Part of the problem stems from the limitations of the analyst hiring process. In the United States, recruiters go to colleges and universities looking for potential analysts. Other candidates simply apply on their own. But this is a seller’s market. The intelligence agencies can hire only those people who evince an interest. Certain schools may have programs that tend to produce more analysts of a certain interest or skill, but this does not appreciably solve the problem. Congress has given the intelligence community a limited ability to offer scholarships for analysts with particular skills, in return for which the analysts must work for the intelligence community for a set number of years. Although a valuable change, such ability does not solve the recruitment problem.
Thus, the intelligence community has greater analytic capabilities in some areas than in others. The situation can be ameliorated to some extent by moving analysts around from issue to issue, but sacrificing depth for breadth can result. The point remains that all analysts have limitations that can curtail the ability of the intelligence community to respond as expected and as the community would prefer.
ANALYST TRAINING. Until recently, the intelligence community did not spend a significant amount of time on analyst training. Training is most useful in giving incoming analysts a sense of what is expected of them, how the larger community works, and its ethos and rules. No amount of training, however, can obviate the fact that much of what an analyst needs to know is learned on the job. Analysts arrive with certain skills garnered from their college or graduate school studies or their work experience (a significant number of analysts now come to the intelligence community after having begun careers in other areas) and then are assimilated into their specific intelligence agency or unit. They learn basic processes and requirements, the daily work schedule, and preferred means of expression, which vary from agency to agency. They become familiar with the types of intelligence with which they will be working.
The minimum skills for all analysts are knowledge of one or more specific fields, appropriate language skills, and a basic ability to express themselves in writing. A senior official used to ask his subordinates two questions about new analysts they wished to hire: Do they think interesting thoughts? Do they write well? This official believed that, with these two talents in hand, all else would follow with training and experience.
The basic skills are a foundation on which better skills must be built. Some of the new skills to be mastered are parochial. Each intelligence agency has its own corporate style that must be learned. More important, analysts must learn to cope with the wheat versus chaff problem and to write as succinctly as possible. These two skills reflect the demands of current intelligence and the fact that policy makers are busy and prefer economies of style. The bureaucratic truism remains that shorter papers will usually best longer papers in the competition for policy makers attention.
Training analysts about collection systems appears to fall short of desired goals, given the ignorance expressed by even some senior analysts about this important topic. Furthermore, until 2006, the U.S. intelligence community had no common training for analysts. Each agency trained its own analysts, in effect creating stovepipes at the outset of analysts’ careers. As of 2007 there are now two parallel training efforts. There are small cross-community classes and a continuation of the individualized training in each agency.
Another important skill that analysts must learn is objectivity. Although intelligence analysts can and often do have strong personal views about the issues they are covering, their opinions have no place in intelligence products. Analysts are listened to because of their accumulated expertise, not the forcefulness of their views. Presenting personal conclusions would cross the line between intelligence and policy. Still, analysts need training to learn how to filter out their views, especially when they run counter to the intelligence at hand or the policies being considered.
A more subtle and difficult skill to master is cultivating the intelligence consumer without politicizing the intelligence as a means of currying favor.
Finally, there is the question of how far training (or experience) can take a given analyst. Any reasonably intelligent individual with the right skills and education can be taught to be an effective analyst. But the truly gifted analyst—like the truly gifted athlete, musician, or scientist—is inherently better at his or her job by virtue of inborn talents. Being able to analyze and synthesize intuitively and quickly and having a good nose for the subtext of a situation are innate skills that are hard to acquire. In all fields, such individuals are rare. They must be nurtured. But the benefits they derive from training are different from those that accrue to less gifted analysts.
MANAGING ANALYSTS. Managing intelligence analysts presents a number of unique problems. A major concern is developing career tracks. Analysts need time to develop true expertise in their fields, but intellectual stagnation can set in if an analyst is left to cover the same issue for too long. Rotating analysts among assignments quickly helps them avoid becoming stale and allows them to learn more than one area. But this career pattern raises the possibility that analysts will never gain expertise in any one area, instead becoming generalists. Ideally, managers seek to create some middle ground—providing analysts with assignments that are long enough for them to gain expertise and substantive knowledge while also providing sufficient opportunities to shift assignments and maintain intellectual freshness. Nor is there any specific time frame for assignments; the length depends on the individual analyst, the relative intensity of the current assignment, and the demands generated by intelligence requirements at the time. More intense jobs tend to argue for somewhat shorter tours to avoid burnout. But more urgent issues also tend to have higher priority, demanding greater expertise and consistency of staffing. Thus, there are again competing needs.
The criteria for promotion are another management issue. As government employees, intelligence analysts are generally assured of promotions up to a level that can be described as high-middle. The criteria for promotion through the grades are not overly rigorous. Promotions should come as a result of merit, not time served. But what criteria should a manager consider in evaluating an intelligence analyst for merit promotion: accuracy of analysis over the past year, writing skills, increased competence in foreign languages and foreign area knowledge, participation in a specific number of major studies? And how should a manager weigh the various criteria?
The competition is stronger for more senior assignments than for those at the lower level, and the criteria for selection are different. The qualities that first merit promotion—keen analytical abilities—are the ticket to management positions, where responsibilities and pay are greater. Ironically, or perhaps sadly, analytical skills have little to do with, and are little indication of, the ability to carry out managerial duties. But, with few exceptions, management positions have been the only route to senior promotion. The CIA has created a Senior Analytical Service, which allows analysts to reach the first rungs of senior ranks solely on the basis of their analytical capabilities.
ANALYSTS’ MIND-SET. Analysts, as a group, exhibit a set of behaviors that can affect their work. Not all analysts exhibit each of these characteristics all of the time, and some analysts may never display any of them. Still, many of these traits are common among this population.
One of the most frequent flaws of analysts is
mirror imaging,
which as described earlier assumes that other leaders, states, and groups share motivations or goals similar to those most familiar to the analyst. “They’re just like us” is the quintessential expression of this view. The prevalence of mirror imaging is not difficult to understand. People learn, from an early age, to expect certain behavior of others. The golden rule is based on the concept of reciprocal motives and behavior. Unfortunately, as an analytical tool, mirror imaging fails to take into account such matters as differences of motivation, perception, or action based on national differences, subtle differences of circumstance, different rationales, and the absence of any rationale.
Simon Montefiore (
Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar
) quotes Josef Stalin as saying: “When you’re trying to make a decision, NEVER put yourself in the mind of the other person because if you do, you can make a terrible mistake.” For example, during the cold war, some Kremlinologists and Sovietologists talked about Soviet hawks and doves and tried to assess which Soviet leaders belonged to which group. No empirical evidence existed to suggest that there were Soviet hawks and doves. Instead, the fact that the U.S. political spectrum included hawks and doves led to the facile assumption that the Soviet system must have them as well. In addition, during the late 1980s, some analysts working on Iran spoke of Iranian extremists and moderates. When pressed by skeptical peers as to their evidence for the existence of moderates, the analysts argued: If there are extremists, there must be moderates. Again, they were reflecting other political systems they knew, as well as making a faulty assumption. Some of their colleagues argued that Iranian politics might include extremists and ultra-extremists.
To avoid mirror imaging, managers must train analysts to recognize it when it intrudes in their work and must establish a higher level review process that is alert to this tendency.
Clientism
is a flaw that occurs when analysts become so immersed in their subjects—usually after working on an issue for too long—that they lose their ability to view issues with the necessary criticality. (In the State Department this phenomenon is called “clientitis,” which should be defined as “an inflammation of the client,” although the term is used when referring to someone who has “gone native” in his or her thinking.) Analysts can spend time apologizing for the actions of the nations they cover instead of analyzing them. The same safeguards that analysts and their managers put in place to avoid mirror imaging are required to avoid clientism.
An issue that has arisen more recently, largely as a result of the Iraq WMD experience, is
layering.
Layering refers to the use of judgments or assumptions made in one analysis as the basis for judgments in another analysis without also carrying over the uncertainties that may be involved. This can be especially dangerous if the earlier judgments were based on meager collection sources. Analysts are allowed to—and are expected to—make assumptions; they are not allowed to use these assumptions as the factual basis for additional assumptions. Layering tends to give these earlier judgments greater certainty and can mislead analysts and, more important, policy makers. Both the Senate Intelligence Committee and the WMD Commission (Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction) accused intelligence analysts of layering when they analyzed Iraq’s alleged possession of WMDs.
ON THE GROUND KNOWLEDGE. Analysts have varying degrees of direct knowledge about the nations on which they write. During the cold war, U.S. analysts had difficulty spending significant amounts of time in the Soviet Union or its satellites, and they were unable to travel widely in those nations. Similarly, intelligence analysts may have less contact with the senior foreign officials about whom they write than do the U.S. policy makers who must deal with these foreigners. Analysts’ distance from the subjects being analyzed can occasionally be costly in terms of how their policy consumers view the intelligence they receive. Some policy clients also may have more in-country experience than do the intelligence analysts.
This problem can be compounded when dealing with terrorists, with whom few opportunities arise for direct or prolonged contact and perhaps little shared basis of rationality by which to gauge their motives or likely next actions.
Analysts, like everyone else, are proud of their accomplishments. Once they have mastered a body of knowledge, they may look for opportunities—no matter how inappropriate—to display that knowledge in detail. Analysts can have difficulty limiting their writing to those facts and analyses that may be necessary for a specific consumer need. Analysts may want the consumer to have a greater appreciation for where the issues being discussed fit in some wider pattern. Unfortunately—and perhaps too frequently—the policy client wants to know “only about the miracles, and not the lives of all the saints who made them happen.” Analysts require training, maturity, and supervision to cure this behavior. Some analysts get the message sooner than others; some never get it and produce analysis that requires greater editing to get to the essential message, which can cause resentment on the part of either analysts or their editors. Furthermore, the intelligence provider may lose the attention of the policy client if he or she gives too much material, large portions of which do not seem relevant to the policy maker’s immediate needs.
Just as analysts want to show the depth of their knowledge, so, too, they want to be perceived as experienced—perhaps far beyond what is true. Again, this is a common human failing. Professionals in almost any field, when surrounded by peers and facing a situation that is new to them but not to others, are tempted to assert their familiarity, whether genuine or not. Given the choice between appearing jaded (“been there, done that”) and naive (“Wow! I’ve never seen that before!”), analysts usually choose jaded. The risk of being caught seems small enough, and it is preferable to being put down by someone else who displays greater experience.