If you attended school anytime after the Nixon administration, you probably watched at some point CIA World Factbook, A map and reference guide to the planet Earth and its inhabitants that almost everyone can agree on.
You may have read parts of it from a floppy disk or CD-ROM for your social studies project due out tomorrow. Or you cleared the list of countries for Latvia, because that is the country you will be representing next week in Model UN. Better yet, you wander the land in your imagination with the physical fact book in your hands, unfold its maps, and understand, perhaps for the first time, that the thumbs-up your friends give each other is considered an obscene insult in parts of the Middle East, Europe and Argentina.
Who knew? He did the book of facts and read it, For more than six decades.
Its authors – some of the world’s best intelligence collectors, who have contributed thousands of their own images – have kept the curated database up to date and available online for public use at no charge. The reasons mentioned were geopolitical and philosophical. But since we’re talking about facts, it’s also true that the Book of Facts went public in 1975 with lofty statements of its purpose at a time when Congress was uncovering abuses By US intelligence agencies, including the CIA.
The CIA itself explained in its pages: “We share these truths with the people of all nations in the belief that knowledge of the truth supports the functioning of free societies.”
The spy agency doesn’t share them anymore.
On February 4, the Trump administration It closed suddenly This is a widely accepted account of humanity and its flags, states, customs, armies and borders. The CIA framed the move as a step forward for an agency whose primary mission had changed.
A great wave of grief rose from fans of the book of facts. Many said they were sad for America, which values knowledge for its own sake. Some saw darker forces at work under a president whose administration runs it Promoted – in times War and peace – “Alternative facts.”
“Stay curious,” the CIA advised in its “warm farewell” to the fact book.
He might have added: Good luck finding out Which is true from Wild and repeatedlyinaccurate world Internet and artificial intelligence.
Decades before Google became an everyday verb, there was the Factbook.
The original story has its roots in Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, an American intelligence failure that led to a more coordinated approach to collecting and organizing information about America’s enemies. The Joint Army Naval Intelligence Studies were born, the nation’s first interdepartmental basic intelligence program. But by 1946, national security experts agreed that “the administration of peace includes all countries, all human activities—not just the enemy and his war production,” as one of them, George S. Kennedy, put it. My house.
The modern CIA was assigned the task of gathering basic intelligence about other countries in 1947, according to the agency’s website.
The Cold War revealed the continuing need for a comprehensive source of basic intelligence—and an opportunity for what in 1971 became the Unclassified Factbook. It was released to the public four years later.
In addition to being beneficial to students, it had a geopolitical impact. The fact book demonstrated US intelligence capabilities against the former Soviet Union and other enemies. Their inclusion in it could lend legitimacy to an opposition state or party. Ironically, an agency founded on the need to know and keep secrets was sharing so much data — called “basic intelligence” — with the public.
The fact book also likely served as a boost to the CIA’s public image and put distance between it and other intelligence agencies that have been tarnished by congressional investigations. In 1975, U.S. Senator Frank Church, Democrat of Idaho, convened a committee that held more than a hundred public hearings, many of them televised, on the most significant oversight of intelligence agencies since World War II.
In 1976, the Church Commission reported widespread abuses by the CIA, IRS, NSA and FBI, including the disclosure of crime secrets. The CIA’s “Family Jewels.” That was it Internal account The CIA’s illegal activities, such as spying on American activists and the plot to assassinate Cuban President Fidel Castro.
Also in 1975, what would become the CIA World Factbook was published, and it rose to prominence as a reliable research tool often recommended in class projects. There has never been any confirmation that bad press inspired the wide release of the fact book, but doing so around the same time fits with the CIA’s need to rehabilitate its brand.
In 1981, the CIA renamed the publication the World Factbook, and in 1997, it jumped onto the Internet. The CIA described it as “a tremendous culmination of the efforts of some of our nation’s brightest analytical minds.”
News of the end of the Factbook shocked more than just American students and researchers. It was reported by news agencies abroad. The story played out across social media, with Reddit users pointing each other to archived fact books and racing to create and identify other sources of unbiased information that might suffice.
The information still exists, but “it will be difficult to find,” said Isabel Altamirano, an assistant professor in the chemistry library at Auburn University in Alabama. For example, university libraries offer similar resources to students, who can access them through tuition.
“It was very easy, because it was all in one place,” she said in an interview, noting that on February 4, when she saw the news, she quickly crossed the fact book off the list of resources for her students in her business communications class.
One analyst said the fact book, compiled by a government agency with secret agendas and murky methods, may not have been unbiased in the first place.
“Data collectors are not neutral, nor can we expect them to be,” said Benoy Kampmark, professor of global, urban and social studies at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia. He wrote in an email that mourning her loss would be “misplaced.”
He added that it might be better to preserve the Book of Facts as a historical document. Its latest release on February 4 is already out of date, according to an archived copy: Under Iran, the country’s head of government is still listed as Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Khamenei He was reported killed on March 1 in US and Israeli raids. The world changed again, but this time without the fact-book noticing.