Tuesday, September 27, 2011

A History of the Office of Naval Intelligence, 1882-1942

THE BIRTH OF NAVAL INTELLIGENCE

On March 23, 1882, the Department of the Navy issued General Order No. 292, which established an office of intelligence within the Bureau of Navigation. The order defined the fundamental purpose of this new agency, a purpose that would remain the same for the next sixty years: to collect and record such information as may be useful to the Navy Department in both war and peace. While "information" was implied to mean the maritime technology, strategy, and policy of foreign navies, the Office of Naval Intelligence(ONI) would broaden that definition to include any information that might involve the security of the naval establishment and the nation at large. This broader definition would eventually involve ONI in all manner of espionage, both at home and abroad, against far more than just foreign navies, to include civil rights groups, labor unions, and peace movements, among many others with the most tenuous of links to naval matters 
What the heck! They spy on us too! But then we already knew that. http://odh.trevizo.org/oni.html

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