Secrets are valuable, scientific secrets especially so. But science hasn’t always been considered an appropriate topic for intelligence agencies. Scientific intelligence had to be defined as a concept and operationalized into practice.
In the United States, one of the key moments in creating scientific intelligence came when Wallace Brode, an Ohio State chemist officially working for the National Bureau of Standards, sent a memo to Director of Central Intelligence Roscoe Hillenkoetter. Based on its location in the collection of his papers available at the Library of Congress, Brode appears to have drafted this document in August 1947, in the run-up to accepting a position as the diretor of the CIA’s first Scientific Branch. (Officially, Brode retained his position at the Bureau of Standards; in actuality, he worked at the CIA.)
Like so many artifacts from Cold War-era institutions, the memo renders a grandiose vision into bureaucratese. The eight-page document assigns responsibility for collecting and analyzing scientific information across the CIA’s various divisions and proposes staffing arrangements within the new Scientific Division. Broded wielded the passive voice to point out the obvious: “There is need for formulation of a definite plan of scientific intelligence and an integration and coordination of the component parts which should provide scientific intelligence.”
My favorite part of this memo comes under the heading of “Method of Scientific Intelligence.” Subhead A, “Scientific Order of Battle,” recommends list-making as the primary tool of scientific intelligence. Specifically, he wanted lists of “the character, location, and quality of scientific manpower, institutes, and organizations,” with appraisals of “all foreign scientific publications, news releases on scientists, membership lists, names and appointments,” to be obtained through overt and covert methods. Elsewhere in the document, he indicated that either the Scientific Division or other divisions of the CIA should create registers of scientists’ names and institutions, a reference library of scientific publications, abstracts and translations of foreign scientific documents, and, in some cases, captured physical objects.
At Brode’s recommendation, the National Security Council issued an Intelligence Directive (NSCID 8) for the CIA to create a registry of biographical data on foreign scientists and technical personnel. Beyond that, though, Brode’s dreams for what I’ve elsewhere described as a “global panoptican of science” fizzled for a variety of reasons ranging from anti-Communist paranoia to the realities of 1940s-era data processing power. Brode left the CIA after about a year, moving right back into the job at the Bureau of Standards he had supposedly held all along.
Brode’s vision was, as they say, overly ambitious. And yet, he wasn’t wrong in thinking that science and technology had taken on new national security implications in the years immediately following World War II, and that existing methods and theories of intelligence collection, analysis, and dissemination would have to change if the United States were going to keep up. It took some time for the United States to get the hang of what constituted scientific intelligence and who should collect it and how. Note the ambiguity of “who” as a pronoun, in this case obscuring debates about types of expertise (scientists? foreign policy experts? military analysts?), institutional actors (the CIA? State? the AEC? specific military agencies? private entities like the NAS?), and levels of access and consent (questions of rank, security clearance, wittingness, etc.)
I have a lot more to say about this in Freedom’s Laboratory, but for now, suffice it to say that these questions preoccupied scientific administrators, military officials, and foreign policy experts for much of the 1950s. At least until 1957, they relied heavily on the scientific values of openness and collaboration to facilitate what we now might call “open-source” intelligence collection via members of the broader scientific community. Eventually, though, the defense and intelligence agencies figured out how to do this on their own. Or so they thought, until the Cold War ended and everything changed and diplomats began speculating about sonic weapons and members of Congress started talking about aliens.
Which brings us back to last week, when the New York Times ran a story with the very 1949-title, “Spy Agencies Turn to Scientists as They Wrestle with Mysteries.” It’s a good nuts-and-bolts piece on contemporary thinking on scientific intelligence, with some interesting asides on methods and desiderata. The article’s reference to a 500-member, “volunteer” “science and technology expert group” particularly caught my eye—who are these people? Are they truly volunteers? Are “volunteers” to be trusted? Is this a reconstituted and expanded JASONs, or something else?
What I’d give to read the 2021 version of Wallace Brode’s memo.