Analytic Culture in the U.S. Intelligence Community (PDF) - CIA

sealed, world of intelligence. Rob’s work also bears witness to the tremendous
passion among intelligence professionals to understand better what they do, why
they do it, and how their work could be improved. There is, in this community, a
palpable desire to do better.
Since the tragedy of 9/11 and the bitter controversies surrounding Iraqi WMD,
the world of intelligence analysis has been scrutinized with an intensity of almost
unprecedented dimensions. The focus of scrutiny, however, has been on the
results, not on the process by which the results were produced and certainly not
on the largely anonymous corps of civil servants whose work was at the heart of
the issue. Those people, and how and why they do what they do, are at the heart
of Rob’s important study. If we are ever to make the improvements that must be
made in the quality of our intelligence work, then we must begin with a more
mature and nuanced understanding of who actually does the work, how, and why.
There is a context within which the work is done, a definite culture with values,
traditions, and procedures that help shape important outcomes.
Rob has characterized a world that I find all too familiar. It is a world in which
rewards and incentives are weighted heavily in favor of filling in gaps in conventional
knowledge rather than in leading the way to alternative points of view. It is
a world in which confirming evidence is welcome and rewarded and disconfirmatory
evidence is, at best, unwelcome and, at worst, discounted. It is a world in
which the legitimate and often necessary resort to secrecy has served, all too
often, to limit debate and discussion. It is a world in which the most fundamentally
important questions—what if and why not—are too often seen as distractions
and not as invitations to rethink basic premises and assumptions.
Much of the recent discussion concerning the performance of intelligence
organizations has been conducted in almost mechanical terms. “Connecting
the dots,” “mining the nuggets” are phrases offered as a way of understanding
the exquisitely subtle, complex business of making intelligence judgments.
As Rob Johnston’s book makes abundantly clear, this is first and foremost a
human enterprise. All of the intellectual power, biases, and paradigms that
inform the thinking of the people who actually do the work need to be understood
in the organizational context in which they do their work. In the finest
tradition of anthropological field research, Rob has observed, collected data
rigorously, reflected with deep insight upon it, and produced a study both
sophisticated and extremely useful.
I worked myself for more than 30 years in the clandestine operations area of
CIA, a part of the Intelligence Community that calls out for the same kind of
understanding, professional, and constructive scrutiny this book has devoted to
the analytic realm. My fervent hope is that the human intelligence service will
benefit from the same kind of rigor and constructive understanding the analytic
side has now experienced. My real hope is that Rob is available for the job.
160