Background “The Green Book” is a set of guidelines for agency officials in charge of responding to FOIA requests, specifically about the proper procedures for processing requests for FBI documents or documents from any other agency under the purview of Department of Justice. The Green Book also contains volumes of numbered memos from directors and other officials in the agency’s FOIA department, instructing FOIA officials on how to respond to requests regarding certain procedures the FBI conducts, organizations under surveillance by the agency, and other persons and events of interest. I first requested this back in June of 2016, and…
Author: John Greenewald
Background In 2007, recognizing that intelligence had not yet become central in FBI operations and to accelerate the growth of the Bureau’s intelligence cycle capabilities, the FBI formed a Strategic Execution Team (SET) initially comprised of almost 100 special agents, intelligence analysts, and other skilled professionals from field offices and FBI Headquarters. The SET examined the intelligence activities in each of the 56 field offices and identified two overarching impediments to transformation: integrating intelligence into operations in the field and building human capital for enhanced intelligence capabilities. For example, the SET found that while each field office had a FIG,…
Background The Plame affair (also known as the CIA leak scandal and Plamegate) was a political scandal that revolved around journalist Robert Novak’s public identification of Valerie Plame as a covert Central Intelligence Agency officer in 2003. In 2002, Plame wrote a memo to her superiors in which she expressed hesitation in recommending her husband, former diplomat Joseph C. Wilson, to the CIA for a mission to Niger to investigate claims that Iraq had arranged to purchase and import uranium from the country, but stated that he “may be in a position to assist”. After President George W. Bush stated…
Background 17 YEARS after being told the documents relating to this event were destroyed — I finally found them! The following is a description of the event, as archived by Wikipedia, to give a bit of background the case: Japan Air Lines flight 1628 was a UFO incident that occurred on November 17, 1986 involving a Japanese Boeing 747-200F cargo aircraft. The aircraft was en route from Paris to Narita International Airport, near Tokyo, with a cargo of Beaujolais wine. On the Reykjavík to Anchorage section of the flight, at 17:11 over eastern Alaska, the crew first witnessed two unidentified…
Background HOMERUN was a secret US aerial reconnaissance operation against the USSR conducted between March and May 1956. During that time RB-47E and RB-47H reconnaissance aircraft flew almost daily flights over the North Pole to photograph and gather electronic intelligence over the entire northern section of the Soviet Union. Project Homerun used 16 RB-47Es from the 10th SRS and five RB-47Hs from the 343rd SRS. 156 sorties were performed. On a typical RB-47H reconnaissance mission covering 5,984 mi (9,360 km), the aircraft would fly from Thule, Greenland to the Kara Sea to Murmansk and then return only to find Thule…