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

Cambridge, MA: Westview Press, 2002. First Printing [Stated]. Trade paperback. Very good. xiii, [1], 386 pages. Illustrations. Notes. Sources. Appendices. Index. Slight cover wear. Jeffrey Talbot Richelson (31 December 1949 - 11 November 2017) was an American author and academic researcher who studied the process of intelligence gathering and national security.[1] He authored at least thirteen books and many articles about intelligence, and directed the publication of several of the National Security Archive's collections of source documents. Richelson was notable for his relentless Freedom of Information requests in order to further scholarship in intelligence and espionage. According to Bruce D. Berkowitz, Richelson was once avoided by the intelligence community as an outsider and a security risk, but gradually became trusted to the extent that he was invited to CIA sponsored conferences. Richelson grew up in the Bronx and earned his BA from the City University of New York. He completed a Ph.D. in political science at the University of Rochester in 1975 and went on to teach at the University of Texas, Austin and American University. Richelson was a senior fellow with the National Security Archive. This study of the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology introduces us to key personalities who helped share the directorate: Edwin Land of Polaroid, Albert Wheelon, Carl Duckett, and others who operated secretly within the directorate such as Antonio Mendez, whose "technical service" skills helped six Americans escape Iran after the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in 1979. Presents intriguing details--many never before published--of the directorate's programs and activities. Derived from a Publishers Weekly review: In recent years, the media have presented several reports on the tragic and scandalous 1953 death of army scientist Frank Olson. Ten days before Olson died, a Central Intelligence Agency researcher had slipped a dose of LSD into the unwitting Olson's drink. The hapless army scientist quite literally went mad and leapt to his death from the window of his New York hotel room. Press accounts have couched Olson's death as the work of a sinister CIA. In Richelson's even presentation, the Olson case, horrific as it was, is less representative of a CIA run amok than it is of a paranoid Cold War mentality in which the nation's premier intelligence agency was tasked with developing extraordinary measures for extraordinary times. The directorate responsible for those measures is the focus of this fine and meticulously researched study by master Intelligence Community researcher and analyst Richelson. Richelson places into context the directorate of science and technology's operations, from sci-fi-style remote-viewing experiments to very practical scientific advances that would eventually find application in heart pacemaker technology. Espionage researchers and analysts will recognize a set of familiar project code names: JENNIFER, MKULTRA and others. Significant spy personalities are also in abundance: Ray Cline, William Colby, Richard Helms. But Richelson expands on what's already known, giving new insights into such matters as the development of U.S. aerial and space reconnaissance systems. The evolution of the aircraft that would become the SR-71 Blackbird spy plane is particularly fascinating, as is the story of the New York Times's investigative reporter Seymour Hersh's apparent agreement to a 1972 request from the CIA to withhold the true mission of the Glomar Explorer, a spy ship that had been dispatched to recover a sunken Soviet submarine.