Intelligence_ From Secrets to Policy - Mark M. Lowenthal [81]
Denial and Deception
Bennett, Michael, and Edward Waltz. Counterdeception Principles and Applications for National Security. Norwood, Mass.: Artech House, 2007.
Godson, Roy, and James Wirtz, eds. Strategic Denial and Deception. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 2002.
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
AS 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