CIA Response Neither Confirms nor Refutes Medal Recipients

The Central Intelligence Agency provided a list of recipients of its Career Intelligence Medal from 2005-2010 in response to a FOIA request but redacted the name of every individual granted the award. Exemption b3 was cited for the withheld information. The recently received FOIA response may be accessed at Google Drive.

One of several similar pages contained in the recent CIA response:

James Semivan

The request, submitted in 2022, was the result of this writer's interactions with James Semivan. He is reportedly a former CIA officer, spanning from 1982-2007 and culminating in receiving a Career Intelligence Medal, according to Semivan and such sources as To The Stars, where he is also a board member. James Semivan gained popularity in the UFO subculture while using platforms like Coast to Coast AM to promote To The Stars and discuss what he described as his and his wife's encounter with a mysterious entity in their bedroom.

It was Semivan's vague descriptions of subsequent interactions with clandestine medical groups seemingly concerned about the incident, however, that attracted this writer's attention and resulted in email exchanges eventually described in the 2022 blogpost, The UFO Injury Study That Wasn't. Semivan claimed knowledge of a secret-ish project in which medical testing was done on self-described UFO experiencers and alien abductees. The testing reportedly included him.

Your author had a lot of questions about all that. Suffice it to say the evidence, ethics and methodologies were found to be lacking, but along the way, Semivan pointed in the direction of another reported former CIA officer, this one with professed knowledge of extraterrestrials and hybrid beings, John Ramirez. Mr. Ramirez made the UFO World rounds asserting he was taken and implanted by aliens at an early age, among other instances of showing little to no concern about making extraordinary proclamations lacking conclusive evidence. He also asserts he was awarded a Career Intelligence Medal in 2009, as explored at Mick West's Metabunk forum.

A FOIA request was therefore submitted to the CIA for a list of unclassified or declassified recipients of the Career Intelligence Medal with a date range of 2005-2010. The goal was to either substantiate or refute Mr. Semivan and/or Mr. Ramirez's CIA employment.

Unfortunately, the CIA response does neither. The Agency supplied a declassified list, it just withheld the names that would populate it.

Offered an opportunity to comment on the latest development, James Semivan reiterated in a March 27 email that he knows where he and John Ramirez worked, as do most of his good friends and colleagues.

"I could care less if Mick West and others don't believe it," Semivan added.

To offer some objectivity about CIA policies and what might seem like smothering bureaucracy, it may often be difficult to verify CIA employment. In addition to the obvious reasons, that's because CIA has a policy of neither confirming nor denying the existence of responsive records unless the subject was previously publicly acknowledged by the Agency. It doesn't matter how much a former officer might talk about something, or if the New York Times reported it, or if it's in a book written by a respected academic. The only circumstance in which the CIA provides responsive records is if an official CIA statement was previously published that established, for examples, the existence of a relationship with an individual, the existence of a specific project or, in other words, the responsive material. Courts are often lenient of CIA security methods in FOIA lawsuits, given the secretive nature of intelligence agencies and national security.

It might be a bit more difficult to understand, however, how former CIA personnel bring their stories to a genre - the UFO community - with a documented history of hoaxers and manipulation yet come in with guns blazing while completely unprepared to substantiate key aspects of their remarkable claims. Many might consider it questionable for former intelligence personnel to seemingly not respect the value of verifying a claim as compared to simply accepting statements as necessarily true.

Arguably, the primary issue here - and the reason for this blogpost - is verification matters. It is a research best practice to seek to either verify or refute. While preparing to write this post and conducting some internet searches, a video arose that even incorrectly referred to James Semivan as a former CIA director. We either get our facts straight or we don't. It can be tiresome and time consuming, but it's essential, or at least that's the case if we actually value facts. It might reasonably be considered perplexing when educated, intelligent individuals purport to fail to understand that position.