Doing Intel Right

I meant to write about this a while ago, but I never got around to it, until I wondered why I tagged "MUST BLOG ABOUT" on the link in my favorites menu (which has about 500 links in total, so "important" and "MUST finish reading" are rather common). After re-reading a few paragraphs, I remembered how excellent this article is, and how much it actually changed the way I think.
Herbert E. Meyer on Intelligence on National Review Online

I'll quote the most-summarizing parts that I can, but don't use these as an excuse to not read the entire article. Since I quote most of the article, you're best off reading the real thing at the link, but I'll quote anyway so that I have something to more clearly reference.

Since the National Intelligence Estimates were the most important products of all — they are the judgments and projections that reflect the combined wisdom of all the dozen or so agencies that comprise the intelligence community — Casey poured a lot of energy into getting the estimates right.
My job was to manage production of these estimates, and one day early on Casey issued these instructions: "Look, I want the president to see where we disagree and to understand what the argument is about. Sometimes these guys at the Defense Intelligence Agency have a very solid point but they don't say it very clearly. They're soldiers, not wordsmiths. When they come in with a dissent, you go meet with them. Understand what they're driving at, then write it yourself and clear it with them. Then let's put the dissents in italics in the estimates so that no one can miss them."
Casey was never bothered when an estimate read like a shouting match and revealed that the intelligence community was split wide open on an issue. And if the finished product didn't reflect his personal judgment, he could always send an "eyes-only" memo to the president and know it would be read.
In addition, we often bounced the drafts of our estimates off experts from outside the intelligence community. Over the decades Casey had accumulated an astonishing rolodex of contacts throughout the world in business, politics, government, and academia. I also knew a few people. When we had the draft of an estimate in hand, we would sort through our rolodexes and then arrange one-on-one meetings with whomever we thought was knowledgeable about this particular issue. Sometimes we would meet in Casey's office — and the analysts were always circling outside, looking worried that the expert would tear their work to shreds. More often — and the analysts never knew this — we would meet with an expert in the evening, at Casey's house or at mine. On a couple of occasions I went overseas to meet with an expert whose opinion we really wanted. We couldn't show the classified estimate draft to the expert, but we didn't need to. We just walked him or her through the draft. (And since these people weren't stupid, they understood precisely what we were doing.) We would come away from the conversation either confident that we were on solid ground or queasy enough to take the draft apart to see where we might be going wrong. Every so often, we wound up shredding the draft completely and starting all over again.
Even with all this, it's possible to go wrong because we humans have a tendency to hear what we want to hear and to filter out whatever doesn't suit us. So we had an internal "fail-safe" system to minimize the chances that we would be so much in love with our own judgments that no inconvenient fact could stop us. It was called the senior review panel (SRP) and it was composed of four savvy and immensely experienced individuals whom Casey had cajoled out of retirement to lend a hand. Among the four — membership in the SRP changed over time, of course — were one of the State Department's most revered career ambassadors, an Army general who had spent much of his active-duty service in military intelligence, and a former CIA officer who knew his way around the ultra-secret world of satellites and electronic intercepts.
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If you've been a diligent reader of recent articles and commentary about the intelligence business, you probably have the impression that collectors collect what they can, then forward their reports, intercepts, and photos over to the analysts — who then read through all this stuff until their eyeballs bleed. This is a formula for disaster. If you don't have a clear grasp of what you're looking for, it's virtually impossible to discern a pattern from the overwhelming torrent of information that's washing over you. Just imagine standing in the middle of a Wal-Mart, realizing you've left your wife's shopping list on the kitchen table — and hoping that if you just walk up and down the aisles you'll somehow figure it out.
Here's how the intelligence business really works: You start with a hypothesis, which is a leap of imagination based on your expertise, your judgment, and your "gut-feel" about what you think is really going on. Then you figure out what you would expect to find if your hypothesis is correct, and you convey all this to the collectors so they can get to work.
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Of course, there are dangers in developing a hypothesis and telling the collectors what you want. They can try to please you by providing whatever bits and pieces they can find, even though these bits and pieces aren't an accurate reflection of the truth. Or, if the collectors cannot find the indicators you are seeking, you can cling to your beloved hypothesis and blame the collectors for their inability to find what you know is really there — rather than admit that your hypothesis is just plain wrong. It's always a judgment call, which is why it's so important that the individual in charge has not only brains, but intellectual integrity.
And sometimes, everything depends on a director who has all this, and also the courage to go with his instinct — that un-quantifiable gut feel for where the big payoff lies. One of Casey's great predecessors was John McCone, whom President Kennedy made DCI after the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco. McCone was an older version of Casey — savvy, street-smart, knowledgeable about the world and Washington, deeply religious, seriously rich. The two men liked each other a lot, and from time to time McCone — frail but razor-sharp — would stop by for a chat. One day after the two had finished their private conversation and Casey had left the building for a Cabinet meeting, McCone had some time to spare and he very kindly stopped to talk with me. Our conversation turned to the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, and McCone told me a story I'd never heard before.

As the crisis built and as members of Congress were warning that Khrushchev was placing nuclear missiles in Cuba that could reach the U.S., the CIA bureaucracy insisted that there were, in fact, no Soviet missiles in Cuba. McCone ordered that a U-2 flight be sent over the island to find out, one way or the other. It would be a dangerous mission — obviously dangerous to the pilot, less obviously a potential causus belli if the spy plane got shot down and Congress demanded that the U.S. retaliate — and opposition to sending the U-2 was strong at the CIA and the Pentagon. McCone insisted, the U-2 flew, and when the film it took was developed and studied by the experts, there were no missiles. McCone ordered a second U-2 flight, and the opposition was even more ferocious. But he insisted, the mission was flown and — again, no missiles. I asked McCone what happened next. "Oh, my," he said. "I'm afraid I wasn't very popular in Washington that week, because I ordered a third flight." And when the film from that third flight showed no missiles, McCone ordered a fourth, and then a fifth. It was the sixth U-2 flight that found the missiles, and the rest is history.
(McCone sent the additional flights because "he knew, just knew, those missiles were there")

Intelligence isn't org charts. It's people. Put the wrong people in charge and they will screw up no matter how perfectly our intelligence community is structured. Put the right people in charge and they will overcome whatever structural flaws there may be and get the job done. The future looks very promising. President Bush's choice for the new post of director of national intelligence is Ambassador John Negroponte, one of the most experienced and effective diplomats in American history. His deputy will be General Michael Hayden, who has been running the National Security Agency and who knows the collection business upside down, backwards and forwards.
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But if all their time and energy is drained away messing with budgets, fighting turf wars with the Pentagon and the now-downgraded CIA, testifying before the dozen or so congressional committees that have intelligence-oversight responsibilities, and coordinating the agencies that comprise the intelligence community, they won't have any time or energy left to do the one thing that will actually make a difference in the quality of the intelligence delivered to the president and his top advisers: to sit quietly in their offices, alone, with the draft of an estimate in one hand and a pencil in the other, weighing the estimate's evidence and conclusions, then matching what they are reading with their own judgment, experience, and instincts.
Their success will depend not on their administrative skills, but on their talent for "doing Intel" right. So will our lives.

OK, so that's a lot of quote.
I don't think I can write anything comparable to the above, so I won't try.