CIA SKSTO&CAL REVIEW TOSRAM
TITLE:illion wanted Persons AUTHOR: Earl D. Bngeljohn
VOLUME: 7 ISSUE: Summer
STUDIES IN
*
INTELLIGENCE
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ions and methods ofCI biographic information.
ILLION WANTED PERSONS Earl D. Engeljohn
Oneld up the Metropolitan National Bank of Wheaton,and escaped. The Montgomery Countyand FBI agents rushed to the scene to Investigate.werehysical description of the fugitive was assembled, and clues to his identity were sought. Files were searched, one may assume, against the descriptive data and other clues, and on tentative Identification hiswere Interrogated for leads to his whereabouts. If he bad fled to another city or state, the help of other policewould have to be asked for, if out of the country that of foreign police organizations or Interpol.
The same kind of effort Is required in counterintelligence. All persons now or formerly employed by Sino-Soviet Blocand security services, either as staff members or asand all persons connected with them are material witnesses on the espionage and covert action, mcluding violent action, directed against us by the Bloc. Without exception each of these persons, conservatively estimatedn number, can supply pertinent information. They will all know something about the organization, location, or activity of the adversary services, how they operate against us, who Is Planning or conducting operations. They can name other informed persons, some of them accessible in tbe West forex-agents, ex-contacts, or oldA striking example of the apprehension of one suchperson through another is the arrest7 of Rudolf Ivanovlch Abel, made possible by the questioning of KGBReino Hay rumen.'
In pursuit of theseillion persons wanted forsome of them at large in the West and some for the
' The Abel story Is told In Studiest.
Wonled Person
present Inaccessible behind their Curtain, thousands ofmust be interrogated in minute detail, and records, both public and private, all over theof city rest-dents, vital statistics, visa applications, social securitythe holdings. agencies and allied foreignto be checked. The mountingof Information must be so stored that It can be rapidlyand collated in many different ways. Thenaunch successful operations on the basis of this Information to get staff officers of Bloc services like Hayhanen or their agents to defect or collaborate with us In place and as weour routine investigations of agent suspects and our double agent operations, the yield of information from these multiplies our knowledge of the still wantedour need to manage and manipulate the data skillfully.
We haveood. If modest, beginning In theof our information. We learned years agoanual index card system is inadequate to cope with data rangingumber of different categories onillion persons. We have devised machine programs to handle some of our InformaUon, letting the machines do the "coolie labor" of collation and freeing analysts and operatives to exploit the Information; but the present machine programs must beaugmented and made to handle all of our wanted-persons InformaUon If we are to pursue these personsIn the following we review some of the things theshould be able to do for us.
Rostert by Category
Machines can file. sort, and retrieve InformaUon (note that we are speaking of mformation, nothey can print out rosters of our wanted persons grouped according to any of several categories of data about them, for example:
Lastof travel undertaken
FirstIn the West, if any, and where
Using index cards, we have only one "handle" by which to retrievelast name of the person, filed in alphabeUc order. With machines, we can useandles or
tnam
bore, depending upon our planning and our needs Much of our information on the staff members of the East German clandestine service is now in machine language, and weumber of category rosters which have been exceedinglytn the questioning of those that have fled to the West.
anted person should, once he Is available forbe Interrogated about his wanted colleagues.can do this most effecUvcJvby goUprdownof those who previous
been his colleagues. This exercise, besides producing newoften corrects misspellings and other Inaccurate entries and helps purge the files. In Berlin ln the fallorormer staff member of the East GermanMax Helm, helped us correct the name of one of hiswhich we had listed as Hans Nlottke. to Jfiotike, an entry which an alphabetical trace would not have turned up. Rosters used in this way also quickly expose frauds and fabri-estors claiming to have Informationlno-SovVet Bloc service; their Ignorance becomes evident under Intensivebased on the rosters.
r,mMng Leads
Machine listings to turn up operational leads arc easilyThe machine can pick out all staff members of Bloc services who are known to have relatives in the West, and when these relatives are questioned some may be able tomeans to lure their kinsman over to us or at least to neutralizeest German related to the wifeigh-ranking officer of the East German service was one suchlead uncoveredachine listing.ist could be made of staff members having criminal records or past af-OUaUonj with the Naziist of those whose photo-traphs we have on file or from whom weignature or band writing specimen would show the most feasible targetsa smear campaign by forgery.
Our program for Indexing all travelers to or from Blocis another search fee- leads: some of these are Intelii-E'nce officers or agents, and we may get clues from otheras to which tbeyefector from the East Ger-*an service. Guentcr MaenneL said that be had once re-
lont
urt Hoffmann, who was later sentn, Sure enough, the name Kurt Hoffmann appears on our hit of East German travelers to Cuba. Maennel and other defec tors from his service, scanning this list, may be able to spot the names of other East German agents going to CubaPolish defectors working with the travel list of Poles to Cuba Moreover, the monitoring of travelers will have rt-
of
those that tWSut to be agents or perhaps are recruited sub-sequently.
A relatively new use of machine capabilities contributing to leads and other purposes is to keep track of who knows whom. We are just begmning to manipulate this type ofbut It Is evident that knowing who among theof the Bloc services has connections with which others will be valuable In the questioning of informed sources It wouldeary task to cull this data from the files
Indices Abroad
It Is often of critical Importance to have Informationat the placean Is being questioned; he may not be able to recall some name or event without being questioned on related Incidents or persons to stimulate his memory. It would be awkward to carry around an indexards; machines make our information portable. Rosters of wanted persona should be located strategically at our stations around the globe and suitably edited versions made available to friendly foreign services to take advantage of the principle of "manyomplete roster could be taken to the scene of an operation for quick checks when there is not time toeadquarters trace, as we did with our East German service listing in Rome during operations connected with the Olympics In the summeror browsing purposes such rosters at the field stations would In large measure remove the annoying bottleneck of having to write cables orwith the usual delay in releases and transmission, to get it done atomplete trace toubject for action such as recruitment must of course include checking the main index at headquarters; thisifferent
^ Wonted
r i
tiling than browsingortable field "library" to flushinformauonource being questioned nearby Quite another problem is posed by the valuable wanted-
ecord brtduigs that do not belong tohotograph may be in Italian Foreign Ministryrirnaaal record in police flies in Rio dean Party card In the Berlin Sou-
Is it ever all assembled? Only tn the rare case that
repositories
have Information on the person. Our habit is to trace only
teni the usual place!
W we traced In aU the places in nuance of any particular
he assembled irdonJtlcn^nigM
. * ofof several thousandes of the ozen
oP toNatl Party, an item of lrdormatiori that any East German official would like very much to erase from hishat we need. then,oZhecWnE blocks of names in the thousands against other record holdings, and machine techniques can furnisheans.
Unsolved Cases Probably the most difficult category of information to deal
meUmes the mosl criHcsi. to the data on un-wived cases. Let us sayoviet defector has told us of TO raruitaeritaitress in Paris, aboutears old, of ft>hsh extraction, to gather Information on our embassy were.ame, there used to be no good way to file ttis information and recover it for collation with other scrapsBut by using machme-manipulated categories it can
'uZ^rT^ Chiet: BarUehred After Revela.
ofabruary lass.
be registered under Occupationocation rP.-Nationalityervice (Soviet)'
a,0W3 something .bout Soviet operatiorjfta lS the roster of wanted persons In Paris wUi uVclude tlus w2ay be possible to identify her. There arV.er o'unsolved cases in our German holding.
no wa, to keep them under review; putting them into the m? chine system would reactivate thenT To the extern JRder.Uons permit we could also pass listrnt on
- "
Fringe Benefits
Two advantageous by-products of the machine file areOf Statistic If he^qua,
Sce^rt^ Slat^ hSVe1
trace requests can be significantly shortened by citing the
UM subject On receiptLxptr "'REQUESTTRACES WILHELM
tkrytec data on mm
which otherwise would have had to be included In the cable
mal^0m, can also determine auto-
matjcally. for example, how many of the staff of the Soviet service have been dismissed, how many have crirninal records or how many there are altogether that we know aboutsuch as these may be used to project an estimate of the total strength and give us some idea of the morale andproblem,endee. We haveosition where we can provide some of these statistics on the East German service.
Wc have thuseginning, but weery long road ahead of us before all our CI biographic Information If incorporated into machine systems. Meantime, as wehopefully,operations against the hostile services, the scope and nature of our work maybe seen in sharper relief If we regard it as the pursuit ofillion wanted persons.
Original document.
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