CIA Best Information Analysis Intelligence Organization

My first exposure to Dick Heuer’s work was about 18 years ago, and I have never forgotten the strong impression it made on me then. That 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 benefit of archival materials from the former USSR and Warsaw Pact regimes, reading Heuer’s latest presentation has had even more resonance. I know from first-hand encounters that many CIA officers tend to react skeptically to treatises on analytic epistemology. This is understandable. Too often, such treatises end up prescribing models as answers to the problem. These 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 effectively is how the human thought process builds its own models through which we process information. This 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 fields ranging from medicine to stock market analysis.

The 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-effect relationships and then process and interpret information through these models or filters. The discussion in Chapter 5 on the limits to the value of additional information deserves special attention, in my view particularly for an intelligence organization. What it illustrates is that too often, newly acquired information is evaluated and processed through the existing analytic model, rather than being used to reassess the premises of the model itself. The detrimental effects of this natural human tendency stem from the raison d’etre of an organization created to acquire special, critical information available only through covert means, and to produce analysis integrating this special information with the total knowledge base.

I doubt that any veteran intelligence officer will be able to read this ARTICLE without recalling cases in which the mental processes described by Heuer have had an adverse impact on the quality of analysis. How many
times have we encountered situations in which completely plausible premises, based on solid expertise, have been used to construct a logically valid forecast with virtually unanimous agreement that turned out to be dead wrong? In how many of these instances have we determined, with hindsight, that the problem was not in the logic but in the fact that one of the premises however plausible it seemed at the time was incorrect? In how many of these instances have we been forced to admit that the erroneous premise was not empirically based but rather a conclusion developed from its own model (sometimes called an assumption)?

And in how many cases was it determined after the fact that information had been available which should have provided a basis for questioning one or more premises, and that a change of the relevant premise(s) would have changed the analytic model and pointed to a different outcome? The commonly prescribed remedy for shortcomings in intelligence analysis and estimates most vociferously after intelligence “failures” is a major increase in expertise. Heuer’s research and the studies he cites pose a serious challenge to that conventional wisdom. The data show that expertise itself is no protection from the common analytic pitfalls that
are endemic to the human thought process. This point has been demonstrated in many fields beside intelligence analysis.

A review of notorious intelligence failures demonstrates that the analytic traps caught the experts as much as anybody. Indeed, the data show that when experts fall victim to these traps, the effects can be aggravated
by the confidence that attaches to expertise both in their own view and in the perception of others.