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evidence. In other cases, there was good material but it was poorly organized. Occasionally, a project officer had to start virtually from scratch -- redoing research to check the contractor's work and essentially writing the paper himself. There was a tendency sometimes to think that the success or lack of success of a contract was a function of the degree of supervision by the project officer; it was more likely a function of the variation in competence among contractors. Since a contractor was required only to put forth his "best effort" -- and who was to say that he did not -- there was little an OSI project officer could do to force an uninspired contractor to meet OSI standards.
Despite the many difficulties with contract supervision, the fact remains that OSI in the span of five or six years did succeed in publishing a large number of state-of-the-art type papers which added up to a good appreciation of the achievements of Soviet research in most fields of possible relevance to U.S. national security. The "baseline" of Soviet R&D was established on which to build other future intelligence activities more oriented toward current high priority problems.
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