Directorate of Operations organization
also: DO, the DO, director of operations
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Related entities (most co-mentioned)
CIAintelligence service · 13Stansfield Turnerperson · 12Richard M. Bissell Jr.person · 9Allen Dullesperson · 5Max Hugelperson · 3George H.W. Bushperson · 3John McMahonperson · 3United Statescountry · 3Frank Wisnerperson · 3William Caseyperson · 3Richard Stolzperson · 3William Wellsperson · 3Soviet Unioncountry · 3John McConeperson · 2Kermit Rooseveltperson · 2Richard Helmsperson · 2Robert Gatesperson · 2Chilecountry · 1Israelcountry · 1Afghanistancountry · 1Fidel Castroperson · 1John F. Kennedyperson · 1Algeriacountry · 1Libyacountry · 1
Claims (11)
William Pickney member_of
Directorate of Operations documented
“Langley's cadre for the DISH was interesting. The DO clearly chose security specialists over covert operators. African Division Chief William Pickney, a veteran of the 1980s ISI Afghan war, reached out to Garrett Jones, then completing his …”
▶ The Colonel's Corner Safe for Democracy Part 50 (52) @ 29:34
Tom Fitton member_of
Directorate of Operations documented
“They didn't flinch when told that the director ought to abolish the Directorate of Operations. Of course, they weren't going to do that. And it wasn't going to be in the final report that they said that. But Thomas Twinton, who was the depu…”
▶ The Colonel's Corner Safe for Democracy Part 50 (52) @ 11:12
Richard M. Bissell Jr. headed
Directorate of Operations book_quoted
“The advent of Richard Bissell's changed many things for the Directorate of Operations, but one stayed the same. The worries of the president's watchdogs again expressed within a few short months. Reporting at the end of October, they made v…”
▶ The Colonel’s Corner Safe For Democracy Part 15 (16) @ 0:41
Porter Goss member_of
Directorate of Operations host_asserted
“who was also in the fraternity, and Neil Gripanti would become Bush's DNI. So all of these guys have known each other since high school, become the brain trust of our intelligence division under Bush. Can I say a few things about Goss? Sure…”
▶ Operation Gladio meets Secret Societies with WarHamster Bady 2025-05-22 @ 30:55
George H.W. Bush failed_to_implement
Directorate of Operations documented
“Shackley did not leave the CIA for almost two more years, and what happened inside the CIA while he was still there was nothing short of remarkable. When Turner began to dig deeper, he learned that an internal CIA study had recommended 1,35…”
▶ Operation Gladio- Prelude to Terror chapter 17 @ 5:53
Frank Wisner headed
Directorate of Operations book_quoted
“got cut in on the profits, not the American people who paid for it. After the Iranian project, Kim Roosevelt returned to headquarters as assistant deputy director of the Directorate of Operations under Frank Wisner. He led his political act…”
▶ The Colonel’s Corner safe for Democracy Part 9 @ 33:55
Kermit Roosevelt appointed
Directorate of Operations book_quoted
“got cut in on the profits, not the American people who paid for it. After the Iranian project, Kim Roosevelt returned to headquarters as assistant deputy director of the Directorate of Operations under Frank Wisner. He led his political act…”
▶ The Colonel’s Corner safe for Democracy Part 9 @ 33:55
John Spinelli member_of
Directorate of Operations documented
“Langley's cadre for the DISH was interesting. The DO clearly chose security specialists over covert operators. African Division Chief William Pickney, a veteran of the 1980s ISI Afghan war, reached out to Garrett Jones, then completing his …”
▶ The Colonel's Corner Safe for Democracy Part 50 (52) @ 29:34
Richard M. Bissell Jr. headed
Directorate of Operations documented
“Taylor panel, but went far beyond it in terms of criticizing the Secret Warriors' assumptions about Castro's vulnerability, arrangements for equipment and training, and changes in the planning, the operational security, and the management o…”
▶ The Colonel's Corner Safe for Democracy Part 23 (24) @ 8:29
Richard M. Bissell Jr. removed_from_power
Directorate of Operations documented
“doing science and technology that the agency was about to create. Bissell declined. He left instead to head a think tank. Of course, that's what all CIA guys do. The Institute of Defense Analysis in Alexandria, Virginia. There was no farewe…”
▶ The Colonel's Corner Safe for Democracy Part 23 (24) @ 23:09
Directorate of Operations carried_out_attack
Project Hake book_quoted
“Project Hake served as an example of how things could go wrong. Robert Lovett, co-author of the board's previous covert study, pressed Eisenhower to transfer review authority to the 5412 group. Gordon Gray, the guy that we talked about earl…”
▶ The Colonel’s Corner Safe For Democracy Part 15 (16) @ 2:39
Mentions (44)
▶ 30:55
who was also in the fraternity, and Neil Gripanti would become Bush's DNI. So all of these guys have known each other since high school, become the brain trust of our intelligence division under Bush. Can I say a few things about Goss? Sure…
▶ 4:57
He's the one that facilitated all the funds going to the Chilean operation to murder Allende. So by the summer of 1977, when Carlucci could be installed, Turner declared open war against the Directorate of Operations. He decided that both S…
▶ 5:26
Turner reassigned both men to what he believed was meaningless jobs. Shackley's colleagues in the DO, the demotion was basically a body blow to a small, very close-knit group of covert operators. Although he could have retired, Shackley rem…
▶ 5:53
Shackley did not leave the CIA for almost two more years, and what happened inside the CIA while he was still there was nothing short of remarkable. When Turner began to dig deeper, he learned that an internal CIA study had recommended 1,35…
▶ 6:21
Bush had taken no action on it at all. In August 1977, Turner ordered the CIA to reduce the Directorate of Operations by 823 positions within two years. The DO sent out the cable firing 823 veteran case officers on Halloween. Inside the age…
▶ 10:20
At the time that Bush was CIA director, Wise headed the Foreign Intelligence Division of the Directorate of Operations. One former Bush deputy said that Bush liked Wise for his directness. Wise's predecessor at the Energy Department was Adm…
▶ 15:13
Although Clines had put in for his retirement and Shackley was no longer in the Directorate of Operations, they continued to task Wilson as if everything was still normal. They also sent taskings to Slatter and Quintero for information abou…
▶ 31:49
were doing on a daily basis. One of the efforts of the covert officers involved the disappearance of John Paisley. And you spell Paisley P-A-I-S-L-E-Y. After Paisley vanished, Turner's enemies in the DO fed him one piece of disinformation a…
▶ 42:47
By the late spring of 1981, Hugel and Casey were regularly meeting directly with Israeli intelligence. During this period, Hugel was also involved in a covert operation that had not been cleared with either the Directorate of Operations or …
▶ 50:11
Hogle had to go, and he had to go soon if Shackley was not going to be shown up as basically worthless. If Hogle had ever felt welcome at the CIA, he had no idea how unfriendly it was about to get. Bill Casey wanted to shake up the Director…
▶ 51:37
Still, this first effort to sidetrack Hoogle's appointment failed, and the Republican-controlled Senate, so the Director of Operations Veterans, turned to the Counterintelligence Division for help. Here they found information showing that H…
▶ 0:41
The advent of Richard Bissell's changed many things for the Directorate of Operations, but one stayed the same. The worries of the president's watchdogs again expressed within a few short months. Reporting at the end of October, they made v…
▶ 1:37
especially objected to the director of operations, which is covert operations, being solely responsible for the review of their own activity. Imagine that. This evaluation function, which also applied to the review of covert action proposal…
▶ 5:07
as a response to the hall board, asking the president to wait and see what became of their effort. By July, Bissell had finished his inquiry, and in response, Dulles made a few changes. Based on the survey's observation that actions to over…
▶ 5:39
Why would the DO have approval? That's the director of operations of the CIA, not the director. Actions might also necessitate clandestine logistics, air support, and paramilitary effort beyond what was capable internally. So the survey adv…
▶ 7:44
White House National Security Official Carl Harr, H-A-R-R, later said, we used to say, well, Alan Dulles, he's not a good administrator or a bad administrator. He's an innocent administrator. He's innocent of administration, meaning he does…
▶ 18:47
not the answer to any of it. Because again, the CIA did whatever they wanted to. Chapter 10, Desmond Fitzgerald. Enthusiasm became vital to the next big campaign. Not only did this one involve many of the same secret warriors again and agai…
▶ 6:24
So the Presidential Intelligence Board submitted many recommendations in 1961, some of them on covert operations from the board's own Bay of Pigs post-mortem. Among these were advice that the CIA increase its intelligence work and de-emphas…
▶ 7:15
90% of the Intelligence Advisory Board recommendations said to have been affected. Of course, the most significant were not. Meanwhile, investigation of the Bay of Pigs also proceeded along in the CIA itself. Just after two years earlier, r…
▶ 8:29
Taylor panel, but went far beyond it in terms of criticizing the Secret Warriors' assumptions about Castro's vulnerability, arrangements for equipment and training, and changes in the planning, the operational security, and the management o…
▶ 11:27
Then he arranged for the IG to supply an additional memo pointing a finger at the U.S. government, meaning the Kennedy administration, where the IG's original report did not point. McCone also promised the DO that a rejoinder would be bound…
▶ 11:55
largely the work of Tracy Barnes, and practically as long as the IG report itself, that paper went to the director on January 18, 1962. Denunciations of the report was also filed separately by Alan Dulles, by Richard Bissell, and by Charles…
▶ 14:19
could not have succeeded on its own terms. So it's Kennedy's fault, even though it was a bad plan from the start and could not be successful. But that's Kennedy's fault too. Absolutely crazy. There is no question that the Cuba debacle strip…
▶ 22:40
and the new director felt he needed some stability. He phoned Bissell from California, where McCone attended the funeral, and asked the DO to stay until he returned. In early 1962, with the president's blessing, Bobby Kennedy met with Bisse…
▶ 22:25
Background, in the process, Helms would preside over a peak in the secret war, the years from Kennedy to Nixon to Kissinger. Helms took over an expanding directorate of operations for the CIA. Already a stream of defectors had begun to sow …
▶ 44:42
cadre of mostly former intelligence officer or naval officers as his inner staff one rusty williams did a global evaluation for the directorate of operations visiting stations poking into all manner of things the rumor mill buzzed with accu…
▶ 45:08
the front office with innuendos about people's escapades abroad. You know, came home and actually told what was going on. Any chance of Turner being accepted evaporated with the staffing reductions. Although the DO passed its evaluation, th…
▶ 45:39
face basically justifying their existence. When the director asked Bill Wells what ought to be done, the deputy director of operations did not oppose reductions. Admiral Turner quickly cut back planned staff reductions by more than a third.…
▶ 46:40
actually forced only about 150 officers into retirement, Cord Myers being one of them, supposedly only actually had to fire 17, although the DO declined from its Vietnam War peak of about 7,500 to roughly 4,750. That total is rather close.…
▶ 49:06
That did not stop officers from blaming him. Many would agree that the DO's Floyd Paceman, who writes, quote, our collection capacity was decimated, unquote. Turner would argue it had been improved. Some sided with him. Tom Gilligan, who ha…
▶ 53:06
And Richard Helms was guilty of so many things, to include lying. It is to Director Turner's credit that he persisted and did what he could to make the community more responsible. In the DO, Turner brought forward John McMahon, whose backgr…
▶ 53:37
had him replace Bill Wells. Everywhere Turner sought to manage the colossus giant, clandestine service officer, DeWayne Claridge, never slow to criticize weakness, credits Turner while trying to transform the director of operations into the…
▶ 54:07
as Deputy Director of Operations, played his own part, among other things, reinvigorating field training for ops officers at Camp Perry and personally selecting graduates' assignments. Admiral Turner conceded in a later interview that he ha…
▶ 12:31
A thousand times I would go over the might have beens if I had raised more hell than I did with Casey about non-notification of Congress. If I had demanded that the NSC get out of covert action. If I had insisted the CIA not play by NSC rul…
▶ 25:10
especially during this timeframe. In the 1970s, he headed the CIA in Belgrade and then was promoted to the Director of Operations, Western European Division. Stoltz had been considered by Turner to be a deputy director, but he chose instead…
▶ 30:23
So Webster took advantage of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 and tried to defuse opposition to his changes. He was basically going to use that as an excuse. Webster and Stoltz established a group of senior officers to brainstorm st…
▶ 33:02
At the Directorate of Operations, an attitude prevailed. Richard Stoltz feared being taken in. Burton Gerber, a legendary case officer and street man in Eastern Europe and station chief in Moscow, was now heading the Soviet and Eastern Euro…
▶ 11:12
They didn't flinch when told that the director ought to abolish the Directorate of Operations. Of course, they weren't going to do that. And it wasn't going to be in the final report that they said that. But Thomas Twinton, who was the depu…
▶ 27:31
um music from armed forces radio the um dj would say keep your head down in the volume up mike shacklin performed in an assignment that he didn't want code name condor shacklin had had his share of heat and sun as a marine major in vietnam …
▶ 29:34
Langley's cadre for the DISH was interesting. The DO clearly chose security specialists over covert operators. African Division Chief William Pickney, a veteran of the 1980s ISI Afghan war, reached out to Garrett Jones, then completing his …
▶ 2:06
In Washington, the first moves came from the DAF, a unit of the Director of Operations paramilitary psychological staff, which concocted a variety of anti-Mosaddegh leaflets to be distributed throughout Iran. Planners traveled to Cyprus, wh…
▶ 33:55
got cut in on the profits, not the American people who paid for it. After the Iranian project, Kim Roosevelt returned to headquarters as assistant deputy director of the Directorate of Operations under Frank Wisner. He led his political act…
▶ 34:59
later that John Foster Dulles did not want to hear such advice. Roosevelt was offered command of the next one as well in Guatemala. Roosevelt turned down this offer because he's going to go work for, I don't know, an oil company. As a senio…
▶ 53:03
so to speak, okay? Concerns over the OPC's autonomy and potential to overshadow the CIA's primary intelligence role led to reforms. In April 51, President Truman established the Psychological Strategy Board to better coordinate U.S. psychol…