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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