U.S. State Department. Biographic Register 1969. 464 pages.

The Biographic Register is an alphabetical listing of alleged State Department employees, with about 40 names per page. Each entry gives a birth date, a chronological list of foreign postings during the person's career, and a history of the person's job titles and government ranking.

John D. Marks, a former State Department employee, made the Register famous in his article "How to Spot a Spook" in Washington Monthly, November 1974. It turns out that CIA officers posted abroad under State Department cover tend to drop in and out of this annual publication with certain characteristics in their listings. Because this was so useful, the 1974 edition was the last one distributed to the public. We went through a 1977 "limited official use" edition (the latest we can get our hands on), and then the unclassified 1973 and 1969 editions. Out of these we ended up with a total of almost 3400 names. About half are CIA officers, while the rest are either with the State Department and at some point in their career may have specialized in intelligence, or were with AID's Office of Public Safety. (Before Congress phased it out in 1974, OPS was used by the CIA for official cover.) We already had most of the CIA names, but the Registers gave us better posting data for our nifty country graphs. The classification of this Register is a loss for human rights researchers everywhere. -- D.Brandt

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