THE ECONOMICS OF NATIONAL SECURITY, NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP78-03584R000100070001-7
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 41
• Document Creation Date: December 15, 2016
• Document Release Date: November 6, 2003
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: January 1, 1964
• Content Type: REPORT

Approved For ReleMp(/~1~~ 78-03584R000100070001-7
of
NATIONAL SECURITY
NATIONAL
INTELLIGENCE
INDUSTRIAL COLLEGE OF THE ARMED FORCES
WASHINGTON, D.C.
1964
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CONTENTS
Page
FOREWORD----------------------------------------------------
I. THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY_____________________________
1
World War II Arrangements_________________________________
1
Postwar Structure___________________________________________
3
The National Security Council___________________________
3
The United States Intelligence Board______________________
5
Standing Committees of the USIB________________________
8
The Role of Intelligence in Policymaking______________________
0
II. THE INTELLIGENCE PROCESS --------------------------------
13
Requirements------------------------------------------------
13
Collection---------------------------------?------------------
16
Information Processing______________________________________
21
Analysis----------------------------------------------------
21
Dissemination-------------------------------?----------------
25
III. CATEGORIES OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE----------------
27
The Strategic Estimate---------------------------------------
28
Defining the Problem-------------------------------------
28
Strategic Stature________________________________________
30
Intentions and Capabilities_______________________________
30
Production Procedures -----------------------------------
32
Current-Intelligence Reports__________________________________
34
The Current-Intelligence Analyst__________________________
35
Past Failures of Current Intelligence_____________________
37
Indications Analysis_____________________________________
38
The Watch Committee and National Indications Center_____
39
Basic Surveys-----------------------------------------------
40
JANIS in World War II__________________________________
43
The National Intelligence Survey_________________________
43
IV. SUBJECT-MATTER SPECIALIZATION___________________________
45
Political Intelligence-----------------------------------------
45
Biographical Intelligence_____________________________________
47
Military Intelligence-----------------------------------------
48
Geographic Intelligence--------------------------------------
50
Scientific Intelligence----------------------------------------
51
Sources of Information___________________________________
52
Personnel------------------------------------------------
53
Analysis---------------------------------? ---------------
54
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FOREWORD
The expanding role of intelligence in support of those who formu-
late and execute national security policies of the United States is
4 abundantly evident today. For an alert and effective defense, indeed,
for its very survival, the Nation needs an adequate intelligence system.
This system must be able to provide an accurate picture of the world
as a whole, of the capabilities and intentions of potential enemies, and
INDUSTRIAL COLLEGE OF THE ARMED FORCES of the chances of imminent attack by an aggressor. It must furnish
WASHINGTON, D.C. information on political, diplomatic, military, economic, and other
matters. And it must remain the servant of national policy, subject
AUGUST SCHOMBURG, Lt. Gen., USA to effective, continuing review and control by the government.
Commandant Many readers can still recall vividly the clandestine efforts of the
Office of Strategic Services in World War II, with agents operating be-
WILLIAM S. STEELE, Major Gen., USAF hind enemy lines and guerrilla leaders dropped into various countries.
Deputy Commandant Yet even then much work of less dramatic nature was also done to as-
semble and evaluate the masses of information vital to the conduct
J. E. RHELER, Captain, USN of diplomacy or military operations. Intelligence today can draw on
Director, Correspondence School electronic sensing devices, powerful high-speed cameras, advanced
computers, and other highly sophisticated types of equipment. De-
spite these technological advances, intelligence is still a difficult process
This material is furnished for instructional purposes only. The of collection, analysis, evaluation, and synthesis of information. It
views or opinions expressed or implied are not to be construed as rep- remains a job for well-trained, competent, experienced, and dedicated
resenting the official policies of the Department of Defense. professionals.
In an earlier era when the United States was more insulated from
events abroad, national policy decisions could safely be formulated
without the organization for intelligence developed since World War
II. Today intelligence on foreign countries, although hardly the
only consideration in policymaking, is one that in many instances over-
rides all others. The intentions, capabilities, and vulnerabilities of
foreign countries are becoming more and more relevant to U.S. courses
of action, and policy decisions affecting the Nation's security rest in-
creasingly on information provided through the machinery and proc-
esses of national intelligence described in the following pages.
M. S. REZCHLEY
Senior Educational Adviser
Industrial College of the Armed Forces
Washington, D.C.
1 April 1964
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IV. SUBJECT-MATTER SPECIALIZATION-Continued Page
Economic Intelligence---------------------------------------- 55
Analysis of War Potential-------------------------------- 55
Wartime Economic Intelligence--------------------------- 60
Intelligence for Economic Warfare------------------------ 62
Economic Intelligence in the Cold War--------------------- 63
V. INTELLIGENCE IN THE SPACE AGE--------------------------- 65
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING---------------------- 68
INDEX---------------------------------------------------------- 71
ILLUSTRATION
The Intelligence Community-------------------------------------- 9
THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY
Intelligence is collected and analyzed on many command echelons.
An infantry company in the field conducts scouting and other obser-
vational activities in its immediate area of operations. The command-
ing officers of battalions, regiments, divisions, and armies similarly
rely on intelligence-either developed by their own G-2's or received
from other echelons-to support them in the execution of their mis-
sions. There may at times be an unhappy duplication of activities by
the intelligence units in the hierarchy, but the desirability of giving
intelligence support to the operational commands at all levels is not
seriously questioned.
Before World War II, the highest echelon of intelligence in the
United States was the departmental level. Military analyses were
produced by the War and Navy Departments and political analyses by
the State Department to assist the respective Secretaries in the dis-
charge of their responsibilities. Estimates produced by, say, the War
Department did on occasion go beyond a mere review of military con-
siderations to take in other elements of the situation as well. For
the character of war in the 20th century and of the tensions between
wars called increasingly for assessments of military capabilities, not
in isolation but in conjunction with economic strengths, state of
scientific achievements, political intentions, and psychological vulner-
abilities. The War Department however, was then clearly giving its
views on matters in which other agencies might claim a greater com-
petence, and the presumptive departmental bias of its estimates tended
to vitiate their acceptability. There was no mechanism to provide
the President and those who assisted him in formulating national
policy with coordinated intelligence analyses on matters which tran-
scended the competence of a single department-in short, with national
intelligence.
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World War II struck hone the urgent requirement for improved
intelligence support to those who formulated national strategy. Pearl
Harbor was a clear failure of intelligence. Despite the victory over
Japan the stamp of the disaster remained indelible on the American
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consciousness. The Hoover Commmission in 1955 observed, "The
CIA may well attribute its existence to the surprise attack on Pearl
Harbor."
Even before Pearl Harbor, the President took the initiative to
develop the machinery for producing national intelligence. In July
1941, the office of the Coordinator of Information was set up with
a charter to collect and analyze strategic intelligence and furnish the
results to the President and other agencies. The office was transformed
after Pearl Harbor into the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).
Strategic intelligence, pertaining as it does to the capabilities, vul-
nerabilities, and probable courses of action of foreign nations, covers
much the same ground as national intelligence in that both types are
commonly addressed to the top officials charged with formulating and
executing national policy. In the strictest sense of the term, however,
strategic intelligence can be conducted on the departmental or other
level without being offered, like national intelligence, as the coordi-
nated view of the intelligence community. Nevertheless OSS was a
lineal ancestor of CIA and so a landmark in the development of the
community for producing national intelligence. OSS made a lasting
impact by the stimulus it gave to the use of scholarly techniques in
intelligence analysis, although the popular literature has centered on
the organization's more dramatic "special operations," such as the
support of guerrilla activities behind enemy lines. OSS recruited
academicians by the hundreds, many of whom served as officials in
successor intelligence agencies and were among the first to articulate
a doctrine of intelligence to encompass the organization and activities
of the national-intelligence community.
OSS did not effect the interagency coordination required to dignify
its analyses with the designation of national intelligence. The syn-
thesis of intelligence during the war was rather centered in the Joint
Intelligence Committee (JIC) of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. OSS
was represented on the JIC along with the Department, of State, the
Foreign Economic Administration, and the military services. It is
questionable whether even the centralized intelligence performed un-
der the JIC could strictly be called national intelligence, since its
purpose was to support the requirements of the Joint Chiefs.
Joint collection groups, staffed by civilians and military officers, were
set up in the various military theaters. The joint effort was also
successful in bringing out a good compendium of data on terrain,
targets, population, and other items of basic intelligence in the JANIS
(Joint Army-Navy Intelligence Studies) compendiums. But no fully
effective mechanism was evolved for the production of composite in-
telligence estimates on such issues a the enei st~v i o ~}'
CL P0 ~cy e,L* It 6/24 Oil
the need to bring the USSR into the move
individual or departmental analyses for background on these vital
issues of the day.
POSTWAR STRUCTURE
It was widely appreciated that the wartime intelligence structure
was makeshift, but there was widespread disagreement at the end of
the war on the best institutional arrangements for intelligence produc-
tion. In some quarters, there was advocacy of a single centralized
agency. Elsewhere, a centralized agency, which might increasingly
arrogate to itself activities traditionally performed by the intelligence
organizations within the military services, was viewed as endangering
the fulfillment of military missions. The nature of the compromise
finally evolved was foreshadowed in January 1946 when the President
issued an Executive order setting up a National Intelligence Au-
thority composed of the Secretaries of State, War, Navy, and the
President's personal representative. The National Intelligence Au-
thority served in the nature of a board of directors over a Central
Intelligence Group, which operated under two basic principles. First,
its mission was principally to coordinate the intelligence produced in
the various departments of the Government. Second, it was to per-
form only those other functions which the National Intelligence
Authority decided could best be performed centrally.
These two principles for the production of national intelligence
were retained by Congress when it passed the National Security Act
of 1947 creating the Central Intelligence Agency. Perhaps even more
important for the evolving shape of national intelligence was the
creation, under this act, of the National Security Council (NSC). In
the business world, there can be no sustained production of goods
for which there is no market demand. In the Government, similarly,
efficient services are not likely to be offered where there is no articu-
lated demand for those services. The NSC has played an historically
noteworthy role in making insistent demands on national intelligence,
and the intelligence community has steadily improved its skills in
tailoring its product to serve the needs of policymaking at the highest
echelons. This orientation of intelligence to the requirements of na-
tional policy has been further encouraged by the NSC's statutory
authority over intelligence production.
The President presides over the meetings of the NSC. The Na-
tional Security Act of 1947 (as later amended) prescribes four other
statutory members : the Vice President, the Secretary of State, the.
Secretary of Defense, and the Director of Emergency Planning-
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THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY 5
Nation's resources in emergency situations. The statute permits the
attendance of such other officials as the President desires; the regu-
lar participation at Council meetings of the Secretary of the Treas-
ury and the Director of the Bureau of the Budget insures that matters
of national strategy are considered in the context of economic reali-
ties. In addition, the President on occasion invites other officials to
sit in on meetings if the agenda includes items in which they have
a special interest. Such ad hoc participants have included the Sec-
retary of Commerce, the Secretary of the Interior, the Ambassador
to the United Nations, and the Director of the U.S. Information
Agency.
The Special Assistant to the President for National Security
Affairs acts as executive officer for the NSC. A key figure in keep-
ing the White House abreast of national security problems, he pre-
pares the agenda of Council meetings and personally briefs the
President on NSC matters.
Two other officials participate in Council sessions : the Chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Director of Central Intelligence.
By statute, these are advisers rather than members of the Council.
They present their views in their areas of competence but do not join
in the final articulation of national policy recommendations.
The statutory function of the National Security Council is to
"advise the President with respect to the integration of domestic,
foreign, and military policies." The working style of Presidents
varies, and the role of the NSC has varied correspondingly from
administration to administration. President Truman did not regu-
larly attend meetings of the NSC until the outbreak of the Korean
War. Under President Eisenhower, the NSC met almost weekly,
and considerable reliance was placed on organs set up within the
NSC to prepare formal papers defining national policy positions and
to survey the implementation of policy by the executive agencies of
the Government.
These organs of the NSC were abolished under President Kennedy,
who called on the Council as a group less frequently than did his
predecessors. In place of formal Council deliberations, task forces
on specific problems are now often used to provide the White House
with viewpoints that represent the consensus. of the participating
departments and agencies. The task force does not ordinarily come
within the NSC structure : The Berlin Task Force and the Counter-
insurgency Task Force are interagency groups that are chaired by
State and report to the President through the Secretary of State.
An example of an interagency task force within the Council struc-
ture is the Executive Committee of the NSC, organized in the fall of
Insofar as the Council must obtain the information it needs to sup-
port its policy recommendations, the lawmakers considered it impor-
tant to give the NSC considerable authority over the national
intelligence process. The 1947 statute placed the Central Intelligence
Agency under the Council. Many of the responsibilities of CIA
and of other intelligence organizations are set forth in directives
issued by the NSC. The Council has also established intelligence
committees to coordinate certain activities within the intelligence
community.
THE U.S. INTELLIGENCE BOARD
The highest ranking of these committees is the U.S. Intelligence
Board (USIB). The USIB acts as a sort of board of review over
the intelligence community, meeting normally once a week, oftener
during crisis situations. The agendas of USIB meetings cover not
merely matters of substantive intelligence but also the general prob-
lems of administrative relationships within the intelligence commu-
nity. Since the heads of the various intelligence organizations are
on the Board, the understandings reached at USIB sessions are gen-
erally effective in achieving smoother working relationships on the
lower echelons.
There are six intelligence organizations represented on the USIB.
Central Intelligence Agency. The head of CIA is the Director of
Central Intelligence, but his responsibilities extend beyond the
Agency itself. He is the senior intelligence adviser to the President,
and he undertakes the coordination and guidance of "the total U.S.
foreign intelligence effort," in the words of a letter from the Presi-
dent of January 1962. ' Reflecting this larger role, the Director of
Central Intelligence, who formerly both presided as chairman of the
USIB and acted as the CIA member, now serves on the Board only
in the capacity of chairman. Since 1962, the practice has been for
the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence to sit on the U.S. Intel-
ligence Board as the representative of CIA.
While CIA's role in matters of intelligence interpretation is in
large part one of melding the estimates of other USIB agencies, it
also propounds its own viewpoints in the general effort to reach a
consensus. On Sino-Soviet bloc economic developments, for exam-
ple, CIA originates a large part of the contributions to strategic
estimates, and CIA viewpoints in this area tend to carry the weight
that the services carry in military intelligence and that other USIB
agencies carry in their special fields of competence.
When the analyses of all these agencies are integrated in CIA or
one of the interagency intelligence committees, the resultant product
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6 THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY 7
the form of strategic estimates (say on the probable course of Sino-
Soviet relations), of basic encyclopedic descriptions (terrain, reli-
gion, labor force, harbors, air force, governmental organizations,
transportation, etc.), or of current intelligence assessments (the mean-
ing of Khrushchev's latest statement on Cuba). CIA must sometimes
bypass the machinery for complete coordination in the case of cur-
rent intelligence, where time pressures may call for quick prelimi-
nary assessments, but the rule is to incorporate the consensus where
possible of the intelligence community at large.
In addition to its responsibilities for analysis and coordination,
CIA is chartered by the National Security Act of 1947 to perform
for the rest of the intelligence community such services as the NSC
determines are best performed centrally, as well as other functions
relating to national security that the NSC may direct. Under this
authority, CIA engages in clandestine collection of information, which
is disseminated to analysts throughout the Government and if the
contents warrant directly
In
addition, the Agency provides the central repository for all intel-
ligence documents, the archives so to speak, which the researcher
can use for the expeditious recall on microfilm of thousands upon
thousands of military attache cables, foreign service dispatches, and
other classified reports.
State Department. Political intelligence as analyzed in the De-
partment of State constitutes a major ingredient of national intelli-
gence production. Foreign Service officers abroad provide some of
the most highly informative reporting on political and economic con-
ditions available to the intelligence community. Their reports are
not products of clandestine operations but rather of information legiti-
mately available to diplomatic personnel.
At headquarters in Washington, the production of finished intel-
ligence in the State Department is the responsibility of the Bureau
of Intelligence and Research. The head of the Bureau, The Director
of Intelligence and Research-with rank equivalent to that of As-
sistant Secretary-serves as State's representative on the USIB. The
Bureau stresses research and analyses that are "policy oriented,"
that is, clearly serve the needs of officials at the level of foreign policy
planning or major decisionmaking. A pending decision with respect
to diplomatic recognition of a new Latin American military regime
might, for example, occasion an assessment by State intelligence of
political repercussions and economic implications.
Department of Defense. The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)
partment of Defense and to improve the Department's capacity for
the collection, production, and dissemination of defense intelligence.
DIA has replaced the J-2 of the Joint Staff, and it is now the
adviser on intelligence matters to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and to
the Secretary of Defense. The Joint Chiefs have designated the
Director of DIA as their agent for developing recommendations to
strengthen the intelligence capabilities of the unified and specified
commands.
DIA is still in process of evolution, but it has already taken over
most of the activities relating to national intelligence that were per-
formed by the military services. It has, for example, assumed all
the responsibility for current intelligence production in the Depart-
ment of Defense, including the operation of a 24-hour center to re-
ceive, display, evaluate, and disseminate information necessary for
quick warning alerts. DIA is also the focal point in the Department
of Defense for the production of other intelligence studies and esti-
mates, and for setting up collection guides and manuals used by
intelligence components in the field. This guidance flows from the
DIA through the unified and specified commands.
In March 1964, DIA became the sole representative on the USIB
of all elements of the Department of Defense with the exception of
the National Security Agency. DIA, however, will not entirely re-
place the Army, Navy, and Air Force intelligence organizations.
These organizations continue to have responsibilities in such areas as
counterintelligence, intelligence training, and technical intelligence
under the coordination of DIA. They are no longer individually rep-
resented on the USIB, but they may attend in an observer capacity.
Arrangements have been made, moreover, to assure that the intelligence
chiefs of the services retain an important voice in the production of
intelligence estimates approved by the USIB, especially in fields of
particular interest like weapons development, air targets, and naval
facilities.
National Security Agency. The interception and decrypting of
foreign communications is carried on by NSA, an element of the De-
partment of Defense.. Communications intelligence has on many oc-
casions provided the United States with information unavailable from
other sources. The breaking of Japanese codes prior to Pearl Harbor
revealed Tokyo's instructions to its diplomats in Washington.
Atomic Energy Commission. AEC plays an important role in
covering foreign developments in the field of nuclear energy. Through
interagency arrangements, AEC works closely with other intelligence
organizations of the Government.
is the newest of the USIB membe sp My r6t 0as M446/24 : CIA-RDP78-0$ bWMN 'Ojp1u$stigation.
achieve unity of effort among the intelligence components of the De- security agency of the Government.
The FBI is the chief internal
Its participation in the produc-
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tion of foreign intelligence is only occasional, but it frequently dis-
seminates to other members of the intelligence community useful
information which it has turned up in the course of its counterintel-
ligence activities.
In addition to the agencies described above, a number of other Gov-
ernment departments collect and analyze information on foreign
areas-Treasury on financial markets abroad, Commerce on economic
conditions affecting U.S. export prospects, Agriculture on foreign
crops, to name but a few examples. In its restricted sense, however,
the term "intelligence community" is understood to include only the
agencies represented on the USIB.
The representatives of the intelligence organizations on the USIB
can oversee only the broadest phases of intelligence production, and
standing committees of the USIB have therefore been set up in a com-
parable role on lower specialized echelons. The Watch Committee is
an example. Watch Committee meetings, attended by representatives
with their supporting staff of analysts from the USIB agencies, assess
current developments with a'special eye on possible implications for
the early outbreak of hostilities. Watch Committee conclusions, after
clearance and approval by the USIB, represent the consensus of the
intelligence community with regard to the likelihood of imminent hos-
tilities in any part of the world.
Other USIB standing committees of growing importance in recent
years are three committees dealing with various aspects of scientific
and technical intelligence, especially those relating to modern weapons
and technology. Since the military services, AEC, and CIA are re-
sponsible for different aspects of scientific and technical intelligence,
assessments of foreign scientific capabilities generally require consid-
erable interdepartmental coordination and approval by one of these
committees.
Similar coordination in the field of economic intelligence is per-
formed through the Economic Intelligence Committee. CIA analysts
produce most of the economic intelligence on the Communist bloc, but
analysts in other departments also prepare frequent analyses on such
economic areas as merchant marine transportation and optimum choice
of industrial installations as military targets.
Another example of a USIB standing committee is the National
Intelligence Survey Committee, which superintends the production
within the intelligence community of "country encyclopedias"-studies
of terrain, religion, economy, political structure, and other background
features. CIA and other agencies contribute chapters of these studies,
THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY 9
and CIA incorporates the chapters into "National Intelligence Sur-
veys." Surveys are prepared for each country and periodically
revised.
THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY
? 4ft
to 00 00
10 100 100
0
?
II
NATIONAL
SECURITY COUNCIL
Statutory Members
Other Participants and
Observers
Advisers;
Chairman, Joint Chiefs
of Staff
Director of Central
Intelligence
STANDING COMMITTEES OF USIB
(Representatives from USIB Agencies)
WATCH COMMITTEE
ECONOMIC INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE
SCIENTIFIC INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE
NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE SURVEY
COMMITTEE
OTHER USIB STANDING COMMITTEES
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tives o the operating departments to recommend nolinv_
THE ROLE OF INTELLIGENCE IN POLICYMAKING
In the National Security Council and in other forums dealing with
national policy, the intelligence representatives avoid the impropriety
of taking a position for or against specific policies. Their role is to
provide the required intelligence, which will serve as an important
\ Chairman of USIB
UNITED STATES INTELLIGENCE BOARD
to Director of Central Intelligence, Chairman
Representatives from USIB Agencies:
? Deputy Director of Central Intelligence
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The reason for this meticulous drawing of the line between na-
tional intelligence and national policy is the need to keep intelligence
unbiased and free from the appearance of special pleading. It is
considered best that intelligence organizations not become committed
to particular policy interests. If naval intelligence stresses an enemy's
vulnerability to sea blockade, or if air intelligence enlarges on foreign
air force and missile strength, some observers see a discomfiting
analogy to investment counseling by brokers who stand to gain large
commissions by marketing certain stocks. The legislators who framed
the National Security Act of 1947 had in mind the necessary line be-
tween policy formulation and intelligence support when they stipu-
lated that the Director of Central Intelligence was to be an adviser
rather than a member of the National Security Council.
Because of the secrecy that necessarily surrounds the making of
national policy, there has been widespread public uncertainty that
the line between policy and intelligence is invariably respected in prac-
tice. The question came up during the Senate hearings in 1962 on
the confirmation of Mr. John A. McCone as Director of Central In-
telligence. Mr. McCone detailed his concept of the position, affirming
that his was not a policymaking role but rather one of getting the
facts and evaluation to those responsible for making policy. The
Senators present expressed agreement with this principle.
The principle must be applied to serve, not thwart, effective policy-
making. It is proper for intelligence analyses to examine the prob-
able effects in foreign countries of alternative U.S. policies. Assess-
ments of the economic situation in Yugoslavia, for example, may be
made under varying assumptions of the level of U.S. aid. Soviet
intentions in Europe or Chinese Communist actions in the Far East
may be similarly estimated under explicitly stated alternative as-
sumptions of U.S. courses of action.
The "hands-off policy" injunction is again relaxed to permit in-
telligence to evaluate the results of policy decisions already taken.
The effect of U.S. export controls on the Chinese Communist economy,
for example, is accepted as a proper area for intelligence analysis.
In such cases, the intelligence community may find itself with a heavy
responsibility for decisions to revise or reinforce past policies, despite
the theoretical apartheid between intelligence support and policy-
making. A decision, Admiral Radford once pointed out, is an action
that the executive must take when the answer does not suggest itself
from the information at hand. When the information supplied seems
so conslusive as virtually to suggest the proper answer, the philosophi-
cal distinction between intelligence support and policy decisions loses
practical force.
A final word on the proper relationship between intelligence and
policy must take note of the charge that policy has too often been
determined without regard to intelligence assessments. This is a
charge which had greater validity before the 1947 Act. In the first
place, the prestige of the intelligence estimate was then not so high as
now. In the second place, the intelligence community is far better
apprised of the needs of policymakers today than formerly. As the
senior intelligence adviser to the President, the Director of Central
Intelligence is in frequent touch with the White House. Intelligence
liaison with the Chairman of the Policy Planning Council in the State
Department helps insure that intelligence studies are programed and
shaped to meet the needs of policymaking. The intelligence contribu-
tion to an interagency task force-say an analysis in depth of the
social, political, economic, and military forces at work in a country-
is likely to be of key importance for developing a "country strategy"
that sets forth sound guidelines to U.S. diplomatic, military, economic
aid, and other officials.
Formal arrangements for intelligence participation in policy forums
are not guarantees of actual practice. The regular apparatus of gov-
ernment is sometimes modified and bypassed. This is truer under some
administrations than others, but ad hoc devices and enhanced personal
roles for key officials ' may be required under any administration, if
the situation is urgent enough. Despite the deviations from estab-
lished patterns, the intelligence community in recent years has been
able to stay in the mainstream, so to speak. The intelligence analyst
still shies from exerting undue influence on policy, but he works today
with greater confidence than his counterpart of earlier years that his
findings will get to the operating officials of the Government and
receive their respectful consideration.
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THE INTELLIGENCE PROCESS
The phases of national intelligence are analogous to the phases of
intelligence on lower echelons, e.g., collection of information, analysis
of data, and dissemination of conclusions. The national-intelligence
process, however, is complicated by the very scale of its activities.
The analysts are separated-at times by continents-from the collec-
tors, so that national intelligence calls for essential liaison activities
and machinery for reconciling the requirements of decisionmakers
with the capabilities of collectors. By contrast, the intelligence proc-
ess at the lowest combat level, where the collector may simply be a
soldier detailed to man a forward observation post and report his
findings to the battery commander, is an ideal of simplicity. The
commander in this case understands the capabilities of the collector
and can levy his requirements with no more than the usual difficulty
that oral communication entails. The decisionmaker in this case is
also the analyst; he both assesses the reports of the soldier and de-
cides what to do about it.
On a somewhat higher level, an officer may be assigned to receive
information from several forward observation posts. The analytical
and decisionmaking process are now partly separated. The officer
evaluates the reports received from the soldiers at their posts in terms
of consistency with each other. The commander must still assess this
information in terms of consistency with other data received and
draw his conclusions on enemy dispositions and intentions.
On a still higher level, an intelligence component of a unit evaluates
the information received and gives its view of the probable courses of
action open to the enemy. On this level, the intelligence organiza-
tion's sources of information are far more inclusive than those usually
open to lower echelons. On this level, however, the specialization of
labor among collectors, analysts, and decisionmakers becomes sharply
defined, and troublesome problems of communication among the spe-
cialists arise.
REQUIREMENTS
As the organization becomes more complex, a machinery for re-
quirements is found desirable to facilitate communication among
personnel in the various stages of the intelligence process. The need
for intelligence information may arise at any level; we may take as
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 THE INTELLIGENCE PROCESS
14 THE INTELLIGENCE PROCESS Approved For Release 2004/06/24: CIA-RDP78-03584R000100070001-7
illustrative a?need arising at the decisionmaking level, say, of -a Voice
of America radiobroadcast programer who wants to know how well
Doctor Zhivago is selling in South Asia and how closely government
officials, military officers, and university students there are following
the tribulations of Boris Pasternak. In the likely event that this in-
formation is not immediately available, the intelligence-producing
organizations will be asked to provide it.
The information may be readily at hand in the files of the intel-
ligence analyst. If so, the task is relatively simple; the analyst simply
brings his talents to bear on the assembly, evaluation, and presentation
of the data in a manner-say, a short memorandum-useful to the
radio programer. The whole process from the initial levying of
requirements by the programer to his receipt of the desired memo-
randum may be completed in a few hours.
When there are gaps in the analyst's files and the deadline for his
memorandum permits, he will levy requirements on the collectors for
the missing information. The analyst stands to be embarrassed, how-
ever, if he levies his requirements only to be told that the information
has already been collected and disseminated. The essential prelim-
inary to the formulation of spot requirements, therefore, is to ascertain
that the answers are not already available. This means a check with
other analysts in whose files the information desired could conceivably
be found. It means in addition a check with the reference services in
the Central Intelligence Agency, which by electronic data-processing
methods can quickly retrieve from its microfilm files copies of intelli-
gence documents received from all agencies of the intelligence
community.
The analyst who decides to go ahead and levy requirements is under
the strongest obligation to explain his needs clearly to the collectors.
The "anything you have on Boris Pasternak" type of requirement is
likely to elicit a flow of irrelevancies. A useful adjunct of a good
requirement is some background to suggest what is already known in
order to help the collector approach his task as a man who is at least
well informed if not necessarily an expert on the subject. The ques-
tions that follow the background information will indicate specific
lines of inquiry for the collector : For example, what statements about
the affair can be reliably attributed to individual government officials?
What was the nature of discussions on Pasternak following certain
lectures at the military command and staff schools? What commen-
taries appeared in student newspapers? in book reviews?
The analyst will also suggest the field-collection agency he considers
best equipped to gather the information. In this case, the services
of more than one are clearly called for. South Asian government
tions with Foreign Service personnel: The State Department is one
obvious choice to receive the requirement. The military services,
whose attaches have occasion to talk with South Asian officers, should
also get the requirement. CIA's clandestine service may also be asked
to help, but the rule is not to ask for covert collection if overt collection
will do the job. STAT
Normally, the analyst does not advise the field collectors on pro-
cedures for obtaining the needed information. On occasion, however,
he is in a position to suggest a good lead.
With a specific priority (urgent, routine, etc.), the requirement is
off through channels to the appropriate collectors in the field, and the
analyst may be relieved of further thought on the matter for the mo-
ment. When the responses come in, the analyst must take a little
time away from his principal preoccupation with substantive analysis
to help the field assess its collection effort. The clandestine services,
in particular, are eager for the analyst's appraisal, since their sources
include many of untested reliability. The retention or dismissal of
these informants depends often on the consistency of their repor8TAT
with other data available to the substantive experts at headquarters.
Servicing the responses may also entail supplemental requirements
by the anal St.
.
An initial spurt of collection activity on behalf of the analyst will
usually be followed by sporadic reports which become less and less
frequent as the weeks go on. Eventually, Voice of America program-
ers must turn to more timely matters as world comment on Pasternak
dies down, and the analyst decides to "close out" his requirement.
The overcautious analyst who procrastinates in taking the final close-
out step is a trial to field collectors, who usually have more requests
for information than they can fulfill in detail.
This description of the analyst's role in levying requirements does
not do justice to the offices that intelligence organizations have espe-
cially set up for "collection guidance," i.e., informing collectors of the
priority needs of intelligence analysts. Collectors must have a broad
picture of intelligence needs if they are to allocate their limited re-
sources efficiently over an extended period of time. This pic-
ture is not acquired by conversation with individual analysts, who
are likely to stress the overriding importance of their own special inter-
h
i
i
i
i
t
es, t
e com
ve pr
or
officials may have spoken about Past~q Ve &P'IK'6gda sVMVAY06/24 : CfA-RDP78 03584 2000100~70i~C~t o and assign relat
 Approved For Release 2004/06/24: CIA-RDP78-03584R000100070001-7 THE INT
ELLIG
N
16 THE INTELLIGENCE PROCESS
ponent responsible for collection guidance will check and validate the
requirements that individual analysts wish to levy.
One of the first tasks of collection guidance is to draw up broad
intelligence objectives that identify the critical problems of substantive
intelligence (e.g., the capability of the U.S.S.R. for nuclear attack or
the Chinese Communist capabilities to support guerrilla war in South-
east Asia). These intelligence objectives are not directives to the
collectors but, rather, guides to planning for analysts and collectors
alike.
Analysts may be able to address themselves to some of the objectives
with little or no demand for new intelligence collection. In general,
however, it will be necessary to detail intelligence gaps in so-called
collection guides. These guides in effect incorporate the standing re-
quirements upon collectors for specific categories of information : ac-
complishments or failures in fulfilling national economic plans, morale;
in the armed forces, radar defenses, and signs of factionalism in the
governing political party, for example.
The standing requirements may be supplemented at any time by
spot requirements, like those described above relating to the Pasternak
affair. The means are at hand, moreover, to levy requirements on an
urgent basis. At any hour, it may be necessary to take immediate
action to clarify information suggesting that a crisis situation is in
the making. This is likely to entail some rather frantic telephoning
to alert collectors and to stay abreast of U.S. operations and deploy-
ments. If a sudden coup abroad seems to be taking a nasty turn, the
intelligence officer responsible for collection guidance will stay in close
touch, for example, with the all-night center in State Department.
In the course of the night, he will perhaps levy a requirement for an
outgoing cable to learn the latest on efforts of deposed leaders to get
U.S. asylum. Collection guidance is a round-the-clock activity, and
the "action officer" of collection guidance components has to take his
turn of night, weekend, and holiday duty.
COLLECTION
In modern intelligence organizations, the analyst's "in-box" is filled
daily with the information that has been gathered for him by a far--
flung network of collectors. The in-box is the analyst's mailbox, so
to speak, to which is delivered the counterparts of the magazines,
newspapers, and other information media that keep the well-educated
American an informed citizen. The intelligence analyst is thus able
to follow his academic bents as a sedentary, good life-insurance risk
l
E
CE PROCESS 17
The picture of the intelligence analyst in the academic research role
is rendered still. more fitting by the nature of data he usually prefers
to work with-overt or semiovert. Not that he deigns to use the
product of clandestine collection; in some cases, he prizes it as the
only intelligence available. But usually he finds that overt sources
provide the greater part of the reliable information open to him. In
many cases, the conclusions reached by the intelligence analyst are
not appreciably different from those that would be reached by scholars
drawing on the information available in their university libraries.
1. News services. Intelligence organizations in the Free and Com-
munist Worlds subscribe to or monitor the press services. Reuters,
AP, or UPI tickers often print the first news of a Latin American
revolt, the resignation of important officials, the text of a communique
released at the end of a state visit. Many an analyst has to leave his
warm bed in the early morning hours to prepare his quick assessment
of a news scoop ticking over the press wires.
During more relaxed working hours, the analyst can take advantage
of the wealth of data offered daily in the newspapers, both foreign and
domestic. The dispatches from news correspondents in London, Ber-
lin, Hong Kong, Djakarta, Moscow, and other cities are not always
in accord with information in intelligence files, but the quality of re-
porting compares favorably with the average of intelligence informa-
tion that comes through the in-box. Insofar as information from
news sources is concerned, the intelligence organizations in the Com-
munist world have, of course, all the advantage. "I would give a
great deal," former Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles has
said, "if I could know as much about the Soviet Union as the Soviet
Union can learn about us by merely reading the press."
2. Foreign publications. Collected either by subscription or by
purchase in foreign countries, these publications make up a valued
component of the intelligence take. The Communists since the death
of Stalin are publishing considerably more detail in their economic
and technical journals. At the 20th Party Congress in February
1956, Premier Bulganin urged the Soviets to "reduce secrecy meas-
ures to allow a freer exchange of information and opinion."
Despite the relaxation of Soviet security, promoted in large part
by the propagandistic advantages of publicizing technical achieve-
ments, many Soviet journals are still chary about releasing types of
data freely published in the West. By contrast, with virtually un-
limited access to American open-source trade publications and scien-
tific journals, the U.S.S.R. can keep relatively well informed on the
status of the U.S. guided-missile program, on atomic-reactor and elec-
t
i
i
t
ll
i
r
c-power
ns
a
at
ons, and on rail and highway tunnels. Fora small
or .
olk
rather than the clock-and-dagger fiA> rBt~~V telease 004/06/24: CIA-RDP78-03584R000100070001-7
 Approved For Release 2004/06/24: CIA-RDP78-03584R000100070001-7
18 THE INTELLIGENCE PROCESS
fee, the Russians can obtain technical descriptions of inventions from
the U.S. Patent Office.
The timelag between publication and arrival at the in-box limits
the usefulness of foreign publications as current intelligence. Their
principal serviceability is to provide details which can be assembled
and incorporated in research studies. In the absence of many foreign
publications, the intelligence services often found their research tasks
exasperatingly difficult in World War II. A Japanese-language
who's who of Japan published in 1940, for example, contained 150,000
short biographies. Apparently no one in the United States requested
a copy before Pearl Harbor, and resort was necessary during the war
to another edition in the English language, which contained only 3,000
biographies.
3. Radio Monitoring: Foreign radio broadcasts provide a large
and valued part of the material that goes into current-intelligence
production. While some of the information in the broadcasts finds
its way into the columns of the daily press, much of it never does. In
any case news accounts are sometimes distorted, and they must be
checked against original texts.
There is, of course, an overlay of propaganda in some broadcasts,
which handicaps the discrimination between facts and claims. Never-
theless, study of enemy broadcasts during World War II showed that
sophisticated propaganda analysis could yield revealing insights to
supplement other information available to intelligence officers. After
the war, perceptive scrutiny of veiled phrases in broadcasts from Mos-
cow and Peiping suggested sharpening differences between the two
Communist allies during the 1950's, when most other indications
pointed to continuing Sino-Soviet solidarity.
4. Domestic collection,. It is not always necessary to go abroad
to collect intelligence on foreign countries. Interviews with in-
formed persons in this country have often yielded information of
value. The Hungarian revolt enlarged the number of intelligence
sources in the United States by the influx of refugees. Letters from
families made available by immigrants to this country have provided
useful details on conditions abroad. Only a small percentage of busi-
nessmen, Government officials, and others who visit foreign countries
sell their stories for publication. The others are generally willing
to recount their experiences to interested listeners. Sometimes trav-
elers report conversations with foreign officials who apparently
intended that their remarks would be passed to others in the United
States. The information is nonetheless of interest to the intelligence
THE INTELLIGENCE PROCESS 19
official duties, they are able to offer authoritative opinions on political,
economic, and cultural developments in a country. On many occa-
sions they have forwarded information that was of highest impor-
tance for national security. In 1935 the Baldwin cabinet in London
was jolted into expanding the British air force by Foreign Secretary
Sir John Simon's account of his conversation with Hitler. The
Fuehrer told Sir John that Germany had already achieved air parity
with Britain and that Germany would go on building until its air
force was as large as those of Britain and France combined.
The diplomatic reports from the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo provided
vital information on the developing tensions in the Pacific. In Janu-
ary 1941 Ambassador Grew wrote :
A member of the Embassy was told by my . . . colleague that
from many quarters, including a Japanese one, he had heard that
a surprise mass attack on Pearl Harbor was planned by the Japa-
nese military forces, in case of "trouble" between Japan and the
United States; that the attack would involve the use of all the Jap-
anese military facilities. My colleague said that he was prompted
to pass this on because it had come to him from many sources,
although the plan seemed fantastic.
6. Attaches. Like Foreign Service officers, military attaches
are able in pursuit of their legitimate functions to collect intelligence
information without recourse to clandestine methods. Invited to
observe maneuvers, to visit installations, to exchange such data as
training manuals, they are able to gather and forward military infor-
mation of a wide variety.
The military attache can be a particularly useful collector in a coun-
try where the army is or threatens to become a force in politics. In
the course of his official associations, he may then become the recipient
of information of high political significance.
Civilians also serve as attaches in U.S. embassies abroad-agricul-
tural attaches, for example. The impact on the American conscious-
ness of recent scientific progress has resulted in an increase in the
number of scientific attaches serving abroad. The information col-
lected by the civilian attaches is overt but nonetheless valuable in
economic- and scientific-intelligence production.
7. Photography. Motion and still pictures are highly regarded
in such applications as target analysis or the computation of plant
capacities. While some of the pictures must be taken covertly, others
are free for the clipping from such propaganda periodicals as China
Pictorial. Many are drawn from the travel mementos of rivo+ citi-
analyst on that account. p
zens. Pictures taken byy a traveler to the Solomons before World War
5. Diplomatic collection. Fore400 s P& arg 'A/24 : CIA-RDP78-03584R000100070001-7
in any activity that savors of espionage, but in the isc e o eir
 Approved For Release 2004/06/24: CIA-RDP78-03584R000100070001-7
THE INTELLIGENCE PROCESS 21
20 THE INTELLIGENCE PROCESS
II formed a useful portion of the intelligence available to the First
Marine Division when it went into Guadalcanal in August 1942.
Aerial photography in wartime has often paid its cost many times
over. Aerial photography, for example, revealed the location of
German rocket-launching ramps at Peenemunde. Subsequent RAF
bombing delayed production of the German missiles for months.
More recently, aerial photography provided the confirming intelligence
of Soviet missiles in Cuba.
8. Clandestine collection. On numerous occasions, clandestine
collection has yielded outstanding results. The U.S.S.R. was notably
successful after World War II in stealing atom bomb secrets through
the services of such skilled agents as Bruno Pontecorvo and Allen
Nunn May. In World War II, the butler of the British Ambassador
in Turkey transmitted to the Germans photographs of documents
which gave details of Allied strategy. Fortunately for the Allied
cause, the Nazis failed to act on the intelligence in the belief that it
had been planted by the British.
As a security measure to protect sources of information, reports
from clandestine services describe the agent only in very general
terms, e.g., "a university student who is a member of the Young
Communist League and might have access to the incident he recounts."
To aid the analyst, such reports usually contain the field's evaluation
of the source's reliability and its own appraisal of the accuracy of
the information supplied. The field evaluation is expressed by a
letter-number rating in accordance with the following key :
A
Appraisal of Source
Completely reliable.
1
Appraisal of Content
Confirmed by other sources.
B
Usually reliable.
2
Probably true.
C
Fairly reliable.
3
Possibly true.
D
Not usually reliable.
4
Doubtful.
E
Unreliable.
5
Improbable.
F
Reliability cannot be judged.
6
Truth cannot be judged.
This rating is sometimes the only guide the analyst has to the
credibility he should attach to the report. At other times, he can
assess it against other confirming or contradictory information in
his files.
9. Communications intercepts. British interception of the fa-
mous Zimmerman message in 1917 was one of the important events
of that year leading up to U.S. entry in World War I. The message
from Berlin's foreign minister contained instructions to the German
Ambassador in Mexico for opening negotiations with that country
and offering it the opportunity to recover its "lost territory in Texas,
INFORMATION PROCESSING
The scale of collection is now so large that the efficiency of the
intelligence process rests to an increasing extent on the skills of the
reference services. The intelligence analyst can store in his own
individual files only a small part of the documents that flow daily
through his in-box. For the remainder, and for the still larger part.
that bypasses his in-box, he rests his trust in the reference services
which operate the central repositories where all incoming informa-
tion is classified and filed. The flow of intelligence information from
the collectors to the analysts is usually simultaneous with the flow of
copies to the reference services.
The initial task of the reference service is to index incoming docu-
ments by a numerical code according to subject (commercial airfields,
railroad transportation, treaties, etc.), area (Lebanon, North Vietnam,
Ecuador), source (air force, foreign publication, clandestine service),
security classification (secret, confidential, unclassified), and date of
information. A document which treats more than one subject or area.
must, accordingly, be recorded under several number codes.
The documents themselves are usually microfilmed. Punched cards
and electronic data processing permit rapid retrieval of the microfilm
copies upon the analyst's request.
Useful as is the reference service in the recording, storing, and
recalling of information, its machine assets also enable it to go a.
step further by synthesizing data in response to specific requests.
Thus, for target analysis, data-processing techniques can quickly
produce a listing of large industrial installations in a specified city.
Or they can come up with a listing of Soviet scientists who have been
reportedly engaged in nuclear-energy research. While these appli-
cations of automation are hardly likely to displace the analyst, they
stand to relieve him of some of his onerous data-assembly duties and
leave him freer for interpretative analyses. Increasingly it is the
reference service rather than the analyst that comes up with the
information-sans-analysis answers which are often called for (percent-
age of Chinese cotton production that goes into padding for clothing
and bedding, for instance).
Utilizing these obvious advantages of automation, the reference
services can also publish general listings designed to economize the
number of special requests. One such aid may be a who's who of
scientific personnel; another, a virtual Dun & Bradstreet record of
foreign industrial firms.
New Mexico, and Arizona." Approved For Release 2004/06/24: CIA-RDP78- 4RO 1llQ?P
ANALYSIS
Q'I'iTtion of intelligence as it comes from the
collectors is "raw intelligence" or "intelligence information." It is
 Approved For Release 2004/06/24: 6IA-RDP78-03584R000100070001-7
not "finished intelligence" until it has gone through the stages of special knowledge are more likely to be found in young men and
evaluation and interpretation by substantive experts. In cases of women. The relatively recent graduate is more apt to understand
urgency, raw intelligence may be passed directly to decisionmakers. the techniques of interindustry statistical analysis than economists
The failure to report to the Army commander in Hawaii the sighting of an older generation. Students of Chinese Communist theory are
of a two-man Japanese submarine in Pearl Harbor about an hour and more readily found in the postwar generation of Sinologues than
a half before the Japanese attack was one of several lapses preceding among the "old China hands." The younger rather than older physi-
the disaster. When time permits, however-and this means in the cists have kept up with recent advances in electronics. Seniority, on
great majority of instances-it is finished intelligence rather than the other hand, has its advantages for the supervisor, who must under-
intelligence information that goes to the decisionmakers. stand the general structure of a problem which cuts across several
Analysis in intelligence has broad similarity to the process in aca- fields.
demic research. One of the distinctions is that the academician is 2. Honesty. The analyst may be under strong pressure to support
freer to examine theory and principles. While a grounding in, say, conventional prejudices. The intelligence organization of a govern-
economic theory is of considerable advantage to the economic-intelli- ment-in-exile is under constant drive to overanalyze signs of popular
gence analyst, he must be responsive to needs of the "consumer," discontent at home. In the United States, variances among estimates
and his research is necessarily oriented toward terms of hardware prepared by different departments of the Government have frequently
and other assets and liabilities, not to ivory-tower studies of theoretical reflected pressures on analysts to backstop their departments' special
equilibria. interests.
The academician can direct his research toward subjects on which 3. Imagination. "Genius," observed William James, "in truth
he has reason to believe information is available for the seeking. The means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual
intelligence analyst is compelled by consumer demand to analyze a way." A characteristic failing of many experts whose talents fall
situation where the gaps of knowledge are uncomfortably wide. This short of genius is their disdain of imaginative hpyotheses. Conclu-
means that the intelligence analyst is called on to offer tentative con- sions must be grounded in evidence, but hypotheses must first be enter-
clusions that the academician would withhold pending additional tained and tested by the evidence. The cavalier rejection of hypoth-
data. For policy decisions cannot await complete information; com- eses by experts has been responsible for the persistence of error in a
plete information is rarely to be had. multitude of cases. The French Academy of Sciences took years to
Another distinction is the usefulness over time of academic and in- concede the impropriety of its arrogance in rejecting the thesis that
telligence studies. Few intelligence studies have longtime usefulness. meteorites originated in outer space.
Constantly in order are reappraisals and revisions to keep the studies 4. Articulateness. The intelligence analyst must communicate
current. his findings to the decisionmaker. Some decisionmakers prefer to be
A final distinction is one which occasions some psychological dis- briefed orally; some insist on abstracts which do not exceed a page in
tress to many intelligence analysts. The academician can publish and length. The analyst must be able to tailor his presentation to his
make a name for himself. The intelligence analyst is by comparison medium. He will usually have the assistance of an editor to clarify
nameless. Most of his studies are unsigned and their circulation re- his prose, but under "flap" circumstances, he will have to articulate
stricted. He is unable to make his mark in the circle of subject or area his thoughts quickly and clearly without editorial polish.
specialists he wants eagerly to impress. 5. Alertness to detail. The volume of data moving across the
Reconciled to anonymity, with restricted opportunity to enjoy the analyst's desk is normally so large that he is in danger of missing im-
pride of authorship, the intelligence analyst should in addition display portant details. The ideal analyst is the Sherlock Holmes genius who
other qualities prized by the recruiting office : can perceive the significant in the mass. Is it a reflection of a man's
1. Expert knowledge. In the junior analyst, this can be developed standing in the party if he is referred to as "first secretary" one month
through experience on the job; it is the essential attribute of the and "First secretary" later? Is a wan, tired reticence indicative of
senior analyst. The senior analyst on Latin America understands loss of power? There is a real danger of overanalysis and drawing of
Spanish or Portuguese, has worked or traveled in the area, and is unwarranted conclusions fr such fragments of indications, but the
as well grounded in its affairs as anPRR4CVRru Mn ?P94 96/24: CIA-RD ?7 9 *VF~~g~ 17 s0 d to further lines of investigation and
Expert knowledge is not altogether a function of age. Some lines of perhaps to the desirability of now requirements on field collectors.
 Approved
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The analytical process in intelligence varies with the office. The
functional intelligence analyst (economic, scientific, or military) is
often engaged in research studies akin to doctoral dissertations. The
current-intelligence officer, with his quick assessments of daily de-
velopments, bears a likeness to the newspaper columnist. The esti-
mates officer has to integrate the contributions of several departments
so that a general consensus rather than his own personal view emerges.
These distinctions notwithstanding, certain phases appear common
to the analysis process in all intelligence offices.
1. Defining the problem. The analyst must have terms of refer-
ence. These may be specified for the estimator in guidance from pol-
icymakers ("We need an estimate on Chinese Communist intentions
toward Southeast Asia"). Or they may be redefined for the func-
tional analyst who is to contribute to the estimate ("We'll need backup
on Communist China's prospective food harvests and population
growth"). Or it may be clearly indicated to the current-intelligence
analyst by the same sense that guides the journalist in deciding what
is newsworthy ("I'd better hurry down to the office and get off some
quick paragraphs on the meaning behind the Kremlin's new blast
at Tito").
2. Assembly of data. The analyst's own files are usually the
first place he goes to for the background ,he needs. Our current-in-
telligence analyst, for example, will look to his files for copies of ear-
lier Soviet blasts at Belgrade and compare their tone with the latest
attack. Because of the pressure of time, his own files may in fact
be the only recourse open to him for the moment. The analyst re-
searching China's food production, on the other hand, can look also
to the files of other analysts, to the resources of libraries, and to the
automatic data-processing machines, which can recover documents
stored in the intelligence repositories.
3. Evaluation. The analyst must judge his data in terms of in-
ternal consistency and in terms of consistency with other known data.
Are Communist China's harvest claims consistent with its statistics of
acreage? with weather reports? and with estimates of reasonable crop
yields? How does a report of troop movements square with the field
evaluation of the source's reliability?
One of the analyst's most dangerous pitfalls in the evaluation phase
f h' n conservatism-his reluctance to accept informa-
ow
one U.S. agency that German war output went up rather than down
in 1943 was rejected by many informed analysts at the time.
"False confirmation" of data is another hazard to the analyst in the
evaluation phase. Reports received from several collectors are often
traceable to one ultimate source. The various reports should be re-
garded as one. The danger of false confirmation becomes especially
high when a foreign government deliberately fabricates reports to
throw off enemy intelligence. A classic example of such deception
was the British "Operation Mincemeat," which involved spurious
messages recovered from the body of an Englishman off the coast of
Spain during World War II. The messages fooled Nazi intelligence
and resulted in the change of Germany's Mediterranean defense plans
in the expectation of an Allied assault against Sardinia and Greece.
The deception saved thousands of Allied lives when the landings came
in Sicily.
4. Study and interpretation. Having assembled the data and
decided which are valid and acceptable, the analyst must construct the
mosaic which will answer the terms of reference given at the outset
of the analytic process. Our researcher into Chinese Communist
harvests has assembled data on past agricultural production of spe-
cific crops. He has also assembled whatever information is available
on the regime's economic objectives as declared in annual and 5-year
plans. He has assembled data on the success or failure in meeting
previous agricultural targets. From his study and best interpretation
of the data, he makes his own projection of Chinese Communist har-
vests. He balances this against food requirements as calculated from
a projection of population growth.
5. Presentation. Intelligence information is not "finished in-
telligence" until it is rendered, with interpretative commentary, in a
form that can be communicated to other persons. Sometimes this
communication is effected through oral briefings. The Director of
Central Intelligence, for example, briefs the National Security Coun-
cil regularly on current-intelligence developments. More often, fin-
ished intelligence is presented in writing, which can take forms rang-
ing from single-page memoranda to detailed studies accompanied by
maps and other graphic aids.
stems rom is
tion which does not square with his own stock conceptions. One of the The term "dissemination of intelligence" is intended to mean
unit 's reconceived concepts during World War distribution to persons entitled to receive it. It is a term used
mm
lh
its
by
y p
gence co
mte
II was that the prewar mobilization of the German economy left little collectors to refer to the distribution of raw intelligence and by ana-
slack for further expansion over the short run. Actually, German lysts speaking of the distribution of finished intelligence. The
war production increased steadily proved For Release 2004/06/24: CIA-RDP78 03584R000100070001 similar in both cases. The duties of dissemina
 26 THE INTELLIGENCE PROCESS Approved For Release 2004/06/24: CIA-RDP78-03584R000100070001-7
tion are entrusted to a service component, which uses routine couriers,
or, if circumstances dictate, special couriers, teletype, and other elec-
tric means of transmisssions.
The collection office in particular is constantly confronted with the
decision to "dissem" or "no dissem," since a large part of its take
is obviously of marginal value to analysts and may be useful only to
develop a file which will ultimately permit an assessment of the
source's reliability or efficiency. While analysis offices sometimes
decide to make "no dissems" out of finished-intelligence studies, such
studies are generally undertaken in the expectation that they will
yield conclusions worthy of publication and circulation.
In the dissemination phase, both collection and analysis offices must
decide how wide a circle of readers will receive the intelligence. In
part, this decision can be based on the security classification placed
on the report; if it is top secret, it will obviously not be circulated
among those who have only a secret clearance. In addition, the dis-
semination decision is governed by the "need-to-know" rule; that is,
regardless of his security clearance, a person should receive only
the information he needs for the efficient discharge of his official
responsibilities.
Both these rules serve as necessary security safeguards, but they can
be prejudicial to national-security interests if applied overrigorously.
The Joint Congressional Committee on the Pearl Harbor investiga-
tion condemned the overrestrictive circulation of intelligence derived
from the decrypting of Japanese codes. The committee observed
that "the fact the Japanese codes had been broken was regarded
as of more importance than the information obtained from decoded
traffic. The result of this rather specious premise was to leave large
numbers of policymaking and enforcement officials in Washing-
ton completely oblivious of the most pertinent information concerning
Japan."
III
CATEGORIES OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE
National intelligence in the United States may be distinguished by
two features :
1. It is intended to
policy.
serve the formulators of national-security
2. Its content, transcending the exclusive competence of a single
department or agency, is presented as the consensus of the intelligence
community.
Since national policy is not designed to be a shifting guide to action
but rather to serve as a standing precept over a considerable span of
time, intelligence is needed that will afford rather long-range fore-
knowledge of the capabilities, vulnerabilities, and probable courses of
action of foreign nations. Such intelligence is usually presented in
the form of a "strategic estimate." When prepared at the national
level as a composite of the views of the intelligence community, it is
produced as a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE).
Strategic estimates may take weeks or months to prepare, although
a "crash" NIE can also be produced on a current crisis. In the in-
terim between the appearance of the estimates, the National Security
Council customarily looks to reports of current-intelligence develop-
ments. It is on these reports rather than the longer-range strategic
estimates that the NSC would have to rely to provide the sort of ad-
vance warning that was so notably missing before Pearl Harbor.
The factual information resulting from the collation of encyclo-
pedic data-basic intelligence-is customarily produced for the use
of other analysts but may also provide needed background informa-
tion to high-level officials. When prepared as the integrated product
of the intelligence community, it appears in a publication which has
been officially designated as national intelligence (National Intelli-
gence Survey).
All three categories of national intelligence-strategic estimates,
current reports, and basic studies-are based on analyses prepared
in the various departments and agencies by military-intelligence of-
ficers, economists, foreign-affairs analysts, and other functional spe-
cialists. These functional studies are designated in conventional
usage as military intelligence, economic intelligence, political intelli-
gence, biographic intelligence, etc. The responsibilities for their pro-
Approved For Release 2004/06/24: q
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787-192 0-65-3 27
 Approved For Release 2004/06/24: CIA-RDP78-03584R000100070001-7 CATEGORIES OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE 29
28 CATEGORIES OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE
ties : ground-forces intelligence to the Army, political intelligence to
the State Department, biographic intelligence on naval personnel to
the Navy, for example. A review of such functional-intelligence
production requires the consideration of activities below the national-
intelligence level and is reserved for the following chapter. Func-
tional specializations are many and are not reviewed in depth. Eco-
nomic intelligence is examined in most detail because of its special
interest to the faculty and students of the Industrial College of the
Armed Forces.
THE STRATEGIC ESTIMATE
The National Intelligence Estimate is the most authoritative
expression of national intelligence today. Preliminary expressions
of view by the intelligence community may go to the National Security
Council in other analyses. The considered view of the community-
reached in most cases only after protracted deliberation-is to be
found in the formal estimate.
The function of National Intelligence Estimates is to suggest where
the world is heading. This requires an examination of the present
situation and a projection of expected trends over the period of the
estimate. The length of the estimative period varies. A general
estimate of the Soviet Union over the next five years might be regarded
as appropriate to support policy decisions relating to the national
posture toward international communism. A special estimate brought
on by another crisis over the status of Berlin or the Chinese offshore
islands might be expected to project Communist courses of action over
the next six months.
When the estimative period is short, particularly in crisis situa-
tions where quick policy decisions are in the making, the task of the
estimator may become especially trying. A 5-year projection permits
successive corrections of intelligence and modification of policy as the
estimates are periodically brought up to date. The shorter range
estimates, on the other hand, may be all too quickly tested by events;
the margin for error is narrower. Strategy in games can be modified
if the play seems to be going against the individual. But if the
game permits only one or two rounds of play, the initial strategy is
an all-important determinant of the outcome.
The initial task of the estimator is that described in the previous
chapter as the first step in analysis, namely, defining the problem or
setting forth the terms of reference. If the estimate is to project the
main trends in a foreign country ApirOlvedeFKbrfiRels e, 2b04k?824 : C
of reference will cover the specific political, economic, and military
issues that bear on decisions of long-range policy. With respect
to the internal political situation, for example, is the present leader-
ship stable? If the government is authoritarian, is its chief advanced
in years and is his death likely to result in a struggle for the succes-
sion? What will be the role of the military in such a struggle? of
the political party or parties? of other loci of power?
What can be said about popular attitudes? The estimate here,
in addition to some necessary generalities, will outline the sentiments
of specific groups in the population-intelligentsia, workers, peasants,
national minorities. If there is widespread hostility to the govern-
ment, will this manifest itself in passive discontent? in sporadic riots?
in sustained armed resistance?
Particular attention attaches to the section of the terms of reference
dealing with the foreign country's external relations, since develop-
ments in this field may impinge most directly on United States security
interests. The estimate will be expected to assess present and prospec-
tive relations with allies, popular and official attitudes regarding the
balance of forces in the world, and the nature and force of convictions
relating to suitable principles for dealing with East-West tensions.
Here again generalities will be supplemented by discussions of atti-
tudes on specific issues, for example, United States military bases
abroad, German unification, UN membership for Peiping. For, while
generalities are useful, they must not conceal the prospect that the de-
gree of support for or opposition to the United States will vary with
the issue involved.
The terms of reference on economic issues will probably indicate an
interest in policies relating to the allocation of resources. Is invest-
ment to be proportionately greater or less in the military-support
industries? in consumer-goods industries? in agriculture? What pro-
jections can be made regarding the absolute level of defense expendi-
tures? of total and per capita private consumption? How will changes
in yields and exploitation of new lands affect crop harvests? What
geographic shifts are foreseen in the location of industries?
The rate of economic growth, as calculated from estimates of gross
national product, may be singled out as a good indicator of economic
viability. In the dynamic economy, this rate of growth is expected
to exceed the rate of population increase by a significant margin.
Economic relations with other countries will be examined for their
possible bearing on the country's political orientation in foreign affairs.
Is trade increasing with other members of the Communist bloc or
Free World? What commitments have been made for receiving or
extending foreign economic aid? Relative rather than absolute figures
A-RDP78 .OI3 84R 1 O1W1500 r1 E iteria for appraising the leverage which
 30 CATEGORIES OF NATIONAL INTELLIGJ p roved For Release 2004/06/24: CIA-RDP78-03584R000100070001-7 CATEGORIES OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE 31
economic relations may exercise on political orientation. The propor-
tion of total foreign trade consisting of commerce with. a particular
country is more meaningful than the absolute level of trade.
If the country is a potential antagonist of the United States in armed
conflict, especial care will be taken in setting forth the military terms
of reference. The conventional questions will be asked about the size,
equipment, and proficiency of the land, air, and naval forces. These
overall aggregates will be supplemented by an examination of capabili-
ties in different geographic areas. In addition to review of men and
hardware, there may be a summary of current military doctrine in
the country. What seems to be its thinking on such issues as surprise
attack? on limited versus total war? on the military organization and
weapons mix best suited for the needs of the day?
In today's world, the military strength of the country is a function
in growing measure of scientific and technical capabilities. If the
country surveyed is one of the more developed in the world, there will
be a detailed appraisal of the state of research and technology in mis-
siles, atomic-energy applications, electronics, and long-range aviation.
If the terms of reference are suitably defined, the estimate is in a
fair way of being able to portray what Sherman Kent has called the
"strategic stature" of the country, that is, the amount of influence it
can exert in international affairs. This influence may be exerted by
employing or threatening to employ military force, by economic re-
prisals or blandishments, by moral suasion, or by propaganda. It
varies in accordance with the country's identifiable assets (as sought
out by the terms of reference) : friendships in the international com-
munity, military and nonmilitary strength in being, ability to mobi-
lize forces and resources in emergencies, and resiliency in catas-
trophes. It further is limited by the country's liabilities: exposed
geographical position, popular dissatisfaction, unstable leadership,
economic backwardness. Its common border with the USSR is a
noteworthy liability of Finland. The sympathy of neutralist nations
for Yugoslavia is one of its assets.
If the National Intelligence Estimate went no further than to out-
line the country's strategic stature, it would still constitute a valued
intelligence study. It must, however, come to grips with the "64-dol-
lar" question, the probable courses of action. While intelligence has
proved far from infallible here, the estimator can make a claim to
something better than mere sootl~syieF~rOr?elt'b'~6/14 : C
what the country's leaders have declared their intentions to be. If
they say they are going to modernize the military establishment, he
may choose to accept the statement as an indication of their true
intentions.
Second, the estimator knows that intentions in reasoning men are
limited by capabilities. Estimates of Chinese Communist intentions
to take Taiwan by military force will be governed by prior estimates
of Communist capabilities to provide the amphibious lift. needed for
an attack.
Sometimes, the prognostication of a probable course of action is
so difficult that the estimator has no recourse but to limit himself to
an analysis of capabilities, noting that the exercise of the capabilities
cannot be excluded as a reasonable possibility. To some extent, this
statement of capabilities is an implied estimate of intentions, since
estimators reject the consideration of capabilities whose exercise ap-
pears outlandish or clearly counter to national objectives, e.g., the
British capability to assault Peru. The statement of capabilities
comes closest to the assessment of intentions when "net" rather than
"gross" or "raw" capabilities are considered. Gross capabilities are
estimated without reference to possible counteraction, e.g., country A
has the capability to commit 150,000 troops in an attack on country B.
Net capabilities are related to opposing forces, e.g., Communist China
can take over Outer Mongolia if the USSR does not intervene. Given
Peiping's estimate of Soviet commitments to Ulan Bator, such a state-
ment of net capability is almost equivalent to an estimate of Commu-
nist China's probable course of action towards Outer Mongolia.
Another recourse of the estimator, when the evidence is insufficient
to support a flat prediction, is to identify the alternative courses of
action that are consistent with a country's capabilities and policies.
Country A, for examplq, can commit its armed forces to a full-scale
military assault on country B during the period of the estimate, or it
can limit its military actions to border incidents and threatening
troop movements, or it can step up its harassments by a combination
of propaganda and economic and diplomatic pressures. If, on balance,
the weight of the evidence suggests that one course of action is more
probable than another, the orders of probability will be given.
An intelligence estimate which allows for more than one possibility
leaves the estimators open to the charge of acting the oracle whose
prophecies seek to cover all contingencies. Their best defense may be.
to point to the statements of order of probability. Their only other de-
fense is that a flat prediction in the absence of supporting intelligence
is even more the mark of the humbug. Intelligence does no service for
policymakers by overstating its knowledge. It is as important to
 32 CATEGORIES OF NATIONAL INTELLIGE"proved For Release 2004/06/24 :
identify what is not known as what is known. History is replete with
instances of inaccurate estimates based on insufficient information.
Many analysts near the close of World War II understood that too
little recent information was at hand to appraise the qualities of
Japan's Kwantung Army in Manchuria. Informed opinion in the
Government, however, was betrayed by the reputation for fighting
strength which the army carried with it from its prewar days, and the
entry of Soviet forces into Manchuria was urged. Actually, the best
units of the Kwantung Army had long been transferred out to more
urgent theaters of the Pacific.
The overcautious estimators are in fact not those who are chary
of flat predictions but those who seek a "margin of safety" in fore-
casting the worst. If the worst does not eventuate, all heads will
remain on their shoulders. If the worst happens without forewarn-
ing, on the other hand, the inevitable postmortems will find their
scalps in the intelligence community. The mettle of the estimators
is most severely tested when, despite a foreign country's military
threats and militant displays, the background evidence suggests that
the country will probably stop short of full-scale hostilities. Even
with the proviso that hostilities are possible, it takes qualities beyond
those found in the charlatan to affirm that, on balance, war appears
improbable.
The mechanics of producing a National Intelligence Estimate insure
high responsiveness to the needs of the policymakers and the consid-
eration of as much information as can possibly be brought to bear
on the problem. While a schedule of production and revision insures
that estimates on the most important countries are kept reasonably
current, a good many estimates are prepared out of schedule on the
suggestion of important policy officials.
The estimate initiated, all the agencies that will contribute (CIA,
DIA, State, etc.) agree on the scope of the problem and the areas
of study to be allocated to each agency. In the next several weeks
(less if the situation necessitates), the basic research and initial
analyses are completed by the contributing agencies. The Central
Intelligence Agency fuses the contributions, and a first draft emerges
which necessarily distorts points made by some of the con-
tributors if unanimity of view on all points was lacking to start with.
Redrafts and interagency meetings and perhaps 'more redrafts may
be called for before a final paper is worked out. Approval by the
Approved For Release 2004/06/24:
IA-RDP78-03584R000100070001-7 CATEGORIES OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE 33
United States Intelligence Board is the final preliminary to publica-
tion as a new National Intelligence Estimate.
While this procedure may seem cumbersome, it does have the virtue
of assuring that the best information and the best talents in the
Government are brought to bear in the drafting of a very important
intelligence document. The time involved in the procedure is not
overlong when one considers that the analysis will provide part of the
rationale underlying the Nation's policies for years. The time in-
volved, moreover, can be telescoped on occasions of especial urgency.
National Intelligence Estimates have been prepared and approved by
the United States Intelligence Board in a matter of hours.
The danger of such intelligence production by conference and com-
mittee lies not in complexities of procedure but in over-zealous efforts
to hammer out a consensus. This could result in "lowest common
denominator" intelligence to irritate rather than inform the policy-
makers. If all contributors to an estimate except one believe that
country A will probably be increasingly antagonistic to country B,
the substitute of "may" for "will probably" is often a wording that all
might agree on. An alternative course would be to reject surface una-
nimity and instead note the views of the dissenting agency in a foot-
note. There is a rule of reason that obtains in the matter of dissents :
Quibbles about phraseology must not obscure the fact that all are in
agreement on the general thrust of the argument. But when there are
firmly held differences on important questions, current practice is to
allow dissent in the estimates rather than compromise on a watered-
down wording.
The National Intelligence Estimate is not analogous to a Supreme
Court decision, by which lower courts must abide. Nevertheless, in
the stamp of highest authority impressed upon the estimate, there
lies the hazard that it may freeze viewpoints throughout the intelli-
gence community. Criticisms and comments from authorities are
therefore invited after the estimate is published. On occasion, the
criticisms will effect a fresh look at the estimate and result in changes
when the estimate is next revised.
With an eye to the next revision, the estimators themselves must
critique their own efforts, noting particularly where they were handi-
capped by intelligence gaps. In a few cases, these gaps can be filled
by more intensive collection efforts in the field. Whatever assistance
the field can offer, intelligence analysts at home will bend their efforts
to initiate research in the areas indicated to the end that successive
revisions of the estimate become more convincing approximations to
reality.
Procedures for preparing the National Intelligence Estimate may
IA-RD0T"iI$1Dfl104k?re is no strong pressure at the moment
 Approved For Release 2004/06/24: CIA-RDP78-03584R000100070001-7
for radical changes. In the postwar period, the National Intelligence
Estimate has given intelligence a stature greater than it ever had
before. . More than any other intelligence publication it has promoted
the acceptance of national intelligence as an essential ingredient of
national policy.
CURRENT-INTELLIGENCE REPORTS
As constant crisis becomes the standard feature of the international
scene, the urgent need by policymakers to keep abreast of day-to-day
developments makes increasing demands on national intelligence.
These demands are met by the media of current-intelligence produc-
tion, which are not far removed from those employed by American
journalism to report current events.
1. Raw intelligence. This is equivalent to the radio or television
announcement, "We interrupt this program to report that the USSR
has just announced the first successful launching of an artificial satel-
lite that is orbiting around the earth. Keep tuned to this station for
further details." When the watch officer on duty in a current-intelli-
gence office during the small hours of the early morning receives
information of such import that he believes it should be passed quickly
to higher officials, he will do so without interpretive analysis. He
may also explain that the desk analyst is being called in and that
interpretive comment will follow shortly. The alerting of high
officials by the rapid dispatch of vital information-with or without
analysis-is an essential function of the current-intelligence office.
2. The written memorandum. This format is employed for
analyses which are not conveniently accommodated in: regularly
scheduled publications. One reason is that of time: The daily pub-
lication has been "put to bed"; it is too late to rerun the presses, but
high officials must have the information and commentary before
them as quickly as possible. The written memorandum also serves
as the outlet for the analyst who wishes to advance a thesis that may
be too speculative for formal publication but nevertheless deserves
consideration. Sometimes, when there are differences of view among
analysts of an agency, the interchange of memoranda is a preliminary
to the achievement of consensus.
3. The oral briefing. The oral briefing is frequently used to
save time. The desk analyst reads the intelligence information and
hurries over to the higher official's office or home to give his quick
estimate of its significance. Sometimes oral briefings are regularly
scheduled for the benefit of officials who like to get at problems
through the person-to-person back and forth of question and answer.
agency coordination required for the production of true national
intelligence. They rather present the point of view of a single
office or analyst. Intelligence produced on the national level appears
in the formal publications. Members of the National Security Coun-
cil and other high officials, for example, receive copies of a daily
report in whose production the various member departments and
agencies of the intelligence community participate jointly. This
is the daily newspaper, so to speak, of the intelligence community,
with the distinction that interpretative commentary is a more promi-
nent feature of the intelligence publication than of the front pages of
the news daily. In the case of current intelligence, the pressures of
time are frequently a handicap to the production of complete analyses
on a coordinated interdepartmental basis, and policy officials find the
analyses published by the individual agencies a valuable backup to the
joint product.
5. Other periodic publications. The weekly, biweekly, and
monthly current-intelligence publications, analogous to the magazine
supplements of the large city daily, summarize and analyze recent
events from. a vantage point which provides better perspective than is
possible when writing for the daily publication. Here, too, policy
officials lean heavily on analyses produced by individual agencies.
However, some standing committees of the United States Intelligence
Board produce periodic publications containing the views of the in-
telligence community as a whole on current-intelligence developments.
6. The National Intelligence Estimate. This format is employed
not only for the long-range strategic estimate but, on occasion, for a
"crash" estimate. When current developments reach crisis propor-
tions, the National Security Council or the United States Intelligence
Board may direct that a National Intelligence Estimate be prepared
quickly to present the consensus of the intelligence community.
The outstanding characteristic of current-intelligence production is
the demand it makes on the analyst for speed. Like the newspaper-
man, he must meet a publication deadline every day. The cases in
which he is called on to research in depth are rather the exception
than the rule. A large part of his activity consists of describing a
development and commenting briefly on its significance, all perhaps
within the limits of a single page. He may, for example, report the
resignation of North Vietnam's Lao Dong (Communist) Party sec-
retary general. By way of comment, he may briefly give some bio-
4. The daily publication. The fir i6w-d iL ipefaOt -06/24 CIA-RD M 4 X14 /Bf 1-o7w secretary general, determine on the
seminating current intelligence do not lend themselves to the inter- basis of other posts retained by. the former secretary general whether
 Approved For Release 2004/06/24: CIA-RDP78-03584R000100070001-7
36 CATEGORIES OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE
the resignation signifies loss of real power, indicate who of his asso-
ciates may have suffered a loss of stature along with him, and suggest
who is likely to benefit. If the former secretary general was closely
associated with certain policies of the regime, the analyst may offer
some speculations on how these policies are likely to be modified.
The analyst's comment has a twofold function : first, to provide the
reader with the background (e.g., biographic data on the new secre-
tary general) which will set the bare report in fuller perspective, and,
second, to suggest what further developments may follow. The
backgrounds function is simple enough for the analyst who is on top
of his job. The premonitory function is of quite another order of
difficulty; and the current-intelligence analysis, like the long-range
strategic estimate, often proposes orders of probability rather than
flat predictions.
The library and reference service, which can be extensively
employed by the researcher working on a long project, are of limited
value to the current-intelligence analyst, who may have to prepare
his comments within the hour. He will possibly have time to phone
other analysts in the intelligence community who might have infor-
mation on the subject. By and large, however, he is left largely on
his own personal resources-the data he has accumulated in his imme-
diate files and the knowledge in his head. The current-intelligence
analyst must therefore be the substantive expert in his area. He does
not have time to learn while working on a project. He must rather
bring the knowledge he already has to bear on his analysis.
The necessity for quick analysis places a. premium not only on sub-
stantive knowledge but also on verbal fluency. The current-intelli-
gence analyst has to write well while writing quickly. The importance
of writing aptitude is so high, in fact, that many senior officials prefer
to hire as apprentice current-intelligence analysts young men with
writing aptitude who will learn the substance of their fields rather
than substantive specialists who have difficulty with verbalization.
From the foregoing, it is apparent that the person who takes to
current-intelligence analysis is continually sensitive to signs of change.
Yet. he is uncomfortably aware that, like the financial analyst who does
not identify a bull or bear market until it is under way for some time,
he too will not often identify a trend at its very inception. Liberaliza-
tion during 1956 in the Communist world was aborted following the
Hungarian revolt and other demonstrations of popular unrest in
Eastern Europe. The shift toward orthodoxy was all the more difficult
to identify because of crosscurrents in the Communist camp. Mao-Tze-
6C bl >
d fl
stocks were sliding while the rails were still heading up, and it was
hard to establish that a bear market was in the making. The acute
analyst is the one who identifies the trend before the public at large
does.
The sixth sense which the current-intelligence analyst hopes will
quickly tell him the direction of developments is a compound of
background knowledge and constant scanning for significant details.
The failure of important officials to make public appearances is the
classic if overworked example of the information the current-intel-
ligence analyst is constantly on watch for. If a new politburo and
central committee has just been elected, he is quick to note the order
in which the members are listed. He is, more than other analysts, the
slave to his in-box. For his work is never to miss what is happening
now, and always to explain what is happening now in the light of
what happened before and as an augury of what will happen later.
owers oom
tung was preaching the virtues of ettmg a hundre
gf'l~! p&RgIpWo > /24 : CIA-RDPf?8-3 h0bW dMeTog4use consulate in Honolulu was sending
months after the shift from liberali messages to Tokyo on the location of ships in Pearl Harbor. It was
world at large. To revert to our stock-market analogy, industrial
PAST FAILURES OF CURRENT INTELLIGENCE
Postmortems reviewing past failures of current intelligence fre-
quently show that the weaknesses lay not so much in the unavailability
of information as in faulty analysis. "It is often harder," Allen Dulles
has said, "to use the product than to get it." A case in point is the
Rundstedt Raid of December 1944, when the Germans launched an
attack with 24 infantry and armored divisions on a 50-mile front to
a depth of 60 miles. Sufficient information was collected prior to the
assault to show that extensive German preparations were under way,
and intelligence at the Army level did in fact predict the attack several
days in advance. Intelligence at higher levels, however, reversed the
judgment, concluding that the Germans were most probably only
strengthening their defensive positions. -
On some occasions, the failure of current intelligence was attribut-
able to the failure to convince policymakers. Stalin, for example,
took a consistently negative attitude toward reports indicating an im-
minent German attack in 1941. Hitler, similarly, ignored forewarn-
ings of the Anglo-American landing in North Africa.
The most disastrous failure of current intelligence in U.S. history
was the unexpectedness of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Here, again, there appears in hindsight to have been sufficient infor-
mation available to alert intelligence officers and policy officials.
There was, however, no full appreciation of the significance of the
information. There was, further, a failure to get the intelligence in-
formation to all the quarters that should have had it. It was known,
 Approved For Release 2004/06/24: CIA-RDP78-03584R000100070001-7
known in early December that the Japanese Embassy in Washington
had been ordered to burn its communications codes. It was known
that Tokyo had told its diplomats in Washington that a deadline had
been set for the completion of negotiations with the United States.
It was known that the Japanese were continuing negotiations in
Washington in early December for the purpose of averting American
suspicions. It was known that Japanese military doctrine set great
store on the virtue of surprise attack. It was, however, the general
assessment in Washington that Japanese military action, if it came,
would be in the Far East. It was, moreover, not deemed necessary
to keep the military commands in Hawaii fully apprised of the intelli-
gence information collected. As a consequence, there was no appre-
ciation in Hawaii of the ominous significance of developments just
prior to the attack on 7 December, such as the entry of a two-man sub-
marine in prohibited waters off Pearl Harbor and the appearance of
unidentified planes on the Army radar screen.
Pearl Harbor impressed many intelligence analysts with the need
for developing a doctrine for identifying the symptoms of impending
attack. A study of past wars, together with some introspection on
logical courses of action in future wars, will soon suggest to any
thoughtful person some likely symptoms : instructions to burn codes,
withdrawal of financial reserves held in foreign banks, recall of mer-
chant shipping to home ports, official warnings that specified acts will
be followed by retaliation, callup of military reserves, accelerated
stockpiling of strategic materials, intensification of vituperative
propaganda, to name a few of the more obvious symptoms. None of
these are essential preliminaries to an attack, and all of them may
appear without necessarily presaging hostilities. Their appearance,
however, must serve as an automatic alert to the intelligence
community.
The sophisticated analysis of these symptoms requires also a recog-
nition of evidence which points to the continuation of peace : the de-
posit of funds abroad, demobilization of armed forces, withdrawal of
troops from frontiers, cessation of bellicose propaganda, to name a
few examples. The analyst here has to be on guard against deliberate
deception. While a break in the diplomatic negotiations between the
United States and Japan before Pearl Harbor would have been a sug-
gestive symptom of early hostilities, the continuation of the talks was
hardly reassurance to the contrary. It rather represented Tokyo's
The watch for symptoms-or indications, to use the favored termi-
nology-has virtually become a specialization within the current-
intelligence specialty. The indications approach is a counterbalance
to the expert's predisposition to reject deviations from known trends
until new trends have been firmly established. This is a predisposition
which is likely to be reinforced by the experience that such an expert
turns out more often to be right than wrong, just as the weatherman
in many climates can be more often right than wrong if he always
predicts today's weather for tomorrow.. Unfortunately, the analyst
who is unconsciously given to this sort of pragmatism is most likely to
be wrong when it is most important to be right. The responsible area
analyst values the stimulus of the indications specialist who is disposed
by his function to wild surmises and, like a Socratic gadfly, forces the
expert to examine carefully-not cavalierly to explain away-each
new symptom of impending hostilities.
The area analyst's particular contribution, in turn, derives from his
expert knowledge of background evidence outside of pure indications
intelligence. Intensification of civil-defense training, for example, is
susceptible to offensive or defensive interpretation. The preferred
interpretation will depend in large part on considerations of setting
and milieu : Would opposition political parties stand behind the gov-
ernment in a war situation? Are economic-development objectives a
discouragement to military adventures at this time? Does the country
enjoy the full backing of its allies?
Indications analysis is in large part a constant watch for the steps,
short of war readiness, which a country must take to be ready to
strike. Its usefulness diminishes insofar as the country in question is
already on a war footing in a situation of constant crisis. Its limita-
tions are particularly obvious in small areas of localized tension,
where the capabilities for attack are complete and only the decision to
attack is in question. Despite these shortcomings, indications analysis
must be pursued as a necessary guard, though hardly a guarantee,
against another Pearl Harbor. A considerable part of the national-
intelligence effort, therefore, is devoted to the watch for symptoms of
imminent hostilities.
effort to allay American suspicions while the Japanese fleet was steam- r each Central Intelligence Agency and
ing toward Pearl Harbor. Approved For Release 2004/06/24 :CIA-RDcstll 7t~7'14eaiaois~, each new sympton of impending hos-
The mechanism for integrating departmental opinions on the sig-
nificance of these symptoms into a national-intelligence analysis is
provided by the Watch Committee, one of the standing committees of
the United States Intelligence Board. At Watch Committee sessions,
 Approved For Release 2004/06/24: CIA-RDP78-03584R000100070001-7
tilities observed since the previous meeting is considered and a con-
clusion reached regarding its bearing on national security. The
conclusions, published in a report as the consensus of the intelligence
community, represent as authoritative a determination of prospects
in the coming days as is the National Intelligence Estimate of longer
range prospects.
Working under the Watch Committee on a round-the-clock basis
is the National Indications Center, composed of indications special-
ists from the various departments and agencies. The center is the
constant recipient from the departments and agencies of all intelli-
gence suggestive of possible hostile intent, together with their evalu-
ations. This intelligence is collated in the center as a basis for the
agenda of the next Watch Committee meeting. In addition, the
center engages in continual analysis of its own based on its long
experience with indications patterns in past crises.
The machinery for current-intelligence production, including indi-
cations analysis, reflects the ever-growing appreciation of the need
for advance warning. The machinery is yet to be tested fully, but
it has been called on to function in recent "flap" situations (Suez and
the Chinese offshore-island crises, for example). The importance of
its assigned role in national intelligence is not seriously questioned in
an age when the time required between the launching of an attack
and the delivery of the blow is being steadily compressed. Under these
circumstances there is little alternative to the development of tech-
niques that will provide all possible forewarnings of decisions to
strike.
CATEGORIES OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE 41
is slow to change but not changeless. Like the World Almanac and
the Encyclopaedia Britannica, basic-intelligence handbooks must be
periodically revised. By and large, however, basic intelligence is rela-
tively stable because it is largely descriptive and comparatively static
rather than reportorial or premonitory in content. Its time range is
from past to present,, in contradistinction to current and estimative
intelligence, which is vitally concerned with the present and likely
developments in the immediate or longer range future. This is not
to say that basic intelligence is devoid of analysis. Like the better
encyclopedias, it also interprets the data it presents.
In modern times, basic intelligence has been called upon to make
valued contributions to military planning, and most European coun-
tries have long supported a considerable basic-intelligence effort.
Sherman Kent's outline of the table of contents of a German hand-
book suggests some of the general areas of study which basic intelli-
gence encompasses.
I. General Background. Location. Frontiers. Area. History.
Governmental and Administrative Structure.
II. Character of the Country. Surface Forms. Soils. Ground
Cover. Climate. Water Supply.
III. People. Nationalities, language, attitudes. Population dis-
tribution. Settlement. Health. Structure of society.
IV. Economic. Agriculture. Industry. Trade and Commerce.
Mining. Fisheries.
V. Transportation.
land Waterways.
The most critical gap in American intelligence during the planning
of operations against the Gilbert Islands in 1943 was the lack of pre-
cise hydrographic data. The available charts were so out of date and
inaccurate as to be worse than useless. Tide tables were extremely
sketchy. Yet information on the surrounding waters was vital to the
success of the proposed amphibious operations, which would involve
decisions on such matters as the best type of landing craft to get the
troops ashore with minimum danger of capsizing or grounding. The
intelligence gap was never satisfactorily filled, and a considerable part
of the heavy casualty list on Tarawa was attributable to the inability
of landing craft to traverse the reefs off the landing beaches. The
VI. Military Geography. (Detailed regional breakdown).
VII. Military Establishment in Being. Army : Order of Battle,
Fixed Defenses, Military Installations, Supply. Navy: Order of Bat-
tle, The Fleet, Naval Shore Installations, Naval Air Supply. Air :
Order of Battle, Military Aircraft, Air Installations (See List of
Airdromes, etc. in Special Appendix), Lighter than Air, Supply.
VIII. Special Appendixes. Biographical data on key figures of
the government, Local geographic terminology. Description of rivers,
lakes, canals. List and specifications of electric powerplants. Descrip-
tion of roads. List of airdromes and most important landing grounds.
List of main telephone and telegraph lines. Money, weights, and
measures. Beaches (as for amphibious military operations).
American dead on Tarawa lay as mute testimony to the vital im- In postwar periods, extensive reliance has been placed on basic
portance of accurate basic intelligence. Approved For Release 2004/06/24: CIA-R[09*M841W0M0> i B * for negotiating and administering
A synthesis of the fundamental facts and features that make up the peace. The British delegates to Paris at the end of World War I,
the character and body of a country and its people, basic intelligence
 Approved For Release 2004/06/24: CIA-RDP78-03584R000100070001-7
42 CATEGORIES OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE
for example, were equipped with so-called peace handbooks, which
summarized the ethnic, economic, and political problems of the areas
which were to be affected by the redemarcation of new frontiers. The
texts of treaties and other state documents were also included in the
handbooks. All the trouble spots of the continent were examined in
historical perspective-Alsace-Lorraine, Silesia, the Dardanelles.
Similar background studies, in varying degrees of detail, were also
available to delegates from other countries. Their preparation before
all international conferences is essential if the delegates are to be
equipped to discuss the issues intelligently. It is hard to imagine, for
example, a disarmament conference whose delegates did not come
forearmed with basic intelligence regarding the armed-forces strength
of the other countries in both men and equipment, the positions of
these countries on disarmament issues in past conferences, signs of
softening or stiffening of their national policies, and the prevailing
military doctrines that would affect their preferences for one sort of
arms limitation rather than another.
Basic-intelligence handbooks also served in postwar periods as aids
to military-government personnel charged with administering the
peace in occupied countries. Though the content of these books was
not far removed from the content of those employed to aid military
strategy, they served dissimilar ends. Railroads, ports, and industrial
installations were now studied, not as targets for attack but for their
serviceability to occupying forces and for their essentiality to the
occupied economy. Military-government handbooks took note of
popular sensibilities that should not be offended rather than popular
characteristics that might be exploited for social subversion.
The amount of basic intelligence accumulated over recent years is
so large that only a part of it is contained in formal studies. The files
of the intelligence community's central reference services are mines of
information that can be collated on an as-needed basis. Electronic
data-processing methods have blurred the distinction between the
cards of the central reference services and so-called finished intelli-
gence. For, within the day, the cards can be run and rerun to yield
printed listings with accompanying descriptive data of personalities
and major industrial targets for military attack, to name but two of
many possibilities.
The advantage of maintaining basic intelligence in a form that
lends itself to automatic data processing is the ease of continuous
revision. The listing of powerplants, municipal utilities, pipelines,
mines, celestial observatories, etc., contain all the data known to
date not merel the information available to the time the last hand-
are called for, as, for example, in studies of social and psychological
characteristics.
The battle for Tarawa was one of several occasions which high-
lighted America's lack of foresight before World War II in failing
to build up its basic-intelligence library. In the early war planning
for North African operations, American officers had fortunate access
to ISIS (Inter-Service Intelligence Studies), the coordinated basic-
intelligence studies of the British. It became apparent that a similar
effort was needed for Pacific operations, and, at the President's direc-
tion, the Joint Chiefs of Staff created a Joint Intelligence Study
Publishing Board to produce the so-called JANIS (Joint Army-Navy
Intelligence Studies). The JANIS volumes provided officials and
intelligence research analysts toward the end of the war with detailed
information on the historical, geographic, political, economic, mili-
tary, and sociological backgrounds of the areas studied.
The JANIS volumes were a wartime stopgap. It was widely real-
ized that basic intelligence must be produced in peacetime and be kept
revised and ready for use in a national emergency. In addition the
qualified character of the postwar peace heightened the general recep-
tivity to a basic-intelligence effort that would serve nonmilitary opera-
tions such as propaganda, foreign-aid planning, and economic
warfare. In 1948 the National Security Council authorized publi-
cation of a basic-intelligence series called the National Intelligence
Survey (NIS).
As in the case of a National Intelligence Estimate, members of the
intelligence community contribute chapters in their special fields of
competence to the National Intelligence Survey for each geographic
area. The Army, for example, is responsible for covering terrain
features; the Navy, for ports and harbors. The Central Intelligence
Agency is responsible for coordination, editing, publication, and dis-
semination of the surveys. General policy and requirements with
respect to the NIS program are set by the National Intelligence
Survey Committee, a standing committee of the United States Intelli-
gence Board.
The agency contributions to an NIS are, in most cases, organically
separable and can be published separately rather than integrated into
a composite production like the National Intelligence Estimate. In
I Y
book was written. This technique A 3}u thfe6ldpebe s2OQMl6S/24 : CIA-RDP7> nq
however, is less useful when textual rather than tabular expositions
ns, CIA must check that they are consist:
gk~AgR74taJ i
~
t
i e of , u ere is not the welding into an organic whole
 Approved For Release 2004/06/24: CIA-RDP78-03584R000100070001-7
44 CATEGORIES OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE
that characterizes the National Intelligence Estimate process. Simi-
larly, when the surveys are revised, the revisions are edited and pub-
lished subject by subject. For affording basic intelligence which is
as up to date as possible, this procedure has clear advantages over any
that would delay publication of the entire NIS until all contributions
were in.
Since the NIS series was inaugurated, comprehensive digests of
basic intelligence have been prepared and published, subject by
subject, for each of the major countries and most of the lesser
countries of the world. The uses to which the surveys are put
are varied. Intelligence trainees find them excellent for orientation
in their new areas of responsibility. Diplomats study them with
equal profit prior to their departure for new posts abroad. Analysts
refer frequently to the surveys for ready answers to spot questions.
(What gauge are the rail lines on Shikoku?) Military officers
employ the surveys as standard references in the formulation of war
plans. At the NSC level, the surveys are not studied in all their
detail, but chapters giving an overview of a country have proved serv-
iceable to high officials.
IV
SUBJECT-MATTER SPECIALIZATION
National intelligence is a synthesis. It is compounded of informa-
tion from virtually all the academic disciplines-sociology, history,
geography, economics, political science, military philosophy, the
natural sciences, and others. Intelligence officers are ordinarily spe-
cialists in one of these categories, although they may be competent
in more than one if their responsibilities happen to be limited to
small geographic areas. Even in the latter case, it is rare for high
competence in the social sciences to extend to the military and nat-
ural sciences as well, so that specialization by subject category is as
much the rule in intelligence today as it is in the academic world.
National Security Council directives have established the respon-
sibilities of each of the organizations in the intelligence community for
producing the various subject categories of intelligence. Over the
years, these categories have become differentiated by specialized tech-
niques of collection and production.
Peace, to turn an aphorism from Clausewitz, is in some lights a
continuation of war by other means. The military strategy and tac-
tics of wartime give way to the political policy and maneuver of
peacetime, and political intelligence comes into its own in the councils
of the country's highest officials.
One of the principal handicaps of the political intelligence officer
is the difficulty of quantifying his data. Economic intelligence may
not be the more accurate for its statistics of production and com-
merce. Military intelligence may be in error despite the pretensions
to exactness in its arithmetical magnitudes of estimated troop
strength. But accurate or erroneous, they provide numerical orders
of strength and weakness. Estimates dealing with political dynam-
ics, by contrast, deal with the immeasurable and the imponderable;
the policymaker must accept intelligence which lacks the precision
he would like. Peasant attitudes may be described as apathetic or
sullen, and no fine measures may be available to suggest the degree
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 Approved For Release 2004/06/24: CIA-RDP78-03584R000100070001-7 SUBJECT-MATTER SPECIALIZATION 47
46 SUBJECT-MATTER SPECIALIZATION
It follows that skill in verbalization marks the political analyst (Khrushchev's speech denigrating Stalin before the 20th Party Con-
gress, the texts of state communiques, and party pronouncements on
more than it marks any other intelligence officer. His expositions are doctrine, for instance) constitute perhaps the bulk of his background
textual rather than tabular. Less able to draw on numbers, he relies
knowledge. The diplomatic cable or dispatch reporting conversi-
in on his purviprecisionew. of A few language to examples will suffice to intelligence illustrate on the the subject range of tions with foreign-ministry officials is an essential source of informa-
tion on foreign policy. Other commentaries from Foreign Service
this purview. officers are also welcomed, coming as they do from specialists who can-
balfance power. among The the equilibrium contenders fofor a leadregimeership. may rest The on the politi- not engage in clandestine activities but whose legitimate duties keep
precarious balance Loci of
them among the best informed on political trends. Reports from
cal analyst strives to understand who and where are the centers of clandestine services are a necessary supplement to overt information
political power. In the jockeying that followed the death of Stalin, on those subjects where official frankness is the exception rather than
the relative strengths of Malenkov, Molotov, Bulganin, and Khru
shchev were not always self-evident. The influence of the army in po- the rule, e.g., popular unrest, jockeying by rival power cliques, secret
litical councils was sometimes in question. Although the Communist treaties, etc.
Party is invariably the most powerful political force in an iron-cur- BIOGRAPHIC INTELLIGENCE
tain country, the prestige of the party varies among the satellites.
Within the party, the Central Committee may sometimes constitute a Our understanding of events is furthered by our knowledge of the
true electorate to which political rivals must appeal; at other times, men who shape them or who at least participate in them. With every
it may be only the echo of a personal dictator. election, every revolution, and every reshuffle of ministries, intelli-
2. Popular attitudes. The occasions when popular hostility is gene must be prepared to describe the emergent personalities : who
clearly revealed in. the fierce glow of open revolt are comparatively they are and what they stand for. If the intelligence organization is
infrequent. More often, the political analyst must sift a regime's on its toes, the job was largely done long before. For biographic
claims of popular support and equally suspect charges by emotional intelligence entails not merely the accumulation of information on
critics. The regime's own propaganda sometimes speaks most elo- the prominent. It includes also personality dossiers on the obscure
quently on the subject. Harangues against "hooliganism" of youths, and the underlings, whose characters and experience are matters of
"conservatism" of peasants, "local chauvinism" of ethnic minorities, record before they make the front pages.
attest clearly to grievances and unrest. Since it is impossible to keep a dossier of every one of the nearly
3. Domestic programs. What is the progress of antireligious 3 billion persons in the world, is biographic intelligence likely to draw
campaigns? of collectivization drives? of literacy and education move- a blank for individuals who become prominent overnight? In the
ments? Here the political analyst can sometimes quantify his intelli- case of persons who advance quickly to political power, the gaps are
gence by estimates of the amount of church lands confiscated, the comparatively rare. The new faces that appear in politburo ranks
number of peasants enrolled in collectives, the number of graduates after periodic reshuffles are not of people new to the party. They are
from college-level institutes. The political analyst is alert to ad- of Communists who have made some mark in subordinate positions,
vances and retreats in domestic programs as they lend credit or dis- perhaps in the provinces. If their previous jobs in the party were
credit to the regime. He is also alive to shifts in the programs for a matter of any record at all, their names must appear in the per-
their bearing on the political fortunes of their sponsors. sonality dossiers. Biographic intelligence may indeed not be fully
4. Foreign policy. Perhaps no phase of political intelligence forearmed to cope with military revolts that raise junior officers (say,
bears so heavily on U.S. security interests as intelligence on foreign a Sergeant Batista) to power. But if the personalities involved are
policy. Supported by his understanding of the basic foreign-policy middle or high ranking, their dossiers should be reasonably full. And
objectives of a nation, the political analyst keeps abreast of tactical if the revolution is any time at all in the making, biographic intelli-
shifts on such issues as disarmament, German unification, Arab na- gene should not be taken by surprise. Castro was hardly an un-
tionalism, U.N. membership for Communist China, ideological con- known when the Batista government fell in Cuba.
formity among the Communist satellites. Much of biographic intelligence consists in the mere chronological
In view of the broad range of hjl l~ Vt6 friR & 44d P24 : CIA-RDP78a0358RO OIiQO 1.gents in a man's life: his appointments to
to be catholic in his use of collection sources. Overt information
 48 SUBJECT-MATTER SPECIALIZATION Approved For Release 2004/06/24: CIA-RDP78-03584R000100070001-7
party and government positions, his resignations, illnesses, trips, and
notes on his presence or absence at public functions. No unusual ana-
lytical abilities are required to handle the compilation of such data.
It is a job of typing and filing, cutting and pasting. The trained
biographical analyst, however, is several cuts above a clerk-typist.
Hardly content with a who's-who enumeration of skeletal facts, he
endeavors to portray the rounded man-character, ambitions, opin-
ions, weaknesses, friends, relatives, and particular allegiances in the
network of cliques that may cut across the formal structure of party
and government. He is prepared, of course, to give World Almanac
answers to such questions as "Who is currently secretary of the Afro-
Asian Solidarity Committee?" But he also stands ready to include
premonitory elements in his report-the nature of the policies to be
expected from de Gaulle, for example, in the light of what the French
leader himself has said and of other information compiled about him.
Useful as are the dossiers of middle-ranking personalities against
the day when one of them emerges into the front rank, biographic
intelligence also needs to speculate beforehand on the likely suc-
cessors to top leadership. Who will follow the aging Mao Tse-tung
as the leader of Communist China? While the element of conjecture
here is considerable, it is limited at least by the fairly narrow slate
of likely candidates-say, the membership of the politburo, or, nar-
rower still, of the politburo's inner circle known as the standing com-
mittee. The principal difficulty is that, while the candidates are few,
the outcome may hinge on the distribution of their supporters in the
rest of the politburo, the central committee, and perhaps other organs
of the party. Biographic intelligence must, therefore, determine who
is likely to support whom. Known friendships, family ties, or pre-
sumptive obligations resulting from sponsor-protege relationships
in past jobs are necessary elements in the analysis. A careful study
of public remarks may be useful. Which members of the central
committee seem invariably to echo Chou En-lai's statements on major
issues? Which seem to incline to Liu Shao-chi's phrases? The im-
ponderables loom large in such an estimate, but the issue is too im-
portant to forego analysis.
tured equipment often yield prolific data during hostilities. Informa-
tion passed openly to military attaches and others is no adequate sub-
stitute during peace.
A large part of the man-hours expended in a military-intelligence
organization goes into the pick-and-shovel work needed to uncover
the organization and administration of the foreign military services.
The result should be a knowledge of the military structure from the
ministry level down through the various levels of territorial and tacti-
cal organization. If the information available is fairly complete, the
intelligence organization will come up with a reasonably good picture
of the relationships among the high commands; the division of the
country into corps areas, fleet commands, air commands; the location
and function of unit headquarters, depots, airfields, and other instal-
lations; numbers and distribution of personnel; and weapons, vehicles,
and other equipment.
The compilation of the aforementioned data will delineate the anat-
omy, so to speak, of a foreign military establishment in its physical
setting. To some extent, this enumeration of tangible specifics will
throw light on the effectiveness of the armed forces. But to round out
the picture, attention must also be directed to the intangibles. This
necessitates, for example, an evaluation of morale, of training meth-
ods, and of tactical and strategic doctrine. Methods and doctrine will
be considered as they bear on the employment of particular weapons
and on the employment, singly and jointly, of the various arms and
services. In the purview of the evaluation will also come practice and
principles relating to reconnaissance, river crossings, guerrilla war-
fare, airborne operations, surprise attack, and civil defense.
Intelligence on logistics requires a consideration of tangibles and
intangibles combined. Requirements for rations, fuel, ammunition,
medical supplies, and other materiel must be computed. Calculations
must be made of the number of trains, ships, trucks, aircraft, and other
transport units needed to move men and equipment under given cir-
cumstances. Requirements must be matched against assets, with ap-
propriate consideration of vulnerability to interdiction.
The "flaps" in military intelligence occur when new activity is dis-
closed-movement of troops to frontiers, increase in artillery ex-
changes between unfriendly forces, transfer of military equipment
from one nati
n t
th
d t
i
i
d
i
o
o ano
er, an
ng or
est
ntro
uct
on of new
The military posture of a country is so large an ingredient of its
strategic stature that even peacetime estimates require extensive analy- weapons, for instance. As often as not, military intelligence alone
is not competent to make the evaluation. A joint consideration with
sis of armed-forces intelligence. It is an awkward fact, however, that
armed-forces intelligence in peacetime is, in many respects, more diffi- political and other analysts is called for to appraise the full signifi-
cance of the new activity. The jeopardy to Middle East peace of Com-
cult to come by than during war. Scouting parties, operational
probes, prisoner-of-war interrogation, aerial reconnaissance, and cap- munist military shipments to the United Arab Republic, for example,
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50 SUBJECT-MATTER SPECIALIZATION
is to be assessed in the light of the political as
operative at the moment.
well as military factors
tion was not precisely known. The launchers of ballistic missiles
must know exact locations on a planet that is still imperfectly mapped.
These and related problems have brought geographic intelligence far
beyond the limits that Moses set in 1500 B.C. when he sent his spies-
into the land of Canaan : "Go up into the mountain and see the land,
what it is." The geographic intelligence office that studies "the land,
what it is" today is abreast of developments in geodesy, oceanography,
climatology, gravimetry.
GEOGRAPHIC INTELLIGENCE'
The geographic intelligence officer works in macrocosm and micro-
cosm. His study may encompass an analysis of the entire Soviet
Arctic. It may, on the other hand, require a description of a small
town in the Communist bloc-down to lining up each building, detail-
ing the number of floors, and giving the postal addresses.
Some of the data that the geographic intelligence officer would like
to have for his studies are closely held by foreign governments. Much
of his work, however, consists in collating open source materials.
The quality of the work depends in considerable measure on the re-
sources of the map libraries that geographic intelligence maintains.
With the help thus of open source and classified materials alike,
geographic intelligence is informed on topographical features (e.g.,
relief, landforms, drainage patterns), and it understands which areas
offer the weakest natural defenses against assault. It has informa-
tion on weather and climate (temperature, precipitation, clouds, fog,
humidity, and winds) and can say when typhoons would be a menace
to say Chinese Communist amphibious operations again Taiwan. Its
data on urban areas are adequate for estimates of defensibility and
trafficability (street patterns, types of building construction, location
of utilities and other vital installations, and distribution of popula-
tion). It has compiled information on coasts and landing beaches,
including tidal data, gradients, underwater slopes and obstructions.
Its studies of railways spurs and other features of the transport
system contribute to knowledge of probable missile site locations.
Geographic intelligence often has to map and describe the loca-
tional patterns of disidence, religious affiliation, and other social
characteristics bearing on the political reliability of populations. To
serve officials who are deciding on a policy position with respect to
an international boundary dispute (e.g., on the Sino-Indian border),
geographic intelligence will provide information on historical juris-
dictions, natural watersheds, main lines of access, ethnic characteristics
of local populations, and other relevant considerations. Geographic
intelligence assists economic intelligence officers by preparing land-use
maps and studies, by showing major traffic and commodity flow pat-
terns, and by detailing other locational factors (altitude, temperature,
rainfall) that influence productive activity.
As modern weapons extend their long reach, geographic intelligence
finds frequent occasion to collaborate with scientific intelligence. The
There is some overlap in practice between scientific intelligence and
technical intelligence, and it is convenient here to consider both to-
gether. Technical intelligence, as it is defined in the Dictionary of
United States Military Terms for Joint Usage, concerns foreign tech-
nological developments which have advanced to the point of having
a practical application for war purposes. Scientific intelligence covers
technological developments also, but only up through the research and
development phase. In addition, its scope includes areas of research
that transcend the strictly technological and the strictly military, e.g.,
mathematics, medicine, solid-state physics, enzymology, radio astron-
omy, and oceanography. Technical intelligence is a responsibility of
the military services. Scientific intelligence may be collected and
analyzed by other organizations, e.g., the Atomic Energy Commission.
The growing importance of scientific and technical intelligence
hardly needs to be labored in an age when national security is so
closely related to advances in nuclear physics, rocketry, electronics,
and medicine, to name only several of the fields marked by dramatic
"breakthroughs" in recent years. Even in the 19th century, the im-
portance of technical intelligence was widely appreciated. Some of
the information which Dreyfus was unjustly accused of passing to the
Germans dealt with the design of a new artillery-recoil mechanism.
The widespread concern over enemy "secret weapons" at the begin-
ning of World War II gave strong impetus to the expansion of scien-
tific and technical intelligence in both the Axis and Allied powers.
Reports in the files of British intelligence when the war began,
for example, indicated German development activities on glid-
ing bombs, pilotless aircraft, long-range guns, and rockets. The war
was less than a year old when the British became convinced that the
Germans had developed radio beams for blind bombing.
The discovery of the beams by the British is illustrative of the man-
ner in which scientific intelligence frequently combines the usual
sources of intelligence information (agent reports, overt publications,
manned aircraft of World WarNApimYddeRDiDFe ll> s2819"6i24 : CIA-RDP78-0 584I46bdgdg6gobow's for confirming the information. In this
 Approved For Release 2004/06/24: CIA-RDP78-03584R000100070001-7
case, the technical means involved the sending up of search
aircraft, which detected the German beams in the expected place and
at the expected frequency. German aircraft, with receivers ostensibly
designed for blind landings, had been able to fly over the British Isles
at night and drop their bombs at the intersection of the beams on pre-
selected targets. After the British uncovered the beams, however,
they were able to jam them and confuse the German night bombers.
The spotting of German radar stations again illustrates the combi-
nation of technical and traditional methods of intelligence collection.
Photo reconnaissance and the radio detection of radar stations while
they were transmitting uncovered most of the coastal radar. In the.
case of the inland transmitters, the British could determine general
locations by taking radio bearings. Agents were then directed to
pinpoint the inland stations, after which further details were obtained
by photo reconnaissance. By these methods, British intelligence
located more than 740 German radar stations on the continent, leaving
not more than 6 to be uncovered by the ground forces after D-Day.
SUBJECT-MATTER SPECIALIZATION 53
equipped with afterburners and to estimate how much thrust augmen-
tation the afterburners provide. It may also be possible to estimate
the weight and unaugmented thrust of the engine.
The covert collection of scientific and technical intelligence is handi-
capped by the extraordinary secrecy that surrounds the obvious
targets of the clandestine services. To aggravate the difficulty, the
secret agent who is also a trained scientist (a Klaus Fuchs or a Bruno
Pontecorvo) is a rare find. When the combination occurs in one pelTAT
son, he can, of course, be of outstanding value.
Scientific intelligence is commonly accorded a higher order of
credibility if it is acquired by technical methods, F_ I
SOURCES OF INFORMATION
Like the other intelligence categories, scientific and technical intelli- PERSONNEL
gence maximizes collection from overt sources. Since the death of The scientific-intelligence officer is, of course, himself trained in
Stalin, the number of Russian scientific and technical journals allowed science. His talents need not run along lines that result in creative
to circulate in the West has expanded. The Library of Congress contributions to scientific knowledge, but he should be able to appraise
publishes a "Monthly Index of Russian Accessions," which gives the significance of such contributions for national security. He may,
the title of all articles and books received. Specialized bibliographies in many cases, be able to draw on the consultative services of eminent
and indexes are also published by other libraries, e.g., the National experts; he will have to talk with them in their language and hold his
Library of Medicine. own with them. At the other end, he will try to avoid technical lan-
The limited Russian-language competence in American scientific guage, so far as possible, when he presents his conclusions to policy-
circles has spurred the initiation of various translation and abstract- nakers and operating officials. He needs this talent for minimizing
ing programs. The Chemical Abstracts, Excerpta Medica, and the argon far more than does the political analyst or military-intelligence
Biological Abstracts are among the best known resumes of Russian )fficer, who speaks to policymakers or commanding officers pretty much
articles. For those with some Russian-language competence, the n their own language. A working solution to the language problem
abstract journal Referatievnyi Zhurnal, published in the U.S.S.R., is nay sometimes be to combine a short intelligence report to the policy-
often a timesaver. Whether read in, the original or in translation, the nakers with a detailed technical supplement.
foreign journal remains perhaps the principal source of information While access to expert consultant services offers demonstrable ad-
on scientific and technical accomplishments abroad. vantages, the scientific-intelligence officer may be justified in reposing
In the overt category may also be placed information gleaned from greater confidence in his own conclusions. An occupational failing
public displays of equipment and accomplishments. May Days, for of experts--though they are right more often than not-is to be
example, frequently provide the occasion for such displays, intended heavily influenced by their own particular lines of research when
often to impress foreign as well as domestic spectators. From flybys called on to assess possibilities in foreign countries. British experts
of military aircraft, trained observers may be able to determine in World War II, for example, whose experience with practical rock-
whether there are unusual design features thhQaJ, wou ermit cordite in a steel case, 1 p
performance. It ma be possible alsAqgrc h~7~i 1? 6/24 CIA-RDgt coked at
y p % graphs o a Orman rocket et at Peenemunde and assessed the weight
 Approved For Release 2004/06/24: CIA-RDP78-03584R000100070001-7
at 80 tons. British scientific intelligence, on the other hand, relying
in part on reports from agents and prisoners indicating liquid oxygen
to be one of the fuels, came up with the much more accurate estimate
of 12 tons.
Where technical methods of detection are successful, the scientific-
intelligence officer is greatly assisted in his analysis. Technical de-
tection, however, is often short of bein all-informative.
In the ma-
jority of such cases, the scientific-intelligence officer labors under the
standard uncertainties, which will not be resolved by the experimental
and laboratory techniques of the natural sciences. He rests his analy-
sis on attache reports, agent disclosures, propaganda announcements,
and the other standard sources. He evaluates the information re-
ceived for consistency with other known facts. His conclusions are
compounded from imponderables, not the measurables he worked with
in his academic training.
The scientific-intelligence officer, though he relies heavily on his
academic training in the natural sciences, thus finds himself approach-
ing his work in the manner of an investigator in the social sciences.
There is indeed no substitute for this approach when the matter under
consideration relates to people and institutions. The organization of
the Academy of Sciences, the curricula of engineering colleges, the
number of annual graduates from technical schools, the transfers of
missile technicians to other localities-these are subjects which the
scientific-intelligence officer handles with techniques that are common
to intelligence analysis generally.
The very speed of technological advance necessitates ever greater
emphasis on scientific intelligence in this century. Scientific intelli-
gence will play a role which is trying enough when both the United
States and another country have developed a new weapon and Amer-
ican experience can serve as a guide in estimating lines of further
advance by the other country. The role is likely to be most critical
when the United States is still unsuccessful while a foreign country
has succeeded. For the prevailing image is of American technological
supremacy, all but the most incontrovertible facts about foreign
levels of achievement being received with widespread skepticism. In
It is the magnitude, structure, and rate of growth of foreign econo-
mies as they can contribute to military power-economic potential
for war-that perhaps occasions the primary interest in economic
intelligence. The decisive influence of American economic superiority
in the outcomes of World War I and World War II gave rise to a
prevailing thesis that a country's success in war depends above all on
its conversion of economic resources to combat power. The all-im-
portant analysis, in this view, draws not from intelligence of forces in
being but of the economic-mobilization base-manpower, stockpiles,
and productive capacity over and above what must be drawn down
for essential civilian requirements.
With the rise of nuclear power, this view has been called into ques-
tion. As some analysts envisage the probabilities, forces in being
must be the primary determinant in deciding the outcome of all-out
nuclear conflict; economic potential for sustaining hostilities is irrele-
vant in a setting where the mobilization base is doomed to quick ex-
tinction. Insofar as nuclear capabilities are a deterrent to all-out
war, hostilities are envisaged on the Korean War pattern, which do
not call for the total involvement of the economic-mobilization base.
Whatever the merits of this viewpoint, complete destruction beyond
recovery of the mobilization base is not universally accepted as a cer-
tainty in all-out conflict. In any case economic potential for war need
not be equated with the theoretical capabilities of the mobilization
base at a given time after D-Day. It can be related as well to the eco-
nomic base a country is building to support necessary forces in being
before the outbreak of an all-out or limited war. When defense pro-
duction in peacetime has to be on a wartime scale, the economic
potential for supporting war, or at least a war posture, must remain a
central concern of economic intelligence.
The analysis of
economic potential for war consists largely in the
derivation of measures of a nation's capabilities to supply, munitions
and military personnel. The measures may be specific or aggregative.
Examples of specific measures are shipbuilding capacity, manpower
of military age, and petroleum production. The aggregative measures
relate to the economy as a whole or to broad sectors of the economy;
e.g., indexes of overall industrial production. A discussion of these
measures will illustrate the elements entering into economic-intelli-
gence analysis of war potential.
the ability of scientific intelligenp tovstlFor R Ie s2Qfl410&24 : CIA-RDP78-0358 QO& 10O 1-7There are no completely self-sufficient
Nation's security against surprise from new technological threats. modern economies, but the island kingdoms and smaller nations that
 Approved For Release 2004/06/24: CIA.RDP78-03584R000100070001-7
were the great powers of an earlier era are under particular disad-
vantages today in having to look outside their borders for so much
of their raw-material requirements. In addition to mineral resources,
the analysis of war potential must consider agricultural resources.
Japan's stature as a great power was supported before World War
II by her ability to command food imports from Taiwan and the
Asian mainland. Her insufficiency of food would be a serious weak-
ness in another war.
Shortages in natural resources can be ameliorated, for a time at
least, by stockpiles. Estimates of stockpiles must, therefore, be in-
cluded in computations of resource availabilities as matched against
requirements. Economic-intelligence analyses also give recognition
to substitutes in such calculations-synthetic in place of natural rub-
ber, for example, or plastics in place of short-supply metals.
2. Manpower. The size of armies is the roughest sort of index
to military power, but it has served reasonably well as a point of de-
parture in analysis. The smallest countries cannot have large armies
for lack of manpower. The economically backward countries cannot
have large armies for lack of means to support them. With more
than three times the population of the United States in World War
II, China put into the field less than half the men mobilized in the
American Armed Forces. It is the large, industrially advanced coun-
tries that can mobilize the biggest armies in wartime.
Calculations of manpower availabilities rest, first, on estimates of
the total population, classified by age and sex. Men of military age
constitute a crucial component of this estimate. Health character-
istics of the population are also considered in determining availability
for military service. Labor productivity is a factor in estimating
civilian labor-force requirements; the lower the productivity, the
greater the number that must be kept in the fields and factories. The
training and education of the labor force are further factors which
limit both the production and utilization of modern weapons. The
calculations invariably allow for additions to the labor force in war-
time of women, schoolchildren, and retired persons who would nor-
mally be outside the labor market.
3. Industrial capacities. War-potential estimates rest in largest
part on calculations of specific industrial capacities-steel ingot, ma-
chine tools, electronic equipment, airplanes, electric power, shipbuild-
ing, munitions, motor vehicles, and others. Degrees of superiority or
inferiority are, of course, not shown by mere summations of capaci-
ties. In their finest detail, estimates will show the proportion of
The production statistics published by foreign governments are a
major source of estimates of industrial capacity.. In recent years,
many Communist governments have found their propaganda purposes
well served by releasing more detailed statistics of economic achieve-
ments and of projections under 5- and 7-year plans. Economic intel-
ligence may have to make its own adjustments to these figures, but
they serve as starting points in analysis.
On sectors of the economy for which statistics are not released-
airplane production, for example-economic intelligence must employ
more indirect methods. Order-of-battle and table-of-equipment in-
formation on the air force may provide one basis for an estimate. A
listing of known factories with production for each calculated from
facts known about plant size, number of employees, or other informa-
tion may provide the basis for another estimate. If the differences
between estimates are not too large, economic intelligence can settle
on an approximation.
4. Transportation. In 1904 an analysis limited to a consideration
of resources, manpower, and industrial capacity would have come up
with a higher war potential for Russia than for Japan. But Russia
was decisively defeated because she was not able to bring her power
to bear in the theater where the contest was decided, the Far East. As
this illustration must immediately suggest, comparisons of war poten-
tial are meaningful only for given assumptions about the character
and locale of the hostilities. China's potential relative to that of
Brazil for a war in the Far East is of one order; for a war in Latin
America, it is of quite another order.
Transportation constitutes a critical element in assessing a nation's
potential for war in a specific theater. The completion in 1953 by
Communist China of a railroad to the Indochina border considerably
enhanced the Vietminh capabilities against the French. Its greatly
expanded merchant marine in World War II enabled the United
States to carry its struggle against the Axis powers to two distant,
widely separated fronts.
The analysis of transport capacities entails the consideration of
such elements as rolling stock (number, type, and size), tonnage of
shipping, motor vehicles, speeds, downtimes for maintenance, turn-
around times, and port and terminal facilities. In localized wars,
none of these elements may be limiting, and the analysis may turn on
the carrying capacity of a specific rail line (so many tons each way per
day), assuming the diversion of rolling stock from other areas of the
country.
capacity that can be devoted to wr nroducll r Rh fe er2 4 4 :CIA-RDP78--e pl~bf r't` c 01Wb6 1~~r7he advantages of commerce to a peacetime efe that must go to civilian customer , e more e army can ave an , e is a precarious asset in war. Hong Kong's food im-
the greater the nation's war potential. ports from the Chinese mainland are economically advantageous in
 S8 SUBJECT-MATTER SPECIALIZATION Approved For Release 2004/06/24: CIA- FDP78-03584R000100070001-7
peace, a liability when under attack. The economic-intelligence offi- thus afford a useful supplement to other areas of study for estimating
cer, however, is not likely to regard a country's trade pattern as one of rates of economic growth and ability to sustain increased military
the most critical factors in its war potential, for patterns of trade are ; expenditures.
often adjusted to political or military necessities. The bulk of The shortcomings in particular cases of financial analysis under -11
b-~ war. Where the government has not the strength nor will to com-
1948. After the break with h Stalin. the West became Yu-aoslavia,s
ous disruption to Belgrade's economy. Soviet trade with China was tax burdens or continuing inflationary pressure, the state of the budget
small in the 1940's _ with a Communist regime in Peiping. the U.S.S.R. becomes a limiting factor on a country's ability to prosecute military
quickly became China's main trading partner; when Sino-Soviet Hostilities. The strain on the -French budget affected the vigor of
party and government relations deteriorated in 1960, Soviet technical France's effort to hold its position in Indochina.
personnel were withdrawn from China and the Chinese began to look Financial analysis is also a useful approach in studying countries
about for other markets and sources of supply. which have very little in the way of resources within their borders In the case of some commodities, however, trade patterns can be but, rather, must procure them through trade or aid from abroad,
fairly rigid. The Chinese Communists might reorient most of the Jordan's dependence on foreign aid to support its armed forces is
Un7. Gross national duct. The most inclusive a ative
TTnitPr~ States gets its nickel from f!a,na,cla,- the wartime disadvantages pro g~eg
l
f
l
oe o
a
l the goods and services produced by a nation within the
ocean routes from the Far East or South America, the disadvantages a
year. International comparisons of gross national product as indica-
may become serious indeed. Trade with nearby, friendly countries
i
dil
Lencies,
t 1a not rea
y apparent what dollar values should be assigned
Domestic commerce is subject to much the same analysis as foreign
in
_? rw,,,,,,.._-
____ tial analysis. Are Bulgaria's haircuts to be valued according to the
zation by region is the rule. Concentrations of heavy industry and actual earnings received by Bulgarian barbers? If Bulgarian barbers
centers of light industry are separated by varying distances. Certain are as efficient as their American counterparts, the procedure under-
links crops like cotton can be grown only in limited areas. Trade p
links the regions, determines a country's regional strengths and vul- states Bulgaria's output in any comparison with the United States.
nerabilities, and conditions the economy's susceptibility to disruption Is the overall total or per capita gross national product the more
when subjected to a given pattern of military blows. useful concept for war-potential analysis? Again there is no ready
6. Finance. Financial analysis has shortcomings for estimating answer. Insofar as low per capita figures for Asian countries reflect
living standards which regimes cannot further depress, the war poten-
the potential of large capitalist economies in an all-out war. The
economic-intelligence officer prefers to make his analysis in real rather tial of those countries is clearly limited. But many of the components
than money terms. The assumption is that, by one method of financing of gross national product are more significant as aggregates than as
or another, industrially advanced countries will command all the per capita averages. Total numbers of tanks in the armed forces,
economic resources possible when national survival is at stake. The rather than tanks per capita, are considered when comparing the
availability of resources, rather than finance, is taken as limiting. military strength of two countries.
This is true also of Communist countries, but here the study of govern- Analysis of gross national product turns as much on its composition
hts because so much of the coun- as on its total. The total product is made up of military equipment
afford better insi
ment finances ma
g
y
tries' economic activities-the and su lies ca ital oods consumer necessities and luxuries, and
CIA-RDP78-WA' 099 .- ervices. The count spending ending the most on
+rine -Fnr nvnmr,lri_ia rnfI M' j--1 7n efsIt hnra.rafe flnmmnn,at. h,ido. tc ~'
 Approved For Release 2004/06/24: CIA-R
60 SUBJECT-MATTER SPECIALIZATION
military goods and services is ostensibly building up its military
strength the fastest. On the other hand the amount a country is able
to spend on entertainment and other luxury consumption is hardly
to be ignored; it represents effort that can be diverted to war produc-
tion after mobilization. It is perhaps the gross national product
exclusive of the amount needed for essential civilian requirements
that affords the best measure of a country's ability to produce war
goods and services in an emergency situation. The problem is to
determine essential civilian requirements. Generally economies with
high gross national products per capita are geared to high civilian
requirements. This does not mean merely that citizens with high
living standards resist deprivations that the poor in other countries
will countenance. The very structure of advanced economies entails
higher allowances for civilian requirements. Where homes, for
example, are fairly distant from factories, more gasoline must be set
aside for getting people to and from their jobs than is the case where
people live within walking or bicycling distance of their work.
The rate of growth is often an important factor in the consideration
of gross national product. Since World War II, the war potential of
the U.S.S.R. has tended to rise with the increase in its gross national
product. Countries with high rates of growth commonly have high
rates of savings and investment. This means that diversion of re-
sources to the military sector will probably necessitate deep cuts in
investment funds so that the war effort will entail a sacrifice of high-
priority development programs.
WARTIME ECONOMIC INTELLIGENCE
Modern military strategy addresses itself only in part to direct
destruction of opposing armies. To weaken the economic base of the
enemy has become a primary design in the prosecution of wars. Long-
range bombers have to seek out the most important targets in the
enemy's economy. Ground forces press toward key industrial centers.
Naval vessels cut off essential imports. When war comes, economic
intelligence is called on to play a central role in support of the military
effort.
The importance of economic intelligence in wartime has grown
as the technology of war has enhanced capabilities to reach behind
the front lines. The airplane brought war to the factories, and
economic intelligence has had to supply the most profitable targets.
This has necessitated the compilation of target dossiers-files of
factories, refineries, and other installations, with the number of em-
ployees, types of products, and other pertinent information. Vary-
ing orders of priority have lhAA pvo> ediFer ? el a 12QO4 G6,fl4st CIA-ROP78
the other hand, other sources of information, e.g., aerial photographs
SUBJECT-MATTER SPECIALIZATION 61
obviously going to those whose destruction would cause the most
serious damage to the enemy's war effort. The factors entering into
the determination of priorities are several. Are substitutes available?
If so, destruction of the plant is not so damaging as it would otherwise
be. Are stockpiles available to be drawn on while a plant is being
repaired? Or will foreign sources of supply make up for bomb losses?
If so, again the plant is not so choice a target. What is the position
of the target in the industrial process? Destruction of a spark-plug
factory will not ordinarily affect motor-vehicle production so directly
as would destruction of the auto plant itself. What is the position
with respect to excess capacity? Where factories are not fully
utilized, increased production in one will readily make up for the
destruction of another.
When the wrong targets are bombed, the losses to the enemy may be
matched by compensating benefits. The British air bombardment
of Hamburg in the summer of 1943 laid waste a third of the city,
but the industrial plants escaped serious damage. The result was the
end of a serious labor shortage in the city as store clerks, garage at-
tendants, shopkeepers, and others turned from their bombed-out places
of employment to the war industries. War production in Hamburg
quickly returned to normal.
Apart from its direct support of military operations, economic
intelligence in wartime must make its contributions to recurrent
strategic estimates designed to inform the Nation's top officials how
well the enemy is doing, how long he may be expected to hold out,
and what negotiation appeals he may be most responsive to. The
subjects of economic intelligence here are pretty much the same as
those described in the preceding section-manpower, industrial pro-
duction, stockpile reserves, trade, finance, and gross national product.
The methods of collection and analysis remain much the sam , o1-
although published statistics may be less accessible in wartime. On
 Approved For Release 2004/06/24: CIA-
SUBJECT-MATTER SPECIALIZATION
Economic pressures on the enemy during war (embargo, preclusive
buying, and freezing of funds, for example) constitute a standard
supplement to military attacks. Economic warfare, in addition, is
also applied in situations short of formal war in order to reduce the
capabilities of unfriendly nations for aggression.
Economic intelligence has had a close historical relationship to
economic warfare. In Britain, the Ministry of Economic Warfare
served as the economic-intelligence agency at the beginning of World
War II. In the United States the newly created Board of Economic
Warfare was charged with responsibility for economic intelligence.
Experience has demonstrated the essentiality of accurate economic
DP78-03584R000100070001-7 SUBJICT?MATTER SPECIALIZATION 63
2. Blacklists. Merchants in neutral countries discovered to be
doing business with unfriendly countries may be black-listed, in which
case exports to them and other business dealings are banned. Eco-
nomic intelligence is responsible for the compilation of dossiers, which
give the names of merchant firms, their nominal officers, the actual
ownership, connections with other companies, records of suspect trans-
actions, and other pertinent information.
3. Export controls. In war an embargo is invariably imposed
on all shipments to the enemy. In other periods of international ten-
sion, export controls are imposed on selected items. Economic in-
telligence is called on to assist in the selection of products whose
export would be to the strategic advantage of unfriendly countries.
This may involve a determination of those countries' legitimate civil-
ian requirements, so that operating officials may impose quantitative
controls on exports of the selected items in excess of those require-
ments.
4. Freezing of funds. When dollar assets of a foreign country
are frozen, American banks are directed to permit no transactions in
accounts owned by that country or its nationals. Economic intelli-
gence may provide information to show that certain firms have a
beneficial interest in accounts apparently owned by others. Swiss
businessmen, operating in behalf of Germans, were the ostensible
owners of sizable American dollar accounts in World War II.
5. Sequestration of property. Enemy nations may seek to cloak
their ownership of properties, securities, and other assets abroad.
Again, economic intelligence may give information showing the true
ownership of these assets.
6. Preclusive buying. This operation involves the purchase of
items for the sole purpose of preventing their procurement by the
enemy. The decision to undertake this expensive operation depends
on a determination by economic intelligence that the product is in
short supply and is extremely vital for enemy war production. Pre-
clusive buying of wolfram and ball bearings limited the availability
of these products to the Germans in World War II.
intelligence in the choice and in the enforcement of economic-warfare ECONOMIC INTELLIGENCE IN THE COLD WAR
measures. The Soviet challenge to the West, Nikita Khrushchev avers, is not
1. Shipping controls. Navicerts, ship's warrants, and restrictions military. The superiority of the U.S.S.R. will be rather demon-
on the bunkering of vessels are intended to block cargoes (including strated, he claims, as it eventually surpasses the West: in economic
those leaving or destined for neutral ports) shipped to or by an un- achievement. The contest is in the economic arena; the world will
friendly country. Economic intelligence, often obtained from clan- be won by the system with the best production records. There is
destine sources, is necessary to determine whether cargoes are being sufficient plausibility in the argument to stimulate the keenest inter-
shipped on behalf of unfriendly interests. Navy vessels may be est of American olic makers in Communist economies quite apart
signaled to intercept ships on A i dIFcVft0t66 2)O41d6 2T4Y: CIA-RDP78-( M,4R9QA gpQar7iiiilitary hostilities.
economic intelligence.
 64 SUBJECT-MATTER SPECIALIZATION '
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The elements that enter into a purely economic challenge are much
the same elements considered in the section on war potential-man-
power, outputs of specific industries, trade, finance, gross national
product, and other measures of achievement. But the lines of
analysis may take new directions. Rates of growth assume unusual
importance, since the Communist challenge of the cold war is the
challenge to "catch up." Changes in the composition of Soviet gross
national product that reflect increases in the proportion of, say, resi-
dential construction, take on the aspect of challenges to the West in
the cold-war competition, whatever its significance for war-potential
analysis.
Economics in the cold war extends beyond the domestic scene,
and economic intelligence follows with particular interest Commu-
nist economic appeals to other countries. Trade agreements have
their implications for national-security interests; Peiping views its
trade pacts with Free-World countries as opening wedges in its drive
to win broader international recognition and eventual U.N. member-
ship. Aid agreements have their political aspect. Economic intelli-
gence and political intelligence working together will assess the effects
of Communist loans and grants on the bloc's prestige in the under-
developed areas of Asia and Africa.
The economic effects of American foreign policies are also the con-
cern of economic intelligence. Is American foreign aid to non-Com-
munist governments truly conducive to economic development? Or
is it doing nothing better than just sustaining low living standards?
Is it impelling a growth momentum that will make the recipient
country independent of American economic support in the foreseeable
future?
These are the questions that concern economic intelligence in its
many analyses in depth for national estimates and other studies and
in its day-to-day current-intelligence reporting. Its eye is, of course,
always cocked for the menace of hostilities. Economic indicators of
possible hostilities, like withdrawals of foreign funds, receive careful
scrutiny. War-potential analysis is far from neglected. But eco-
nomic intelligence is also alert to the economic stature of the bloc as
a challenge quite independent of the military threat. As this stature
looms larger, economic intelligence plays an increasingly vital role in
keeping the Nation's top officials informed of the underlying forces
that will decide the contest between East and West.
INTELLIGENCE IN THE SPACE AGE
National intelligence in the United States today represents the
coordinated views of the intelligence community. Despite the neces-
sity of production on an interdepartmental level, national intelligence
is being prepared with reasonable dispatch. Moreover the experi-
ence of the community with "flap" deadlines points to an intelligence
machinery which can react to crisis situations faster than ever before
in American history. The procedures for achieving consensus, never-
theless, do involve some minimum of personal discussions and group
verbalization of issues. The human touch is unavoidable and places
finite bounds on the speed with which national intelligence can be
prepared. Is this speed adequate to needs of an age which is obsessed
with the dangers of surprise attack by intercontinental weapons that
may be delivered within minutes of their launching?
The answer requires a clarification of the relation between early
warning and the intelligence process. The Watch Committee and
National Indications Center may apprise the President of signs sug-
gesting preparations to launch missiles against the United States.
But when the missiles have left their pads, the responsibility rests
on early-warning operations of the military services, with their
paraphernalia of DEW and SAGE, the complex of radars, computers,
and other electronic mechanisms for round-the-clock surveillance of
the air spaces. On the basis of early-warning data, air defense and
other decisions will be made in minutes or less. Indeed, decisions
like the directions to air-defense installations will be part of the
electronic data process itself. At this critical stage, the conventional
national-intelligence machinery is bypassed.
The more pertinent question for the space age, therefore, may relate
less to the speed of national-intelligence production than of early-
warning operations. Levels of scientific achievement in detection
devices are clearly of key importance here. Television, radar, infra-
red detection, surveillance by space satellites, and computations by
high-speed computers, rather than human observation and analysis,
will yield both the source data and final conclusions of early warning.
The critical importance of the air defense and other early-warning
systems acknowledged, national intelligence must still measure up to
its own responsibilities in the space age, when the accuracy of its esti-
65
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 66 INTELLIGENCE IN THE SPACE AGEApproved For Release 2004/06/24 : CIA-RDP78-03584R000100070001-7 INTELLIGENCE IN THE SPACE AGE 67
mates is more closely bound than ever with the issue of national national product, developed as a tool of economic analysis, has been
survival. In the unending quest for greater accuracy, the intelligence adapted in recent years to the needs of economic intelligence. Tabula-
community is bound to modify its techniques of collection and analysis tions of the interindustry and interregional flows of goods and services
by incorporating the latest technological developments. Progress have been more difficult to compile in the absence of necessary statis-
has been made in electronic data processing of information. Thou- tics. As such tabulations are developed in coming years for the United
sands of manhours will be saved in the intelligence community States and other economies, it may be possible to draw on them for
when machine translation becomes operational, to the point eventually parameters that can be applied to the study of Communist countries.
of small-size machines and audible translation. The use of com- The progress of academic research in the social and natural sciences
puters for gaming-measuring mathematically the optimum strat- will always contribute to the insights of national intelligence.
egies open to a foreign nation-is a promising development. The The need for these insights assures a continuing role for national
value of the conclusions will, of course, depend on the data with intelligence in a space age of increasing complexities and multiplying
which the intelligence community works. It can set up a model of a uncertainties. With the expanding number of unknowns, intelligence
real system and test the behavior of the system under a variety of errors are inevitable. The best to be hoped for is that errors will be
prescribed conditions, but the exercise is of intelligence value only embarrassing rather than disastrous. The design of the machinery,
insofar as the model approaches reality. process, and concepts of national intelligence described in the fore-
The areas of intelligence interest today-foreign policy, military going pages is to minimize the errors and, above all, to be right when
developments, personalities, economic conditions, scientific achieve- it is most important to be right,
ments, for example-seem broadly representative of the probable
subject content of intelligence in the space age. The relative weights
of each subject will, of course, vary with the demands of the day:
Military intelligence takes on additional importance in the event of
hot war; economic intelligence remains in high demand if economic
achievement continues to be vital to national strength in military
struggle and to national prestige in cold-war competition. Increasing
consideration of scientific intelligence in national estimates is impera-
tive in an age when technological breakthroughs by one side may
become the all-important factor affecting the balance of forces in the
world.
The combination of personal observation and technical methods of
intelligence collection and analysis will probably be increasingly
weighted in favor of technical methods. Earth satellites equipped
with TV cameras and other instruments, for example, should be able
to distinguish the clouds caused by nuclear explosion, should in fact
enlarge many times the amount of economic and military intelligence
that can be uncovered by present-day methods of aerial photography.
These developments, however, are hardly likely to, eliminate or even
diminish the importance of the human collector and analyst. Photos
of factories do not tell all that goes on under the roofs of the factories.
The course of political rivalries, the attitudes of peasants, the decisions
of party councils-these are areas of intelligence interest where tradi-
tional collection methods should continue to be profitable and the
human analyst essential.
Intelligence will continue to profit, of course, from the origination
of concepts and methods in othM,
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 68 SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READINGApproved For Release 2004/06/24: CIA-RDP78-03584R000100070001-7 SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING 69
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING ------ Senate, Committee on Armed Services. Investigation of the
Anderson, Dillon, "The President and National Security," Atlantic
Monthly, January 1956, pp. 42-46.
Ayer, Frederick, Jr., "The Intelligence Services," Vital Speeches of
the Day, February 1958, pp. 247-251.
Churchill, Winston S., "The Wizard War," ch. 4, Book 2, Their
Finest Hour, Vol. 2 of The Second World War, Boston : Houghton
Mifflin Co., 1949, pp. 381-397.
Dulles, Allen W., The Craft of Intelligence, New York : Harper &
Row, 1963.
Farago, Ladislas, War of Wits: The Anatomy of Espionage and
Intelligence, New York : Funk & Wagnalls, 1954.
George, Alexander L., Propaganda Analysis, Evanston, Ill.: Row,
Peterson & Company, 1959.
Hilsman, Roger, Strategic Intelligence and National Decisions, Glen-
coe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1956.
Jones, R. V. "Scientific Intelligence," Journal of the Royal United
Service Institution, August 1947, pp. 355, 369.
--------
_____ "Scientific Intelligence," Research (London), September
1956, pp. 347-352.
Kent, Sherman, Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy,
Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1949, 1951.
Knorr, Klaus, The War Potential of Nations, Princeton : Princeton
University Press, 1956.
Orlor, Alexander, Handbook of Intelligence and Guerrilla Warfare,
Ann Arbor, Mich.: The University of Michigan Press, 1963.
Pettee, George S., The Future of American Secret Intelligence, Wash-
ington : Infantry Journal Press, 1946.
Platt, Washington, Strategic Intelligence Production: Basic Prin-
ciples, New York : Praeger, 1957.
Ransom, Harry H., Central Intelligence and National Security, Cam-'
bridge : Harvard University Press, 1958.
------ Can American Democracy Survive
Doubleday, 1963.
Cold War?, New York :
Ruggles, Richard, and Henry Brodie, "An Empirical Approach to
Economic Intelligence in World War II," Journal of the American
Statistical Association, March 1947, pp. 72-91.
Wohlstetter, Roberta, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision, Stan-
ford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1962.
U.S. Congress, Report of the Joint Committee on the Investigation
of the Pearl Harbor Attack, Washington: U.S. Government Print-
ing Office, 1946.
Preparedness Program-Interim Report by Preparedness Investi-
gating Subcommittee (88th Cong., 1st sess.), Washington: U.S.
Government Printing Office, 1963.
------ Commission on Organization of the Executive
Government, Intelligence Activities: A Report to
Washington : U.S. Government Printing Office,
Branch of the
the Congress,
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 Approved For Release 2004/06/24: CIA-RDP78-03584R000100070001-7
INDEX
A
Academic research and intelligence, 22
Aerial photography, as source in Intelli-
gence, 20
Agency contributions to NIS, 43-44
Air Force intelligence, 7
Alertness to detail in intelligence, 23
Ambassador, U.S. to United Nations, 4
Analysis, intelligence, 21-22
financial, 58-59
Indications, 38-39
political, 46-47
scientific, 54
steps in, 24-25
war potential, 55-60
Analyst, intelligence
anonymity, 22
automation support, 21
biographic, 47-48
current intelligence, 35
economic, 58
functional, 24
geographic, 50
personal qualities of, 22-24
political, 45-47
Army intelligence, 7, 43
Articulateness, need in intelligence, 23
Asia, 56
Assembly of data, 24
Associated Press, 17
Atomic Energy Commission, 7, 50
Attaches, intelligence source, 19
B
Basic intelligence surveys, 27, 40-44
Berlin Task Force, 4
Biographic intelligence, 41, 47-48
Biological A.betracts, 52
Blacklisting, 63
Bulganin, Premier, 17, 46
Bureau of Intelligence and Research, 6
C
Central Committee, U.S.S.R., 46
Central Intelligence Agency, 2, 3, 4, 5-6,
11 14, 15 25 39, 43
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Central Intelligence Group, 3
Chairman, JCS, 4
Chemical A.bstract8, 52
China, Communist, 57, 58
China Pictorial, 19
Chinese offshore-island crises, 40
Civil defense training, significance of,
39
Clandestine intelligence, 6, 15, 20, 47
Clausewitz, 45
Cold war, economic intelligence in, 63-
65
Collection guidance, 15-16
Collection of intelligence, 1, 15, 16-20
Commerce, factor in intelligence, 58
Communications intercepts, as intelli-
gence source, 20
Communist biographical data, impor-
tance of, 47
Communists, 36, 46
Coordinator of Information, 2
Conservatism in intelligence evaluation,
24
Conversations, value in intelligence, 47
Counterinsurgency Task Force, 4
Country characteristics, importance in
basic intelligence, 41
Country encyclopedias, 6, 8
Credibility of scientific intelligence, 53
Cuba, 4, 6, 20
Current intelligence, 27, 34-40
and advance warning, 40
analyst, 35-37
failures of, 37-38
D
Daily publication as intelligence media,
34-35
Data quantification, 45
Deception, 25
Defense, Department of, 3, 6-7
Defense Intelligence Agency, 6-7
Deputy Director of Central Intelligence,
5
DEW, 65
Dictionary of U.S. Military Terms for
Joint Usage, 51
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 74 INDEX Approved For Release 2004/06/24: CIA-FkDP78-03584R000100070001-7 INDEX 75
0
Operation Mincemeat, 25
Oral briefing, use of, 34
P
Pasternak, Boris, 14
Peace handbooks, 42
Peace symptoms, 38
Pearl Harbor, 1, 2, 19, 22, 26, 37-38
Periodic publications, use of, 35
Personnel, scientific intelligence, 53-54
Photo reconnaissance, 52
Photography in intelligence, 19-20
Policy Planning Council, CIA liaison
with, 11
Policymaking and intelligence, iii, 3, 9-
11
Political intelligence, 45-47
Political science, 45
Pontecorvo, Bruno, 20, 53
Popular attitudes, 46
Population statistics, and war poten-
tial, 56
Posture, military, 48
Preclusive buying, 63
Presentation of intelligence, 25
President, U.S.,1, 2, 3, 4
Priorities, target destruction, 61
Production statistics, use in intelli-
gence,57
Prognostication in intelligence, 30-32
Secretary of Defense, 3, 7
Secretary of Interior, 4
Secretary of State, 3
Secretary of the Treasury, 4
Security classification in information
processing, 21
Sequestration of property in economic
warfare, 63
Shipping controls for economic warfare,
62
Sino-Soviet bloc, 5
Sinologues, 23
Sociology, 45
Soviet Union, 2, 17, 58
Space age, intelligence in, 65-67
Speed in intelligence preparation, 65
Stalin, Joseph, 87
Special Assistant to the President for
National Security Affairs, 4
Spot requirements in intelligence, 16
Standing committees, USIB, 8-9
Standing requirements in intelligence,
16
State, Department of, 2, 3, 5, 28
Strategic estimates, 6, 27
defining the problem, 28-30
intentions and capabilities, 30-32
production procedures, 32-34
strategic stature, 80
Strategic Services, Office of, iii, 2
Study and interpretation, 25
Subject-matter specialization, 45-64
(see also Intelligence)
Suez, 40
U
U.S. Intelligence Board, 5-8, 9,33
United Press International, 17
War symptoms, 38
Warning systems, importance to intel-
ligence, 65
Wartime economic intelligence, 60-62
Watch Committee, 8, 39-40, 65
World War II, iii, 1-3, 18, 43, 55, 57, 60-
62
Written memorandum, use in intelli-
gence, 34
Radar, 52
Radford, Admiral, 10
Radio monitoring, 6, 18
Rate of economic growth, and war
potential, 60
Raw intelligence, 21, 34
Referativnyi Zhurnal, 52
Requirements, 13-16
Reuters, 17
Royal Air Force, 20, 52
Rundstedt Raid, 37
S
SAGE, 65
Saudi Arabia, 59
Scientific attaches, 19
Scientific intelligence, 51-54
Scientific Intelligence Committee, 9
Secretary of Commerce, 4
V
Vice-President, U.S., 3
Vietminh, 57
Voice of America, 15
w
War Department, 1
War potential, analysis of, 55-60
War readiness, role of Watch Commit-
tee, 39-40
Taiwan, 56
Tarawa, 40, 43
Target dossiers, 60
Task force, use by President Kennedy,
4
Technical intelligence, 51, 66
Technology, role in intelligence, iii, 54
Terms of reference for NIE, 29
Topography, 50
Trade and war potential, 57-58
Transportation and war potential, 41,
57
Travellers, U.S., as intelligence source,
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Ap