US Intelligence Community Research Articles

What If? Re-imagined Scenarios and the Re-Virtualisation of History

What If? Re-imagined Scenarios and the Re-Virtualisation of History

Rethinking the training of intelligence analysts

Despite intense scrutiny and promised fixes resulting from intelligence ‘transformation’ efforts, erroneous analytic assessments persist and continue to dominate news coverage of the US intelligence community. Existing analytic training teaches analysts about common cognitive biases and then aims to correct them with structured analytic techniques. On its face, this approach is eminently reasonable; on close inspection, incomplete and imbalanced. Current training is anchored in a mid-twentieth century understanding of psychology that focuses on checking over-confidence and rigidity but ignores the problems of under-confidence and excessive volatility. Moreover it has never been validated against objective benchmarks of good judgment. We propose a new approach: (a) adopting scientifically validated content and regularly testing training to avoid institutionalizing new dogmas; (b) incentivizing analysts to view training guidelines as means to the end of improved accuracy, not an end in itself.

Professionalizing Intelligence Analysis: An Expertise and Responsibility Centered Approach

Looking at trends of professionalization of intelligence analysis within the United States Air Force as a subset of the broader US Intelligence Community, this paper calls for a re-evaluation of the professionalization of intelligence analysis away from a bureaucratic ‘corporateness’ approach examining the traits of a profession. Instead, reform of intelligence analysis should focus on the unique expertise and responsibility that define the profession. It identifies the analyst's unique expertise as managing adversary information to reduce a decision maker's uncertainty, and the responsibility in striving to improve capabilities within the profession while ensuring both the strengths and limitations of intelligence analysis are understood by intelligence customers. By focusing on corporateness, the community jeopardizes reform efforts by moving professionalization toward ‘getting the right answer’ and away from a broader understanding of the strengths and limitations inherent in the field of intelligence, where getting the right answer isn't often attainable.

You Can't Yell Loud Enough: Intelligence and Warning

Intelligence and Surprise Attack: Failure and Success from Pearl Harbor to 9/11 and Beyond. By Erik J. Dahl Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2013. 277 pp., paperback (ISBN-13: 978-1-58901-998-0). The history of US intelligence is, in many ways, a history of intelligence failures. The attack on Pearl Harbor shocked the nation's embryonic intelligence structures into life. The failure to predict the Chinese intervention in the Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Tet Offensive, among many more, was formative in the history of the CIA and American Intelligence Community (IC) in general. The disaster of 9/11 is but the most recent in a long line of intelligence failures which—with their inevitable inquests, investigations, and congressionally imposed reforms—have shaped the US IC into its current form and driven the growth of the formal academic study of intelligence. From the 1940s onwards, books by authors such as Sherman Kent, Roberta Wohlstetter, Amy Zegart, and David Betts have pushed a series of conflicting arguments about the causes of intelligence failure (Kent 1949; Wohlstetter 1962; Zegart 1999; Betts 2007). Some, such as the “father” of intelligence studies, Kent, argued early on that by good social science methodology intelligence failure could be avoided. Wohlstetter argued that intelligence failure is ultimately inevitable because of the intrinsically impossible task of predicting an opponent's behavior. Zegart has argued that the inflexibility of the US government bureaucracy renders intelligence failure almost certain—intelligence failure is not natural, it occurs because of bad government, and only that renders it …

The US Intelligence Community's Mathematical Ideology of Technical Communication

ABSTRACTReading historical intelligence community documents primarily through the lens of Kenneth Burke's essay “Semantic and Poetic Meaning,” this article explores the history and stakes of the intelligence community's ongoing commitment to a problematic model of language use. The essay argues that the intelligence community's pursuit of a “mathematical” ideology of language is an attempt to render language “neutral” and to divorce rhetoric from ethics in ways that Burke anticipated, and with negative consequences for the generation of written intelligence reports and national policy decisions.

The ‘Incredible Wrongness’ of Nikita Khrushchev: The CIA and the Cuban Missile Crisis

AbstractThe role of the CIA in the Cuban Missile Crisis was of crucial importance to events and decisions. This article explores and evaluates the activities of the CIA in the crisis. It examines how intelligence‐gathering and analysis were conducted and how assessments and information were provided to decision‐makers. The study of the crisis illuminates many aspects of intelligence. On some of these there remain debates. The significance of CIA covert action against Cuba prior to October 1962, for example, is explored. Another important focus is the mistaken assessment of the US intelligence community that the Soviets were not going to deploy nuclear missiles in Cuba. The nature and significance of this conclusion is considered, along with the views of the Director of Central Intelligence, John McCone, who contrary to his analysts, believed Khrushchev would deploy nuclear missiles. The view that the CIA played a successful part in monitoring the Soviet military build‐up after the discovery of medium‐range ballistic missiles is analysed. The lack of success in identifying Soviet tactical nuclear weapons is also considered. The article draws upon an extensive corpus of scholarship on the crisis, as well as declassified material and reflections of former officials. Research into the crisis extends to Soviet and other decision‐makers and thus helps facilitate a more genuinely international intelligence history of the Cold War. The article proffers a reflective and nuanced assessment that underlines the achievements as well as the shortcomings of the CIA at this most crucial moment in the Cold War.

Corona over Cuba: The Missile Crisis and the Early Limitations of Satellite Imagery Intelligence

In the autumn of 1962, two weeks before U-2 aerial photographs confirmed Soviet deployments of nuclear missiles in Cuba, the US intelligence community attempted to image the island with the spy satellite Corona. Insufficient image resolution and extensive cloud cover, however, prevented this photography from providing solid evidence confirming or denying the presence of offensive missiles. This event – previously unaddressed either by Missile Crisis or Corona scholars – illustrates both the promise and the limits of early satellite imagery intelligence. It further provides insight into the early imagery tasking and coordination process and demonstrates needs that drove further development of national satellite reconnaissance in the years that followed.

Our men in Havana: Canadian foreign intelligence operations in Castro’s Cuba

Diplomats based at the Canadian embassy in Havana conducted extensive foreign intelligence operations in Fidel Castro’s Cuba from the early 1960s through the early 1970s. They collected human intelligence of both a political and military nature, using covert as well as overt means. They did so generally at the behest of the United States, and undertook specific “tasked” operations on request from the State Department and the US intelligence community. The diplomat-spies also collaborated operationally with United Kingdom personnel. This article represents the first detailed survey of the Cuba operations and attempts to place Canada’s foreign intelligence program in the context of its relations with the United States and of Canadian foreign policy generally.

Editorial Welcome

In The Future of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, Lt. Col. Mike Fowler engages the current debate about the future adoption of such systems by modern military organizations. Contrary to much of the conventional wisdom on this topic, Lt. Col. Fowler argues that the adoption of UAV’s may not be as universal as many scholars and analysts predict. In Business as Usual: The Egyptian-U.S. Intelligence Relationship, Michele Black and Osamah Alhenaki focus their attention on the intelligence relationship between the United States and Egypt, and assess the impact of the Arab Spring, and subsequent events in Egypt on the nature of this relationship. In doing so, they trace the historical relationship between the US intelligence community, and its Egyptian counterparts, to offer valuable insights into the potential evolution of this relationship. James Hess and Curt Friedel’s study, entitled Applying a Critical Thinking Framework to Improve Intelligence Analysis, assesses the effectiveness of the application of a new analytical framework in improving intelligence analysis. The study uses insights derived from historical case studies and observations from West Point cadets who were taught the use of this analytical framework. Finally, David Kriebel’s article on Anthropological theory and Intelligence offers a wide-ranging discussion of anthropological theories and their utility for intelligence analysis.

Chinese nuclear forces, 2015

China is the only one of the five original nuclear weapon states that is quantitatively increasing the size of its nuclear arsenal and it now is estimated to have approximately 260 warheads. The arsenal’s capabilities are also increasing as older missiles are replaced with newer ones. As China assigns a growing portion of its warheads to long-range missiles, the US intelligence community predicts that by the mid-2020s the number of warheads on missiles capable of threatening the United States could increase to well over 100. The nuclear warheads in the Chinese stockpile are intended for delivery mainly by land-based ballistic missile but also by aircraft and submarines. The current force has nearly 150 nuclear-capable land-based missiles, half of which are short-range and medium-range. China has also built two types of submarine-launched ballistic missiles, one developed for a submarine no longer considered operational and the other in the final stages of development.

Why Assessing Estimative Accuracy is Feasible and Desirable

The US Intelligence Community (IC) has been heavily criticized for making inaccurate estimates. Many scholars and officials believe that these criticisms reflect inappropriate generalizations from a handful of cases, thus producing undue cynicism about the IC's capabilities. Yet there is currently no way to evaluate this claim, because the IC does not systematically assess the accuracy of its estimates. Many scholars and practitioners justify this state of affairs by claiming that assessing estimative accuracy would be impossible, unwise, or both. This article shows how those arguments are generally unfounded. Assessing estimative accuracy is feasible and desirable. This would not require altering existing tradecraft and it would address several political and institutional problems that the IC faces today.

Collect it all: national security, Big Data and governance

This paper is a case study of complications of Big Data. The case study draws from the US intelligence community (IC), but the issues are applicable on a wide scale to Big Data. There are two ways Big Data are making a big impact: a reconceptualization of (geo)privacy, and "algorithmic security." Geoprivacy is revealed as a geopolitical assemblage rather than something possessed and is part of emerging political economy of technology and neoliberal markets. Security has become increasingly algorithmic and biometric, enrolling Big Data to disambiguate the biopolitical subject. Geoweb and remote sensing technologies, companies, and knowledges are imbricated in this assemblage of algorithmic security. I conclude with three spaces of intervention; new critical histories of the geoweb that trace the relationship of geography and the state; a fuller political economy of the geoweb and its circulations of geographical knowledge; and legislative and encryption efforts that enable the geographic community to participate in public debate.

Wilful Blindness or Blissful Ignorance? The United States and the Successful Denuclearization of Iraq

This article examines the successful denuclearization of Iraq by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in the early 1990s and the apparent failure of the US Intelligence Community (IC) to rethink its assessments of Saddam's desire for nuclear weapons despite Baghdad's co-operation with the IAEA inspectors, and clear evidence from the Ongoing Monitoring and Verification team that this was a highly successful process. US policy towards Iraq, from the Clinton administration onwards, was hyper-politicized; it relied on a default, unchanging view of Saddam Hussein as a rogue leader bent on WMD acquisition and regional domination in an area that was of vital importance to the United States. The article also considers the impact of the fractious UNSCOM inspections process and argues that this was severely compromised by political intrusion, which was also ignored by the US IC in its assessments of Saddam's intentions. Ultimately, US intelligence on Iraq was filtered for a decade through a hyper-politicized lens that tended to discount evidence from the IAEA that disproved pre-existing assumptions.

Collect it All: National Security, Big Data and Governance

This paper is a case study of complications of Big Data. The case study draws from the US intelligence community (IC), but the issues are applicable on a wide scale to Big Data. There are two ways Big Data are making a big impact: a reconceptualization of (geo)privacy, and Geoprivacy is revealed as a geopolitical assemblage rather than something possessed and is part of emerging political economy of technology and neoliberal markets. Security has become increasingly algorithmic and biometric, enrolling Big Data to disambiguate the biopolitical subject. Geoweb and remote sensing technologies, companies, and knowledges are imbricated in this assemblage of algorithmic security. I conclude with three spaces of intervention; new critical histories of the geoweb that trace the relationship of geography and the state; a fuller political economy of the geoweb and its circulations of geographical knowledge; and legislative and encryption efforts that enable the geographic community to participate in public debate.

Problems in the Intelligence-Policy Nexus: Rethinking Korea, Tet, and Afghanistan

Accusations of failure by elements of the US intelligence community (IC) have followed in the wake of nearly every war and terrorist bombing since Japan's successful strike on Pearl Harbor in 1941. This article will illustrate how some problems that exist inside the ‘intelligence-policy nexus’ are beyond the control of the IC. By investigating the dynamics and tensions that exist between producers of intelligence (the IC) and the consumers of those products (policy-makers), we review three different types of alleged failure. First, by revisiting the Chinese intervention in Korea, we show that a rarely listed case in the literature is in fact a classic example of producer-based failure generated from within the IC. However, in our study of the Tet Offensive during the Vietnam War (1968), we show that the alleged intelligence failure by producers should be more accurately described as a ‘failure of intelligence’ by consumers. Third, by revisiting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (1979), we conclude that there existed neither a producer nor a consumer failure. The Carter Administration made a conscious policy choice to act surprised (when it was not).

Origins of the Psychological Profiling of Political Leaders: The US Office of Strategic Services and Adolf Hitler

The US intelligence community prepares occasional psychological profiles of foreign political leaders. The origins of these practices lie in frantic and ad hoc attempts to understand the character of Adolf Hitler during the latter stages of the Second World War. The US Office of Strategic Services (OSS) commissioned profiles of Hitler, contracting with a titan of personality theory in Professor Henry A. Murray and practicing psychoanalyst Walter C. Langer. Reconstructing the history of these profiles grounds the contemporary analysis of foreign leaders in the lessons of the pioneers. Useful insights on the challenges of profiling leaders, the relationship of academic theories – and academic personnel – to government, and the role of intelligence in policy abound.

Guest Feature: Remote Sensing Research and Education at Rochester Institute of Technology [Education

Remote sensing research and education at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York, USA, traces its roots from an academic degree program in Photographic Sciences established in the 1960?s. Many students were educated (and continue to be) in the science behind photography, later going on to careers working for NASA, the US defense and intelligence community, and other research organizations. In particular, the Digital Imaging and Remote Sensing (DIRS) Laboratory was formed in the early 1980?s by Prof. John Schott while part of the Photo Science program. Prof. Schott and the lab transitioned to the Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science (CIS) when it was established in the mid 1980?s and remote sensing activity has grown from one professor and a few students to now encompassing ten professors, dozens of students, and over 40 research projects ongoing at any one time.

Chinese nuclear forces, 2013

The number of weapons in China’s nuclear arsenal is slowly growing, and the capability of those weapons is also increasing. The authors estimate that China has approximately 250 warheads in its stockpile for delivery by nearly 150 land-based ballistic missiles, aircraft, and an emerging submarine fleet. China is assigning a growing portion of its warheads to long-range missiles. The authors estimate that China’s arsenal includes as many as 60 long-range missiles that can reach some portion of the United States. The US intelligence community predicts that by the mid-2020s, China could have more than 100 missiles capable of threatening the United States.

Civic education: the overlooked narrative of 9/11 intelligence community reorganization

Two narratives dominate the literature on the history of post-9/11 US intelligence community reorganization. The first narrative centers on how to improve the performance of the intelligence community. The second narrative centers on placing blame. Overlooked in the histories and evaluations of post-9/11, intelligence reorganization is a civic education narrative. In this narrative, intelligence community reorganization arguments serve as a vehicle for engendering public support for the political system and bolstering the long-term health of the political system. It is argued here that developing a full understanding of post-9/11 intelligence reorganization in the US requires incorporating this civic education narrative into histories and analyses of this reorganization effort.

Intelligence shocks, media coverage, and congressional accountability, 1947–2012

Recent research indicates that most lawmakers rarely engage in intensive intelligence oversight unless a major scandal or failure – a shock – forces them to pay more attention to the dark side of a government. Still, the question remains: what degree of shock is necessary to stir members of the Congress into taking a closer look at the clandestine activities of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the other fifteen organizations that comprise the US Intelligence Community? This report examines ten major intelligence shocks since the creation of the CIA in 1947 and explores the extent of media coverage associated with each. The findings suggest that the level of media coverage often corresponds with the degree of energetic intelligence oversight exercised by government officials: low oversight if a low level of media coverage, moderate if moderate, and high if high.