The Intelligence Review | volume 3 | issue 6 |

in 2019?”. Another example is, “will the Venezuelan government of Nicolás
Maduro remain in power by December of this year?”. Inevitably, attempts to
provide comprehensive answers to these questions generate sets of
interrelated sub-questions, which occupy analysts for months at a time.
Throughout that intense period, analysts are expected to brief the
entire CIB analytical team on a weekly basis, and answer challenging
questions by their instructors and peers. They must do so while remaining
faithful to the diagnostic methods and briefing conventions of the
intelligence profession —a set of skills that forms the basis of their
evaluation by the course instructor.
In some cases, analysts are asked to produce what is known as ‘current
intelligence’, namely research that focuses on immediate concerns
and threats of an ongoing nature. In other cases, they are asked to
engage in ‘estimative intelligence’ —efforts to anticipate future
developments, with various degrees of certainty. The latter is arguably
the most challenging task of an intelligence analyst, and the one that
leaves his or her analytical products most open to dispute. These tasks
are extremely challenging for the junior analyst who is called to apply
the theoretical foundations of intelligence analysis to a real-life topic
that is unfolding daily, and sometimes hourly. As can be expected,
CIB analysts are startled and stimulated in equal measure during the
initial stages of their assignments. Gradually, however, they begin to
deepen their understanding of the topic that has been assigned to
them and to see the connections between it and many of the topics
that have been assigned to other analysts. More importantly, they
start to perceive patterns of interactivity between developments that
may initially seem disconnected and unrelated, and to make sense of
developments on a progressively wider scale.
As their perceptive capacity both deepens and widens, analysts begin
to display the unmistakable signs of analytical confidence. This can
be witnessed in their daring forecasts, which they issue with
increasingly high levels of confidence. Successful forecasts by CIB
analysts have included the anticipation of Venezuela’s announcement
of its voluntary withdrawal from the Organization of American
States, several weeks before it occurred on April 26, 2017, as well as
the stated expectation that Saudi Arabia would lift its ban on women
drivers many months before it the royal decree was announced in
September of 2017. Other analysts anticipated with remarkable accuracy
the results of the first round of the 2017 presidential election in France
(The Intelligence Review, Vol. 2, No. 3), and the United States’ abandonment
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