Reflections on CIA Analysis: Is it Finished?

Despite the CIA's improved analytical tradecraft and increased resources, the future of its analytic mission remains in doubt. Post-9/11 improvements have been coupled with a continued focus on current intelligence priorities that minimize attention to the development of strategic research and deeper knowledge. Simply increasing the number of analysts has not produced deeper expertise. The CIA's traditional recruitment and training methods, as well as its rewards and promotion system, encourage analysts to avoid concentrating on any single area of regional or functional expertise in favor of moving around the agency to build a successful career. A continued reliance on risk-avoidance security practices also restricts analysts' contact with non-government and foreign experts who often have needed political and cultural knowledge of intelligence topics. To rectify these inadequacies, the CIA's analytic directorate needs to develop incentives for analysts who wish to develop more strategic analysis and remove the security barriers to closer collaboration with experts outside the US government. Developing cross-agency analytic collaboration would also maximize expertise and would benefit from intelligence community-wide training programs similar to what the US military does at its senior service colleges.     

Why do analysts use structured analytic techniques? An in-depth study of an American intelligence agency

This article presents findings from the first publicly available survey generalizable to an intelligence agency to explore why analysts use structured analytic techniques (SATs). Mandated by the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act (2004), SATs are simple methodologies supposed to make analysis more transparent and, hopefully, valid. Despite the US government’s investment in training thousands of analysts, there is no solid evidence on how often or why analysts actually use SATs. A survey of 80 analysts and nine follow-up interviews at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research reveals a simple, but important, truth: implementing the techniques requires training and compelling evidence they will improve analysis. Other factors, most notably the amount of time pressure an analyst experiences, were not significantly related with the use of the techniques despite anecdotal accounts and conjecture from the literature. Future research should examine other intelligence agencies to cross-validate these findings. If these findings hold in other cases, intelligence agencies should focus on reforming and incorporating evidence into the training process.     

The future of the intelligence analysis task

Abstract

Information technology will have a significant impact on the intelligence analysis workflow, skills, and organization in the next couple of decades. In future, instead of ingesting information themselves, analysts will use a range of information tools to add value to data. Future analysts will need less knowledge of subject matter, and more general reasoning skills. The future task will involve more creativity, and less focus on detail, than today.     

Analytic Outreach for Intelligence: Insights from a Workshop on Emerging Biotechnology Threats

This article describes a new effort to engage in analytic outreach between academic scholars and intelligence analysts on the issue of emerging biotechnology threats to US national security. The context of this outreach was a September 2012 meeting in London to explore possibilities for enhanced analytic outreach in relation to emerging biotechnology threats, supported by the UK Genomics Policy and Research Forum. This meeting consisted of a mix of current and former intelligence practitioners and policy officials, and social science and scientific experts, from both the UK and the US. As will be described below, this unique pairing of experts and subjects revealed new insights into how to improve intelligence assessments on biotechnology and bioweapons threats. It also revealed continuing challenges in reforming assessments within existing intelligence work routines.     

Intelligence Analysis

American intelligence analysts have been severely criticized for failing to anticipate the 9/11 Al Qaeda attacks and for the ill-advised invasion of Iraq. The resulting Intelligence Community reorganization, intended to repair these presumed deficiencies, reflects a misunderstanding of what intelligence analysts can do and where responsibility for political and military decisions lie. In fact, the Intelligence Community is far more diversified in its tasks than is generally realized. Where analysis is done and for whom makes a large difference in its effectiveness. Moreover, changing technology is altering how it is done, where, and by whom. The border between what is ‘strategic’ or ‘national’ intelligence and ‘tactical’ intelligence is much diminished. At the same time, intelligence analysts all too often fail to incorporate the growing amounts of open source information, as well as analytic concepts and theories available from academic and scholarly literature.     

Intelligence Studies Centers: Making Scholarship on Intelligence Analysis Useful

Abstract

Improving intelligence analysis requires bridging the gap between scholarship and practice. Intelligence studies as an academic discipline is not very theoretical compared to the more established disciplines of political science and international relations. In terms of conceptual depth, levels of abstraction and theoretical development, even the theoretical portions of the academic intelligence studies literature could be described as policy relevant and potentially useful for practitioners, including intelligence analysts. Yet despite this orientation to the practitioner, there is still a substantial gap between scholars and practitioners, thus replicating within a more applied context the conventional theory/practice divide that exists in other fields. Those fields do, however, possess a variety of ideas and recommendations that could be used to bring scholarship on intelligence analysis closer to practice. If implemented, these ideas might help actualize the benefits of scholarship that are as yet still unrealized potential.     

Managers of Analysts: The Other Half of Intelligence Analysis

The literature on intelligence analysis has a glaring hole: assessment of the management of analysts and their work. This gap is striking because managers influence all aspects of analysis and share responsibility with analysts for analytic successes and failures. While many managers ably recruit, train, mentor, and manage their analysts, they also are responsible for pathologies that negatively affect analysis and are often incorrectly attributed to analysts. Accurate understanding of the roles and influence of managers should change scholars’ views of the processes of analysis and better balance attention on analysts and managers.     

Intelligence and knowledge development: what are the questions intelligence analysts ask?

Question-asking is central to intelligence. Despite recognition of the importance of questions, in the absence of empirical research, much of what we understand about question-asking within the intelligence process remains speculative or limited to personal experience and memory. To develop an evidence-based approach to improving intelligence, this paper argues that empirical research into the questions that intelligence analysts ask is required. Drawing on insights from educational research, an initial set of research questions is proposed to understand the questions that intelligence analysts actually ask.     

Explaining the depth and breadth of international intelligence cooperation: towards a comprehensive understanding

ABSTRACT

Despite neorealism's predominance in the academic debate, it is too narrow a basis for the comprehensive understanding of present-day international intelligence cooperation. This approach is perfectly capable of explaining what is currently not happening in international intelligence cooperation and why this is the case. However, it is inadequate to understand what does happen in international intelligence cooperation. To explain international intelligence cooperation, especially in long-standing multilateral arrangements such as the EU and NATO, additional approaches are needed. This article advocates stepping beyond a state-centric approach of international intelligence cooperation, viewing it as a process and using a sociological perspective.     

Intelligence in war: how important is it? How do we know?

The role of intelligence in determining outcomes of battles and wars has varied dramatically across conflicts and time, contributing to wide differences in judgments about the importance of intelligence in war. Some analysts minimize the importance of intelligence while others argue it is essential. Opposing perspectives often do not engage each other’s points and generalize from small samples of conflicts. The result is a disjointed discussion of the roles and importance of intelligence in armed conflicts. This article’s aim is to partially rectify this situation by deriving an analytic framework that links intelligence to military operations and strategic outcomes.     

Introducing the special issue: bringing in the public. Intelligence on the frontier between state and civil society

ABSTRACT

This special issue is based on the observation that today’s intelligence services stand before a difficult task of, on the one hand, having to manage the uncertainties associated with new threats by inviting civil actors in to help, while also, on the other hand, having to uphold their own institutional authority and responsibility to act in the interest of the nation. In balancing this task, we show how today’s intelligence practices constantly contests the frontiers between normal politics and security politics and between civil society and the state. In this introduction we argue that these changes can be observed at three different levels. One is at the level of managerial practices of intelligence collection and communication; another is in the increased use of new forms of data, i.e. of social media information; and a third is the expansion of intelligence practices into new areas of concern, e.g. cybersecurity and the policing of (mis-) information.     

Mind games: cognitive bias,US intelligence and the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia

This article examines the impact of cognitive bias on the analytic output of the United States intelligence community during the Prague Spring. Utilising a range of primary sources, including declassified documents, oral history and contemporary accounts, this article argues that as a result of heuristic biases, analysts formed the mindset that the Soviet Union would not invade Czechoslovakia, and did not alter that assumption in the face of increasing evidence to the contrary. Consequently analysts possessed a distorted understanding of both Soviet intentions and the prevailing political environment and did not accurately convey the likelihood of military action to consumers.     

From madness to wisdom: intelligence and the digital crowd

ABSTRACT

This article sheds light on the complexity and sensitivity of crowd-based intelligence in security governance. The 'crowd’ as special manifestation of ‘the public’ is both challenging and enabling new forms of intelligence practices. As a spontaneous eruption of collective activity, the crowd is a notion of great versatility. Sometimes considered mad/dangerous, sometimes wise/useful, the crowd’s drivers are a context-dependent collage of (affective) group engagement, projection from the outside and the workings of digital technologies. The article traces how the existence of crowds in its variations is connected to how they are approached by security agents and their intelligence practices.     

Waking up on another September 12th: implications for intelligence reform

Abstract

After 9/11 the US Government tried to ‘fix’ intelligence by adopting the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act (IRTPA). Resources increased and, to varying degrees, performance improved – particularly in counterterrorism. This article, however, argues that the constellation of Intelligence Community authorities and organizations, either created or left in place by the IRTPA, coupled with the challenges of a complex security environment, leaves us ill-prepared to deal with the Country’s twenty-first century intelligence requirements. Should that critique prove accurate, and should future intelligence failure(s) be judged strategically and politically unacceptable, the second half of the article provides a framework for revising the IRTPA; the proposals substantially increase the authority of the head of the Intelligence Community, consolidate structures, and create centers of analytic critical mass necessary to meet the knowledge requirements for both regional and transnational security issues. Reflecting the Intelligence Community’s long standing tradition of questioning assumptions, the article is meant to foster reflection and debate about whether the Intelligence Community is postured to meet the needs of the Country, and if not, what needs to change.     

Planting the espionage tree: the French military and the professionalization of intelligence at the end of the nineteenth century

Abstract

Intelligence in France evolved as it professionalized at the end of the nineteenth century, led by determined individuals within the French army. However, in the centuries prior to the professionalization of espionage and counterespionage, military men rejected intelligence, viewing the practice with skepticism and disdain. This article asserts that there was a change in views towards espionage, particularly among the military, beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century. As the army went from eschewing intelligence to embracing it and taking the lead in its practice, the nature of intelligence work in France consequently reflected the goals and aims of the army, prioritizing military intelligence over others.     

A doctoral program in the policy sciences

The complex nature of policy problems requires innovative approaches to problem analysis and a new social science interdiscipline focused on policy processes. The Policy Science Program at SUNY Buffalo is designed to advance this field and to train hybrid Ph.D.'s as research-scientists/practitioners. These new policy science professionals will augment policymaking organizations as policy analysts, evaluation researchers, knowledge brokers, research feedback disseminators, process monitors, and consultants. Their training must include research methodology, analytic approaches, orienting conceptual schemes from systems theory, social sciences, and specific problem domains, and operating skills. The curriculum includes both academic and field-training aspects.Though the program is oriented toward the applied sciences, it is an attempt to mold a version of the new combination of revised social science paradigms and analytic approaches identified by Dror as the Policy Sciences.     

Anglo-American Intelligence and the Soviet War Scare: The Untold Story

Abstract

During the Soviet war scare of the 1980s, British intelligence shared vital information from KGB officer Oleg Gordievsky with its American partners. The US intelligence community, however, was suspicious of the message and the messenger, dismissing Soviet ‘war talk’ as disinformation. Some officials even believed that the British had tweaked their reports to influence US policy. President Ronald Reagan, however, on the advice of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, listened to Gordievsky rather than his intelligence advisors. The war scare had a profound influence on Reagan's thinking about nuclear war, Kremlin fears, and Soviet–American relations that led him to seek a new détente with Moscow and the end of the Cold War through diplomacy rather than confrontation.?Subsequent events and post-Cold War revelations vindicated Gordievsky. Reagan sought his advice on the eve of his first summit meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev and later expressed his gratitude during a private meeting in the Oval Office.     

The Next 100 Years? Reflections on the Future of Intelligence

Abstract

A growing interest in the history of intelligence might be a way to learn more about not only the past, but also the dynamics shaping the future of intelligence. Intelligence is an evolving activity and the twentieth-century experience must be regarded as a phase in an ongoing transformation of its institutions, methods and roles. At least six fundamental processes can be identified as relevant to this re-shaping of intelligence in long perspective; the decreasing hegemony of national intelligence, the rise of new fields of knowledge with intelligence relevance, the diminishing relative importance of exclusive sources and methods, the rise of new actors producing and providing intelligence, the loss of an intellectual monopoly in a competitive knowledge environment and finally an increasing demand for reliable assessments and verification in a fragmented world of information.     

British open source intelligence (OSINT) and the Holocaust in the Soviet Union: persecution,extermination and partisan warfare

Where does British open source intelligence (OSINT) fit into the intelligence debate surrounding Allied knowledge of the Holocaust? In particular what can this source of intelligence tell us in regards to the opening of the extermination phase of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union? Were the Allies conclusions being falsely influenced by their own OSINT analysts? Or conversely did OSINT provide further evidence (alongside SIGINT decodes) that the Nazis were now committing mass genocide. This article explores these questions by examining the FRPS/FORD OSINT reports from the civilian ruled territories of (and those intended for) the Reichskommissariate Ostland and Ukraine.