Educing Information: Interrogation - National Intelligence University

• Begun to map the relevance of negotiation theory and practice to
educing information and to further research in this area;
• Started to construct an EI research agenda that identifies promising
areas for study that may improve EI practices;
• Gathered and organized a working bibliography and a computerized
library of scientific and analytic articles related to EI; and
• Worked with the NDIC to make EI a subject of professional intelligence
education.
Products of the Study
Attached to this report are ten papers commissioned by the Study on EI and an
annotated bibliography of key work in English on EI from World War II to the
present. Because they report on current or historical research and practice, most
of them of necessity address aspects of “interrogation”: the standard term used to
date in intelligence, military, and law enforcement contexts to describe methods
of obtaining information from sources.
To our knowledge, none of these papers duplicates the existing literature, classified
or unclassified. However, the papers do not cover the full spectrum of EI or of the
study’s investigations, nor do they collectively constitute the justification for the
study team’s recommendations. Instead, they report on selected aspects of current
research and practice that the U.S. government may wish to take into account as
it moves toward a new model of EI for the twenty-first century. The study team
offers these papers to stimulate better thinking, practice, research, teaching, and
training. They are intended as the “first word” in next-generation discussions of
EI, rather than as definitive statements.
The papers are:
1. “Approaches to Interrogation in the Struggle against Terrorism:
Considerations of Cost and Benefit”
This paper explores areas of cost and benefit when interrogation choices are
made. The discussion points out the complexity of our choices and the need for
additional research to inform and to discipline how we think about these choices.
2. “Approaching Truth: Behavioral Science Lessons on Educing
Information from Human Sources”
This paper reviews a wide range of material from the social and behavioral sciences
on educing information. Few empirical studies directly address the effectiveness
of interrogation in general, or of specific techniques, in generating accurate and
useful information. The paper concludes that virtually none of the interrogation
techniques used by U.S. personnel over the past half-century have been subjected
to scientific or systematic inquiry or evaluation, and that the accuracy of educed
information can be compromised by the way it is obtained. By contrast, a promising
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