"We're USA today with spies"

Last Friday the Raleigh News & Observer ran my column on Ron Johnston's study of the work life of U.S. intelligence analysts (click the title above to link to it). Titled Analytic Culture in the U.S. Intelligence Community, and published by the CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence, the study makes for fascinating if rather depressing reading. Today's title is a quotation from one analyst interviewed by Johnston. The gist of the story is that analysts are often no longer doing my analyzing. Instead, they are being turned into reporters, and the emphasis in their reporting is on the short-run and the tactical (or even the operational), to the detriment of long-run and the large-scale.

Admittedly, mentioning this on a day which sees Yahoo (http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20051107/wl_mideast_afp/usiraqintelligence) reporting that "U.S. Iraq intel 'intentionally misleading'" (about a Defense Intelligence Agency assessment of an al Quaeda defector who supplied information on a Saddam-al Qaeda connection concluding that it was probably deliberate misinformation, but the Bush administration ignoring their conclusion),the fact that analysts no longer get to write longer, more reflective pieces, or that nobody reads them anyway might seem to be small potatoes. Granted, it is not by itself criminal, but it speaks to a pervasive malfunctioning of the national security "management information system" which may ultimately be a larger problem because it is not linked to criminality or the knavery of specific elected or appointed officials but to a larger more systemic problem.

Quoting from my own concluding paragraphs:

To its credit, the report presents some good ideas for addressing the problems on the supply side -- through strengthening what the report terms the "infrastructure" of research and analysis, making the evaluation of analysis much more systematic and institutionalizing a process of learning from mistakes.

Unfortunately, the intelligence agencies can do little about the demand side. They are in no position to teach their consumers that they should be asking for a different kind of intelligence product. That will only come about when voters elect leaders who have an interest in analysis that goes beyond short-term tactical considerations, and who are willing to listen to points of view that they might not like to hear.