The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
“Creating a Smart Nation,” pp. 107-130
The International Intelligence Fellows Program, for senior officers (flag and bull colonel), is an example of where the future of intelligence must lie–in what the Swedes originated and I enhanced by adding sense-making:
Primer for the Non-Professional, October 24, 2008
Gary Berntsen
This is a publisher's idea of a quick buck. The author did what he could within the constipated formula. It is recommended for anyone who knows very little about intelligence and wants a useful overview that avoids the nitty-gritty. Indeed, this is a very fine companion to Intelligence: From Secrets to Policy(3rd Edition), which is deficient in the very areas where this book offers a rather gross-level overview to the student new to the intelligence discipline. The price is reasonable, one reason I was tempted.
I tried hard to justify four stars but I just cannot do it. There is nothing wrong with this book, if you want a Middle School reader with a handful of ideas that are good but not unique, while avoiding anything that could have held the book up when being reviewed by the CIA, this is it. It is a small book with 19 brilliantly selected chapter titles each receiving as many as six or as few as two (small) pages.
I tried reading each “chapter's” Core Points a second time, and found little to arrest my attention (or that of a future President). Support Colombia. Spray crops in Afghanistan. Special Ops is under-represented. Hmmm.
The eleven recommended books are an afterthought. Obviously the author is an experienced case officer but he is not broadly read and none of the books deal with the profession of intelligence–a couple by bubbas, a couple on counter-insurgency, a couple on the Islamic mind–you get the idea. In this instance, “practical guide” appears to mean “my personal view, without bothering to look into anything anyone else has recommended…)
All of my books are free online, and of course here on Amazon, so I won't flog them. The core chapters can also be found online, notably “Presidential Leadership” from the first book, “New Rules for the New Craft of Intelligence” from the second, and so on.
I cannot do justice to all the deep books, including the author's own, Jawbreaker: The Attack on bin Laden and al-Qaeda: A Personal Account by the CIA's Key Field Commander which I strongly recommend instead of this book, as well as First In: An Insider's Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan. See my varied lists, especially the early ones before I started focusing on Earth Intelligence across the board.
Here are the aspects of intelligence as it pertains to national security, and a single recommended book for each, among many others I have read and reviewed here at Amazon:
1) Does it inform policy?
Informing Statecraft
2) Does it avoid doing harm?
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
3) Do policymakers abuse it for their own ends?
A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies
4) Do we tell ourselves and the public the truth?
None So Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam
5) Can intelligence make a difference?
Intelligence Power in Peace and War
6) Can intelligence see the invisible?
Seeing the Invisible: National Security Intelligence in an Uncertain Age
7) Do we do as well as we can analyzing what we collect?
Lost Promise
The author is a good, brave, and talented man in the field. We are losing too many like him now, before their retirement age, because we are allowing contractors to steal them and rent them back to us at twice the price. If anyone were listening to me, which they are not, I would have two policies:
1) Pay for performance at commercial rates
2) Lose your clearances for two years if you leave before retirement age, and start the clearance process over when you come back, but if you get to retirement, we hold your clearances for five to ten years without your having to commit to a vendor (or any single vendor) right away and to allow you to free lance while still having your original agency as “home base.”
The US Intelligence Community consists of incredibly good and earnest people trapped in a very bad system with multiple sucking chest wounds from security to acquisition to leadership (no middle, losing the seniors at the directorate levels) to you name it. Nothing in this book is going to fix that, I am sorry to say. We need a firehose, not another Happy Hour menu to throw on the fire.
Disappointing, Some Value, October 22, 2008
Gregory F. Treverton
There are six (6) pages in this work that held my attention: pages 11-12 (Table 2.2 Analytic Concerns, by Frequency of Mention); page 14 (Figure 3.1, A Pyramid of Analytic Tasks); page 20 (Table 3.1, Wide Range of Analytical Tools and Skills Required); page 34 (Figure 5.1, Intelligence Analysis and Information Types), and page 35 (Table 5.1, Changing Tradecraft Characteristics). Print them off from the free PDF copy online (search for title).
My first review allotted two stars, on the second complete reading I decided that was a tad harsh because I *did* go through it twice, so I now raise it to three stars largely because pages 11-12 were interesting enough to warrant an hour of my time (see below). This work reinvents the wheel from 1986, 1988, 1992, etcetera, but the primary author is clearly ignorant of all that has happened before, and the senior author did not bother to bring him up to speed (I know Greg Treverton knows this stuff).
Among many other flaws, this light once over failed to do even the most cursory of either literature or unclassified agency publication (not even the party line rag, Studies in Intelligence). Any book on this topic that is clueless about Jack Davis and his collected memoranda on analytic tradecraft, or Diane Webb and her utterly brilliant definition of Computer Aided Tools for the Analysis of Science and Technology (CATALYST), is not worthy of being read by an all-source professional. I would also have expected Ruth Davis and Carol Dumaine to be mentioned here, but the lack of attribution is clearly a lack of awareness that I find very disturbing.
I looked over the bibliography carefully, and it confirmed my evaluation. This is another indication that RAND (a “think tank”) is getting very lazy and losing its analytic edge. In this day and age of online bibliography citation, the paucity of serious references in this work is troubling (I wax diplomatic).
Here are ten books–only one of mine (and all seven of mine are free online as well as at Amazon):
Informing Statecraft
Bombs, Bugs, Drugs, and Thugs: Intelligence and America's Quest for Security
Best Truth: Intelligence in the Information Age
Early Warning: Using Competitive Intelligence to Anticipate Market Shifts, Control Risk, and Create Powerful Strategies
The Art and Science of Business Intelligence Analysis (Advances in Applied Business Strategy,)
Analysis Without Paralysis: 10 Tools to Make Better Strategic Decisions
Strategic and Competitive Analysis: Methods and Techniques for Analyzing Business Competition
Lost Promise
Still Broken: A Recruit's Inside Account of Intelligence Failures, from Baghdad to the Pentagon
The New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, & Political–Citizen's Action Handbook for Fighting Terrorism, Genocide, Disease, Toxic Bombs, & Corruption.
On the latter, look for “New Rules for the New Craft of Intelligence” that is free online as a separate document. Both Davis and Webb can be found online because I put them there in PDF form.
The one thing in this book that was useful, but badly presented, was the table of analyst concerns across nine issues that did not include tangible resources, multinational sense-making, or access to NSA OSINT.
Below is my “remix” of the table to put it into more useful form:
54% Quality of Intelligence
54% Tools of intelligence/analysis
43% Staffing
43% Intra-Community collaboration and data sharing
41% Collection Issues
38% Evaluation
32% Targeting Analysis
30% Value
Above are the categories with totals (first initial below connects to above). The top four validate the DNI's priorities and clearly need work.
32% T Targeting Analysis is important
30% V Redefine intelligence
30% Q Analysis too captive to current
30% To Directed R&D for analytic technology needed
27% T Targeting needs prioritization
27% S Analyst training important and insufficient
22% V Uniqueness
22% E PDB problematic as metric
22% To “Tools” of intelligence analysis are poor
22% To “Tools” limit analysis and limited by culture
The line items above are for me very significant. We still do priority based collection rather than gap-driven collection, something I raised on the FIRCAP and with Rick Shackleford in 1992. Our analysts (most of them less than 5 years in service) are clearly concerned about both a misdirection of collection and of analysis, and a lack of tools–this 22 years after Diane Webb identified the 18 needed functionalities and the Advanced Information Processing and Analysis Steering Group (AIPASG) found over 20 different *compartmented* projects, all with their own sweetheart vendor, trying to create “the” all-source fusion workstation.
19% C S&T underused, needs understanding
16% E Critical and needs improvement
14% E Assess performance qualitatively
14% Q Quality of analysis is a concern
14% Q Intelligence focus too narrow
14% S Language, culture, regional are big weaknesses
11% A Leadership
11% L Must be improved
11% Q Problem centric vice regional
11% Q Global coverage is important
11% C Open source critical, need new sources
11% I Lack of leadership and critical mass impair IC-wide
11% I IC information technology infrastructure needed
11% I Non-traditional source agencies need more input
8% V Unclear goals prevail
8% T Targetting analysis needs attn+
8% C Collection strategies/methods outdated
8% S Concern over lack of staff or surge capability
8% S Intelligence Community-wide curriculum desireable
8% I Should NOT pursue virtual wired network
8% I Security is a concern for virtual and sharing
5% E Evaluation not critical
5% Q Depth versus breadth an issue
5% Q Greater client context needed
5% C Law enforcement has high potential
5% S Analytic corps is highly trained better than ever
5% S Career track needs building
5% I Stovepiping is a problem, need more X-community
5% I Should pursue virtual organization and wired network
3% V Newsworthy not intelligence
3% L Radical transformation needed
3% E Metrics are not needed
3% E Evaluation is negative
3% E Audits are difficult
3% Q Long term shortfalls overstated
3% Q Global coverage too difficult
3% T Targeting can be left to collectors
3% C All source materially lacking
3% C Need to guard against evidence addiction
3% C Need to take into account “feedback”
3% S Should train stovepipe analysts not IC analysts
3% S Language and cultural a strength
For the rest, not now, but three at the bottom trouble me: the analysts do not have the appreciation for feedback; they do not understand how lacking they are in sources; and they don't know enough to realize that radical transformation is needed.
On balance, I found this book annoying, but two pages ultimately provocative.
The Single Best Examination of Secrecy Costs, October 16, 2008
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
I testified to this Commission, both publicly and also in a private session in the office of Daniel Patrick Moynihan (RIP).
This is the single best non-partisan overview of the costs of unnessary secrecy, as well as the imperatives of providing proper definition and protection of necessary secrets.
I note with appreciation that my testimony led him to include the words “open source” in his cover letter of transmittal to the White House.
See also:
Nation of Secrets: The Threat to Democracy and the American Way of Life
Secrecy: The American Experience
Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers
For a sense of the logical implementation of the findings of this Commission, see THE SMART NATION ACT: Public Intelligence in the Public Interest.
For a sense of how we must radically alter the “closed circle” of national intelligence to embrace the entire Nation and indeed the Whole Earth, see Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace.
Most Recent Truly Relevant (and Ignored) Offical Findings on Intelligence Reform, October 16, 2008
Commission on the Roles and Capabilities of the United States Intelligence Community
I testified to this Commission, and won the Burundi Exercise, a benchmark exercise in which General Lew Allen, USAF (Ret) examined what I could produce with six telephone calls to the Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) world, and what the U.S. Intelligence Community could provide on a “no-notice” overnight basis.
This Commission's finding remain the most relevant to intelligence reform. They also remain the most ignored, one reason Senator David Boren (D-OK) was willing to write a Foreword to my own first book, On Intelligence: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World. In his Foreword (in the year 2000), Senator Boren points out explicitly that the reform recommendations of this Commission have been ignored by a succession of Directors of Central Intelligence (and today, Directors of National Intelligence.
There are a number of books on intelligence reform, I list a few below, and they all boil down to one simple truth: more outreach, less secrecy.
Best Truth: Intelligence in the Information Age
Reshaping National Intelligence for an Age of Information (RAND Studies in Policy Analysis)
Bombs, Bugs, Drugs, and Thugs: Intelligence and America's Quest for Security
The New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, & Political–Citizen's Action Handbook for Fighting Terrorism, Genocide, Disease, Toxic Bombs, & Corruption
Information Operations: All Information, All Languages, All the Time
THE SMART NATION ACT: Public Intelligence in the Public Interest
Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace
“The Open Source Program: Missing in Action”
Responds to Hamilton Bean's “The DNI's Open Source Center” in IJIC Summer 2007, a copy of which is available on this web site under References.Ā Click on Frog to go there.
