What Do Decision Makers Want From the Intelligence Community (IC)?
When people ask me, what policymakers want from the IC, my answer is simple: They want goodintelligence. Unfortunately, much of what we provide goes in one ear and out the other leaving many decision makers dissatisfied, or worse still forces them to become their own intelligence analyst. I’ve seen both. Rumsfeld setting up his own intelligence unit in the run up to the Iraq War was the worst instance ever. My own analysts at INR complained to me about what was going on; fearful that the junk coming out of this operation would blind people to what was really happening. I reacted strongly: Shame on them for thinking that a rag tag bunch of want-a-be analysts at the Pentagon could out-think and out write the best current reporters in the business. Get back to work.
“Cherry picking” by policymakers – choosing information that confirms their own beliefs while disregarding all the rest -- is much more prevalent than Rumsfeld’s approach and thus far more dangerous. Yet, we have no one to blame but ourselves for the prevalence of “cherry picking.” Decision makers look for the evidence we provide and the logic of our analysis. Too often we give them events and our opinions of what these might mean, but little evidence to support our claims and almost never how we arrived at our conclusions. Many analysts object, arguing it is the policymaker’s fault. We provide good assessments. Policymakers simply choose to ignore them. What bull ----! Decision makers have no responsibility, none, to believe a single word we tell them even on those occasions when we are right. Convincing them falls to us. A failure to persuade is the IC’s fault. But watch out the first time a policy maker questions our judgements. Immediately someone will cry politization. No. It means that the evidence we have presented isn’t enough. The policymaker wants more. Unless we provide it, they will look somewhere else.
Usually that is to someone they trust – most often themselves. Analysts rarely, if ever, interact with politicians. I think they assume that policymakers think and act much as they do. A good analyst, for example, frequently changes his or her mind based on new evidence. This is considered best practice for producing good intelligence. Not so in the policy world. First, senior officials – the President and cabinet officials – rarely lack confidence in their own abilities. They have been at it far longer than the average analyst and have developed strong opinions on the subjects they care most about. Changing their minds takes some heavy lifting, especially if they have stated their position publicly. I first learned this working on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for Senator John Glenn. He was more opened minded than most and with sufficient evidence prepared to change his position. That is until he stated his views in public. The key for staffers like me then was to convince him to insert a new idea in a speech or a press release. Once pronounced it became embedded in concrete. No flip-flops for him or any other policymaker I’ve worked for. If you want to change their view on a subject they believe in strongly, analysts’ opinions and “we think” won’t cut it.
It is the conventional wisdom among managers of current intelligence reports that senior officials do not have time to read long, detailed pieces; it is better to provide them just the highlights. Most current intelligence reports contain a snappy headline and few paragraphs of explanation. Although we mostly send summaries to our consumers, it is not necessarily because that is what they want from us. I have found that when policymakers are preoccupied with an issue, they are eager to receive anything we can give them. They read more, get quickly up to speed on what current reporting has to offer, and cast about for more details. Continuing to offer up short, summary articles at that point leaves them frustrated, not satisfied.
What they are looking for most is intelligence that is timely and relevant to their top priority of the moment. Short and sweet may suffice in the early stages of a policy challenge, but as the problem wears on, the policymakers’ needs change. Details become more important. They start asking questions and want in-depth answers. Opinions, even those of the IC’s experts, are not what they want to hear. Once they become fully engaged in an issue, only new evidence and the rationale for the conclusion will do. Even then your analysis may only force them to question their views, not necessarily to buy your ideas hook, line, and sinker. Going beyond this and influencing a policymaker’s views, the intelligence officer’s holy grail, depends almost entirely on the strength of the evidence.
An incident when I served in INR, helps make this point. President Bush was scheduled to meet with Russian President Putin in Moscow and invited Secretary Powell to accompany him on the trip. A senior INR Russia analyst, learning of the trip, took the initiative to call on the services of a colleague outside of INR for help. One of his friends, a Foreign Service Officer (FSO), had worked almost daily with the then more junior Vladimir Putin while stationed in St. Petersburg 1990-1996. Thinking the FSO’s recollections and impressions would help the Secretary in preparing for the upcoming trip, he asked his friend to jot down his experiences on paper. He agreed. A week or so later a lengthy report arrived, all 50 or 60 pages of it. It was so well written that we decided to send the entire manuscript to the Secretary, adding only a note from INR summarizing the paper’s findings. Although some suggested it was too long and detailed to be of much use to the Secretary, we sent it to him anyway. I am glad we did. It turned out that he read the entire paper, not just the summary, and decided to take the report with him on the trip. At some point, I do not know all the details, he shared the report with the President. The President’s notes in the margin suggest that he read most, if not all the paper on the airplane. Moreover, the President asked the Secretary to pass on his thanks to the author suggesting that he liked what he read. “Atta boys” from policymakers are rare in the intelligence business, making this one even more special. For the report writer, my Russian analyst, and the entire Bureau, it was an unexpected, but a gratefully accepted compliment.
As I’ve written several times before, the dismantling of the IC’s research effort in favor of only current reporting and the demands of the war on terror crippled our ability to answer the many questions raised by policymakers today. It seems that research and development is the first to go in government programs as is often the case in the private sector. No matter how hard they try and how good they are, current reporters even the best of them can’t fill this gap. Creating new knowledge isn’t easy and invariably takes a considerable amount of time. Current reporters don’t have this luxury.
At CIA, as a directed research analyst, I would first identify a problem, often starting with the conventional wisdom, and develop a question I thought might provide us with a better, or at least more nuanced, answer. Foremost, I intended it to assist other research analysts and current reporters hopefully improving their understanding of the problem. If it made it all the way to policymakers great, but that wasn’t necessarily my top priority; creating new knowledge was. Once I thought that I was asking the right question, the next step was to design a research strategy for attacking my question. In military capabilities analysis, this most often means turning to imagery and signals intelligence and determining how you are going to exploit these resources in your study. Open-source materials can sometimes be useful, but HUMINT, except in one special case of mine, rarely covers the sorts of problems my research questions posed. The next step was convincing my superiors that the project was worth the time and effort I would need to come up with an answer. Most times they agreed even when I was talking months not weeks.
That special HUMINT case mentioned above occurred during my time as an OB analyst at DIA doing basic research. CIA was convinced that the PLA was still reeling from the impact of the cultural revolution seriously damaging its capabilities. Reading and listening to the Chinese media could give you that impression. At DIA, however, we were seeing a much different picture focusing on what was happening on the ground. It appeared to us that the Military Districts and local forces were experiencing the brunt of the impact, but the main force combat units had been spared most of the upheaval and by the early 1970s were practicing combined arms training – infantry, artillery, armor, and airborne units working together in field exercises. Since this didn’t fit with CIA’s vision of the PLA being ill prepared for modern combat our views were not being advertised to a broader policy audience.
Being responsible for the OB in southern China I benefited from the British practice in those years of interviewing everyone who entered Hong Kong from China and publishing a report. Many, if not most, were from the very areas I focused on. Virtually everyone, even the BRITs, suggested that using these reports for following PLA activities was a waste of time. One issue was the sheer volume of the reports. Secondly, and most important, the interviews contained only fragments, and little or no information on military affairs. I accepted this view and paid little attention because of the fragmentary nature of the information and the sheer volume of reports flooding into my inbox. At some point, a fragment mentioning PLA activity caught my eye. Someone mentioned seeing tanks near his village. I started a logbook and marked the event on a map of the area. Over a period of weeks, I discovered that others nearby had also reported military activity. My map was filling up with reported sightings of PLA activity. Some had seen infantry units, others had seen or heard artillery. One individual witnessed men parachuting from airplanes. Added to my original sightings of tanks, it suggested that combined arms field training at the division level was occurring.
The most interesting aspect of my study, spanning several weeks, was that the fragments reporting these activities occurred within days of each other in the exact same general area. I checked with a SIGINT analyst at NSA who conveyed to me what he described as a communication exercise – a wargame being played, but without actual forces participating -- during my time frame. I next asked an imagery analyst to look back at the area in question only to find that on the days that my fragments indicated, he found tanks, artillery, and infantry units operating just as those interviewed had reported. It clearly was not just a communication exercise, but a full-fledged Division level field training exercise. I don’t think my findings convinced the skeptics at CIA, but it did sneak into the next national estimate of the PLA’s capabilities.
Current reporters not only don’t have the background information that the dismantled research effort could have provided, but they often must also deal with the mismatch between the daily collection of intelligence and the decision timeline for policymakers. Reports flood in everyday and current reporters capture the best, add their knowledge on the subject, and pass it on to the policymakers for their use. These assessments invariably provide valuable insights into what is happening around the world. If these views arrive on the policymakers’ desk when they are focused on the issue, they factor it into their thinking and ask for more. Unfortunately, rarely does the flood of information flowing in each day focus on these top priorities. Of course, there will be the latest political and military developments in the Ukraine – what happened overnight – but little on the latest thinking in either capitol about next steps. For that sort of information, one could learn more from CNN that the PDB. Only well-placed sources can provide that sort of data and CIA’s tracked record of covert actions – the good and the awful – is far better than its ability to recruit agents.
Any attempt to reform the intelligence community in any major way is like trying to turn an aircraft carrier. It can be done, but only slowly and with a captain in charge who know what he or she is doing. With a DNI whose expertise is covert action not analysis and a Director of CIA who is a diplomat from the Department of State, I have little confidence that either understands what needs fixing and are in no position to turn the aircraft carrier around and sailing in a new direction. Policymakers will have to make do with current reporting and cross their fingers and hope that the next botched call doesn’t happen on their watch.