Psychology of Intelligence Analysis

by Central Intelligence Agency

My frst exposure to Dick Heuer’s work was about 18 years ago, and I have never forgotten the strong impression it made on me then. Tat was at about the midpoint in my own career as an intelligence analyst. After another decade and a half of experience, and the opportunity during the last few years to study many historical cases with the beneft of archival materials from the former USSR and Warsaw Pact regimes, reading Heuer’s latest presentation has had even more resonance. I know from frst-hand encounters that many CIA ofcers tend to react skeptically to treatises on analytic epistemology. Tis is understandable. Too often, such treatises end up prescribing models as answers to the problem. Tese models seem to have little practical value to intelligence analysis, which takes place not in a seminar but rather in a fast-breaking world of policy. But that is not the main problem Heuer is addressing. What Heuer examines so clearly and efectively is how the human thought process builds its own models through which we process information. Tis is not a phenomenon unique to intelligence; as Heuer’s research demonstrates, it is part of the natural functioning of the human cognitive process, and it has been demonstrated across a broad range of felds ranging from medicine to stock market analysis. Te process of analysis itself reinforces this natural function of the human brain. Analysis usually involves creating models, even though they may not be labeled as such. We set forth certain understandings and expectations about cause-and-efect relationships and then process and interpret information through these models or flters.

Genres: Psychology

Kindle Edition

First published September 28, 2011

About the author

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the U.S. Government, tasked with gathering, processing and analyzing national security information from around the world, primarily through the use of human intelligence (HUMINT). As one of the principal members of the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC), the CIA reports to the Director of National Intelligence and is primarily focused on providing intelligence for the President and his Cabinet.

Unlike the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which is a domestic security service, CIA has no law enforcement function and is mainly focused on overseas intelligence gathering, with only limited domestic collection. Though it is not the only U.S. government agency specializing in HUMINT, CIA serves as the national manager for coordination and deconfliction of HUMINT activities across the entire intelligence community. Moreover, CIA is the only agency authorized by law to carry out and oversee covert action on behalf of the President, unless the President determines that another agency is better suited for carrying out such action. It can, for example, exert foreign political influence through its tactical divisions, such as the Special Activities Division.

Before the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, CIA Director concurrently served as the head of the Intelligence Community; today these functions and authorities reside with the Director of National Intelligence. Despite transferring some of its powers to the DNI, the CIA has grown in size as a result of the September 11 terrorist attacks. In 2013, The Washington Post reported that in fiscal year 2010, the CIA had the largest budget of all IC agencies, exceeding previous estimates.

The CIA has increasingly expanded its roles, including covert paramilitary operations. One of its largest divisions, the Information Operations Center (IOC), has shifted focus from counter-terrorism to offensive cyber-operations. While the CIA has had some recent accomplishments, such as locating Osama bin Laden and taking part in the successful Operation Neptune Spear, it has also been involved in controversial programs such as extraordinary rendition and enhanced interrogation techniques.

Reviews

[Alien Bookreader · Rating 4 out of 5]

Intelligence analysts should be self-conscious about their reasoning processes. They should think about how they make judgments and reach conclusions, not just about the judgments and conclusions themselves.
- Richards Heuer

available here:
https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/sta...

The CIA published this and made it open source so everyone could understand the basics of skills that go into intelligence analysis, whether it’s analyzing open source info or human intelligence (HUMANINT). It's essentially a guide on how to structure your thinking when dealing with difficuly questions that must be answered.

The word tradecraft refers to the trade and the craft of collecting intelligence, starting with the intelligence collector (the spy) and ending with the intelligence analysts who analyze the information in the context of what they know about the culture, the sources and the current situation (politically, economically, in the context of current events). This guide is an intro into what the analysts do.

Unlike other fields of inquiry like science, there are additional challenges, like intentional deception (either from the collector or the source of the information). There is always potential for additional noise, cultural misreadings, bluffing, underestimating or overestimating threats. This field is full of landmines, and that's why you need to know how to grapple with sensitive and sometimes contradictory information to come to some set of predictions. Often it comes down to not one conclusion, but to several possibilities (the most likely ones) after the less likely ones have been throughly analyzed and discounted.

I love tradecraft strategies because they are so applicable to so many fields and to life in general, but surprisingly there are not that many books/ articles / videos out there about it. Even the tradecraft Reddit page is a ghost town. However one active source of tradecraft knowledge that I like, is this tradecraft Substack newsletter: https://substack.com/profile/45324145...

So, the tradecraft primer outlines strategies dealing with three main ideas: Diagnostic techniques involve making analytic arguments and gaps more transparent. Contrarian techniques involve challenging your assumptions. Imaginative thinking is about developing new insights. All of these techniques should improve the clarity and credibility of intelligence assessments.

Some highlights of the techniques I find most useful:

Diagnostic techniques:

Key Assumptions Check - identify all the assumptions you have about a situation and assess them. How much confidence exists that this assumption is correct? What explains the degree of confidence in the assumption? What circumstances or information might undermine this assumption?

Example: finding an active shooter. You assume it's a male, white, acting alone, riving a van. Once you know each key assumption you will be sensitive to new info that contradicts it. Keep only he strongest assumptions.

Quality of information check: Check the validity of information including the circumstances under which it was collected and in the case of HUMANINT, the background of the source as well as their motivation for providing information. Check if info is corroborated, re-examine dismissed info, caveat ambiguous info properly, indicate a level of confidence for all sources of info.

This way you can detect deception, intelligence gaps, and the confidence level of the overall analysis. Checking the quality of info is an ongoing process, and quality is much greater than quantity when it comes to collecting intel.

Indicators or signposts of change:
Watch how events develop, and know I advance what events would be a sign that things are moving in the expected path or the unexpected path. Basically, analysts always consider the many possible paths that the future can take (ie the Soviet Union will get stronger, or weaker, will expand or will collapse). There are different likelihoods assigned to these paths, but it can be the the unlikely path is the one that ends up happening. You have to know what to look for, what signs are indicative of any given path occurring, and watch them, note them, reassess your predictions as needed and re-assign likelihoods when enough signposts occur.

Analysis of competing hypotheses:

People are sometimes biased toward first impressions, cherry picking evidence to fit a pre-existing hypothesis and similar things. This strategy aims to overcome this: create a matrix of all competing hypotheses - then load already collected information into the matrix, then work to create a likelihood score for each hypothesis.

Focus on disproving hypotheses rather than proving one. Evidence is more diagnostic if it supports only one hypothesis and not multiple. However also consider: if an individual piece of evidence turns out to be wrong - how much does this shift the likelihood of a hypothesis being true?

Ask what evidence is not being seen but would be expected for a given hypothesis to be true. Is denial and deception a possibility?


Contrarian techniques:

High Impact - Low Probability Analysis - consider the events that are low probability but would be seriously impactful. This occurs in real life, world events no one expected to occur do occur and shake the world (the fall of the USSR, German unification, the fall of the Shah, the 9/11 bombings were all considered low probability at the time that they occurred). Define the outcome and then possible pathways that would lead to it, including possible triggers (like natural disasters, the death of a leader, economic and political shocks). Identify each pathways and a set of "observables" that you can track in the future as events unfold. Identify factors that would deflect these outcomes/ reduce their likelihood / promote a positive outcome instead.

This way you will notice signposts of an unlikely event occurring, even if it goes against expectations. You need to be able to counter your own prevailing mindset.

[DeAnna Knippling · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very short introduction to the craft of intelligence work via the CIA.

I highly recommend this for any writer looking to write mysteries. Parts of it read like a roadmap for Sherlock Holmes or Agatha Christie (or Batman), but there were lots of great hints on how to mess with the reader, too, like first suggesting a wrong hypothesis based on incomplete data because it would take the reader longer to find the right one, even if they didn't agree with it!

Recommended if you like mysteries. Plus you can do a search on the title and get it for free from the CIA website.

[Alex Campbell · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent book that reveals common flaws in analysis and, unlike many similar such works, actually provides actionable methods of reducing the frequency of such flaws.

Richards Heuer was a CIA officer for c.45 years and this book is the distillation of a lifetime's experience in intelligence analysis. It is clear, simply written and provides ample evidence for its main claims. More experienced students of behavioural bias will be familiar with several examples provided in the latter half of the book, where Heuer details availability bias, anchoring and more. With that said, Heuer's more contemporary approach and genuine insight into how to prevent these biases makes reading this worthwhile for any aspiring analyst.

[Martin Dion · Rating 4 out of 5]

Classical intel material, a must read for every analysts