Tradecraft of Intelligence Analysis

“Analysis” in the U.S. Intelligence Community is definitely plural. It encompasses a range of styles, levels, and customers. It ranges from solving puzzles (such as whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction a question that could be answered definitively if only the United States had access to information that in principle was available) to framing mysteries (those questions that are future and contingent, which no information could resolve definitively). It would surprise many citizens to learn that the big “collectors,” such as the National Security Agency or the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, have more “analysts” than the Central Intelligence Agency. The vast majority of what all those analysts do is current and tactical, more question answering than producing deep understanding of critical issues. That tyranny of the immediate has become more entrenched, for a variety of reasons, not least that technology now permits the take from big national collection systems to be retrieved in time...