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

FINDINGS
foreknowledge that this researcher has a number of personal and professional
biases. 4
Finding: Secrecy Versus Efficacy
Secrecy and efficacy conflict. Secrecy interferes with analytic effectiveness
by limiting access to information and sources that may be necessary for accurate
or predictive analysis. In turn, openness interferes with security by
degrading the value of information resources and by revealing specific
sources and methods.
Perfect secrecy would ultimately be unproductive, because it would
restrict information to one mind or to a very small group of minds. Limiting
available resources in this way would produce organizational failure in
competition with resources available to a large and diverse group of adversaries.
Perfect openness would also lead to organizational failure, because,
with full access to all information, there would never be an instance of
advantage for any one group over any other group. In addition, perfect
openness would result in adversaries being aware they are under observation
and could lead them to alter their behavior to deceive the observer if
they so desired. 5
Between these two extremes, there is some notional point where secrecy
and openness converge to create an optimal performance tradeoff. My perception
is that, within the Intelligence Community, more organizational emphasis
is placed on secrecy than on effectiveness. It is important, in my view, that
there be a voice in favor of openness to counterbalance the many voices
whose sole or primary responsibility is the advocacy and maintenance of
4
Throughout the project, my data collection method consisted of written field notes. Anthropologists
traditionally include specific detail from participant input or direct observation. Usually, this is
in the form of precise descriptions of the actual behavior of participants and transcripts of their verbal
interactions. It is also standard practice in field work to capture these data, and the data from the
interviews and focus groups, on audio- or videotape. These practices were not followed in this particular
case for two reasons: first, the nature of my work was not to document actual practices and
procedures; rather, it was to derive categories of variables and individual variables in order to create
a taxonomy, and to use the prototype taxonomy to structure the interactions; second, the nature of
intelligence work and the environment in which it occurs, as well as its professional practitioners,
require that certain data be restricted.
5
This has been demonstrated in the psychological literature and is referred to as the Hawthorne
Effect. Derived from research that began with an experimental program at Western Electric’s
Hawthorne Works conducted between 1927 and 1930, the Hawthorne Theory, broadly interpreted,
states that the behavior of subjects changes when they are aware of being observed. See
Fritz J. Roethlisberger and William J. Dickson, Management and the worker; Elton Mayo, The
Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization.
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