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CHAPTER 6
ANALYSIS
Casting aside the perceived—and I must admit the occasionally real—excitement of secret operations, the absolute essence of the intelligence profession rests in the production of current intelligence reports, memoranda and National Estimates on which sound policy decisions can be made.
Richard Helms,
A Look over My Shoulder
A
S DIRECTOR of Central Intelligence (DCI) Richard Helms (1966-1973) observed, despite all the attention lavished on the operational side of intelligence (collection and covert action), analysis is the mainstay of the process. Intelligence analysis provides civil and military policy makers with information directly related to the issues they face and the decisions they have to make. Intelligence products do not arrive on policy makers’ desks once or twice a day, but in a steady stream throughout the day. Certain products, particularly the daily intelligence reports and briefings, are received first thing in the morning, but other intelligence reports can be delivered when they are ready or may be held for delivery at a specific time.
Although not all intelligence practitioners agree, the ongoing production and delivery of intelligence can have a numbing effect on policy makers. Intelligence analysis can become part of the daily flood of information—intelligence products, commercially provided news, reports from policy offices, embassies, military commands, and so on. One of the challenges for intelligence is to make itself stand out from this steady stream of information.
Intelligence can be made to stand out in two ways. One is to emphasize the unique nature of the intelligence sources. But this option is not the preferred choice of intelligence officials, who believe that they are much more than just conduits for their sources. The other way for intelligence to achieve prominence is to produce analysis that stands out on its own merits by adding value. The value added includes the timeliness of intelligence products, the ability of the community to tailor products to specific policy makers’ needs, and the objectivity of the analysis. One analyst who had been a presidential briefer put it this way: “My value was telling the president something he didn’t already know about something he needed to know.” But the fact that value-added intelligence is discussed as often as it is within the intelligence community suggests that it is not achieved as often as desired.
MAJOR THEMES
Prescribing how to produce value-added intelligence—or to measure the frequency with which it is produced—is difficult because intelligence officers and their policy clients do not agree on what adds value. For policy clients, value added is an idiosyncratic and personal attribute.
Analysis is much more than sitting down with the collected material, sifting and sorting it, and coming up with a brilliant piece of prose that makes sense of it all. Major decisions have to be made in the analytical process, and several areas of controversy have proved to be resilient or recurrent.
FORMAL REQUIREMENTS. In the ideal intelligence-process model, policy makers give some thought to their main requirements for intelligence and then communicate them to the intelligence managers. Such a formal process has not appeared often in the history of the intelligence community, leaving managers to make educated guesses about what intelligence is required.
Some people argue that a less formal process is, in reality, much better than the presumed ideal one, because most of the requirements of intelligence are fairly well known and do not need to be defined. For example, most people, if asked to name the main U.S. intelligence priorities during the cold war, would mention a number of Soviet-related issues. Even in the less clear post-cold war period before the September 2001 terrorist attacks, a similar exercise would yield such answers as narcotics, terrorism, proliferation, Russia’s reform and stability, and the regional trouble spots of the moment, such as the Balkans, the Middle East, and North Korea. The list parallels the U.S. intelligence priorities as stated in the Clinton administration’s Presidential Decision Directive 35. After September 2001, terrorism became the primary, but not the sole, focus of intelligence.
The real importance of the requirements process may lie in giving the intelligence community some sense of priority among the requirements. Formal discussions about priorities between senior policy makers and intelligence officers tend to revolve around relative degrees of importance instead of issues that have been added to the priorities list or overlooked. Assigning priorities is especially important and difficult in the absence of a single overwhelming issue, as was the case from roughly 1991 (the end of the Soviet Union) until 2001. When several issues are considered to be of roughly equal importance, no single one of them has priority. However, this seeming lack of focus may reflect the reality of national security interests. In such a circumstance the intelligence managers must then make critical decisions about the allocation of collection and analytical resources among several equally important issues.
Another issue in setting priorities is the fact that very few, if any, national security issues or threats are completely independent issues. Instead, there are interconnections among many issues. For example, the nexus between terrorism and weapons of mass destruction (WMD) is a constant concern. Terrorism is also connected to narcotics, as narcotics trafficking is a primary means of funding terrorism. In addition, terrorism and other transnational issues (crime, narcotics, human trafficking, etc.) thrive in failed states, which have little law and order or control over their borders. The issues in such failed states are not equally important, or threatening, but it is necessary to take into account the interconnections when determining priorities. Thus, a lesser issue may get more attention because of its relationship to a more pressing issue.
It is also important to understand that issues do not exist in an abstract realm: All issues have a geographic aspect. This may be broad or narrow but every issue can be tied to specific locations. In determining priorities, it may be useful to differentiate based on the importance of the geographic aspect of the issue. For example, drugs being produced in Afghanistan may be seen as more problematic than those produced in Southeast Asia because of the Afghan-Taliban-al Qaeda connection. This geographic differentiation may also be useful in determining which supporting issues are more or less important.
Finally, issues are not monolithic. Every nation in which the United States has intelligence interests comprises several issues (e.g., political, military, social, economic) that will be of varying importance depending on the nation and its relationship to the United States. For example, U.S. interest in the state of the British military is that of assessing the capabilities of a close ally. while in North Korea we focus on the capabilities of a potential enemy. Although both are capabilities issues, the basis of our intelligence interest in each is quite different. Similarly. when dealing with a transnational issue, such as terrorism, it is important to differentiate among the various groups, their capabilities, their locations, and their interrelationships. Not every group will pose the same level of threat or of interest. It is important for intelligence managers to be able to make these distinctions to achieve the optimal allocation of both collection and analytical resources, even when examining the same issues.
CURRENT VERSUS LONG-TERM INTELLIGENCE. The struggle between current and long-term intelligence is a perennial analytical issue.
Current intelligence—
reports and analysis on issues that may not extend more than a week or two into the future—is the mainstay of the intelligence community, the product most often requested and seen by policy makers. In many respects, current intelligence pays the rent for the intelligence community. Current intelligence always predominates over other types, but the degree of this predominance varies over time. During a crisis or war, current intelligence increases, as many of the decisions made during these periods are tactical in nature—even among senior policy makers—thus demanding current intelligence.