I wrote: "They said the top secret government information was seldom more accurate or informative than what is published in the New York Times."
I meant broad intelligence evaluations of policy issues and estimates of the intentions of leaders. Obviously there was military intelligence far more detailed and accurate than anything the newspapers had access to! For example, a U.S. submarine tapped an undersea Soviet military phone line. This was described in the book "Blind Man's Bluff." The DIA document says: "This assessment is based on analysis of a wide body of intelligence reporting, most of which is open source information including scientific briefings, peer-reviewed technical journals, international scientific conference proceedings, interviews with scientific experts . . ." As you see, nearly everything in the document is available at LENR-CANR. And everything at LENR-CANR comes from somewhere else. We have no original material except for a few things like my book. So the truth is out there. You just have to look. My late spook friends said that most of the useful intelligence about Russia in the 1950s came from freely available documents published in Russia. Not spies or purloined secret documents. The Soviet government lied through its teeth about a wide range of subjects, such as how many tons of potatoes they produced. But if you looked carefully through enough books and official publications, you could make a reasonably accurate assessment of potato production. For example, you could extrapolate from vodka production plus independently sourced info on people's diets. Needless to say, the Internet and Google makes intelligence far easier than it was back then. For everyone. I just read a new book by J. Adelstein "Tokyo Vice" which describes how Japanese gangsters use Google alerts in English to keep track of U.S. press coverage of their activities. That's a pretty good book, by the way. It is recommend by Alex Kerr and Taro Greenfield, who know what they are talking about. Kerr is one of the leading Japan experts of our time. - Jed
