CIA: The record before us is the Annual Report of the Director of

The record before us is the Annual Report of the Director of Central Intelligence to the Congress for the year nineteen seventy‑nine, submitted on January twenty‑fifth, nineteen eighty. It is a declassified Central Intelligence Agency document that offers a contemporaneous assessment of the United States intelligence community’s performance and challenges at the close of the 1970s. This report was released to the public through a Freedom of Information Act request filed under case number two‑zero‑zero‑eight, with the declassification authority exercised by the Central Intelligence Agency’s Office of Information Management. The material was approved for release on March third, two thousand eight, and is now available through the Internet archive at the address archive dot org slash download slash us‑china‑intel‑CI02175 slash CI02175_djvu dot txt. The document opens with a statement from the Director of Central Intelligence, Stansfield Turner, and then proceeds to outline the three major challenges faced by the intelligence community in nineteen seventy‑nine. I will read the substantive portions verbatim. The Intelligence Community faced three major challenges in nineteen seventy‑nine: to improve the quality of political and economic intelligence in the face of rapidly and sometimes profoundly changing requirements; to ensure that we could effectively carry out our many treaty monitoring responsibilities despite the loss of some capabilities and the heavy demand placed on others; and to respond positively to the effects of active Congressional oversight. Our response to these challenges this year demonstrated the enduring strength of the United States’ intelligence services and their growing ability to function as a Community. Because these challenges will remain with us for the foreseeable future, we must continue to strengthen the Community’s capabilities in collection and analysis in order to anticipate the problems of tomorrow and deal with them effectively. This report, consequently, assesses the Intelligence Community’s performance in nineteen seventy‑nine from two perspectives: — the major challenges and how they were met; and — the primary lessons learned and their implications for our future direction and capability. Improving Political and Economic Intelligence To improve the quality of political and economic intelligence in the face of rapidly and sometimes profoundly changing requirements. For the Intelligence Community the year ended as it began—with attention focused on Iran. Our experience there underscores the importance of sensitivity to broad trends and underlying social, political, and economic forces that will shape the international environment in the nineteen‑eighties. How well equipped are we today to detect these kinds of social and political changes, changes that could threaten United States interests elsewhere? Detecting Societal Change When the government of the Shah fell, the Intelligence Community was criticized for not predicting the event in advance. The real issue here is not whether we were able to predict the moment of the Shah’s fall. There were no written plans for the kind of revolution which occurred in Iran. The moment when disparate forces coalesce behind an obscure or unlikely leader is a moment of spontaneity usually unforeseen even by the participants. While predicting such events is certainly to be strived for, it is only the final step in a continuing process of warning, whose earlier steps are probably more important because they give the policymaker the time and the option to act. Consequently, the real issue is how well we alerted the policymaker over the years to the drift in Iran, to the mounting challenges to the Shah, and to the underlying societal currents. The Black Vault’s archive entry notes that this document is a declassified CIA annual report providing an internal assessment of intelligence performance and that it reflects the agency’s own framing of its challenges and priorities at the time. This is what the public record looks like at its most ordinary. For further reference, the full text can be accessed at storyflo dot com and at the archive dot org link provided earlier.