA
Directorl denied-.all-,thisin a
recent television interview.
He said the CIA 'never had
jumped into a situation with-
out getting the consent 'of the
President... He also :defended
the necessity for secrecy, by
pointing out that :Russia 'andJ
Red:China were pushing their
espionage battles strongly and
that you had to 'fight fire with
fire.
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' Q EXIerts to Clear
Fite, Store Records
.ore o awes urn,
says.
When it enters a company thaI has not had
its files cleaned for some. time, Leahy often
finds it can throw away about half the records
'without serious danger of losing something im-
portant. Such a Housecleaning, coupled with
new retention schedules and other changes, cut
American Cyanamid Co.'s annual record -keep-
ing e sts by some $85,000 a few years ago.
Rental of space occupied by each office file
cabinet, plus amortization of the cabinet's ini-
tial cost, was costing Cyanamid $8.72 a year.
Files in storage were costing $2.76 annually
per cabinet to keep. Leahy tossed out 54?%a of
the storage records and destroyed or trans-
ferred to' storage '16% of the office records.
Studies show that it costs about $140 a year l
to maintain a four-drawer file cabinet, includ- 11
ing file clerk salaries as well as space costs
and cabinet amortization.. One management
consultant has estimated that of each 100
pieces of paper filed in the average well-run of-
fipe only 20 will ever be called back for refer-
ence.,
; eahy is specializing increasingly in help-
ing companies retain records of the best
thoughts of employes who are paid throughout
their-careers mainly to think. Often the memos,
notes and other personal papers of scientists,
lawyers and other professionals are lost to the
cptany when the`man retires or leaves, Mr.
xneron' sayy`s. Leahy specialists currently are
*orking with the research arm of a major oil l
company to try to draw important findings
out of personal records and incorporate them
into a central system which any researcher,
tacklipg a problem, can draw upon. The same
approach is being tried with several large law
Co itinuud_From_,'age One
ret fined at least four years after the settle-
nie t. Heavily regulated companies tend to
have fat files. The average major airline will
likely have 10,000 cubic feet of files, enough to
fill about 1,700 four-drawer file cabinets, com-
pared with around 2,000 cubic feet for a large
non-regulated company, Leahy's Mr. Cameron
'This information is often valuable even be-
fore a man leaves, since employes in some
firms are known to labor hard on problems
that Xe solved in Ijn6ther employe's files, Mr.
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iinerican Cyanamid t uts Costs
ew 9 ysenr1; federal
mules Add -to Paperwork Bulk
r` tC6ff Reporter O/THE `GALL STREET JOURNAL
NFL" RK A few years ago investigations
by 'ec oral ? agencies forced 'an American
World airways to save all its records instead
of periodically destroying them. Tn 'f'our years
the contents of Rail Am's files doubled and if
all the papers it was savingrsd been piled in
a single stack they might have scraped the'
wings of a jet flying at 25,00b feet.
Witlz_.Lbe- investigations ended, the airline
ls4w has climbed out of its paper fogbank. But
the speed and immensity of its file build-up il-
lustrates why more and more companies are
relying heavily on the file-clearing expertise of
specialists called records managers or archi
vials.
With business booming. American office:
M~re_genera tlnle t'rs vouchers order 'cTfi fa anclhunrecTs of otherl
at a r' f anou li to fill an
minste veers tie At I
t4e . ss lrr n e many, r com panies ,61movh'it
e tim
into new office buldins where space is more
expensive and where an excess of filing cabi-
nets spoils the aesthetic effect office designers
labored hard to achieve.
It's the records control' specialist s job to ;
-d away,
Nee to it that outdated papers are to 96
important ones kept on hand and paper's that
ale neither useless nor important kept in some
spot where they can be stored cheaply and got-
ten to if need be. At the same time, he strives
to see to it that all mforniation stored by the
company, even in personal files, can be quick-
ly obtained.
Postwar Development
Systematic records management`and dispos-
al is largely a post-World Wax II development.
Many companies have adopted it only in recent
years. The National Records Management
Council (NRMC), a non-prdfit research and ad-
visory agency based in New York City, esti-
mates that the number of specialists in the
field, Judging from membership in three pro-
fessional associations, has- more than doubled
in the past decades
$ekins_Van & Stor-
. Angeles, or corpora ions a
records storage service while many large firms
ha-me set ' their own well-organized archives.
Among them is the Pell System, which once
estimated all its file cabinets together would
make a row 50 mTesTong. 11R:MC says it has
helped 400 major companies set up records con-
trol facilities in recent years.
t world be. rare to tind any company do-
ing in excess 6f$1O million rn business annual-
ly that has not done something in this field,"
says Christopher A. Cameron, president of
Leahy Archives, Inc., and Leahy &z Co., a two-
pronged ,Manhattan-based enterprise which
atones recprds a ' el s com anies set up con-
froIs to keep files from ballooning.
Lea,hy's four records storage centers - in
New York City, Whitehouse, N.J., Elk Grove
Village, Ill., and Miami, Fla.-resemble high-
stack libraries except that the stacks contain
file boxes instead of books. Leahy has 150 cli-
ents, 60 more than five years ago, including
Pan Am, Florida Power & Light Co., Metro-!
Goldwyn-Mayer, Inc., and Singer Manufactur-
ing Co. Records on file in its Whitehouse cen-
ter range from bank trust account ledgers dat-
ing back to 1852 up to such current materials
as copies of payroll checks, which usually are
tossed out after two years.
Storage Schedules
-Leahy archivists, working with the client,
assig.i each type of record a "retention sched-
ule' which sets a limit on how long it will be
kept in storage. A very few, including most
trust ledgers, are kept permanently. Some,
such as extra copies of outgoing correspond-
ence, are: tossed out after six months, At Leahy
storage centers workers see to it that disposal
schedules are followed and also fish things out
of their stacks to answer client inquiries. A
large company, with 4,000 cubic feet of rec-
ords, normally would pay between $4,800 and
$5,500 a year for Leahy's storage and file man-
r. Cameron says.
age ment services, Mr.-
To decide how long companies should keep
each type of document, Leafiy consultants use
a number of guidelines. Some have been de- j
veloped through research in various industries'
on such subjects as the elements of risk, say,
in throwing out an employe's personnel records
10 years after he has left the company. But
the most important guides are supplied by
Federal and state governments in lists of rules
on retention of records.
The Interstate Commerce Commission alone
h a s s 258 separate retention regulations for rail-
roads, airlines and other carriers to follow. For
instance, records of a damage claim must be
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