The intelligence community for any nation tends to keep even the most mundane details of their operation secret, presumably as a measure of security for all secrets. The idea is to teach intelligence employees to discuss nothing about their work and for the intelligence agencies to discuss nothing about their organization or operations. In this way, no accidental leaks of information can take place. Another reason, of course, is that most nations protect much of the actual tradecraft as legally secret information and prosecute heavily anyone who speaks out. The result is that we have only outdated information on most intelligence operations.
However, after a reasonable amount of time, one would expect to see some indications of the intelligence community operates. And sometimes the silence is broken by a brave soul or by a diligent researcher who stumbles across accidentally released budget or operational information released to oversight agencies. The result is outdated, but only barely so, information.
The MILNET special reports section will endeavor to get a closer look
at intelligence operations. Recently, the CIA histrorian has released
documents that address the early years of U.S. Intelligence up to the mid
1980s. We include a number of such reports in our list of mirrored
material below. Also, the annual budgeting and quadrennial planning
processes sometimes yield up interesting tidbits that tantalize us with
visions of where the intelligence services are going in the future.
The Intelligence Community
Infrastructure
Operations