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

CHAPTER TWO
described by participants during the interviews and observed during direct and
participant observations throughout the fieldwork.
Analysts were asked to describe the work processes they employed to
answer questions, solve problems, describe and explain phenomena, make
forecasts, and develop intelligence products. The process they described
began with an examination of previous analytic products developed by their
organization in order to establish a baseline from which they could build their
own analysis.
When a request comes in from a consumer to answer some question,
the first thing I do is to read up on the analytic line.
The first thing I do is check the pervious publications, and then I
sort through the current traffic.
I’ve looked at our previous products, and I’ve got a good idea of the
pattern; so, when I sort through the traffic, I know what I’m trying
to find.
I try to keep up with all the products that come out of our area, so I
know where to start my piece.
A literature search is often the first step in any research endeavor. The utility
of this practice is not merely to define and understand the current state of
research in the field but also to determine major controversies and divergences
of opinion. Trying to discern controversies and divergence in intelligence
products is often difficult, because some of them—national intelligence estimates
(NIE), in particular—are specifically designed to produce a corporate
consensus for an audience of high-level policymakers.
These products can and do include divergent opinions, in the form of footnotes,
but these tend to indicate inter-, rather than intra-, organizational differences.
Dissenting footnotes are products of the coordination process, the result
of an inability on the part of one or several community organizations to convince
the others of a particular point of view. Not surprisingly, the least probable
opinion is often the hardest to defend, whereas the most probable opinion
is the easiest to support.
The literature search approach may promote a logical consistency among
analytic products, but it has the unintended consequence of imposing on the
analyst using it a preexisting mental model of the phenomena in question. The
existing analytic products describe, implicitly or explicitly, a set of working
hypotheses that an analyst may wish to reflect in his or her own work. Of
course, these existing hypotheses are rarely tested each time they are incorporated
into new products. What tends to occur is that the analyst looks for current
data that confirms the existing organizational opinion or the opinion that
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