What did the declassified documents reveal?

This Declassified briefing covers a declassified Central Intelligence Agency record, a December fourteenth, nineteen-sixty-four memorandum evaluating the Defense Intelligence Agency's performance with respect to the Far East. This document, shedding light on inter-agency intelligence assessments during the Cold War, is available at archive.org. This record, bearing the catalog ID CI01645, was declassified under the Freedom of Information Act and released on April thirtieth, two-thousand-and-two. Its declassification was authorized by a review official under the Automatic Declassification Review program. The memorandum, marked "Secret" and "Draft," is titled "Evaluation of the Defense Intelligence Agency With Respect to the Far East." It states: "Although sometimes commendable, D-I-A contributions and participation on F-E estimates have for the most part been poor. In our view, D-I-A simply has not put adequate stress on Far East intelligence production to effect satisfactory results. In result, the U-S intelligence community is woefully shaky on a myriad of Far East military questions - years behind the attention and sophistication of the community's Soviet effort. D-I-A's representatives usually lack a good knowledge of the areas on which they are working and sometimes lack experience in intelligence work. In fairness, these weaknesses are not to be easily overcome because of the diversity and difficulty of the intelligence problems encountered in work on the Far East, and because of what we judge to be a D-I-A practice of generally assigning their better people to E-H projects. Furthermore, we emphasize that there are shining exceptions to this generalization, and we should also point out that our personal relationship with D-I-A people is almost always gratifyingly congenial. Part of D-I-A's trouble, in our view, stems from its bureaucratic dichotomy. The representatives with whom we deal come from the 'Estimates' part of D-I-A, while most of the detailed research is done by the 'Production' section. The 'Estimates' representatives are often not familiar with the details of the facts and figures worked up by the 'Production' section, and, moreover, seem loath to question or challenge the work done by their colleagues. In this connection, we have found that representatives of the individual services (O-N-I, A-C-S-I, and A-F-C-I-N) are often able to make valuable contributions of information in their special fields. A detailed evaluation of D-I-A's performance on Far East problems can probably best be presented under three main headings: Communist China, Indochina, and the rest of the area. A. Communist China: One. D-I-A's competence on China has suffered from a lack of sufficiently high claim on resources. For example, D-I-A was asked for an all-source contribution to an estimate on Communist China's military establishment, but the contribution submitted was at the Secret level and reflected no serious attempt to exploit our most valuable…

Why was this case declassified?

This material entered the public record through the U.S. declassification and Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) process. The originating source document is linked on this page so the citation chain is auditable.

This Declassified Briefing Covers A Declassified Central Intelligence Agency

◆ BLUF — The short version

This Declassified briefing covers a declassified Central Intelligence Agency record, a December fourteenth, nineteen-sixty-four memorandum evaluating the Defense Intelligence Agency's performance with respect to the Far East. org. This record, bearing the catalog ID CI01645, was declassified under the Freedom of Information Act and released on April thirtieth, two-thousand-and-two.

Date: AUG 31 · 2026
Release: Declassified · U.S. public record (FOIA)
Source document: View the primary source document

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This Declassified briefing covers a declassified Central Intelligence Agency record, a December fourteenth, nineteen-sixty-four memorandum evaluating the Defense Intelligence Agency's performance with respect to the Far East. This document, shedding light on inter-agency intelligence assessments…

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Questions about this case

What was This Declassified Briefing Covers A Declassified Central Intelligence Agency about?: This Declassified briefing covers a declassified Central Intelligence Agency record, a December fourteenth, nineteen-sixty-four memorandum evaluating the Defense Intelligence Agency's performance with respect to the Far East. org. This record, bearing the catalog ID CI01645, was declassified under the Freedom of Information Act and released on April thirtieth, two-thousand-and-two.
Why was this case declassified?: This material entered the public record through the U.S. declassification and Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) process. Storyflo narrates it directly from the public release.

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