Spycraft - Melton [7]
With the assistance of attorney Mark Zaid, we filed an appeal two weeks later. Such appeals, according to Agency regulations, would be adjudicated by the CIA’s Executive Director within thirty days of receipt.
We received no response to our appeal for eight months. Mid-level officers of the bureaucracy took no action in what appeared to be an attempt to deny publication by causing an indefinite delay. Faced with the unwillingness of the Agency to conduct a review consistent with its prepublication policies, we prepared to seek relief in federal court. In the opinion of our legal counsel, the Agency’s refusal to honor its own regulations, coupled with the capricious deletions of unclassified material from the manuscript, constituted a violation of First Amendment Constitutional rights.
Before taking the legal step, we made a personal request to the CIA’s Associate Deputy Director in December 2006 for intervention. As a result, on February 8, 2007, we were advised that another review had reduced objections to approximately fifty of the manuscript’s pages. Further, the board offered to reconsider the remaining deletions if the authors could demonstrate the material was not classified. Although we believe none of the disputed material is classified, as an accommodation, we revised certain passages and deleted some terminology that the CIA considered operationally sensitive. On July 18, 2007, we received approval to publish virtually all of the original manuscript.
The best that can be said of the experience is that Agency management eventually recognized a need to reform its prepublication policy and repair the broken review process. A historical irony is that William Hood encountered a similarly recalcitrant bureaucracy in 1981 when writing Mole, an account from the 1950s of the Soviet spy Pytor Popov.5 “Every word in this manuscript is classified,” said the initial CIA review. Twenty-five years later, Mole is now recognized as an espionage classic.6
The first five sections of Spycraft recount remarkable stories of ingenuity, skill, and courage throughout the first fifty years of OTS history. Section VI presents the doctrine of clandestine tradecraft from the perspective of espionage historian H. Keith Melton and includes a chapter devoted to the revolutionary changes digital technology has brought to spy work.
We wrestled from the beginning with the difficulties of when to present necessary explanations of the operational doctrine behind the technical topics that appear in the text. The impracticality of repeating explanations each time a technical topic appeared became quickly obvious. Lengthy footnotes also seemed more likely to distract rather than enlighten the reader.
Therefore, we consolidated into Section VI the five essential elements of clandestine operations used by every intelligence service regardless of nationality or culture. These chapters, drawn from Melton’s widely acclaimed lectures, writings, and exhibits, set out the basic principles underlying technical support to operations. These principles transcend any specific service and represent knowledge common and available to intelligence professionals and civilians alike from print, electronic, and film media. The individual chapters will aid the reader in understanding the basic philosophy and principles of assessment, cover, concealments, surveillance, and covert communications as practiced by professional services. Readers have the option of diving directly into the OTS story and the development of CIA’s clandestine spy gear in Chapters 1-19 or first immersing