The Uses and Misuses of Intelligence in Four US Wars

President Harry S. Truman created the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947 to ensure that the policy community would have access to independent intelligence analysis that was free of the policy advocacy of the Department of State and the Department of Defense. The CIA's most important analytic mission was the production of national intelligence estimates (NIEs) and assessments that tracked significant political and military developments and provided premonitory intelligence on looming threats and confrontations.

One gauge for measuring the success of the CIA's intelligence analysis is to measure the Agency's performance before and during four controversial wars: Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Three presidents (Truman, Eisenhower, and Johnson) did not interfere with the production of intelligence analysis in these crises; two presidents (Nixon and George W. Bush) tried to slant intelligence analysis; and now President Obama is fighting a war without benefit of the estimative capabilities of the intelligence community.

President Truman wanted sensitive intelligence with the bark on, and that is what he and President Dwight Eisenhower got from the CIA during the Korean War. Unfortunately, the CIA made a series of fundamental errors in its judgments, including failures to understand the policies and actions of North Korean leader Kim Il Sung, ascertain the nature of Kim's dialogue with the Soviets and the Chinese, provide strategic warning of Kim's decision to go to war, and anticipate China's entry into the war.

As a result of these failures, President Truman named the first civilian director of the CIA - Allen Dulles - and supported the creation of an elite Office of National Estimates (ONE) under Harvard Professor William Langer, a senior Office of Strategic Services (OSS) analyst during World War II. ONE consisted of two offices, an upper tier known as the Board of National Estimates (BNE), composed of senior government and academic officials, and an estimates staff composed of intelligence professionals who drafted NIE's. ONE quickly became the focal point of the CIA's intelligence analysis until it was abolished in 1973 by CIA director James Schlesinger, who shared the Nixon administration's desire to end ONE's independence and its dominance within the intelligence community.

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Predictive Analysis and Death From Above

The way predictive analysis works is quite simple. With more data (from the vidcams, electronic eavesdropping and informants on the ground) it's possible to create a model (or simulation) of what terrorist activity on the ground looks like. Thus, if the CIA analysts see certain patterns of actions on the ground, they can accurately predict where the Islamic terrorists are, what they doing and, often, exactly who (like a key Taliban or al Qaeda operative) is down there. At that point, the Hellfire missiles are applied. The track record of the accuracy of these predictions has been striking. Few civilians have been attacked, nearly all the targets have been, as the predictive analysis indicated, terrorists.

A key factor in making all this work was the U.S. government changing its policy, in the last two years, of only attacking terrorists on a list (of up to 500) of named individuals. Predictive analysis cannot always guarantee that a target will be a specific individual, but it can, with near certainty, indicate that the target is an Islamic terrorist. It all began back in the 1970s, when some CIA analysts discovered a new way to analyze the mountains of information they were receiving. The new tool was predictive analysis. What does this do for intelligence analysts? Predictive analysis was the result of a fortuitous combination of OR (Operations Research), large amounts of data and more powerful computers. OR is one the major (and generally unheralded) scientific developments of the early 20th century.

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Al-Qaeda Leader Possibly Killed in CIA Drone Attack

A Central Intelligence Agency drone is believed to have killed a top strategist and spokesman for al Qaeda, Abu Yahya al-Libi, in the tribal areas of Pakistan near the Afghan border, according to officials familiar with the strike.

Top Al Qaeda strategist Abu Yahya al-Libi is believed to have been killed by a CIA drone. Mr. al-Libi has been one of the most sought-after terrorist targets since his escape from the prison at Bagram Air Force base in 2005. A rising star in al Qaeda, he was on the CIA's list of top-20 al Qaeda targets, according to an official familiar with the list.

He was killed Tuesday near Miram Shah in North Waziristan. He was believed to be under the protection of the Haqqani network, a militant group with a tight relationship with al Qaeda. The State Department announced a $1 million award earlier this year for information leading to his capture. "Based on a Pakistani tip, the Americans got him," one official said.

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CIA Buys Stake in Firm That Monitors Blogs, Tweets

In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It’s part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using "open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day.

Visible crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. (It doesn’t touch closed social networks, like Facebook, at the moment.) Customers get customized, real-time feeds of what’s being said on these sites, based on a series of keywords.

Then Visible “scores” each post, labeling it as positive or negative, mixed or neutral. It examines how influential a conversation or an author is. Finally, Visible gives users a chance to tag posts, forward them to colleagues and allow them to response through a web interface.

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Enhanced interrogation techniques

The ethics of enhanced interrogation techniques, detailed in a series of White House memos earlier this year, have come under growing fire in Washington and around the world. And the effectiveness of these practices—including sleep deprivation and waterboarding—have drawn increasing scrutiny in the scientific community. A new review paper, published online in Trends in Cognitive Science, investigates whether such intense approaches, labeled as torture by some, might be counterproductive to obtaining accurate information from suspects.

The use of coercive interrogation "is based on the assumption that subjects will be motivated to reveal veridical information to end interrogation, and that extreme stress, shock and anxiety do not impact memory," Shane O'Mara, a professor at the Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience in Dublin and the paper's lead author, said in a prepared statement. "However, this model of the impact of extreme stress on memory and the brain is utterly unsupported by scientific evidence."

It's become the conventional wisdom that the tortured will say anything to make the torture stop, and that "anything" need not be truthful as long as it is what the torturers want to hear. Solid scientific evidence on how repeated and extreme stress and pain affect memory and executive functions (such as planning or forming intentions) suggests these techniques are unlikely to do anything other than the opposite of that intended by coercive or 'enhanced' interrogation."

• “How torture may inhibit accurate confessions”, Scientific American, 9/21/09.
• “The Tortured Brain”, Newsweek, 9/21/09.
• “CIA Interrogations Informed by Bad Science”, Time, 9/21/09.

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CIA World Factbook

The World Factbook, produced by the Intelligence Directorate of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is no longer printed by the U.S. government. All the information contained in it has been produced in a brand new website that is much larger and more encompassing than before. It is also updated every two weeks and therefore keeps up with changes occurring across the world. The Factbook is also downloadable from the web.

The World Factbook provides information on the history, people, government, economy, geography, communications, transportation, military, and transnational issues for 266 world entities. The Reference tab includes: maps of the major world regions, as well as Flags of the World, a Physical Map of the World, a Political Map of the World, and a Standard Time Zones of the World map.

To visit the new website, please click here.

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