The Wizards of Langley: Inside the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology

Extract

This book celebrates the triumphs of the Directorate of Science and Technology of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) over some forty years of the Cold War. While not entirely uncritical, Jeffrey T. Richelson concludes that the directorate's “foresight and successes far outdistance its follies and failures.”

As an institutional history of a key branch of the CIA, this account focuses on prominent programs and individuals whose mission was to harness science and technology in pursuit of secret intelligence. Most of the effort focused on high-technology spying on the Soviet Union's nuclear weapons program.

Richelson offers a great deal of original material based on research in CIA documents, memoirs, and interviews. There are two appendices and three pages of acronyms. The chronological narrative assesses the directorate's programs and initiatives as well as bureaucratic reshuffling, insider wrangling, interservice rivalry, and episodic misdeeds and scandals.

Most of the history, however, revolves around U.S. land- and air-based intercept operations devised within the Directorate of Science and Technology. Richelson credits the deputy director, Albert “Bud” Wheelon, with playing the key role in establishing the directorate at the focal point of high-tech spying in the mid-1960s. The National Security Agency eventually assumed primacy in that role, but Richelson makes clear the early CIA dominance.