What Analysts Need to
Understand:
The King’s Intelligence Studies Program
Michael S. Goodman and
David Omand
Most of all, the program
offers a containing
space in which
analysts from every part of the community can explore with each other the
interplay of ideas about their profession.
Origins
In April 2007, a British
newspaper the Mail on Sunday ran a story headlined “Can Sherlock Holmes
restore the reputation of our bungling spies?” The report observed, “Spies and Whitehall officials are being given a crash course in
Sherlock Holmes’ deduction techniques to prevent a repeat of the intelligence
failures in the run-up to the Iraq war.” Although not
quite accurate, this was the first public mention of an innovative course
created in the aftermath of Lord Butler’s report on intelligence and Iraqi WMD.[i]
In this article we shall
outline some of the conclusions we have drawn from the first four courses that
we have run over the past two years. What do experienced analysts—those with
five to 10 years on the job—need to know? Or, rather, what do analysts need to
understand?
We are not concerned here with
the acquisition of subject knowledge or the honing of techniques of analysis.
Such teaching is best delivered in a secure environment with the classified
databases and tools to which analysts would have access in their work. Exposure
to an academic environment, such as the Department of War Studies at King’s
College London, can add several elements that may be harder to provide within
the government system: close access to academic disciplines, such as military
history, intelligence history, international relations, social sciences and so
on; an introduction to the relevant literature; and exposure to a variety of
critical views, including the unorthodox. But most of all, it offers a
containing space in which analysts from every part of the community can explore
with each other the interplay of ideas about their profession.
We have earlier written how
“intelligence is not a new phenomenon, the academic study of intelligence is.”
That article went on to describe how “intelligence” as an academic discipline
is studied and taught in the United Kingdom.[ii] It is worth briefly reiterating some of its
findings as they pertain to the training of government intelligence officers.
The CIA had recognized as early as 1960 how beneficial it would be to use
universities as a means of intelligence training.[iii] Put simply, it was felt that by
enhancing the understanding of practitioners of intelligence, they would be
able to work more effectively.[iv] Such a course would be led by someone with
“extensive and well-rounded intelligence experience” and as a whole would
“apply the teachings of many academic disciplines.”[v]
Lord Butler, in his 2004 Review
of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction, called for an increase in
the number of British intelligence analysts and suggested forming a
specialization of analysis with scope for advancement within it across the
entire British intelligence community. It fell to David Omand, then UK
intelligence and security coordinator, to start to turn the report into action.
He chaired a high-level implementation group with the chairman of the Joint
Intelligence Committee, the heads of the UK intelligence
agencies and the permanent heads of the government departments most concerned.
It was recognized that:
- The high level of secrecy that is inevitable within an intelligence
community means that training has to be largely in-house, but that, in turn,
makes it more important to provide opportunities for analysts to meet and
develop a wider professional outlook.
- Care is needed that analysts do not come to see themselves as a
professional “closed shop” that might make it harder for the intelligence
agencies to rotate their intelligence officers between operational, analytical
and managerial duties, bringing the experience of their service to bear during
their tours of duty in the analytical environment, for example when seconded to
the Cabinet Office Assessments Staff or to the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre
(JTAC).
-
The label “analyst” should be interpreted widely to include researchers
who regularly use secret intelligence, for example in the Foreign Office or in
the Serious and Organised Crime Agency (SOCA), and not just be confined to
“all-source analysts.”
A professional head of
intelligence analysis (PHIA), working within the Cabinet Office’s Intelligence
and Security Secretariat, was subsequently appointed to promote the idea of
greater professionalism in analysis and to help generate this sense of
profession, albeit a virtual one. One of her early initiatives was to
commission us at King’s College London to develop a course for experienced
analysts.
With a small staff, the PHIA’s
main tasks are to provide advice in the security, defense and foreign affairs
fields on gaps and duplication in analyst capabilities, on recruitment of
analysts, their career structures and interchange opportunities; to advise on
analytical methodology across the intelligence community; and to develop more
substantial training on a cross-government basis for all analysts working in
these fields. The overall aim of these tasks is to enhance the analytic
capability of the United Kingdom’s
intelligence community to enable it to work together more effectively and
provide the highest quality intelligence to ministers and policy makers.
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Approach
The aim set for the course can
be summarized as promoting multidisciplinary understanding of the concepts,
issues and debates regarding intelligence. Analysts will thus become more aware
of issues around the meaning, value, nature and proper use of intelligence, and
more confident in their own discussions of these topics. Fostering that sense
of being part of a single UK intelligence
community, and of belonging to the virtual profession of analysts, represents a
key underlying motivation for the course.
To achieve this aim we offer
the analysts encouragement to look at their profession from four points of
view, based on Stafford Thomas’s pioneering fourfold typology of intelligence
studies:[vi]
- The functional approach: studying an intelligence cycle appropriate for the needs
of a 21st century national security strategy, looking at the development of
intelligence activities, processes, and technologies. The choice of analytic
methodology is examined, drawing on the experience of other professions
grappling with problems of knowledge.
- The historical/biographical approach: studying the historical experiences of the use of
intelligence, good and bad; examples examined have included the controversy
over Iraqi WMD, the Falklands War, and UK counterintelligence against the Soviet Union.
- The structural approach: studying the institutional development of the UK
intelligence community, especially the Joint Intelligence Committee and the
more recent JTAC. We look in particular at how the UK
intelligence community has adapted to an era of avowal, greater openness, and
judicial and parliamentary oversight.
-
The political approach: looking at the part that pre-emptive intelligence now
plays in operational decision-making in counterterrorism and other areas. This
provides the opportunity to sensitize the analysts to the institutional
dynamics of analytical organizations and the obvious pathologies that can occur
in the relationship between the intelligence community and its customers. The
ethics of intelligence gathering, sharing and public use are examined in the
context of current counterterrorism strategies.
These four ways of looking at
the subject are inter-woven through the classes, each two hours long, typically
comprising a mixture of lecture and discussion. Learning in the 10-week course
is assessed by means of a 4,000-word essay, marked to King’s College London MA
marking criteria. For this, participants are explicitly required not to rely on
practical experience but to utilize the wide intelligence studies literature.
In their essay they will normally choose the one approach with which they have
come to feel most comfortable. One outcome of this is that those who take and
pass the course are given a number of credits, which they can then use toward
one of the nine MA degrees offered by the Department of War Studies, or indeed
any other MA offered within King’s College London; in effect it is a means of
encouraging thinking about broader personal and professional development.
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What do the sessions cover?
1) The
functional approach
Starting with the functional
approach, the emphasis is on developing an awareness—a self-consciousness—of
the mental processes that we all employ when we do what we call “analysis.”
There is much we can learn here from other professions and from recognizing the
differences between them. We draw attention to the relevant methods of analysis
employed by journalists, physicians, historians, paleontologists, detectives,
mathematicians, and physical and social scientists. Each group has something of
methodological value to offer to the debate in terms of what makes for reliable
evidence, how to judge between competing theories, what makes theories useful,
and how uncertainty is dealt with.
One unusual example is
paleontology, an academic discipline that has had to develop a methodology and
tools for assessing fragmentary and often incomplete evidence, on an
internationally collaborative basis, and drawing general conclusions from the
evidence. For instance, from the example of modern human origins (MHO) comes
discussion of paradigm shifts and competing hypotheses and how best to select
between them when direct experimentation is not possible. One intelligence tool
that we explore is the use of the Heuer model,[vii] as developed by the UK Defence Intelligence
Staff (DIS) and which provides a structured way for analysts to relate
competing hypotheses to their essential assumptions. The need for care over
deception, in the form of examples such as the Piltdown fraud, can also be
introduced here.
From the mathematicians comes
the Bayesian approach, where we emphasize the way that new information can be
reliably and consistently incorporated to revise an estimate of the
believability of a hypothesis. Heuristics, such as those of the mathematician
George Polya, are introduced, including his advice to draw diagrams, try and
recognize when similar problems have been solved in the past, and the notion
that if a problem is too hard to solve, attempt solution of a related but much
simpler version.
At the same time the fuzzy
logic school provides the analysts with cautionary lessons concerning the less
than Cartesian categories of the typical real-world problem. A general issue
young analysts invariably raise at this point is how far such theoretical
examinations of decisionmaking can have application to their real-world
problems. An example we have used will illustrate the point. The example below
sets out an apparently simple practical problem that just might be posed to an
analyst supporting an arms control inspection regime:
You are an
imagery analyst looking for an unlawful biological warfare trailer. You think
it could be hidden in one of three equally likely locations, A, B or C. You
pick one, say site C, and start to prep the arms control inspectors for a snap
inspection. The host country then unexpectedly throws open one of the other
sites, site A, to journalists so it is obviously not there. You have the chance
to change your advice to the inspection team and tell them now to go to site B
or stick with your original choice, C. Should you change, or stick to C?
When posed this question,
analysts immediately split into two camps. The minority quickly spots the
underlying structure of what in North
America is known as the “Monty Hall problem,” from the
name of the game show host.[viii] As a problem in probability it is straight
forward, if paradoxical. The majority of analysts who have not come across the
problem refuse to believe the result when they first come across it but can be
persuaded to follow the probabilistic reasoning, as set out in Figure 1.
![Figure 1 Figure 1](https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/eot2008/20090506030524im_/https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol-52-no-4/images/Figure1_mini.jpg)
That, however, is the start of
the teaching point. The analysis of the probabilities in the graphic depends
upon a set of strict assumptions that are not explicit in the question. For the
intelligence analyst little, if anything, should be taken for granted,
especially statements from the opponent. What unlocks a proper analysis of the
problem for the analyst is understanding where implicit assumptions are being
made about the reporting being received. For example, do we assume that the
opponent knows which initial site was picked (the question does not say so)? If
not, the solution is quite different. Would it be safe not to assume he knows,
given the history of arms inspection regimes? Is the opponent engaged in
deception, using the media as a shield? Can it be safely assumed that the
opponent who threw open the site was privy to the secret of where the
bio-trailer was actually located? And so on.
In the end, the problem reduces
to a number of alternative hypotheses, on a number of different assumptions,
and the analyst can use the Heuer table approach to rank these. Our
calculations show that the problem is asymmetric: the wise analyst will advise
switching on the grounds that some assumptions will improve the prediction,
while on others it makes the chances no worse.
One of the objectives of taking
the analysts through such exercises is to emphasize that prediction may not
match reality because the model of human motivation being used to interpret the
intelligence has built-in inappropriate assumptions. This lesson about the
nature of explanation is important for analysts to understand. The point has
been well made by a leading quantum physicist, as originally attributed to
Bertrand Russell in his philosophy lectures, but which we adapt to the
intelligence world. Imagine a chicken farm where the chickens spy on the farmer
and intercept a message that he is ordering much more chicken food. The JIC of
chickens meets. Is their key judgment that at last peaceful coexistence has
come and the farmer is going to feed them properly in the future? Or is it that
they are all doomed since they are about to be fattened for the kill? It is the
same raw reporting, but different implicit assumptions about human behavior.
The fact that
the same observational evidence can be extrapolated to give two diametrically
opposite predictions according to which explanation one adopts, and cannot
justify either of them, is not some accidental limitation of the farmyard
environment: it is true of all observational evidence under all circumstances.[ix]
Or, to put it another way, as
the Nobel prize–winner Paul Dirac said of the early Bohr model of the hydrogen
atom, it is possible to get the right answer for the wrong reason.
We have found that many young
analysts implicitly carry in their heads what might be described as an
inductivist model of their work, involving experience of being able to
generalize from patterns or from changes to recognized patterns. They need to
be reminded of
the asymmetry
between experimental refutation and experimental confirmation. Whereas an
incorrect prediction automatically renders the underlying explanation
unsatisfactory, a correct prediction says nothing at all about the underlying
explanation. Shoddy explanations that yield correct predictions are two a
penny, as UFO enthusiasts, conspiracy theorists and pseudo-scientists of every
variety should (but never do) bear in mind.[x]
We emphasize too the risk of
overinterpreting evidence and contriving ever more complex explanations to fit
available data. As the late Professor R. V. Jones, the father of scientific
intelligence, put it in a dictum he called Crabtree’s bludgeon:
No set of
mutually consistent observations can exist for which some human intellect cannot
conceive a coherent explanation.[xi]
Discussion with analysts
usually leads to their volunteering examples from their experience of the human
tendency to try to explain away apparently contradictory evidence that might
confound the favorite explanation of the moment. A temptation we have all
noticed is likely to be unconsciously stronger if that explanation is known to
be favoured by the senior customer, or if deciding upon it has been particularly
stressful for the organization, in which case a form of cognitive dissonance
may effectively blank out discussion of alternative explanations.
A well-documented case that
illustrates the pitfalls here, which we give the analysts to examine, is the
1982 “yellow rain” allegation of Soviet BCW agent use in Laos and Cambodia.[xii] In that case there were good reasons for
initially giving credence to the reports, but as contrary evidence began to
emerge it was explained away by ever more complex explanation. Thus, as an
example, the alleged agent particle size was smaller than might have been
expected, well, that just showed how fiendishly clever the enemy was because
smaller particles could be ingested more quickly through the lungs as well as
through skin absorption. In the end, analysis by labs such as the UK’s Porton
Down showed no trace of BCW agent and the organic substance found was probably
pollen from clouds of defecating wild bees—as perhaps the analysts might have
found out if experts on the fauna of the region had been consulted initially,
another useful learning point. There may well have been covert activity going
on in the region, but this was not the way to go about uncovering it.
We introduce the students
gently to postmodern critiques of international relations and the role of
intelligence—the only session that we might describe as turbulent since our
experience is that most analysts are impatient with modern structuralist
thinking. However, it is important for analysts to realize how the language
they habitually use, such as intelligence collection, production, analysis,
assessment and so-called finished product (and the meaning that different
generations of customers may ascribe to words such as probably) are categories
that can shape and constrain thinking.
![Figure2 Figure2](https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/eot2008/20090506030524im_/https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol-52-no-4/images/Figure2_mini.jpg)
In discussion with analysts we
have found our own thinking about the “intelligence cycle” being reshaped. The
depiction of the intelligence cycle in Figure 2 uses “access” to cover all
three types of information that can be turned into intelligence: traditional
secret sources, open sources (including nonintelligence government information,
such as diplomatic reporting) and the third increasingly important category of
private information covered by data protection legislation (such as financial,
credit, travel, passport, biometrics and communications records).
We have found that the analysts
respond readily to the term “access,” that deliberately conjures up the image
of the analyst and the collector working together and the development of a new
skill set of mission management to connect them. We only have time in the
course for the merest glimpse of the technological possibilities that the
future will bring here for their work, for example in data mining and pattern
recognition software.
Our description of the cycle
uses “elucidation” to describe the ways in which usable intelligence can be
created by shedding new light on what is going on in theaters of interest,
providing a crucial element to situational awareness and providing surer
explanations of what has been experienced from which more reliable predictions
can be generated.
As Winston Churchill put it:
“The further back you look the further ahead you can see.” Certainly the
traditional evidence-based inferential work is still there, as it was during
the Cold War, but so is seeing inside the head of the enemy. The term
“dissemination” is used to convey the sowing of seeds in the minds of other
analysts as well as customers, and to a much wider group of potential users,
including local police officers or operators of the critical national
infrastructure, interested in data streams, pictures, maps and video as well as
written reports of the traditional kind.
From these discussions we have
the impression that analysts are being pulled in two different directions. On
the one hand, the center of gravity of UK intelligence work
has shifted to “action-on” intelligence, to use the old SIGINT expression. That
brings a very close interaction with the user operating in real time or near
real time, a feature of both support for military operations and support for
what in UK
parlance we might call the civil authority, including law enforcement over
terrorism, narcotics, proliferation and serious criminality.
On the other hand, the demands
for high-level analysis have become more demanding, with military involvement
in Iraq
and in Afghanistan,
where strategic judgments depend crucially on deep knowledge of language,
customs, history, religion, tribal relationships and personalities, and
topography that place exceptional demands on the analyst. The future will hold
many demands for such deep analysis of global phenomena, such as resource
shortages and the security impact of climate change, posing real challenges for
the next generation of young analysts.
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2) The historical/biographical
approach
Under the heading of the
historical approach, the analysts have been able to hear Professor Sir Lawrence
Freedman analyzing the dynamic interaction between UK and Argentine intelligence in the
run-up to the invasion of the Falkland
Islands and showing how perceptions of the moves made
by one side affected the other.[xiii] For example, Argentine intelligence
incorrectly assumed that a nuclear attack submarine was leaving Gibraltar for
the South Atlantic.
The UK
government was not unhappy to have such a deterrent message understood, but the
Joint Intelligence Committee failed to assess that the Argentine junta would,
as a result, actually accelerate its plans for invasion before supposed British
reinforcements arrived. Such dynamic situations are much the hardest that the
intelligence analyst ever has to face. Another important lesson is that
dictators may not react the way democracies would.
Different lessons about the use
of intelligence have been provided by Gill Bennett, until recently chief
historian of the Foreign Office, with her analysis of the meticulous
intelligence case built up against Soviet espionage that allowed the UK to
expel 105 Soviet officials in 1971 (Operation Foot), a blow from which their
effort against the UK never recovered.[xiv] She contrasts that with the hasty and botched
action in 1927 against ARCOS, the Soviet trade society that had been fomenting
industrial subversion. In attempting to defend his action, Prime Minister
Stanley Baldwin revealed to Parliament the contents of an intercepted Soviet
telegram with the obvious result that readability of Soviet diplomatic cyphers
was promptly lost.
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3) The structural or
institutional approach
It would be fair to say that we
have found the analysts less knowledgeable than they need to be about the
history of the wider intelligence community outside their own employing agency
or organization. In particular, the history of the UK’s
Joint Intelligence Committee has many lessons for the analyst in understanding
the developing relationship with the policy customer.
Examples abound of JIC key
judgments that illustrate predictive intelligence at its worst and best. At its
worst, we examine the conclusions of the recently declassified Nicoll Report
that provide the basis for a rich discussion of mirror imaging, perseveration,
transferred judgment, etc., all made worse by group think.[xv] At its best (leaving aside the double
negative which would be disapproved of today), we have the following historical
key judgment based on fresh HUMINT in 1939:
Apparently
the reason which was supposed to have led Herr Hitler and his advisers to come
to this decision was that they felt the rearmament of the democratic powers was
proceeding at such a pace that Germany’s relative
strength would inevitably decline. This was therefore the moment to strike…by
reason of [intelligence reports] which show which way the wind was blowing, it
is unfortunately no longer possible to assume that there is no likelihood of
Germany “coming West” in 1939.[xvi]
And this judgment from 1956 on Suez:
Should
Western military action be insufficient to ensure early and decisive victory,
the international consequences both in the Arab States
and elsewhere might give rise to extreme embarrassment and cannot be foreseen.
This shows a nice delicacy
about reaching a judgment, not about the enemy but about your own government’s
proposed actions.[xvii]
One of the course sessions that
has been the most popular has been that dealing with the history of avowal and
oversight. We examine how the use of pre-emptive intelligence in countering
terrorism has brought greater public awareness and, at times, criticism of
intelligence work. We engage the analysts in a vigorous debate about the ethics
of intelligence, one of the most appreciated sessions on the course, given sensitivities
over the uses that may be made of their intelligence to guide military or
police action.
On a lighter note, we have
devoted one session in each course to examining how the serious media now
operate. Students have been fascinated to talk to the foreign editor of a
leading journal and to a leading BBC correspondent to learn first hand about
how the process of serious reporting is managed, open and private sources
handled, and editorial discretion exercised, since in journalism, as in
intelligence analysis, to edit is to choose. Writing accurately and clearly, to
a tight deadline, is a skill that both professions have to exercise.
Our media representatives
readily concede, however, that there is one big difference. As the Economist
put it many years ago on the retirement of Sir Kenneth Strong as the director
general of defence intelligence:
Modern
intelligence has to do with the painstaking collection and analysis of fact,
the exercise of judgment, and clear and quick presentation. It is not simply
what serious journalists would always produce if they had time: it is something
more rigorous, continuous, and above all operational—that is to say, related to
something that someone wants to do or may be forced to do.[xviii]
4) The political approach
Under this heading, the course
examines the analyst/customer (variously called the producer/consumer)
relationship. Two models are compared at the outset of the course, broadly the
school associated in the literature with Bob Gates’s time as DCI and that
espoused decades earlier by Sherman Kent. Most of the analysts feel comfortable
adapting their approach to circumstances. We discuss times when the former
approach is more appropriate, for example in strategic assessment of issues of
peace and war (Iraq), and times when a
very close mutual understanding is needed (uncovering terrorist networks).
We have many more publicly
documented case studies of problems in intelligence assessment to draw on
than there are documented successes. The Butler
inquiry has provided useful case histories, including A.Q. Khan and Libya,
to balance its strictures about intelligence on Iraqi WMD. In the course, we do
however look in detail at the now reasonably well documented controversy over
pre-war associations between al-Qa’ida and Iraq
and, in particular, the case of Curveball and Iraqi BW trailers.
We encourage the analysts to
distinguish between intelligence “gaps” and intelligence “failures.” Certainly,
as far as domestic counterterrorism is concerned, they need to accept that the
former will always exist—the analysts are, we find, very balanced in their
views about the acceptable limits of surveillance. To be classed as a failure,
there has to be a reasonable expectation that the analysts could have had
access to actionable intelligence that would have provided timely warning were
it not for some negligence, including that resulting from over-stretch,
inadequate training, personal dereliction of duty, institutional rivalries and
so on. The analyst needs to be alert to the first warning signs of incipient
failure conditions.
In looking at the relationship
with the user, the writings of Professor R.V. Jones provide examples during WW
II when he resorted to advocacy rather than presenting facts neutrally, fearing
important warnings were not being heeded. Who could blame an analyst for
advocacy, faced with, say, a General Percival in Singapore refusing to accept
the reality of the impending Japanese invasion or a secretary of defense, as
Robert Macnamara admits in his own memoir, resisting appreciation of the true
state of affairs developing in Vietnam?
But the analysts are quick to
recognize this must never, ever, become the slanting of intelligence. And the
analyst must encourage the customer to recognize that what the analyst is
painting is an impressionist portrait, without the complete detail that you
would find in a photograph. So what is included as the essential highlights and
what is left out as distracting detail is a matter of analytical judgment.
Customer and analyst alike need to be conscious of this.
We look, therefore, in a final
session at institutional dynamics as they might apply to teams of analysts and
their interactions with users. What modes of behavior are likely to encourage
innovation and creativity (or not)? How much latitude should the dissenting
analyst expect, and what safety valves exist, such as the use of the
intelligence counsellor, an independent senior retired figure who can be
consulted in confidence over professional issues of conscience? What are the
first symptoms of group think and blame culture? We find that most of the
answers here come from the analysts with little or no prompting from the tutors,
demonstrating that recent experiences have had their impact on the intelligence
community.
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Conclusion
To conclude, as a result of
having worked with four iterations of the course, we think we have a better
understanding now of what, outside the professional tools of their trade, it
would be helpful for the up and coming analyst to understand better. Much of
this understanding revolves around self-knowledge and development of sound
instincts of curiosity.
The first permanent secretary
that David Omand ever met was in the Ministry of Defence in London over 35 years ago. He sat in a large,
elegant Whitehall
office and inquired kindly about how this new recruit was settling in and then
he said, “You may wonder what a permanent secretary does all day. Let me tell
you.” He went on, “I sit behind my desk and I transfer papers from my intray to
my outtray. And, as I lift them, I sniff them, and 35 years in Whitehall has given me the ability to tell
when advice going through to the minister is soundly based and well timed, and
it has also given me the nose to detect a wrong’un.”
This encounter was, of course,
before the advent of managerialism in the British public service. But his words
were good advice in relation to developing strong professional instincts.
Perhaps, for he was a highly educated man, he had in mind Wittgenstein’s
account of a visit to a tailor, when the experienced customer who knows his own
mind came to indicate his choice from an endless number of patterns of suiting—almost
beyond words of explanation—no, this is slightly too dark, this is slightly too
loud, this is just right.[xix] The experienced mind is demonstrated by the
way choice and selection is indicated.
Much of the early career may
necessarily be spent in acquiring mastery of the necessary technical skills of
the analytic trade, processing raw intelligence, in searching through imagery
or communications patterns and collating data of every kind. For experienced
analysts, however, what will make the difference are the instincts—which we
believe can be developed—that can be brought to bear to generate hypotheses
worth testing on the evidence base. It may rest on the ability to get into the
mind of the adversary, to understand the responses of a foreign culture, to
sense when new thinking is needed, and—in the words of that permanent
secretary—to spot a wrong’un. It will rest also on deep understanding of the
world inhabited by the users of their intelligence, to understand what
intelligence they need to do their job better, and also to sense what they do
not yet know that they need to know, and that the intelligence community might
be able to provide if appropriately tasked.
To conclude with the words of
Richards Heuer, which might have been written for the course at King’s College
London:
Intelligence
analysts should be self-conscious about their reasoning processes. They should
think about how they make judgments and reach conclusions, not just about the
judgments and conclusions themselves.[xx]
[Top of page]
Footnotes
[i]HC 898. The Lord Butler of Brockwell. Review of
Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction. (London: The Stationary Office, 2004).
[ii]M.S. Goodman, “Studying and Teaching About
Intelligence: The Approach in the United Kingdom,” Studies in
Intelligence 50, no. 2 (2006): 57–65.
[iii]P.J. Dorondo, “For College Courses in
Intelligence,” Studies in Intelligence 4, no. 3 (1960).
[iv]S.T. Thomas, “Assessing Current Intelligence
Studies,” International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence
2, no. 2 (1988): 239.
[v]Dorondo, A15–A16.
[vi]Thomas, 239.
[vii]R Heuer, The Psychology of Intelligence
Analysis, (CIA: The Center for the Study of Intelligence, 1999)
[viii]An entertaining simulation can be found at math.ucsd.edu/~crypto/Monty/monty.html
[ix]D. Deutsch. The Fabric of Reality. (London:
Allen Lane, 1997)
[x]Ibid.
[xi]R.V. Jones. Reflections on Intelligence
(London: Mandarin, 1989).
[xii]With acknowledgments to Professors Meselson and
Perry Robinson, who generously allowed us to draw on their work on this subject
as part of the Harvard Sussex program.
[xiii]L. Freedman, The Official History of the
Falklands Campaign (London:
Routledge, 2005).
[xiv]Documents on British Policy Overseas. Series III:
Volume I – Britain
and the Soviet Union, 1968-1972.
(London: The Stationery Office, 1997).
[xv]M.S. Goodman, “The Dog That Didn’t Bark: The Joint
Intelligence Committee and the Warning of Aggression,” Cold War History
7, no 4 (November 2007): 529–51.
[xvi]Cited in W. Wark, The Ultimate Enemy: British
Intelligence and Nazi Germany,
1933–1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985).
[xvii]Cited in P. Cradock, Know Your Enemy: How the
Joint Intelligence Committee Saw the World. (London:
John Murray, 2002).
[xviii]The Economist, 1 October 1966: 20.
[xix]L. Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations
(Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1966), 7.
[xx]Heuer, ch. 4.
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