Talk:Central Intelligence Agency

Latest comment: 8 days ago by Ed Moise in topic Legacy of Ashes

Former good articleCentral Intelligence Agency was one of the Social sciences and society good articles, but it has been removed from the list. There are suggestions below for improving the article to meet the good article criteria. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake.
On this day... Article milestones
DateProcessResult
April 15, 2007Good article nomineeListed
May 20, 2008Peer reviewReviewed
April 11, 2009Featured article candidateNot promoted
June 24, 2009Good article reassessmentDelisted
On this day... A fact from this article was featured on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "On this day..." column on September 18, 2012.
Current status: Delisted good article

Merge proposal

Merge Office of Congressional Affairs into Central Intelligence Agency. There's no justification for the agency's otherwise unremarkable office of Congressional affairs to have its own article. Longhornsg (talk) 00:40, 30 June 2024 (UTC)Reply

Merge, with caveat. In general there's not categorically a problem with having a separate page for this as we do a similar thing in other comparable cabinet agencies at a similar level, e.g. Bureau of Legislative Affairs for State; however in this specific case there's not really enough content to justify an independent page and given that classification issues are going to likely always weigh against that, I think it'd make more sense to merge.SWATJester Shoot Blues, Tell VileRat! 03:18, 30 June 2024 (UTC)Reply
Merge. Dozens of agencies in the US government have an "office of congressional affairs". It's doubtful that any of them are independently notable. This one is not. Cambial foliar❧ 22:39, 29 July 2024 (UTC)Reply
  checkY Merger complete. Klbrain (talk) 10:38, 21 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

Legacy of Ashes

Hello everyone, the article currently cites Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes extensively. This is a problem because the book is controversial. Some people love it (Kirkus Reviews calls it "the standard history of the CIA"), but it has been negatively reviewed by historians (example), who say it is biased. I propose replacing it with more neutral sources, but I wanted to seek consensus here first. Cerebellum (talk) 10:29, 1 March 2025 (UTC)Reply

I would avoid Weiner -- even the title of his book is a factual error, and his scholarship is widely criticized as being shoddy. Not to mention he was making some obvious COI edits on his own articles with the account Tiwein (talk · contribs), which is not a good sign. SWATJester Shoot Blues, Tell VileRat! 18:35, 1 March 2025 (UTC)Reply
How can Legacy of Ashes be a factual error? I don't see a purported statement of fact in those words. Ed Moise (talk) 15:18, 22 March 2025 (UTC)Reply
Legacy_of_Ashes_(book)#Title. SWATJester Shoot Blues, Tell VileRat! 03:25, 23 March 2025 (UTC)Reply
Your explanation does not explain. What in that title constitutes a factual error? Ed Moise (talk) 05:52, 24 March 2025 (UTC)Reply
I think it's pretty well explained in the above link. Weiner incorrectly attributes the phrase "legacy of ashes" to Eisenhower's assessment of the CIA's performance under his administration...."as more than one reviewer of Weiner's book has shown, Eisenhower was not talking about the CIA; he was addressing another subject altogether—the fact that each branch of the US military had its own intelligence agency, and the failure during his administration to centralize that ongoing, wasteful, inefficient military intelligence setup. SWATJester Shoot Blues, Tell VileRat! 07:06, 24 March 2025 (UTC)Reply
Thank you. That would have justified a statement that the title came from a factual error, or was based on a factual error. Not that it is a factual error. The title did not say, or even hint, anything about the origin of the phrase. Thus my original confusion. Ed Moise (talk) 13:10, 24 March 2025 (UTC)Reply

Jeffreys-Jones as a source

On this article, there's some citations referencing Rhodi Jeffreys-Jones' A Question of Standing. Just wanted to make readers aware that there's a fairly recent (2023) book review from the Studies in Intelligence journal which, while published by the CIA, is a properly peer-reviewed academic journal that hits all the required points of a reliable source. It stresses that Jeffreys-Jones is a serious writer offering an honest and open-minded appraisal of the Agency, and in general praises many areas of his research; but does go on to point out that the work is prone to an unfortunate tendency to choose sensational, unsupported assertions that distract the reader and call into question his analytic rigor, pure, unsubstantiated supposition, pseudo-psychology and generalization, and similar embellishments; and that In a pattern that is all-too-frequent in A Question of Standing, the author spends pages making an argument about the relative standing of the CIA at a certain time, only to undermine his point shortly thereafter. It further notes that... To be fair, Jeffreys-Jones—like all intelligence historians—has a great disadvantage when writing about the recent past because they are forced to rely so heavily on journalistic accounts and interviews with former intelligence professionals, often leading them to draw conclusions based on incomplete information. Some errors in A Question of Standing, however, are hard to excuse. For example, the author confuses the 1976 Entebbe raid by Israeli commandos with the events surrounding the hijacking of TWA 847 in 1985 and implies—mistakenly—that forces from the US Joint Special Operations Command participated, a blunder so eminently discoverable that it leads this reviewer to judge that the book’s editors and fact-checkers were also falling down on the job. In general, the book review did not levy a specific criticism at any specific claims that we're relying on from Jeffreys-Jones that I saw in a quick skim, though I could have missed something; however it does strongly imply that we should get independent sourcing where possible. The one claim that comes to mind specifically is the one stating that the Phoenix Program resulted in the assassinations of 20,000 civilians. That's a pretty extraordinary claim that I think should get additional sourcing to support it. CC: @Cerebellum: as this touches on your recent edits. SWATJester Shoot Blues, Tell VileRat! 18:19, 18 March 2025 (UTC)Reply

Thank you Swatjester. I've removed the claim about the Phoenix Program, since another source disputes the characterization of the killings as assassinations, and of those killed as civilians (p. 12). As for Jeffreys-Jones, it looks like publications unaffiliated with the CIA have reviewed him more favorably ([1], [2]), but feel free to remove him if you would like. --Cerebellum (talk) 09:22, 19 March 2025 (UTC)Reply
I don't see how removal of that material is justified by this critique of the source, especially when there are other sources in the main article that can be used to improve the material. I took a stab at improving the language used here, let me know what you think. Monk of Monk Hall (talk) 15:42, 19 March 2025 (UTC)Reply
Not all material merits inclusion in an article. It's an extraordinary claim, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary sourcing; a single secondary source whose reliability has been criticized in a peer-review journal, provided without methodology as to how it came to that conclusion, doesn't meet that bar. If the number were legitimate, it shouldn't be difficult to find non Jeffreys-Jones sources that verify it or support the methodology. To be clear, it's the claim surrounding the number specifically that's the problem, not the claims of targeted killings. SWATJester Shoot Blues, Tell VileRat! 17:21, 19 March 2025 (UTC)Reply
I agree with Swatjester; the number is questionable. The figure of 20,000 is taken from the testimony of William Colby to a congressional committee in 1972. Colby had clear bureaucratic motivation to minimise the number of murders committed by employees of the article subject. Vietnamese sources give a figure of 40,000, which is also cited by numerous scholarly sources. It's appropriate to indicate the range of figures cited in the available literature on the topic. Cambial foliar❧ 19:04, 19 March 2025 (UTC)Reply
It's been a couple decades since I've read them, but I vaguely recall that some of the autobiographies of the early (Richard Marcinko-era) Navy SEALs who were involved with the Phoenix program had additional supporting information here, in the format of "we were running X missions a night for Y months straight, and we totalled Z number of hits..." so there's definitely additional sourcing out there we can use to either refine the number or backstop the existing claim. SWATJester Shoot Blues, Tell VileRat! 19:16, 19 March 2025 (UTC)Reply
Another example of a serious problem in Jeffreys-Jones:
"Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) was able to estimate the number of regular troops in the North Vietnamese armed forces . . . A young Harvard-educated analyst working alone at the CIA took a different view. Sam Adams counted guerrilla-militia forces as well as the regular troops infiltrated from the North. At the end of 1966, the US armed forces chief gave enemy strength as 270,000, but Adams made it 600,000." Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, A Question of Standing, pp. 83-84.
In late 1966 MACV and Sam Adams were counting exactly the same categories of enemy personnel. Adams included guerrilla-militia in his count because MACV included them in its count. Indeed that MACV estimate of about 270,000 included far more guerrilla-militia than North Vietnamese regular troops.
Also, Adams was not yet in late 1966 giving a total even close to 600,000, though he did somewhat later. Ed Moise (talk) 07:20, 22 March 2025 (UTC)Reply