Ukraine (closed; covers till August 2014)

[OUTLAW 09]

First I do not have a clue who the guy is. The name I offered up, Alexei Savich, is cited as an aviation expert by the AFP article you placed such stock in as a verification. I would like to know his bone fides as an aviation expert. Second, I would appreciate your being a little more explicit about which other site you would like me to come over to. The Internet is a pretty big place.


The article and video have confirmed nothing as far as I can tell. I've looked at open source satellite imagery of military airfields in Crimea dated 2014. Those airfields had significant numbers of Soviet-era combat fighter aircraft as well as larger aircraft. (I'll admit my "squint" skills have atrophied so I'm not sure what they all were, and I did not have a light table to look at them as closely as one might like.) For all I know the videos and reports you cite are just people seeing those aircraft flying around to get ready for some kind of flyby for Putin on Friday.

The following account, from page 43 of John Prados' [I]The Soviet Estimate[/I, details the source of the 1950's "bomber gap" and is rather instructive I think:



For confirmation, here from Wikipedia, is an alternative report, citing a completely different source,




A good analyst cares whose name is on a report because source evaluation is a significant part of analysis. An IIR was (and I presume still is) evaluated in terms of the source and the content. The need for both should be obvious: a good source can be deceived and thus report as true something that is false, as the story above makes poignantly clear about Col. Taylor.

wm---you do understand that any IIR from a field HUMINT collector that is not a technical collector is in fact always a F6---hope you understand the significance of F6? And yes if you know the IIR collection system even an US Ambassador who is reporting via Cables is also a F6 as is the reporting from a OGA field agent a F6.

Before a F6 is in fact converted to a higher classification by the analyst there is far more in play than source and content as stated in the report. Have actually seen in some really stupid sounding/looking IIRs trigger a major reaction because a single word was mentioned and it had nothing to do with source and or content.

Am assuming you are evidently aware that sometimes a F6 has a single sentence in the report body and a single sentence in the Summary which in the end can trigger a formal report to the NCA ie the WH---you are aware of such reports since you are evidently a solid expert in IIRs and how the analyst works?

So again you seem to fully not understand the intel collection world just as you wedre not in Europe in 1989 so get real.