Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Military history/Intelligence task force/Archive 1

Intelligence task force item

I'll happily move this discussion to a task force specific page, but I wanted to get broad advice. Om one of the CIA articles I have drafted, the first response was not discussion, but a call for deletion (see CIA Activities by Transnational Topic: Arms Control, WMD, and Proliferation)

Intelligence seems to be a very hot button for some Wikipedians. Some of you will remember that within a very few minutes of putting up the first draft of the article on human source recruiting, an admin speedily deleted it with no discussion. After a AfD discussion, it was put back.

As many of you know, the CIA article had gotten extremely long, and roughly half its content was devoted to alleged (and real) covert action, but rarely with sourcing. A great number of posts about "Operation Gladio" and police training, it developed, came (unsourced) from two books alone.

Now, my approach may be wrong, but I'd rather have too much sourced and coherent prose (the words of the person who wants it deleted), and cut back based on discussion, than immediately call for deletion. As the saying goes, once is random, twice is coincidence, and three times is enemy action, a saying rather appropriate for this Project. :-) We are now at the coincidence level of two delete-rather-than-discuss events.

How should this apparently controversial area be approached, or is it simply something that cannot be presented in NPOV, and multiple edits, due to emotion about it?

Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 21:43, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

Moved from Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Military history by Kirill 22:30, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

To a certain extent, this is an issue of semantics: the nature of the article is not apparent from its title. Simply renaming it to something like History of the CIA and arms control and proliferation (cf. History of the CIA and terrorism, History of the CIA in the Americas, etc.) would make the article's relationship to other articles clearer, without the need for an alarm-raising self-referential introductory section. The appearance of a clear overall hierarchy:

• CIA
  • History of the CIA
    • History of the CIA and ...

would help the articles survive as true branched sub-articles rather than simply collections of related incidents. Kirill 22:30, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

That makes very good sense, especially considering that some of the articles will probably split in the future. The introductory section would still be needed in the top-level CIA article, I would think.

Do you know the appropriate renaming template offhand?

I'm hoping all of this is a matter of naming, and not that this sets off the "CIA is the Dark Force" crowd, who doesn't understand that Dick Cheney has taken over Prince of the Darkness from Bill Gates. A couple of the original critics, who at least discussed the matter on the CIA talk page, have helped me understand what has been there. Apparently, people went through Tim Weiner's book and put "CIA trained police and military" under every country where that was suggested--the fellow who did this said he had gotten complaints about "repetitive sourcing" so took off sourcing. If anything, I go in the other direction of sourcing too much.

The other all-from-one-book is "Operation Gladio", which is from Ganser's book. That has some fairly obvious problems, like Switzerland subordinating itself to NATO, or SAS being trained by the CIA.

Believe me, while the CIA does do some things well, there are other things that I've seen that made me say "I'm glad this is classified. Someone would die laughing if they heard about it.Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 22:39, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

The formal process for renamings is at WP:RM. Normally, you could just move the pages yourself; but doing so while one of them is nominated for deletion might be viewed as a bit questionable, so you may be better off going through the paperwork.

It would probably also be a good idea to create a navigational template linking all the articles; I can take a first stab at it, but you'd need to update the links once the articles had been moved. Kirill 22:45, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

Even before the navigational template, it would be good to thing of an unambiguous naming hierarchy. Right now, the CIA structure has two branches under the main article, geographic and transnational/functional. This isn't completely clean, as there were, for example, programs or policies that affected an area, such as the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, etc. I used the general model that if the function (e.g., nonproliferation) drove the contents, it didn't belong in a geographic sequence. That model, incidentally, comes from the way the CIA and US Intelligence Community have reorganized in recent years: some things, like counterproliferation and counterterror, as well as epidemic disease, are inherently multinational. IIRC, they now have 3 geographic and 8 functional areas in the Directorate of Intelligence, with some functional areas moving out of the CIA to the DNI.

To some extent, I've done some crosslinking, nothing that would be hard to change, mostly from the "CIA History" area into the "Intelligence cycle" hierarchy. That does have some navigational templates, although I didn't create them. My idea would be that the CIA (or, for that matter, any major intelligence service) would deal more with the "what", and the intelligence hierarchy would deal with the framework of "how". Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 22:57, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

That's part of it, yes. The current article seems to deal more with context—covering the various details of actual arms control, in other words—than with the direct activity of the CIA itself; hence the complaints that it reads more like an essay than it ought to. There is no reason, I think, to rehash the histories of each country's weapons program; a more focused presentation of the role of the CIA in producing these estimates would be more appropriate than an exhaustive presentation of the estimates themselves. Kirill 23:08, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

In addition, there are a number of extended quotes on the page that aren't obviously marked as such (e.g. via blockquote formatting); this gives the impression that the article itself is a collection of unrelated snippets. Kirill 23:11, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

Out of scope?

Just wondering if disinformation and maskirovka would fall under intel? Trekphiler (talk) 01:34, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

It's already in a few places. From the standpoint of how analysts have to be aware of it, Cognitive traps for intelligence analysis#The Other Side May Be Trying to Confuse You, and Intelligence cycle security#Countermeasures to Specific Collection Disciplines--although being aware of it, as opposed to doing it, runs through those articles. There are aspects of technical deception and counter-deception in SIGINT#Counter-ELINT, SIGINT#Defensive SIGINT, the introduction to the main MASINT article and things scattered through the more detailed MASINT, such as Electro-optical MASINT#Spectroscopic MASINT. Also, Clandestine HUMINT#Recruit Types with double and multiply turned agents, as well as false flag. See Counterintelligence#Offensive Counterintelligence Operations.

So, there's context already. The articles Military deception and London Controlling Section are under MILHIST but not intelligence, but they could use amplification.

Thoughts?Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 03:50, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

TECHINT

Once upon a (recent) time, I took a break from the CIA controversy and decided to fill out Farewell Dossier. That article, I think, is in fair shape, hopefully B-class; someone might want to take a look.

Then, since the Farewell Dossier dealt, depending on your point of view, with TI or S&TI, I thought it wise to update Technical Intelligence (TECHINT), so there was cross-reference to KGB Directorate T and Line X. Very quickly, I realized that Farewell was indeed national/strategic-level S&TI, so I started adding S&TI information I Before I really knew it, I was wandering from S&TI to economic intelligence, a line easy to cross. consider In all fairness, the article had bee nnice and comfortable, dealing with the basically tactical level of military technical intelligence.

Then, things took off.

Anyway, I'd like another set of eyes on TECHINT, and at least an opinion if it can be made to work, in its present form, as one article, or if it needs to split into two or three articles. If two, national level S&TI would go with economic intelligence, although things like trade negotiations and macroeconomics are things that are economic but not S&TI. There doesn't seem to be any great way to split up the topics, as all of these "output" areas -- TI, S&TI, economic intelligence -- all have collection, analysis, and, especially when deciding what to share with industry, dissemination issues.

I have avoided even thinking about FININT, which certainly affects economic intel and should link with it.

Any thoughts are welcome.Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 18:45, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

Moved from Category:Intelligence articles needing attention to structure by Kirill 18:48, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

Analytic tradecraft

I just expanded US intelligence community A-Space, which I haven't connected to the intelligence hierarchy although it's logically analytic tradecraft. Should I?

Perhaps this should be done by creating (if it doesn't exist) a category for intelligence analysis, which I don't know how to do; perhaps both. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 16:25, 19 January 2008 (UTC)

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Soviet-run peace movements in Western Europe and the United States

Would this article fall within the scope of this taskforce? --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 18:06, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

Hearing no objections, I am assuming it is, and I'll be tagging it so. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 16:01, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

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Category:People by intelligence agency is subcategory of Category:Spies. Is it correct? I don't thin that all people employed in an intel agency are necessarily spies...? Further, we could use a category for undercover agents and such, as far as I can tell - by looking at Category:Stasi, Category:People of the Central Intelligence Agency and Category:People of the KGB, we don't have such a category at all. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 18:51, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

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Wikipedia:WikiProject Espionage

Seems to have been created few months back, but has only one member. Perhaps some form of merger would be advisable? --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 09:52, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

Scope

Would articles like Web bug or Email tracking or even Hacking fall within the scope of this project? --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 09:53, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

It's probably got some scope, although I can see an issue with identifying credible and reliable sources. The existence of Defensive Information Assurance capabilities is acknowledged, but there is no official acknowledgement of any Offensive Information Assurance capability that I'm aware of.

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