28 ORGANIZING SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH FOR WAR 



cated even within the Services themselves. Appointees were further advised 

 that the Committee's investigations could not be discussed with any per- 

 sons, civilian, military or naval, except as designated by the Committee or 

 its duly authorized representatives. 



In order better to impress upon scientists in laboratories the need for 

 secrecy, the Committee adopted the policy of appointing the chief investi- 

 gator under each contract as "official investigator" and requiring him to 

 sign a pledge of secrecy binding him not to disclose any confidential in- 

 formation regarding the research except to others engaged in work on 

 the specific problem under direction of the Committee, or to persons ap- 

 proved by representatives of the Committee. Each official investigator was 

 given a commission of appointment which among other things stated that 

 he had taken an oath of allegiance to the United States and subscribed 

 to the pledge of secrecy. 



The appointment of official investigators led to some administrative com- 

 plications, but there is no reason to doubt that the appointments served 

 their express purpose of impressing upon the appointee the need for se- 

 crecy. The Committee felt it desirable to place such stress upon secrecy 

 because the tradition of scientists in academic institutions is to give wide 

 distribution to the results of their research. 



Another step in the maintenance of security was that of compartmen- 

 taUzation of information. The Committee adopted as a guiding principle 

 that no person associated with it desired to have or would be given any 

 classified information except that needed for the performance of the par- 

 ticular tasks which had been entrusted to him. In practice this meant that 

 relatively few individuals were acquainted with the entire program of 

 operations of NDRC. Only the members and Secretary of the Committee 

 and a few members of the central stafi had a picture of the over-all oper- 

 ations of the organization; members of a division were given information 

 relating only to the problems of that division and members of a section 

 only information relating to the problems of the section. Such compart- 

 mentalization had within it the seeds of inefficiency inasmuch as it was 

 quite possible for one section to be in possession of information which might 

 be valuable to another section. In theory the Committee members and 

 later the Office of the Chairman had the responsibility for seeing that infor- 

 mation crossed divisional lines whenever research would be speeded thereby. 

 In numerous cases transmission of information across divisional Unes was 

 authorized and it was always the prerogative of the Division Chief to 

 request information which he believed to be in the possession of another 

 division and which would be useful to his activities. Unfortunately, how- 

 ever, there were cases in which information in the possession of one divi- 

 sion of NDRC was not known to another division, although it would have 

 been very useful to the second division. 



