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Dead Drop: November 4

Dead Drop: November 4

NIP AND TUCK. Last Friday, the Director of National Intelligence released the budget figure for the National Intelligence Program  (NIP) for FY2016.  It was $53.0 billion. The Pentagon released the number for the Military Intelligence Program (MIP) which came to $17.7 billion.  Neither outfit included past years amounts for comparison – but the folks at Secrecy News did the research for you. The NIP was up $2.7B from the previous year and the MIP up $1.2B. To quote Everett Dirksen,  “A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon, you’re talking real money.”

DRAFT DODGE DIES:  On Monday, the CIA finally released Volume V of its internal history of the Bay of Pigs debacle.  The Agency successfully fought for years to prevent the release of the 180-page-long document, which had been sought in numerous FOIA requests, saying that it was an incomplete draft.  A recent change in the law, championed by the National Security Archive, however, removed that argument for withholding documents more than a quarter century old. You can tell the CIA is still not happy about being forced to release the document.  Agency historian David Robarge explains in a cover letter that the CIA fought the release because of the chapter’s “serious shortcomings in scholarship, its polemical tone, and its failure to add significantly to an understanding of the controversy over the Bay of Pigs operation—much of which has now been discussed in open source histories and memoirs.”

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