Intelligence_ From Secrets to Policy - Mark M. Lowenthal [107]
It is important to understand analytic standards for their own sake, but they cannot be wholly separated from the circumstances in which they are written. The twin events of 9/11 and Iraq WMD left most observers with the overwhelming impression that the analytical capacity of the intelligence community was flawed and performed badly. However, as has been noted earlier, the perceived “lessons” of the two events tend to run in opposite directions.
• Warning: The “lesson” of 9/11 was that the intelligence community failed to be strident enough in its warnings, leaving policy makers with an imprecise sense of the impending nature of the threat. Intelligence officers serving at the time deny this and also note that the tactical intelligence that would have been useful did not exist. In the case of Iraq WMD. the intelligence community is said to have overblown the threat based on very little new intelligence.
• Analytical process: In 9/11, analysts failed to make the necessary linkages between disparate pieces of intelligence (hence the “connect the dots” metaphor) but for Iraq WMD they made too many linkages, resulting in a false image of the WMD programs. The analysis before 9/11 has also been attacked as a “failure of imagination” but in the case of Iraq the analysis was perhaps too imaginative.
• Information sharing: The failure to discover the 9/11 plot is ascribed, in part, to the failure of the CIA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to share information. But in the case of Iraq WMD, the intelligence community was taken to task for sharing information (the unreliable human source called CURVEBALL) that was not true, although those sharing it did not know that.
Therefore, when crafting the legislation creating the DNI, Congress went into unusual detail about what it expected of future analysis. The DNI must appoint an individual or office responsible for ensuring that finished intelligence produced by any intelligence community element is “timely, objective, independent of political considerations, based upon all sources of available intelligence, and employ the standards of proper analytic tradecraft” (Section 1019). This individual or office can have no direct responsibility for the specific production of any finished intelligence and must prepare regular detailed reviews of analytic products, lessons learned, and recommendations for improvement. The criteria for these evaluations and reviews are detailed. Finally, the act calls for the creation of what has become an analytic ombudsman. In response to this requirement, the position of assistant deputy DNI for analytic integrity and standards was created under the deputy DNI for analysis.
This office, which is also that of the ombudsman, created a set of evaluation tradecraft standards for analysis, few of which are controversial. They deal mostly with the underlying aspects of intelligence: sources, assumptions, judgments, alternative analyses, logical argumentation, and so on. The final standard, accuracy, may not be known for some time.
Most observers would likely agree that these are among the necessary standards for good analysis. The real concern is how these standards are put into practice. It is noteworthy that the standards reflect more of the perceived lessons of Iraq WMD than of September 11. The DNI’s office has stated that these standards will serve as communitywide guidelines, making them part of the training for all new analysts and for analytical managers. Given the paucity of communitywide courses, this training can only capture a small number of the analysts across the community in any given year and far fewer than the large numbers currently being recruited. Therefore, overseeing standards implementation requires insights into the analytic training being conducted at each agency.
The use of these standards as an evaluation tool is more problematic. The congressional mandate for a broad review of finished intelligence products is impractical given the volume of intelligence