THE CONTENT OF INTELLIGENCE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 55
• Document Creation Date: December 14, 2016
• Document Release Date: July 2, 2003
• Sequence Number: 71
• Content Type: REPORT

Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
Chapter 1
INTELLIGENCE IS KNOWLEDGE
This paper deals with "high-level foreign positive intelligence;" short
for the knowledge our state must possess of other states to assure itself
that its cause will not suffer nor its undertakings fail from sheer ig-
norance. Upon this knowledge we base our high-level national policy to-
ward the states of the world.
Notice all knowledge of our domestic scene is left out (the sort which
lies behind the police function). Foreign positive intelligence is truly "for-
eign" in purpose, scope, and substance. The word "positive" denotes that
this intelligence is neither counter-intelligence nor counter-espionage de-
signed to uncover domestically-produced traitors or imported foreign agents.
The words "high-level" exclude operational, tactical, and combat intelli-
gence.
How describe this kind of knowledge?
I have adopted a functional approach. It starts from the premise
that our state, in order to survive in a world of competing states, must have
two kinds or areas of policy. The one is its own self-initiated, positive,
outgoing policy, undertaken in the interests of a better and more secure world
order and a higher degree of national prosperity. The other is its defensive-
protective policy necessarily undertaken to oppose those policies of other
states which are inimical to our national aspirations, better called our policy
for national security.
Consider our positive policy first. To be effective, its framers,
planners, and implementers must be able to select the proper instrument
of persuasion from a long list of possibles, i.e., should one select a reso-
lution in the UN? diplomacy? political and economic inducement? threat?
force? or some combination of these instruments?
Now neither this selection nor its subsequent application can be made
without reference to the other fellow, the other country. Hence, before policy
leaders take any action they would be well advised to know:
how the other country is going to receive the selected policy and
what it is prepared to use to counter it;
what the other country lacks in the way of countering force, i.e., its
specific vulnerabilities;
ApprOved-Fbr Release 2003/07/10 ?;-CIA-RDP_80R0,1731R0031001340071-0
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
what it is doing to array its protective force;
and
what it is doing, or indeed can do, to mend its specific vulnerabili-
ties.
It follows that our policy leaders must know many things about other
countries as objective entities;
For example:
a. The physiques of these countries; their natural topography and
environment and the structures which man has added (his cities,
his agricultural and industrial enterprises, his transportation
facilities, and so on);
b. their people - how many; how they are settled; how occupied;
c. the status of the arts, sciences, and technologies of these people
(and I would include in this the status of their armed forces);
d. the character of their political systems, their economies, their
social groupings, their codes of morality, and the dynamic in-
terrelations which prevail among all these.
Now consider, secondly, our defensive-protective policy - that of
national security. Here our policy leaders must make constant provision
for the positive aggressive policies of other states. Some of these policies
we will regard as hostile to our interest. Some we must block; some, we
may meet half way. To frame and operate our policy we must know the
nature and weight of the instrumentalities which these other countries can
place behind their own policies, and we must know the direction those policies
are likely to take. We must know this so that we will not be taken by sur-
prise; so that we will be in defensive or offensive readiness when the policy
is launched. When such things are known, you know much about the other
country's stratetic stature and something of its probable intentions.
It can be seen from the foregoing that the first class of information
required is essentially descriptive and reportorial; descriptive of relatively
changeless things like terrain, hydrography, and climate; descriptive of
changeable things like population; of more transient phenomena such as
governmental or economic structures.
The second class of information deals with the future, its possibilities
and probabilities: how another country may shape its internal forces to
service its foreign policy or strategy; how it may try to use these strengths
against us; when, where, and with what effectiveness. This is speculative
and evaluative.
- 2 -
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
Now we perceive the statics, the dynamics, and the potentials of other
countries; perceive the established things, the presently going-on things,
and probable things of the future. Taken together these make up the sub-
ject matter of high-level foreign positive intelligence, or as I shall call it
henceforth - strategic intelligence.
In the following pages Iwill set forth the substantive content of stra-
tegic intelligence in its three basic forms: the basic descriptive element,
the current reportorial element, and the speculative-evaluative element.
- 3 -
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
Chapter 2
SUBSTANTIVE CONTENT: THE BASIC
DESCRIPTIVE ELEMENT
The descriptive element of strategic intelligence is what gives mean-
ing to day by day change and the groundwork without which speculation into
the future is meaningless.
In the recent war the belligerents compiled encyclopedias on coun-
tries they fought, planned to occupy, or swing into their orbits. The basic
aim was to provide the strategic planner with enough knowledge of a country
to make calculations on its attributes as a zone of combat. Actually they
served a hundred uses, by no means all of which were solely military. A
survey of the table of contents of a typical German book will indicate its
scope:
I. General Background. Location. Frontiers. Area. History. Gov-
ernmental and Administrative Structure.
II. Character of the Country. Surface Forms. Soils. Ground Cover.
Climate. Water Supply.
III. People. Nationalities, language attitudes. Population distribu-
tion. Settlement. Health. Structure of society.
IV. Economic. Agriculture. Industry. Trade and Commerce. Mining.
Fisheries,
V. Transportation. Railroads. Roads. Ports. Airfields. Inland
Waterways.
VI. Military Geography. (Detailed regional breakdown).
VII. Military Establishment in Being. Army: Order of Battle, Fixed
Defenses, Military Installations, Supply. Navy: Order of Battle,
The Fleet, Naval Shore Installations, Naval Air, Supply. Air:
Order of Battle, Military Aircraft, Air Installations (see List of
Airdromes, etc., Special Appendix), Lighter than air, Supply.
VIII. Special Appendixes. Biographical data on key figures of the gov-
ernment. Local geographical terminology. Descriptions of rivers,
lakes, canals. List and specifications of electric power plants.
Description of roads. List of airdromes and most important land-
ing grounds. List of main telephone and telegraph lines. Money,
weight, and measures. Beaches (as for amphibious military oper-
ations).
- 4 -
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
A table of contents is the hare bones; it does not reveal the character
and bulk of the surrounding tissue. The knowledge which lies behind a simple
one-word entrie is encyclopedic.
Take "transportation" and consider its details. The road section
begins with a map; then follows a kilometer-by-kilometer log of the main
routes, with observations on surface, width, grades, curves, fills, cuts, and
bridges; then follows an overall appreciation of the route under survey. These
seemingly endless data have been assembled to permit the transportation
man to make the calculation: What speed may the largest and heaviest
vehicle maintain from A to B and how many such vehicles may pass at that
speed before the road (and in consequence the vehicles) will start disinte-
grating?
Consider another category, "ports". Here there is: area of pro-
tected water, depth (at low water ordinary spring tides), dockage and depth
at dockside, cranes, transportation for clearing docks and harbor area,
warehousing and storage, harbor craft, local stevedoring situation, bunker-
age, watering, and repair facilities. All these and many more things - all
of them in considerable detail - you must know before you can plan effective
use of the port. Most of these things you can find out; some are not learned
because no one asked the right question.
For example, the transportation officer responsible for debarking
our men and equipment in the port of Algiers was well supplied with the
most detailed knowledge, but still intelligence failed him. It did not tell that
virtually every square yard of dock space was jam-packed with enormous
barrels of wine and equally large and unhandy bales of straw.
One on the officer's duties was to unload and move a number of fighter
aircraft to nearby Maison Blanche airdrome in the shortest time. If the
fully assembled planes could be off-loaded and wheeled down the docks, clear
the harbor area, and down the highway, he would have loaded them on ship-
deck ready to fly. But he was not sure of the width of the streets along his
itineraries and so he removed the wings. If intelligence had anticipated such
a requirement, the officer might have saved some time. At least one route
proved amply wide for the job.
Now, to close this most condensed presentation, consider a final
item?the operational airfield. First it must be analyzed from the point of
view of how well it might serve the purposes of a potential enemy. What is
its exact location and its location relative to other airfields and supply
centers? What is its elevation above sea level? What supply facilities does
it enjoy? Its place in the transport and communications net, in the electric
power grid; the character of its shops and hangars, barracks; its fuel, lubri-
cant and munitions storage facilities? What planes can it accommodate and
how many (length and type of runways, taxiways, revetments, hard-stands,
dispersal areas)? What hazards to air navigation does it present? What
protecting AA positions and smoke installations does it have?
- 5 -
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
This same field might be analyzed as to its suceptibility to attack:
what are its identifying characteristics from the air? what camouflage is
used or may be anticipated? how vulnerable and how recuperable are its
installations if subjected to bombardment?
Again the field might be analyzed from the point of view of use if
captured. Can the machine shope, if taken unscathed, be used for one's own
plans? Can the revetments and hard-stands? If not, how much must they
be modified, etc.?
The little set forth above could be blown-up to many pages as other
knowledge requirements were elaborated. Let it suffice, however, to illus-
trate the scope, depth, and complexity of knowledge merely to serve one as-
pect of war making. I now indicate the substantive character of three other
aspects of wartime intelligence, that of strategic air bombardment, of polit-
and economic warfare, and of military government.
Strategic Bombardment
The crux of strategic bombardment intelligence is target selection.
Assuming urgency, you must select those sectors of the enemy's war ma-
chine whose destruction will most significantly, rapidly, and permanently
weaken his striking power. Since there may be several such sectors, and
since they all cannot be destroyed in a single raid (even with the A-bomb)
you must not only identify such targets, but you must arrange them in order
of importance.
These most vulnerable areas cannotbe picked out from less vulner-
able areas until a great deal is known about the enemy's entire way of life
and his entire way of making war.
Before the planes went off on their first mission of systematic de-
struction, the planners for the bombardment of Germany had to know a very
great deal about the airframe, aircraft-engine and aircraft-component pro-
duction, the production of ball bearings, of synthetic rubber, and of oil. More-
over, before they decided that these sectors were the ones whose destruc-
tion would give them the most significant, rapid and permanent weakening of
German war-making capacity they had to know a very great deal about other
sectors.
Still more descriptive knowledge was required to carry out the attack.
Our bombers were to bomb structures that the enemy was trying hard to con-
ceal from ken, camera, and eyesight. Their pinpoint location, susceptibility
to high explosive and incendiary, the ease with which they could be repaired,
was more descriptive knowledge for which strategic intelligence and oper-
ational intelligence were responsible.
Political and Economic Warfare
A great deal of war, i.e., political and economic warfare, is un-
orthodox. It is fought with unconventional weapons. In these warfares you
- 6 -
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
try to do two things: weaken the enemy's will and capacity to resist, and
strengthen your own and your friends' will and capacity to win. In their
politer guises both of these warf ares are employed as instrumentalities of
the grand strategy of peace; and both have their own intelligence require-
ments in war and peace.
These two warfares encompass a wide range of possible activities
directed at a wide range of objectives. On the political side we may start
with international alliances of friendships to be strengthened or strained
and international animosities to be smoothed over or aggravated.
There is a wide range of potential targets: first of all the armed
forces of the opponent and their morale. Then there are the political dis-
sidents, maladjusted social groups, the under-privileged, self-conscious
minorities, labor leaders, gold-star mothers, pacifists, angry housewives,
emergent messiahs, gullible or corruptible? officers of government, and a
hundred other categories of the misinformed, displeased, annoyed, unsatis-
fied, and outraged elements of the population.
The instrumentalities which total war suggests in the exploitation of
these targets are numerous and may be as thoroughly unlovely as shooting
war itself. Begin at the gentle end, truth itself - truth purveyed openly by
radio of known origin, by newspapers in miniature form (delivered by air-
craft). Then comes the distorted truth which we call open propaganda, and
with which we associate the names of Lord Haw Haw, Axis Sally, Tokyo Rose,
and the Japanese artist who designed fulsome five-color depictions of what
the "Yanks" were doing to the wives of Australian soldiers. Next, is what
is termed black propaganda, that which purports to come from dissident
elements within the enemy's own population, but which is really carried on
in great secrecy from the outside. Sometimes black propaganda is done by
radio, sometimes by leaflet, fake newspaper, forged letter, or by any means
occurring to perverse ingenuity.
Then there are other instruments which can be employed only by
penetrating enemy lines. This group leads off with the rumor invented and
passed along by word of mouth, it includes subornation of perjury, intimi-
dation, subversion, bribery, blackmail, sabotage in all its aspects, kidnaping,
booby trapping, assassination, ambush, the franc tireur, and the underground
army. It includes the clandestine delivery of the tools of the calling: the
undercover personnel, the printing press and radio set, the poison, the ex-
plosives, the incendiary substances, and the small arms and supplies for the
thugs, guerrillas, and para-military formations.
The instrumentalities of economic warfare are simon-pure by com-
parison. In one idiom they consist of the carrot and the stick, or in Pro-
fessor Viner's inversion, the Big Stick and the Sugar Stick. Translated into
technical idiom they involve: blockade, preclusive purchase, freezing of
funds, boycott, embargo, and the black list on the one hand, and subsidies,
loans, bilateral trade, barter, and purchasing agreements on the other.
- 7 -
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
Before calculations of risk, effort, and effectiveness can be made,
all phases of one's enemies' polity, society, and economy must be understood,
their vulnerabilities appraised, and methods of pressure selected. A political
warfare as deadly as the Germans used in Europe and as the Japanese used
in the Co-Prosperity Sphere of Greater East Asia was based upon a large
amount of accurate descriptive knowledge.
Military Government
The war over, our responsibilities continued in the civil activities
of the military government of occupied territory. The Army-Navy Manual
of Military Government and Civil Affairs which "states the principles which
serve as a general guide. . . (to the exercise of) military government and
control of civil affairs in territory occupied by forces of the United States"
lists the occupant's responsibilities in twenty-three named and one miscel-
laneous category.
The degree of the occupant's responsibility is circumscribed by the
nature of his mission, i.e., he will try to run the country with an eye merely
to the prevention of those evidences of dissatisfaction: "disease and unrest,"
as the formula goes. Even so the responsibilities are large; so large that
they cannot be undertaken without a very careful evaluation of objectives,
formulation of policy, and a great deal of highly detailed planning. Here is
another legitimate demand upon the descriptive element of intelligence: the
nature of the society, polity, and economy, i.e., new encyclopedias. This
time they cover new aspects of familiar ground. They deal with government
not as something to be subverted by political warfare, nor with physical plant
as something to be bombed. They must deal with government and industry
as things which the occupant must conserve for his own use. Not the data
necessary to blow up a railroad or run one's own military trains over it;
but such things as its indigenous management and how it may be put back on
its feet.
In the foregoing pages I touch upon certain omnibus studies which
serve the strategic requirements of war and shade off into post-war. Two
more kinds of encyclopedia are typical of peacemaking and peace itself.
The first can be called the peace handbook, the second the general purpose
survey.
At the end of World War I, the British delegation came to Paris
equipped with any number of little blue books. Sponsored by the Foreign
Office and used by the delegates, they were what might be called a peace-
maker's Baedeker. In short, terse paragraphs, and appendixes containing
the most important documents of state, treaties, etc., they aimed to supply
the minimal needs of officials charged with drafting the treaties. A brief of
the contents of the two volumes on Austria-Hungary will indicate the general
substance of the work.
The study is first broken down according to seven regional com-
ponents of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire: 1. Austria-Hungary.
- 8 -
- Approved For -Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
II
Approved For Release 2003/07/10: CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
2. Bohemia and Moravia. 3. Slovakia. 4. Austrian Silesia. 5. Bukovina.
Transylvania and the Banat. 7. Hungarian Ruthenia. Within each of the
regional sections there is a breakdown by subject. The section on Bohemia
and Moravia ran to 109 standard-size pages. No one who read them could
have remained ignorant of the main ethnic and economic problems which
beset the men responsible for drawing the western frontiers of the new
Czechoslovakia, and one who read them would acquit himself better at the
peace table.
There were many other handbooks in the series. The book on France
has along and detailed section on Alsace-Lorraine; the one on Germany has
sections on Silesia, the Kiel Canal and Heliogoland, and the Colonies; the one
on Turkey, an excellent treatment of the Straits question; and there is a
short study on the Yugoslav Movement.
Could there be such a thing as a general-purpose handbook of peace-
time? Yes. It would be similar to some of the encyclopedias already de-
scribed.
The foregoing forms of the basic descriptive element are broadest
in one dimension and likely to be shallower in the other. Two other forms
are worthy of mention: they are the narrow and deep study, and "spot infor-
mation." Since many of the examples of the past pages were taken from a
war context, these next will be taken from that of peacetime.
The Narrow-Deep Study
The national peacetime objectives of this country are numerous and
the grand strategy to attain them a many-faceted affair. Everywhere one
looks in the world a national objective is on the block. In the New York Times
for a day taken at random there were between fifty and sixty news items of
concern to officials of our federal government. The items touched fourteen
sovereign states, three dependent areas, five areas under U. S. Occupation
and five subjects of importance all the way across the UN board.
Under Secretary of State Clayton, appeared, according to one of these
news items, before the House Foreign Relations Committee to explain and
defend a request for 350 million dollars for continuing UNRRA functions.
One of the beneficiaries would be China. Mr. Clayton emphasized that the
distribution of relief would be rigidly supervised and controlled by the United
States. It was in our power to do something in defense of our objectives and
interests in China. What kinds of knowledge should Mr. Clayton have had?
First and foremost he should know how many people there were in
China and how many of them were starving. Then he would have his own
notion of the size of the calamity. Were 2 per cent starving or 15 percent?
Next he shouldknow if the starvation of x per cent of the Chinese was some-
thing, that happened every year, or if it was something happening because of
special post-war conditions. He would wish to know this to decide the basic
question - is there any use trying to feed the Chinese? For if Chinese were
- 9 -
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
chronically unable to produce enough food or amass sufficient foreign ex-
change to import foreign food, was there any point in taking China on as a
permanent charge? If this were true, and a healthy, unified and democratic
China one of our national objectives, should we not perhaps go about it in
another way?
But assuming that Mr. Clayton knew that famine was not chronic, what
other things should he know? He should know how much food of what kinds
would be necessary; how food was normally distributed in China and if these
distribution systems were partially to blame for the famine. If they were,
he should know how their faults could be overcome and whether or not that
task in itself would be too large to underwrite. He should also know what
kinds of food were acceptable to the Chinese. E'en seriously undernourished
people are astonishingly choosey about the staples of their diet, as was proved
after the last war. He should know - assuming the Chinese insisted upon
rice - if the world rice market was able to deliver in exchange for dollars.
He should know, as far as possible, what internal and international conse-
quences might follow a successful operation.
One can imagine Mr. Clayton armed with a study which answered, all
these questions and many more. It would require much work, for such know-
ledge will not be lying around in neat bundles.
Spot Intelligence
These is a category of strategic intelligence that the trade calls "spot
intelligence," or "Information Please," or "Ask Mr. Foster." What it
supplies is usually in answer to some innocent-sounding question like: What
side of the road do cars run on in Petsamo? What is the best map of southern
Arabia? What is the depth of water (LWOST) alongside the jetee Trans-
versale of Casablanca? What are the characteristics of domestic electi?ical
current in Sidney? How much copper came out of the Bor mines in 1937?
How good is the water supply in Hong Kong? When did Lombardo-Toledano
last go to Venezuela? What are the administrative units of the USSR?
With this sort of question, there are others answerable only by maps,
diagrams or plans and photographs. The descriptive element must stock
such items or know where to find them. Distasteful as "spot intelligence"
is to strategic intelligence, it is one of the items which must be kept in stock.
In conclusion, it can be seen that in order for us "to assure our-
selves that our cause will not suffer nor our policies fail because they are
ill-informed" our intelligence organizations must be prepared to describe
a large number of phenomena. They must be prepared for more than this
however. Description involves stopping the clock and the clock cannot be
stopped. It goes on; and descriptions of yesterday's things are out of date
tomorrow. To remedy this defect, a second element of intelligence is essen-
tial. This is the current reportorial element which aims at keeping certain
descriptions up to date.
- 10 -
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
Approved For Release 2003/07/10: CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
Chapter 3
SUBSTANTNE CONTENT: THE CURRENT REPORTORIAL ELEMENT
The phenomena of life which appear in encyclopedias can be regarded
as frozen in mid-passage. The obvious fact, however, is that practically
nothing stands completely still, and that the most important characteristic
of existence is change. The requirements of grand strategy must everlast-
ingly take into account this fact of change. Keeping track of change is the
function of "current reporting."
It is worth making the point that change moves through many-way
streets, and that there are many kinds of change. For example, it is as im-
portant to know that the military establishment of a potential enemy is being
demobilized as it is to know that it is being built up or merely reoriented
around a new weapon or a tactical concept. It is as important to know when
the level of prosperity in a friendly country is rising as it is to know that it
is going on the rocks; as important to know the emergence of a friendly gov-
ernment in a hitherto hostile state as it is to know the downfall of a hither-
to friendly government. In fact the direction of change is a matter of high-
est significance.
If the current reportorial phase of intelligence is to do the job; if an
important part of intelligence is the observation of day-by-day developments
what phenomena should be put under "surveillance"?
The following categories, although rather arbitrary, are usual:
1. Personalities. The basic-descriptive element will have chron-
icled in its biographical encyclopedias and files the names of people who were
important. The reportorial element must keep track of the present goings,
comings and liaisons of these people. More important, it must pry beneath
the surface to discover the emergent figures of tomorrow. Who knows the
leader of the French Communist Party in 1960? The head of the Soviet Union
in 1955? Who will be the chief of staff of the Yugoslav air force? The
leaders of a divided Palestine? Who will be president of Lever Brothers or
United Chemical? The director of the Pavlov Institute and leader of the
Latin American Confederation of Labor? These men are alive at this mo-
ment. Where are they? What are they doing? What sort of people are they?
The future is by no means free to nominate such officials by random
choice. The chances are that the future must select from a fairly narrow
slate of candidates. At this moment they are the comers in business, the
military, the trade union movement; in politics, the arts (let us not forget
Paderewski), education, and the conspiratorial underground). The job is to
find these emergent leaders and watch their progress so that as revolutions
brew and deaths approach, the human replacements may be known.
Approved For Release 2003/07/10: CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
An intelligence operation to do its job on men must know their char-
acter and ambitions, their opinions, their weaknesses, the influences which
they can exert, and the influences before which they are frail. It must know
their friends and relatives, and the political, economic, and social milieu in
which they move. Only by knowing such matters can the dimensions of leader-
ship be glimpsed and can one guess at the change toward which the new leader
will strive when he comes to power.
2. Geographic. There are already descriptions of the physiques of
other countries. Current reporting must continuously improve and extend
these descriptions. Not merely must it chronicle the changes that man is
making, but also it should be abreast of the widening horizons of geophysical
knowledge. What can be observed in such matters as erosion rates, the
silting of rivers and harbors, weather, beaches, water power sites and
supplies of drinking water. What is being discovered in the fields of hydro-
graphy, geodesy, and geology.
3. Military. The armed force-in-being, as outlined in the preceding
chapter, has been carefully described as of a certain date. The reportorial
element has the task of keeping track of developments within the establish-
ment. It must know of new legislation which will set the size and quality of
the force. It must keep track of recruitment policies and their success and
failure; changes in training enlisted men and officers. It must know devel-
opments in the training of troops, the social strata from which the corps of
officers is recruited, the economic status of men and officers. No matter
what the difficulties, it must try to keep track of those changes which the
other country properly regards as its own military secrets: such things as
new fighting ships, new types of aircraft, new weapons of horrendous sorts,
new devices for improving fighting efficiency, changes in morale and in the
loyalty of the force in its regional, political, religious, and nationalistic
orientation.
4. Economic. The handbooks have stopped the economic machipe at
a certain point in time and described it. The reportorial element ha's the
task of keeping track of current developments. It must note the emergence
of new economic doctrines and theories - for purposes of example I cite a
range which lies between Keynesian theory, down through Ham and Eggs, to
the Technocrats. It must keep careful track of changes in the housekeeping
side of the armed forces, administrative reorganizations, and the like, and
it must note changes in government economic policy-policy affecting industry,
the organization of business, agriculture, banking and finance, and foreign
trade. It must know the changes which are occuring in the size and distri-
bution of national wealth and income, of changes in the standard of living,
wages, and employment. It must watch for new crops and the developments
of new methods of agriculture, changes in farm machinery, land use, ferti-
lizers, reclamation projects, and so on. It must follow the discovery of new
industrial processes, the emergence of new industries, and the sinking of
new mines; the development of new utilities and the extensions of those al-
ready established. It must follow changes in the techniques of distribution,
- 12. -
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
new transport routes and changes in the inventory of vehicles (autos and
trucks, locomotives and cars, transport aircraft, canal boats, and merchant
shipping). Perhaps most important in the age of atomic fission, it must note
discoveries in new natural resources, notably the discovery of high-grade
uranium deposits.
5. Political. The reportorial element must pay strictest attention
to basic constitutional change and events such as those which have occurred
in the past in France and Italy. It must observe how political power blocs
are lining up on significant issues, and how they may be splitting into factions,
disintegrating into other groups, or joining them en bloc. It must watch
changes in the political doctrines of these groups; changes in relationship
among the central, regional and local political authorities, and the major
shifts in policy toward domestic, foreign, colonial, and imperial problems.
It must follow new legislation which will make political expression either
more free or less free. It must watch national and local election results for
the emergent political figures. It must follow new pressure groups and other
organizations capable of political influence from outside of party framework.
It must know of new governmental and administrative techniques.
6. Social. Perhaps the most important single social phenomenon that.
the reporting element must watch is population. It must watch: its growth
or decline, and its rates of growth and decline; changes in its age groups,
its occupational groups, and consumer groups. It must watch for changes
in distribution between city and country, and between regions. It must take
note of migrations within and emigration from the country, and until time
and permanent residence envelops them, it must have an eagle eye on dis-
placed persons. There will also be changes in the social structure. What
groups are emerging to social and economic eminence, what groups or
classes of groups are sinking? What are the developments within the labor
force? Its changes in size and structure, and above all how it is organiz-
ing, and under what leadership, in its struggle with management? What is .
happening to church membership; who is joining clubs and what kind of clubs;
who is founding new lodges, secret societies, and cooperatives?
Intelligence, must also know a large number of other things about
the society, such as changes in the way of living, development of new housing,
changes in the home economy and family diversions. It must be aware of
changes in taste, manners, and fashions. It must follow the program of
educational institutions of all levels, and worry almost as much about the
changing content of the elementary history textbooks as it must about changes
in the curricula of the highest graduate and professional schools. It must
concern itself with government policy toward education at all levels and with
changes in the relationship between government and non-governmental organ-
izations, such as the churches, the trade unions, the clubs and societies.
It must know of the changing relationship among minority groups within
cultural, social, and economic groups; and it must watch for the changes in
the statutory and judge-made law, which in turn change the course of human
behavior throughout the population pyramid.
- 13 -
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
7. Moral. Within the wide range of morals the reportorial element
must heed changes in the basic doctrines of life: the waxing or waning of
religion, of patriotism and nationalism, of belief and confidence in the ruling
order and the national myths. It must know of change in popular attitudes
toward the purge of undesirables, the nationalization of private property,
party government, civil marriage, lay education, rights of minorities, uni-
versal military training, to hit a few of the high spots.
8. Scientific-Technological. Since much of the world-to-be will be
the product of science and technology, the reportorial element must watch
these with sharpness. It must know of significant developments in mathe-
matics, physics, chemistry, zoology, geography, oceanography, climatology
and astronomy. It must know what is happening in the realm of the social
sciences. What are the students of sociology, economics, psychology, law,
and history, coming up with? What new ideas are they getting that will some
day have the influence of the discoveries of Locke, Rousseau, Darwin, Pavlov,
Freud, or Haushofer? What is happening in the medical schools and the
clinics; what are the new diagnoses, the new remedies, the new treatments?
What is going on in the realm of communications: the telephone, the tele-
graph, the submarine cable, and above all, radio? What is happening in the
world of cartography? What new areas and phenomena are being charted on
the map? What new purposes are old theories being applied to, what new
uses for old materials? How are any or all of these being applied to arma-
ments?
The preceding paragraphs cover a staggeringly large area of human
activities. I have written them to portray the dimensions of subject matter
and not as an exhortation to the reportorial force to keep every square inch
of it under active and systematic observation. It should be thought of as de-
scribing most of the real and many of the potential responsibilities of the
reporting function. The question which at once arises is what fragments of
the enormous whole are actually to be put and kept under scrutiny. The only
answer is no answer - namely: only such fragments as are positively ger-
mane to national problems which are now up or appear to be coming.
The reporting element constantly adds freshness to the content of
the basic descriptive element. It does more than this, for in keeping static
knowledge up-to-date it maintains a bridge between the descriptive and what
I have called the speculative-evaluative elements - a bridge between the
past and the future.
- 14 -
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0 .
Chapter 4
SUBSTANTIVE CONTENT: THE SPECULATIVE-EVALUATIVE
ELEMENT
To introduce this most important and complicated element of strategic
intelligence a few obvious facts are worth restatement.
Our world is very largely composed of separate sovereign states, and
the contact of the United States with it ranges from the most pacific to the
most belligerent. By many and diverse means we try to promote a better
world order. We undertake agreements reached in the UN; bilateral and
multilateral agreements with other states and groups of states; we exert
pressures in behalf of world well-being and our own security; and we go to
war. In carrying out this enormously complicated business we mustbe fore-
sighted. We should be prepared and well girded for the future; we must not
be caught off balance by the unexpected.
The problem of this chapter is the analysis of what the United States
must know in order to be foresighted. This knowledge is far more specula-
tive than that discussed in the last two chapters. Obtaining it puts a high
premium on the seeker's power of evaluation and reasoned extrapolation.
That is why I have called it the speculative-evaluative element of strategic
intelligence.
What knowledte should the U. S. have about the future of other states
in order to have the requisite foresight?
Create a hypothetical state, Great Frusina.
About Great Frusina the United States should know two things:
(1) What is her strateNc stature, (2) what are her specific vulnerabilities
which qualify that strategic stature? lithe United States can answer these
two questions, it will be in a fair way to answer the next: What courses of
action will Great Frusina be likely (a) to initiate herself, and (b) to take up
in response to courses of action initiated elsewhere. The problem here is
to put the finger on the kind of knowledge and the method we must employ
before we can produce the answers. Such identification cannot proceed until
at least two terms of recent coinage (strategic stature and specific vulnera-
bility) are given more precision and definition.
Strategic Stature
By stratet ic stature is meant the influence Great Frusina can exert
in an international situation in which the United States has a grand strategic
interest. This statement is broad by intention. By internationa/ situat ion I
mean any of the differences of opinion, misunderstandings, disputes, or dis-
locations among states which may have a bearing on world security and which
therefore may affect Great Frusina's security and material welfare. Given
the oneness of the contemporary world, there will be little unrelated to that
- 15 -
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
security and welfare, and consequently many areas in which Great Frusina
will wish to exert her influence. By influence I mean all those instrumen-
talities that states employ in peacetime or wartime?influence through moral
suasion, propaganda, political and economic threats, inducements, and actual
penalties; through acts of reprisal (in the non-technical sense); threats of
hostility, and war itself. Strategic stature is thus the sum total of sugar
sticks and big sticks which Great Frusina possesses, to which must be added
her will to use them and her adeptness in applying them.
To get at strategic stature there are a number of things you must
know. The first is the probable "Objective situation" within which Great
Frusina may be expected to exert influence or throw weight. Ever-present
in the objective situation are the elements of geographical location and time.
There are other elements. To cite a few-for purposes of illustration-is to
list such intangibles as the degree of gravity involved; the nation's popular
assessment of that gravity; the degree of its acceptance of the sacrifices it
must make; the power line-up, that is, on what friends and on how much
support can Great Frusina count; and whatfriendly support can its opponents
muster.
The elements hinted at above, i.e., the geographical position of the
contestants, the time factor, or the power line-up often, in themselves, deter-
mine the eventual outcome of a dispute in interest. The crisis passes. But
many times these elements do not rule. Then there are two more things you
must know before you can gauge Great Frusina's strategic stature. The first
of these is the weight, applicability, and effectiveness of Great Frusina's
non-military instrumentalities of policy and strategy. The second is Great
Frusina's war potential.
By Great Frusina's non-military instrumentalities are meant those
levers which lie between such a simple device as a properly worded and de-
livered formal note of objection or invitation, and such a complicated and
dangerous device as an embargo, blockade, or other stringent economic
sanction. Also are meant such things as telling Cuba we dared not continue
shipping thereapeutic narcotics to her as long as she afforded haven to
Lucky Luciano, well known to us as a dope peddler and general bad egg, whom
one of our states had been at great expense to catch, indict, convict, jail, and
later deport to Italy. We did not want Luciano in our backyard and we used
a mild non-military instrumentality to get him out.
The Soviet's use of the Comintern and now the Cominform, the para-
phernalia of party infiltration and front organizations, state trading, and even
the World Federation of Trade Unions are comparable devices. Great Frusina
will push such levers, pull such strings, and manipulate such needles and
ice-picks. Knowledge of their weight, applicability, and effectiveness con-
stitutes part of the knowledge necessary to estimate her strategic stature.
By war potential is meant the possible power to make war. It may
be useful in talking of war potential to distinguish between Great Frusina's
- 16 -
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
actual military force inbeiq and her mobilizable military force. This dis-
tinction is artificialbecause even the force in being is not fully prepared to
get up and go at a moment's notice. It must be topped off, so to speak, by
the issuance of battle equipment, completion of arrangements for supply and
auxiliary services, moving up to the line of attack, etc. But even though
much of the force needs to be topped off, there are likely to be units which
are completely mobilized and ready to startshooting. Hence the distinction.
Now the problem before us is this. Given as/ tuat Ion, forseeable or
in being, what must intelligence know of it, of the non-military instrumen-
talities, the force in being, and the war potential of Great Frusina so that an
evaluation can be made of her strategic stature.
The situation: Realize that it has not yet arisen and that the first
big question for intelligence is to imagine what it will be like when it does
arise. To sharpen the imagination, intelligence must have a great deal of
the descriptive and reportorial knowledge discussed in previous chapters.
For example, it must know a great deal about Great Frusina's foreign re-
lations, and the apparent grand strategic plan within which she is working,
and it must have some sort of rational basis for calculation of the time
factor. Intelligence's reportorial staff must have kept the organization
fully informed as they watched clandestinely and overtly, so that the spec-
ulative take-off will be from the most advanced point on the runway and the
flight of imagination on that course which will prove to be in the truest di-
rection.
It is perhaps worth mention here that calculations on strategic stat-
ure which are not based on some anticipated, imagined, or rationally
assumed situation are not likely to be meaningful. There can be no such
thing as a calculable national potential - potential for the achievement of
goals by peaceful or warlike means - so long as the calculation proceeds in
a vacuum. Only when you fix the adversary, the time, place and the probable
means to be used can the calculation have point.
The non-military instrumentalities: Knowledge is based on what
intelligence has been able to find out about Great Frusina's inner stability
and strength and the ways she has conducted her international business in
the past. Which instrumentalities will she use and with what weight and
effectiveness will she use them? Intelligence may hope to possess the re-
quisite knowledge only as it has studied Great Frusina deeply and system-
atically; has been able to transmute itself into the Great Frusinan foreign
minister and see from his particular perspective. This knowledge, ideally
is coldly objective and factual; is accurate, complete, and up to the moment.
In actual practice it is often none of these things. Certain phenomena
elude description. Maybe they are supersecret and have been successfully
concealed from sight - like the Japanese shallow-water torpedo. Maybe
they have gone unnoticed for a multitude of reasons, for example, the beaches
of a number of South Pacific islands. Maybe the published descriptions have
- 17 -
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
been lost. Faced with the necessity, intelligence inevitably falls back upon
the sort of description which is a small speculation in itself; an interpolation
between two known and related phenomena; or an extrapolation from an
established base, a pure deduction, or a depiction from analogy.
War potent ia/ : First, your knowledge of the partly and wholly mobi-
lized force in being will have been supplied by the people who report such
matters: the military, naval, and air attaches, sent openly to Great Frusina,
who are permitted to know certain fairly large brackets of data about Great
Frusina's military establishment. Great Frusina permits this in exchange
for similar knowledge from the countries to which she sends her own military
attaches. As a general proposition every country knows a great deal about
all other countries' forces in being and a great deal about most of their
weapons. What they are likely not to know about are the new and secret
weapons which even Great Frusina's own troops have not been permitted to
practice with and learn.
To ascertain Great Frusina's war potential is a very large order.
Were it not the single most important element in Great Frusina's strategic
stature and an absolute must, intelligence would never attempt the calcu-
lation. But in as much as naked power, or the threat of it, is all too often
the force which decides, it is mandatory that Great Frusina's opponents have
some reasoned estimate of this potential.
This computation which intelligence must attempt involves an answer
to the following prodigious question: What amount of active military power,
or better, lethal energy, can Great Frusina dig out of herself; how many men
and how well trained to fight on ground, in air, and sea; armed with what
weapons of modern combat which Great Frusina can produce in what amounts
of time; and finally how much such force can she project to the most strate-
gically advantageous or necessary battleground and maintain there?
To answer such a question intelligence must know many facts and it
must know a method of combinit4 them. In short, it must arrange its know-
ledge as Great Frusina's General Staff and her Office of Production Manage-
ment will normally have arranged its facts before they made their fateful
decision. At no place in the intelligence operation is the professional train-
ing of the intelligence producer of more importance. The job of synthesis
upon which he is embarking is one which requires the very highest compe-
tence in one or more of the sciences of politics, economics, geography, and
the military art: He should not even undertake it unless he has an easy
familiarity with the literature and techniques of the relevant disciplines.
Without giving the impression that you have all the facts when you
have a line-up of Great Frusina's key resources, let me name them.
The first is her geographical location, the quality and extent of her
terrain. Next is her population, especially that part of it which lies in the
age bracket 17 to 45, and qualitatively speaking, its health, vigor, and degree
- 18 -
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
of general and technical education. Thirdly are the raw materials and power
sources she possesses or has unequivocal access to: mineral (including
uranium), forest and fishery resources, water power, etc. Fourth are food
stuffs and feeds; next, standing industrial plant and the means of distributing
the finished product. Sixth is the transportation net and the inventory of
vehicles; seventh, the political structure of the state and its stability; eighth,
the social structure and the inventory of virtues which the population possess -
es; ninth, the moralquality of the people and the kind of values for which they
are prepared to make sacrifices. Sometimes this list is shortened and some-
times it is spun out, as anyone can see it might be, to fill pages and pages.
But intelligence must also be aware of the process of mobilization
and what it involves. Mobilization is in essence a matter of internal adjust-
ment or readjustment. A country organized for the welfare and security of
its citizens must now put security way out in front and welfare an appropriate
distance in the rear.
Mobilization means that a large percentage of the most productive
age group - the men and women between 17 and 45 - are put into uniform
and taught to use the complicated and eXpensive implements of war. Before
the process is completed this group may be 10% or even more of the total
population. In terms of food, shelter, clothing, medical care, transportation,
communications, insurance and the tools of war it may be supported at a
higher average level than was required in civil life. There must be adjust-
ments. What adjustments? How successful is Great Frusina likely to be
in making them? These two questions are the points of departure for gauging
the net effectiveness of mobilization.
All adjustments must take place within Great Frusina's polity. Even
though her government may be as dictatorial as Hitler's in 1936, there still
must be political loin-girding. The less concentrated the political power,
the greater must be that adjustment.
The next adjustment which the new government must initiate and
supervise is in Great Frusina's economy. Here there are at least three
things intelligence must know before it begins its analysis. (1) the amount
of fat on the economy (2) the amount of slack in the economy and (3) the
flexibility of which the economy is capable.
By fat, I mean such things as Britain had at the start of World War
II: extensive external assets, a large merchant marine, access to necessary
raw materials and the credits to buy them without going into current pro-
duction, a large and up-to-date supply of capital equipment, a large inventory
of finished goods, a national diet of three to four thousand calories per day,
etc. Important elements of German fat existed in the excess capacity of ma-
chine tools, a large amount of brand new plant and new housing. The Italians
had practically no fat, indeed little enough lean.
- 19 -
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
Approved For Release 2003/07/10: CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
By slack, I mean such things as the 40-hour week, twelve to sixteen
years of education for youth, small proportion of women in the labor force,
unemployment of both labor and capital, only partial utilization of equipment,
etc.
By flexibility, I mean the capacity of the economy to beat plowshares
and pruning hooks into swords, and that in jig time; the ability of technicians
to make typewriter factories over into machine gun factories, and put the
manufacturers of dry breakfastfood into the shell-fuse business; the ability
to make synthetics from scratch where the natural sources have dried up.
As adjustments take place within the economy what must intelligence
know to gauge the extent and results of the shake-up?
It must know how enlargements in standing capital equipment, power
resources, and in the labor force are being contrived; how strategically-
necessary raw materials are being stockpiled; andfor those in short supply,
what success is attending the development of substitutes. It must know how
speedily and efficiently heavy industry is being changed over from the manu-
facture of the machines of peace to the engines of war, and how deftly light
industry is being shifted from consumer durables to shell fuses, range
finders, radar components, and small arms. It must know these things - in
so far as they may be known or estimated - and hundreds like them. Then
it must be able to gauge how well the government is allocating raw materials,
making its contracts with private enterprise, financing essential blocks of
war industry, arranging for the equitable distribution of consumer goods,
and curbing inflation; i.e., it must know how tolerable the government is able
to make an otherwise intolerable life to the civilians who must produce the
implements of war, suffer its economic hardships, bear its tragedies and
still be denied the incentives of active participation.
None of these things can be known in the same way that one can know
the number of miles of paved street in City X or the number of sugar beet
refineries in County Y. Intelligence must have far more than a checklist of
capital goods, labor force, and raw materials; it must have a great deal of
general wisdom about the capacity of Great Frusina to pull these resourses
together, the strength of its political authority, its unity and resolve, its
managerial competence. The intelligence worker must have a willingness
to transmute himself into the Great Frusinan who is boss of mobilization,
who realizes that the issues are those of national survival and who may pull
any trick in the book - dirty, unorthodox, "unsound" in classical terms, and
illegal - if it will get him results.
The third adjustment attendant upon mobilization is the social adjust-
ment. Intelligence must know how the people will adjust to the loss of luxu-
ries, amenities, and even necessities; how they will react to poorer if not
less food, less clothing, more crowded living conditions, and less civil liberty;
how they will take the departure of their young people, the disruption of
families and family businesses, and the grim prospect of casualties. Few
- 20 -
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
of these things can be positively known. Intelligence must settle for approx-
imations which emerge from devious methods of inquiry. If it cannot find
out exactly how people are reacting to rationing, it may find indirect evidence
by following such things as changes in government rationing regulations.
These may be available in the newspapers and may indicate in so many words
that the black market is booming or that civilian compliance is high. One
cannot stress too heavily the importance of the indirect approach where the
direct is impossible, nor can one overstress the fact that devising the indirect
approach - "formulation of the method" it would be called informal terms -
is itself an act of intelligence and an essential part of the process.
The last adjustment which Great Frusinans must make and of which
intelligence must take note are those within the code of their national morality,
within their established values of good and bad. Here, perhaps, are some of
the most difficult tasks which intelligence must face and some of the most
important to solve. On the assumption that all the accepted moral values of
life in peacetime are not values which will forward victory in war, the
problem for the government is to alter these values or remodel them. The
problem for intelligence is to anticipate how the people will react to these
attempts. Let us suppose that Great Frusinans were broughtup on the mes-
sage of Jesus, how easily will they make the transition to a war morality
where all evil things are pragmatically, at least, justified?- How many people
are going to be pacifists or conscientious objectors, and if any large number,
how will their point of view affect the success of mobilization? Or suppose
Great Frusinans, like some Orientals, appear to view the business of staying
alive with indifference; as soldiers do not expect to survive war, indeed often
seem to welcome death, what can intelligence discern in this attitude which
will qualify its overall guess on war potential? A correct estimate along
these lines, for instance, would have told us much about the long-range capabi-
lities of Japan's air force.
The preceding pages have been addressed to these questions of mobi-
lization: What adjustments must Great Frusina accomplish in turning from
peaceful pursuits to preparations for the use of armed power? The second
question is yet to be answered. It is: How successful is she likely to be?
Here you must try to simulate Great Frusina's own appraisal of the
situation against which she is prepared to mobilize. How do the elements
of time and space (geographical relationships) shape up in Great Frusina's
probable calculations? Has she the time to prepare, and once mobilized can
she expect to project her military power to a spot on the earth where it will
do some good?
Against this background you will again consider what I have called
the fat, the slack, and flexibility of the economy. You will reassess the skill
and will of Great Frusina to plan, coordinate, and implement the huge job of
mobilization. You will reconsider its probable performance with the civilian
economy. Will it do a good job; will the citizens realize it? Will they be
- 21 -
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
able to see results commensurate with their efforts and sacrifices, or will
things appear to be as bad as the gloomy ones have predicted?
When the speculative element of strategic intelligence knows and
correctly assesses these things - drawing heavily for basic data from the
descriptive and reportorial elements - it is in a fair way to know the di-
mensions of Great Frusina's strategic stature.
Specific Vulnerability
In speculations about Great Frusina's future it is not enough merely
to analyze and add up her strategic assets. There are subtractions to be
made. The negative quantities are what I am calling her specific vulnera-
bilities.
By these words I do not mean the general indefensibility of her
frontier or the destructibility of her cities, or any other such thing that may
be common to a great many states and may constitute a broad strategic
weakness against which a strong opponent may direct his general attack.
Assuming that Great Frusina: is one of the world's strongest powers and
that frontal attack with any of the non-military or military instruments of
grand strategy is too costly to contemplate, perhaps she possesses soft
spots the exploitation of which will yield results disproportionate to the
outlay of efforts. If she has such soft spots she has what I am calling spe-
cific vulnerabilities. The problem is: What must you know to know the
location and nature of Great Frusina's specific vulnerabilities?
The answer to this question is that you must have the kinds of en-
cyclopedic knowledge described in the last two chapters; and from that select,
by analytical processes, those facets of life of Great Frusina which are vul-
nerable to the psychological, political, economic, and military weapons you
may possess.
During World War II we identified and misidentified a large number
of specific vulnerabilities of our enemies. Unquestionably our correct identi-
fications hastened the victory. Among the readiest examples of successful
selection was in the strategic air bombardment of German synthetic oil and
aircraft production and on the Hokkaido-Honshu coal ferries.
Peacetime affords as many examples as wartime of specific vulnera-
bilities and of their exploitation by the non-military instrumentalities of
grand strategy. For instance; the Soviet Union's ambivalent position on the
western frontiers of Poland. To the Poles, the U.S.S.R. was saying, "We
assure you the Oder-Neisse line," and to the Germans in the Soviet-occupied
zone whose support the Soviets were earnestly seeking, the U.S.S.R. was
saying, "As agreed at Yalta, the Oder-Neisse line is not a closed issue."
Mr. Byrnes in his Stuttgart speech of September 1946 exploited this vulnera-
bility to the hilt. When he asked the Russians if they had decided how this
frontier would be fixed he forced them to close a decision they wished to keep
- 22 -
?
Approved For For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
open. It will be recalled that the Russians had to forsake the comfortable
double position and reassure the Poles, thus losing support in Germany.
This was precisely Mr. Byrnes's plan.
Probable Courses of Action: Estimates
If you have knowledge of Great Frusina's strategic stature, knowledge
of her specific vulnerabilities and how she may view them, and knowledge
of the stature and vulnerabilities of other states party to the situation, you
are in a fair way to be able to predict her probable courses of action.
To strengthen the reliability of your prediction you should possess
two additional packages of knowledge. First, you should know about the
courses of action which Great Frusina has followed in the past. Does the
history of her foreign policy reveal a pattern which she will adhere to? Has
she followed certain lines of international behavior for so long that they have
hardened into traditions with proven survival value. Or are they myths
founded in irrationality? Will these traditions or myths exert an influence -
even though an illogical influence-upon her probable present course of action?
Has Great Frusina an old friend with whom she will never break; has she
had over the years a real need for an "eastern ally"; has she a traditional
"life-line of empire" to maintain, or the urge for "Ice-free ports"? Know-
ledge of this order is important but must be used with caution. For while
the force of tradition is strong, the present moment may be the very one in
which Great Frusina is girding herself to break with the past.
Second: you should know, as closely as such things may be known,
how Great Frusinans are estimating their own stature. She is not immune
to errors in judgment (neither were Germany and Japan in World War II)
and is capable of overestimating her own chances of success, and under-
estimating the strength of her opponents.
One may say in summary that if intelligence is armed with the various
kinds of knowledge which I have discussed in this chapter, and if it commands
the welter of fact which lies behind them, intelligence ought to be able to make
shrewd guesses - estimates, they are generally called - as to what Great
Frusina, or any other country is likely to do in any circumstance whatsoever.
In such fashion intelligence-can have a reasoned opinion on what
policies any country is likely to initiate within the next year. Intelligence
should be able to estimate the chances of nationalization of a particular
British industry in the next six months and the effect such a move would
have on Britain's balance of payments. Likewise intelligence should be able
to estimate another country's reaction to outside stimuli. What for instance,
would be the probable reactions of the U.S.S.R. to an arrangement whereby
the U.S. secured rights to the naval and air facilities of Mers el Kebir,
Bizerta, Malta, Cyprus, and Alexandria? What would they be to a violent
swing to the left of the British Labor Party or the emergence of Communist
Party control in France?
- 23 -
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
Approved For Release 2003/07/10: CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
Before leaving this subject the question s hould be asked: how valuable
is the "knowledge" which emerges from this element of strategic intelligence?
Are the so-called "estimates" of any value? My answer is Yes, they are of
very great value if they are soundly based in reliable descriptive data, re-
liable reporting, and proceed from careful analysis. The value may not be
an absolute and ultimate one; the speculative evaluation or estimate may not
be exactly accurate, but if individual lives and the national security are at
stake I would prefer the indexes of strategic stature, specific vulnerability,
and probable courses of action as they emerge from this phase of strategic
intelligence to the indexes afforded by the only alternative, i.e., the crystal
ball. In actual fact, many a speculative estimate has been astonishingly close
to what actually came to pass. The social sciences have by no means yet
attained the precision of the natural sciences; they may never do so. But in
spite of the profound methodological problems which they face they have
advanced prodigiously in the last fifty years. Their accomplishments are
large not merely in the area of description but more importantly in the area
of prognosis. If the record did not read thus, this pamphlet most emphati-
cally would not have contained a chapter on this element of the long-range
intelligence job.
A Note on Capabilities
Although this discussion has faced up to the possibility of war and
the mobilization of armed power, and although I have drawn many illus-
trations from wartime, it has so far been cased in a context - and hope -- of
peace. It has been written as if we were directing our peacetime policy to-
ward maintenance of peace and national security, but at the same time we
were remembering that we might be thrust into a war which we must win.
The question may be put: What happens to the speculative-evaluative ele-
ment of strategic intelligence and how are our speculations changed, by the
introduction of a state of war? The answer is, our speculations change in
emphasis and direction, but not in fundamentals.
For example, the components of strategic stature are somewhat
altered. To begin with, the si tuat ton may wellbe much clearer now. We are
in it! There is a larger degree of certainty in the time factor. We are likely
to be able to discern much more clearly the geographical-spatial elements
and foresee exactly the place or places of major and diversionary attack.
The line-up of allies and enemies willbe much clearer though we may never
be able to call the turn exactly.
Next, although the enemy is still using his non-military elements of
grand strategy, they have been converted into quasi-military instruments.
Political pressures and inducements are used with gloves off and become
political and psychological warfare. The economic big stick and sugar stick
become the implements of economic warfare.
The armed establishment in being is now the already-mobilized frac-
tion plus what was mobilized during the emergency period. The big question
with respect to military power is now referred to as the country's capabilities,
- 24 -
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
i.e., a state's ability to achieve a given objective expressed in time andforce
requirements. Where the enemy's objective is precisely defined - viz., to
contain an amphibious operation (Normandy), or capture a vital strategic ob-
jective (Stalingrad), or destroy by aerialbombardment his opponent's ability
to stay in the war (the first blitz of London or the V-weapon attack), or destroy
his merchant marine (the Atlantic campaign), a broader and more explanatory
definition is permissible. In this context we might say that "capabilities"
means the amount of armed force (ground, naval, and air power) that the
enemy can mount and maintain at maximum operational activity, without
undue damage to over-all strategic commitments, without overstraining or
ruining the home war economy, and without shattering the staying power of
the polity and society.
Thus the problem of peacetime war "potential" becomes the problem
of maintenance of the armedforce at the level of maximum operational activ-
ity. Nearly all the factors are still very much in the calculation which intelli-
gence made in peace, but since the war is on, the word "potential" might well
be dropped.
Specific vulnerabilities are, if anything, of intensified importance
and their identification one of the major tasks of intelligence. They should
be exploited with all effective and available weapons, and will be defended
with all the skill, ruse, and strength the enemy can muster.
Our side will be calculating the courses of action open to the enemy
(our estimate of his capabilities). Military doctrine shys away from trying
to put the finger on the one course of action the enemy is most likely to take.
Rather it prefers to narrow down the alternatives. In an estimate or evalu-
ation of these alternative courses of action, the military formula known as the
"estimate of the situation" is used. Roughly speaking, this formula runs as
follows: (1) knowledge of the environment, i.e., the terrain, weather and
climate, hydrography, logistics, etc., (2) knowledge of the enemy's strength
and the disposition of his forces. (3) knowledge of one's own forces, (4) pro-
bable courses of action open to the enemy. The courses of action will lie
primarily in the field of military operations, but secondarily and scarcely
less importantly in the fields of political and economic relations.
To sum up: to make an estimate of enemy capability in wartime you
must have possession of the main categories of knowledge needed to gauge
what I called the strategic stature, and specific vulnerabilities of peacetime.
To get at probable courses or act ion you have to know much the same sort
of thing you needed for estimating probable courses of action in peacetime.
In totting up these similarities we must not forget one very large
dissimilarity. In peacetime it is not too difficult a task to come by the sort
of basic knowledge you must have to make these speculations (the U.S.S.R.
excepted). But during a war, when the enemy knows fullwell the importance
of keeping you in ignorance, acquiring the basic knowledge is quite another
- 25 -
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
matter. It can be had, and much of it through perfectly overt channels, but
the effort necessary to get it has been multiplied many times.
Throughout this chapter in discussing the speculative knowledge
content of strategic intelligence, I may have given the impression that it is
a common commodity to be had for gathering. If I have given this impression,
I wish to correct it. Speculative knowledge is not common and it is not to
be had for the gathering. It is the rarest ingredient in the output of intelli-
gence and is produced only by the most competent students this country poss-
esses. It requires of its producers that they be masters of the subject
matter, impartial in the presence of new evidence, ingenious in the develop-
ment of research techniques, imaginative in their hypotheses, sharp in the
analysis of their own predilections or prejudices, and skillful in the presen-
tation of their conclusions. It requires the best in professional training, the
highest intellectual integrity, and a very large amount of worldly wisdom
which is that subtle knowledge which comes from a set of well-stocked and
well-ordered brain cells.
- 26 -
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
a
ways
Apprloved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R0031000400
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
Chapter 1
INTELLIGENCE IS ACTIVITY
In the language of the trade, the word intelligence is used not merely
to designate types of knowledge. It is also used as a synonym for the activity
of an intelligence organization. I will discuss in this paper, intelligence as
activity, or better, as process. My primary concern will be the large num-
ber of methodological and other problems to which this process gives rise.
But before discussing these problems, I shall briefly discuss the intelligence
process itself.
The knowledge, which I call strategic intelligence, serves two uses:
it serves a protective or defensive use in that it forewarns us of what other
powers may be hatching to damage our national interests; and it serves a
positive or outgoing purpose in that it prepares the way for our own foreign
policy or grand strategy. Here the important thing to grasp is that, no mat-
ter what its diversity, this knowledge is produced by the process of research.
Sometimes research is formal, highly technical, and weighty; some-
times it is informal, untechnical, and speedily arrived at. Sometimes a re-
search project requires thousands of man-days of work, sometimes it is done
in one man-minute or less.
This research process, in strategic intelligence, is initiated in two
chief ways. When the policy people or planners of our government begin
formulating something new in foreign policy they often come to intelligence
and ask for background. (They should do this more than they do.) In their
request for this or that block of knowledge, they stimulate the intelligence
force to embark upon a piece of research and a course of specially directed
observation or surveillance. There is, however, a second way in which this
process is initiated. This is through the systematic and continuing surveil-
lance activity of the intelligence staff itself. So important is this surveillance
that it is often conceived of as separable from research. I do not think it
should be.
Surveillance, as I am using the word here, is the observation of what
goes on abroad and the deliberate attempt to make sense of it.
Thus, in foreign countries we carry on through a multitude of open-
and-above-board personnel -- some civilian, some military -- whose duty
is to keep eyes and ears alert and report what they learn. They are the for.-
eign service officers and attaches. Each of them has his field of special in-
terest and competence, whether itbe political, military, commercial, or cul-
tural, etc., and each is supposed to keep himself and his principals at home
posted within this specialty.
- 1 -
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
Some foreign governments supplement the work of their overt officers
with espionage activities; that is, they send out secret agents, or undercover
recruiters of secret agents, to discover and report on matters which would
be difficult to discover overtly. If you would like a sample of how such ac-
tivities are established and operate, read Richard Hirsch's "The Soviet Spies",
or the "Report of the Royal (Canadian) Commission"...upon which it is large-
ly based.
Not all surveillance activities take place abroad; some very impor-
tant ones take place at home. Queer as it may seem to observe a foreign
country from a home observation post, there are several reasons for this
paradox.
First, there must be surveillance at home purely and simply for con-
venience. For example, what the official French radio beams on the rest of
the world is of considerable interest to us; we should like to know the content
of its political news and commentary. But this can be done easier domesti-
cally. Hence, that extremely important surveillance organization known as
the Foreign Broadcast Information Branch is established at home. Its moni-
toring stations pick up the most significant programs; the home office tran-
scribes them, translates (and sometimes abstracts them), reproduces them,
and sends them around to officers of the governments. Departmental, i.e.,
Army, Navy and State intelligence organizations are, of course, the chief
beneficiaries.
Sharp newspaper foreign correspondents though they have no con-
nection with intelligence work, are important observers of foreign affairs
and important, though inadvertent, contributors to the surveillance activity.
Wise is the government that does not intercept their dispatches at point of
origin, but lets them land in the home cable rooms of our domestic papers,
there to put the content to official use. Doing business this way means that
intelligence engaged in overt surveillance must have some small force at
home which follows the best foreign news.
There is a second reason for home surveillance. It is based upon the
proposition that anything being hatched abroad to our detriment is conspira-
torial, i.e., it is hatched in secret; but there are several people or groups
party to it. In the world of international relations these parties to the con-
spiracy may be residents of half a dozen countries, and the story of what they
are up to, must be pieced together from fragments supplied from the half-
dozen different sources. For example, what Franco was considering at a
given moment might be less available from Madrid than from Mexico City,
Buenos Aires, Lisbon, Bayonne, and Rome. This is not to argue that Wash-
ington is the only place where surveillance should take place, but it is to
argue that given the complicated nature of the modern world, there must be
a listening and observation post and clearing house in a central spot.
However conducted -- overtly or clandestinely, abroad or at home --
surveillance, as it goes about uncovering a policy or an action hurtful to our
- 2 -
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
Approved For Release 2003/07/10: CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
national interest, stimulates our desire and need for knowledge. Thus it stim-
ulates the production of defensive-protective knowledge and tells us what we
must know about affairs abroad if we are to implement our own active outgoing
policies. It is surveillance, then, which produces that wide range of phenom-
ena without which strategic intelligence would have little content of current
importance.
In talking of surveillance there is always the danger of portraying
something passive. Surveillance sounds like sitting back and awaiting the
impression. But surveillance worthy of the name must be vigorous and ag-
gressive; aggressive in that the observer covers as much ground as possible,
seeking to expose himself to a miximum number of phenomena; and more im-
portantly, it must be aggressive in that the observer does a maximum amount
of following up his impressions of these phenomena.
So long as I use the imprecise term "following up" I am on safe ground
with the general reader and intelligence brotherhood. It implies checking the
accuracy of sources, comparing divergent accounts, and gaining perspective
by broadening the field of inquiry, finding new leads--out of which emerges a
proposition which seems the truest of all possible propositions. Now I would
like to call this process of following-up by the more precise term of "re-
search" and say that it must accompany the surveillance activity. Such re -
search consists of a systematic endeavor to get firm meaning out of impres-
sions. Lacking it, surveillance will produce spotty and superficial informa-
tion.
Research has greater importance than merely supplying the cutting
edge to surveillance. It has a role entirely its own. In wartime, research
produces the knowledge of enemy strategic capabilities, enemy specific vul-
nerabilities; it produces knowledge of the political and economic strengths
and weaknesses of the enemy; and knowledge of the physical plant which the
enemy is using. On such knowledge our own offensive military plans are
based. In peacetime, research produces that knowledge of foreign lands which
you would wish if you had to decide whether to sponsor a European economic
recovery program; and then defend it before Congress and your fellow coun-
trymen.
Research is the only process which we of the liberal tradition are
willing to admit is capable of giving us the truth, or a close approximation
to truth. We insist, and have insisted for generations, that truth is to be ap-
proached, if not attained, through research guided by a systematic method.
There is such a method in the social sciences, which largely constitute the
subject matter of strategic intelligence and in which, for the purposes of this
paper, I include the science of military strategy. The method is much like
that of the physical sciences. It can be described, for instance, by paraphras-
ing the discussion of physical sciences as set forth by President Conant of
Harvard. One could say that the method of the social sciences involves the
development of new concepts from observations and that these concepts in
turn indicate and lead to new observations. But perhaps this is less useful
- 3 -
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
Approved For Release 2003/07/10: CIA-RDP8OR01731R003100040071-0
than to spell out seven steps or stages in the research process specifically
designed to meet the requirements of strategic intelligence. They are:
1. The appearance of a problem requiring attention of a strategic in-
telligence staff.
2. Analysis of this problem to discover which facets of it are of im-
portance to the U.S. and which of several lines of approach are most likely
to be useful to its governmental consumers.
3. Collection of data bearing upon the problem as formulated in stage
2. This involves a survey of data already at hand and available in the librar-
ies of documentary materials, and an endeavor to procure new data to fill in
gaps.
4. Critical evaluation of the data thus assembled.
5. Study of the evaluated data with the intent of finding some sort of
inherent meaning. The discovery of such meaning can be called the moment
of hypothesis. In reality there is rarely such a thing as one moment of hy-
potheses nor can it be said categorically at what moment hypotheses appear.
One would wish that they appeared here at respectable stage 5, but in actual
practice they begin appearing when the first datum is collected, and may
appear long after the project is closed out.
6. More collecting of data along the lines of the more promising hy-
potheses, to confirm or deny them.
7. Establishment of one or more hypotheses as truer than others and
thus as the best present approximations of truth. This is the last stage and
is often referred to as the presentation state.
At each of these stages two problems arise. One is characteristic of
all systematic research in the social sciences, the other derives from the
peculiarities of intelligence's research activities. My principal concern in
the next chapter will be with these latter methodological problems.
- 4 -
Approved For Release 2003/07/10: CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
Chapter 2
PROBLEMS OF METHOD IN INTELLIGENCE WORK
Before proceeding with an analysis of the problems in intelligence, I
would like to clarify my use of the adjectives methodological and substantive.
By "methodological" I mean a problem characteristic of the method of trying
to establish a new approximation to truth. By "substantive" I mean a problem
in the subject matter of strategic intelligence. As an example of a "sub-
stantive problem" consider the strategic stature of the Chinese Communists;
as an example of a "methodologicalproblem" consider the means you would
employ to get the basic data on the Chinese Communists' military establish-
ment.
1. Stage One, the appearance of the substantive problem
The substantive problem in strategic intelligence can emerge in three
principal ways.
a. It may emerge as a result of the reflections of a man employed to
do nothing but anticipate problems. In actual fact, the intelligence business
employs too few such men. Their job is to ask themselves the hard, the
searching, and the significant question and keep passing it on to professional
staff. An intelligence operation should be bedeviled by such questions, and
a substantial part of its work program should be concerned with getting an-
swers. A Pearl Harbor maybe ascribed in no small measure to the absence
of that unpleasant and insistent person, who, conscious of the growing animus
of Japan, would have kept asking when is the attack coming, where is it coming,
and how is it coming?
The methodological problem involved here is a slight one, on the sur-
face. It consists of devising means by which the question-askers will be
sure of formulating good substantive problems. The only answer lies in
picking a man who knows the area in which he is supposed to ask questions,
who has an inquiring mind, and then see that he has ready access to every
scrap of incoming evidence, access to everyone who knows about it, and free-
dom from other burdensome duties.
b. The substantive problem may emerge when surveillance makes
one aware of something unusual. For example, suppose the people watching
Great Frusina (my hypothetical country) learn it is expanding its Christian
mission program in the Belgian Congo and that it has named Brother Nepomuk
as aide to the new director. If surveillance is sharp enough to recognize
this shift in a minor Great Frusinan policy it has initiated a substantive prob-
lem which may be very important when followed-up; or be of no importance
at all.
5
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
Approved For Release 2003/07/10: CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
The methodological problem here is similar to that just touched upon;
how can surveillance be sure of putting the finger on the three unusual and
potential things per week out of the thousands it observes and the millions
that happen? The answer is again: procure wise men, wise in the subject,
and pray that they will produce hypotheses of national importance.
c. The last way in which the substantive problem may emerge is at
the request of the consumer. For example, let us suppose that the policy
people, who are the prime intelligence consumers, are facing a revision of
the established China policy. They summon some of the control and profes-
sional staff of intelligence to a meeting where the problem is put on the table.
In this meeting aspects of the China question will appear which the policy
people have not considered before. Let us assume that they have to do with
population. A prospective change in policy has caused a substantive problem
to emerge.
Here there is no methodological problem. Intelligence feels things
have gone just as they should. True, the assignment is so large and general
that serious difficulties are presented but since intelligence was at the meet-
ing, it may assume further guidance from the consumers in shaping the sub-
stantive problem to their needs. But what usually happens is that decision
to revise policy is taken without intelligence. Weeks later, when the policy
people are up against a deadline, they discover they need a new population
estimate and that at once. They pose a problem all right, but they pose it
to the consternation of intelligence, which is asked to do a month's work over
night.
2. State Two, the analysts of the substantive problem
The substantive problem has at last emerged in rough form. It must
now receive some close and searching analysis. The aim is not merely to
discard what is irrelevant or unimportant, but to shape the problem toward
solution.
For example, to return to Brother Nepomuk, the surveillance people
have many courses of observation opened to them by their discovery of Great
Frusina's new missionary zeal. They can begin watching the church-state
relationship looking for new angles; they can start an observation of the
Great Frusina-Belgium relationship; they can skip over Great Frusina,
Belgium, and the Congo, and start chasing after developments in the general
field of missionsto find new church policies therein. They are almost cer-
tain to turn up interesting leads no matter what lines they pursue. But the
question is, what particular line of observation is likely to prove most im-
portant to the security of the United States?
The research people back from the policy-on-China meeting are posed
a somewhat similar problem. They were asked to come up with some popu-
lation data; no more explicit than that. Obviously there are dozens of kinds
of population data. But only one or two will have bearing on the task of the
- 6 -
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
Approved For Release 2003/07/10: CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
policy people. What are these data, and in what detail should they be worked
up?
As the surveillance and the research people search for the most
fruitful line of attack they will seek guidance. This guidance should come
both from their own inner selves and from the policy, planning, or operating
people whom they are endeavoring to serve. Let me take the problem of
guidance as it appears to the surveillance man.
He discovered that Great Frusina was enlarging its Christian mis-
sions program in the Congo; he knows that the Congo has large uranium de-
posits; he asks himself, is there a connection? Then his foray into research
reveals that Brother Nepomuk won a Nobel prize for work in geology. He
now sees a connection and has uncovered the most fruitful line of attack. He
now has a hypothesis that Great Frusina is trying to get uranium from the
Congo and that Brother Nepomuk is a Great Frusinan agent. At this point
he must get outside guidance. What other lines of attack will the people
whom he serves designate as fruitful; what do they propose to do if such and
such a line confirms an ill-intentioned activity on Great Frusina's part?
The sequence may be exactly reversed with the research people work-
ing on the population of China. They will promptly go back to policy and ask
advice about lines of attack. They will also ask how the policy people see
the task shaping up, and what their aim is in revising the old policy. If they
get answers they can state the substantive problem and answer it in a way
which will have practical utility to policy. Moreover, as research advances
their study will get useful hypotheses which spring from familiarity with the
subject matter, and which the policy people might never have got on their own.
The methodological problem here is not that of inner guidance but
guidance from the users of the knowledge. Here is one of the critical prob-
lems of intelligence, i.e., the relationship between its producers and con-
sumers. Intelligence often finds it impossible to get that guidance which it
must have if its product is to be useful. One of the places where this lack
of guidance produces its most disastrous results is right here at stage 2 of
the intelligence process. Unless the intelligence organization knows what use
its product is designed to serve, and what sorts of action are contemplated
with what sorts or implements, the analysis and proper formulation of the
substantive problem suffer.
3. Stage Three, the collection of data
The collection of data is the most characteristic activity of intel-
ligence. There can be no surveillance nor research without the collection
of data. Accordingly, an intelligence organization cannot exist until it does
a broad and systematic job of collecting. But in this very task lie metho-
dological problems so tough that they are a perpetual source of inefficiency.
- 7 -
Approved For Release 2003/07/10: CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
a. One such problem is that which a member of the professional staff
encounters when he embarks upon a piece of research. He has blocked out
his substantive problem. His next step is to see what data bearing upon the
subject exist in his own and other intelligence organizations. Let us assume
that his own files are in good shape and that his outfit has a centralized
library of properly indexed documents. The materials from his own sources,
so to speak, indicate, as will also his horse sense, that there are other kindred
materials in neighboring intelligence organizations. He must reach these, but
there are real difficulties if (1) he must work through a third person in his
own organization who has an exclusive mandate to collect data, and (2) if the
other organizations possess no central library of indexed documents. Unfor-
tunately, many intelligence organizations raise these considerable barriers.
b. Now, let us assume that the staff member discovers that even after
canvassing every resource in his headquarters city there are still a number
of unanswered substantive questions which he must explore. He must com-
municate with the field; he must try to explain to someone in a foreign capital
what he wants. Now if the man on the other end of the wire was formerly a
worker in the home office, has a feel for home-office functioning, and per-
sonally knows the staff, he then will more readily understand what he is be-
ing asked to do and will do it with efficient good grace. He will quickly
grasp the instructions (which can be given in office shorthand) and will act
pretty much as an overseas projection of the home staff. But if he has not
served in the home office, and instead has gone to his foreign post improperly
briefed on home problems then there may be difficulties.
It is not easy to explain in a letter or cable precisely what is desired
to someone who starts from scratch. Requisitions of this sort must be
spelled out in detail and to achieve results they must communicate in their
substance a sense of urgency and importance. Such a requisition is time-
consuming. If it is no more than a blunt command it is likely to be handled
in a perfunctory fashion.
The problem increases when the recipient is a stranger to the sub-
ject. The home office may wish to have a foreign official interviewed on a
technical demographic matter or wish to have someone audit and report on
a scientific congress. But the men in the field may have had the wrong kind
of professional training or no professional training at all, and thus be totally
incompetent to handle such a request. Or, most likely, the field staff is com-
pletely engulfed in making good on a previous request which seems to them
to be of highest importance.
The foregoing problems of collection are not too formidable because
simple good sense can probably beat them. But there are other problems not
so easily disposed of and they are inherent in the surveillance phase of intel-
ligence.
The surveillance force is supposed to watch actual, fancied, or po-
tential ill-wishers or enemies of the United States and report on their
- 8 -
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
activities. It is also supposed to procure information which, though possibly
less dramatic, is none-the-less calculated to forward the success of our
own policies. In both areas the surveillance force must work clandestinely,
or it could not deliver on a small but extremely important part of this task.
Thus a certain fraction of the knowledge which intelligence must produce is
collected through highly developed secret techniques. Herein lies the major
methodological problem of the collection stage of intelligence.
It begins with the segregation of the clandestine force. This segre-
gation is dictated by the need for secrecy. The minimum of people must
know anything about the operation, and the greatest caution and dissimulation
must attend its every move. But unless this clandestine force watches sharply
it can become its own worst enemy. For if it allows security to cut it off from
all guidance, it destroys its own reason for existence. Guidance, in the nature
of things, should come from the ultimate consumer directly or indirectly, i.e.,
through the overt part of intelligence to which the consumer has gone for help.
As this relationship is stopped down (as it may have to be for long periods);
as it becomes formalized to the point where communication is by the written
word only; as it loses the informality of man-to-man discussion, some of its
most important tasks become practically impossible. Requisitions become
soulless commands. The consumer may ask for something the organization
is not setup to deliver, or he may ask for so wide a range of information that
the resources of the organization would be fully deployed for months, or he
may ask for something which the clandestine force knows is not worth the
effort. With a high wall of impenetrable secrecy the consumer has great dif-
ficulty in not abusing the organization, and the organization has equal dif-
ficulty in shaping itself along lines of greatest utility for the consumer. It
is constantly in danger of collecting the wrong and not collecting the right in-
formation.
Clandestine intelligence involves highly complicated techniques: the
correct approach to a source, its "development," its protection once de-
veloped, the security and reliability of its own communications, and so on.
Isolated by the security barrier, the perfecting of these techniques sometimes
becomes an end in itself. One can understand the technician's absorbed in-
terest in the tricks of his trade, but it is hard to pardon him when he gets his
means and ends confused. There are records where clandestine intelligence
has exploited a difficult and less remunerative source while it has neglected
an easy and more remunerative one. This kind of mis-collection would be
less likely to occur if the operation were less free to steer a course behind
the fog of its own security regulations.
44 Stage Four, the evaluation of data
If the language of intelligence were more precise it might use the
word "criticism" in place of the word "evaluation", and if "criticism of
data" were permitted we might move forward with a little more certainty
and speed. The word criticism means the comparison of something new and
unestablished with something older and better established. The best critic,
- 9 -
Approved For Release 2003/07/10: CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
in these terms, is the man who has the greatest number of established some-
things in the right sort of mind, for he will be able by comparison to appraise
the validity of the new somethings as they come in. Thus he rejects a report
which puts Great Frusina's steel capacity at 45 million tons because he knows
from other evidence of unquestionable reliability that her capacity is 36
million tons.
In intelligence research the collected data bearing on the substantive
problem must be criticized before they can become the stuff from which a
hypothesis emerges. If incorrect data are not rejected the emergent hy-
pothesis will be incorrect, and thus the final picture incorrect. The methodo-
logical problem boils down to the expertise of the critic, the breadth of his
understanding, and the freedom he is permitted in arriving at his appraisal
of the data. Maybe, as in an earlier problem, this is as much a problem of
administration as of methodology. But the point is, that intelligence which
tries to run itself on an assembly-line basis and tries to substitute admin-
istrative techniques for high-class professional personnel is all too likely
to fall down on its all-important criticism of the data. This is just another
way of saying that intelligence is a pursuit which cannot get along without men
of knowledge and wisdom.
There is, however, a problem in the area of evaluation which can prop-
erly be called methodological. It arises because of the two ways in which the
produce of the surveillance operation is distributed to the consumers. The
first way of distribution is through the finished digest, report, or daily or
weekly summary. The new stuff is put on the expert's desk; he criticizes it,
judges its importance, mixes it with other data he received yesterday and
the week before, gives it background and point, and sends it on to the consumer.
This activity may be called "reporting", but as can be seen it contains all
of the elements of research.
The second way in which the produce of the surveillance operation is
distributed is in a much less finished form. The collectors pass to a sort of
middleman what they have picked up. The middleman grades the data for re-
liability of source and the accuracy and reliability of content. He may then
distribute direct to the consumer or to the research staff of his own organi-
zation or to other intelligence organizations. There is reason for the ex-
istence of this middleman, i.e., he is handling data which have been collected
clandestinely and his organization must protect its sources. But the middle-
man -- regardless of his reason for existence --often does far more than ob-
literate the sources's identity. He attempts to grade the reliability of the data.
In doing so he is sometimes guided by some strange patterns of thought.
The middleman, according to standard practice, is restricted to a
very narrow language in making evaluations. He is permitted to grade the
reliability of the source according to the letters A, B, C, D, and the content
according to the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4. Thus A-1 would designate a report of
unvarnished truth straight from the horse's mouth. Data from less dependable
sources, and less accurate, might be B-2, C-4, etc. If the data happen to have
- 10 -
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP8OR01731R003100040071-0
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
come from a document, a newspaper or press release, one school of evalu-
ators designates their value with the single word "documentary". Middle-
men have insisted on not amplifying their comments beyond this elementary
code and have done their best to see that others who might well amplify were
prohibited from so doing. They cling to this procedure on the ground that
they are purveyors of a raw commodity and that it is their duty to distribute
the commodity in the rawest state possible.
If this argument has force the middlemen themselves at times do much
to negate it by distributing the commodity in a state anything but raw. They
edit it, abbreviate it, or otherwise obscure its import, frequently losing the
point-of-observation or slant of the information: Was it a French Communist,
Socialist, or Rightist source which told the number of machine guns on the
headquarters of the Communist newspaper, L' Humani te, or told of new politi-
cal instructions from the Vatican? When the information lands on the con-
sumer's desk, it is no raw commodity but a semi-finished one.
Evaluation of the source by the middleman maybe a valid and valuable
service. Ti the source is known to be a good one and if it must be protected
at all costs, to label it as grade A is helpful. But it is helpful and valid only
in so far as the middleman knows what he is talking about, or in so far as
the validity of the source has bearing on the content. But middlemen if they
lack independent line on the reliability of the source have been known to
grade the source based on the apparent reliability of the content. This is
neither helpful nor valid, particularly as the ultimate intelligence consumers
often tend to use the data without further and systematic criticism. Accepting
the evaluation at face, they are accordingly misled.
Middlemen have at times been people who neither directed clandestine
operations nor sat in a place where they were forced to view all incoming
materials. By all incoming materials I mean those collected overtly from
newspapers, government reports, transcriptions of foreign radio broadcasts,
etc., as well as those collected clandestinely from other secret sources.
Middlemen so placed were insulated from both the field experience of the
operator and the desk experience of the research man who is constantly and
aggressively working at a specialty. I can understand how a man living in
Rome and spending all his time collecting information on Italian politics can
develop a high critical sense. I can understand how a research man in Wash-
ington who immerses himself in the data of his specialty and every moment of
his professional life runs an obstacle race with his own and other people's
hypotheses must have a high critical sense and ability. It is less easy to
understand how a man who passively reviews a wide range of material with-
out doing anything about it except grade tt, can possibly have the necessary
critical faculties.
To illustrate further: During the war a document graded as A-3 was
circulated which told of the American failure to take care of the inhabitants
of the city of Oran, Algeria, in the winter of 1943. The source was given an
A rating because it appeared to be someone familiar with Oran; the content
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
was graded as unreliable because the evaluator knew conditions there
were not as bad as represented. One recipient of this document poked around
until he identified the source as none other than an important French official
and the document as the text of one of his off-the-record speeches. Now the
official was unquestionably an A source; his knowledge stemmed from first-
hand informants or even his own experience. But what he said about Oran
under the Americans was of relatively little importance even if it had happened
to be correct. The importance of this document was that the source -a
man who was allegedly a friend and close ally-had voiced violent adverse
criticism of Americans. Yet this, its real value, had been completely ob-
scured by the encoded evaluation. To serve the more important use, the
evaluation should have called attention to the authorship of the document. If
the document had fallen into American hands through the work of a secret
agent whose identity had to be protected, the evaluation would have required
four or five sentences instead of one. But suppose that these sentences
could not be written without compromising the agent, is this adequate reason
for misleading the consumer through the A-3 evaluation? I would say not.
I would say that the middlemen should think up some other method of handling
the problem or get out of the business.
The crowning peculiarity that is met at times in this sort of evalua-
tion is that of removing the name of the newspaper from the reproduction of a
newspaper clipping and substituting the word documentary. What purpose this
can serve has always eluded me. Without the name of the newspaper the reci-
pient is deprived of perhaps the most useful piece of information in making
his own evaluation. For example, would you not like to know whether the
New York Times or the Datly Workerwas responsible for an estimate that
Henry Wallace would poll ten million votes for President in 1948? Or would
you settle for the attribution "documentary"?
5. Stage Five, the moment of hypothesis
What is desired in the way of hypotheses, whenever they may occur, is
a large number of possible interpretations of the data, a large number of in-
ferences, or concepts, which are broadly based and productive of still other
concepts.
There are two things an intelligence organization must have in order
to generate more and better hypotheses: (1) professional staff of highest
competence and devotion to the task, and (2) access to all relevant data.
There were many men who lived contemporaneously with Mahan and
Mitchell, with Darwin and Freud, with Keynes and Pareto who could have
made these men's discoveries, for to a very large extent the facts were there
for anyone. But the great discoveries of the race are the result of rigorous,
agile, and profound thinking. The many failed because they lacked the brains
capable of such thinking and the stamina to face up to an intellectual re-
sponsibility. This all points a moral for intelligence: worthwhile discoveries
- 12 -
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
are not made by a lot of second-rate minds, no matter how they may be jux-
taposed organizationally. Twenty men with a mental rating of 5put together
in one room will not produce the ideas of one man with a mental rating of 100,
and you cannot add minds as if they were so many fractional parts of genius.
But even if intelligence recruited its professional staff from among
the nation's most gifted people it does not follow that there are no problems
other than those which face any university researcher or journalist. Even
gifted people would not produce the good hypotheses unless they had access
to all the relevant data. This is by no means easy to arrange in intelligence.
One of the things that gets in the way is again security.
The worker in intelligence is dealing with state secrets upon which the
safety or well-being of a nation may rest. On the theory that the secrecy of
a secret is in inverse ratio to the number of people who know about it, a
highly important secret cannot be too widely known. But a man cannot pro-
duce the good hypothesis in any area if he does not know as much as there is
to know. It is interesting to speculate on how far Lord Keynes would have got
if libraries withheld large blocks of economic data on the ground that they
were operational, or how far Dr. Freud might have progressed if mental
clinics sealed their records against him on the ground that they were too
confidential. Yet intelligence people are constantly confronted with this
very argument which seeks to restrict the scope of knowledge on the grounds
that an important secret is involved. Security here is bought at great cost in
terms of results. Secrecy should be allowed to interfere only so far as ab-
solutely necessary.
7. Last State, presentation
I am skipping stage 6 (i.e., more collecting and more testing of hy-
potheses) in the intelligence process because it contains few, if any, problems
not covered in stages 2 and 3. The last stage, the one in which the established
hypothesis is presented as a new and better approximation to truth, contains
at least two important problems.
The form which the finished product must take is one of unadorned
brevity and clarity. To be sure, intelligence produces long reports - some
may reach many hundred pages -- but there are few studies, reports, or
monographs which do not also furnish a one or two-page summary. This
limit forces the intelligence producers to be clear in their thought and con-
cise in their presentation, and it enables the hurried consumer to digest while
he runs. The result is by no means an unalloyed good. There is such a thing
as a complicated idea; one that cannot be expounded in 250 words, or in two
pie-charts, an assemblage of little men, little engines, and three-quarters
of a little cotton bale. The consumer who insists that no idea is too com-
plicated for the 300-word summary is doing himself no favor. He is re-
quiring the impossible and paying heavily for it in two ways: he is kidding
himself that he really knows the subject, and he is contributing to the de-
moralization of his intelligence outfit.
- 13 -
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
The intelligence people who spend weeks of back-breaking work on a
substantive problem and come up with an answer whose meaning lies in its
refinements are injured at the disortion that may occur in a glib summary.
Next time they go at such a problem they will have less enthusiasm for ex-
haustive work, will turn in a poorer study with a still poorer summary tacked
on the front. This is not a plea to the harassed man of action to read all the
hundreds of pages which come his way, but it is a plea for the middle ground.
If he lets it be known he will read nothing longer than one double-spaced page,
many of his most loyal and hardest workers will lose some of their fervor in
serving him.
A second problem of the presentation stage is that of footnote re-
ferences. Intelligence consumers, unlike most serious and critical readers.
have not demanded footnotes; in fact, they have often condemned footnoting
as mere evidence of an academic mind. Thus in those intelligence organiza-
tions where rules of styling are made by men who do not understand the
methods of research there is opposition to the reference note. Even in or-
ganizations where the value of citing sources is fully understood, many
sources must be concealed for the reason of security. Thus on both sides
there are reasons for skimping on citations and citations are skimped.
I know of no formula for evil any surer than sloppy research unfoot-
noted. Sloppy and footnoted is not good, but sloppy and unfootnoted multiplies
the danger in a way the layman can hardly imagine. The following example is
in point.
The military staffs of two countries, X and Y, had some pre-war con-
versations about the airfields which Y had in one of its colonies. Y told X
that it had some airfields built, some about to be built, and a third group to
be built when the land had been purchased. On the outbreak of war the con-
tent of these conversations became an important item of intelligence, and
one of Country X's intelligence outfits distributed a report which accurately
named and located the fields, noted that some were ready, others not yet
built, and others only planned. It cited its source and gave the dates of the
conversations. So far so good.
A few months later another intelligence outfit in another country, Z,
got out a report on the colony. The report had a section on airfields. The
information which it contained came from the earlier study, but it was changed;
those airfields the land for which had not yet been bought were not so indicated,
and the citation of source was omitted. We now have a report in which three
categories of airfields have been reduced to two, i.e., those in operation and
others soon to be completed.
A little later a second intelligence outfit of Country Z tookthe second
report and entered the airfield data on cards. These cards were printed
forms which had no appropriate box for noting that an airfield was in operation
or merely in the process of construction. The cards carried no footnote re-
ferences. All three categories of airfield thus dropped into one category.
- 14 -
Approved For Release 2003/07/10: CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
Taking information from the cards you would have thought that the area had
some fifty more airfields than it in fact possessed.
It was about this time that a third intelligence outfit of Country Z came
into being and inherited the card file. It developed a technique of presenting
airfield data on maps with symbols to indicate length and type of runway.
Now back in the original document no length was given for the runways of
fields to be, but it was noted that the areas to be purchased for development
were to be one mile .square. This datum had been repeated in all the suc-
ceeding reports. But when the map-makers landed upon it they found it
inconvenient. They did not wish to do the unrealistic thing of depicting a
square runway one mile by one mile, so they compromised. They reasoned
that the runways would be of maximum length, hence must follow the diagonal,
and hence be something over a mile, say 7,000 feet, in length. This point
decided, they made their maps and assigned a symbol indicating a 7,000 to
8,000 foot runway to fields, some forty-eight of which were never completed.
This sort of error is not entirely ascribable to a lack of footnote, but
I would say that the lack considerably enhanced the chance of error. Further-
more, the lack of the footnote made correction more and more unlikely as the
data went through the producer-consumer-producer-consumer chain. By
the time the map was made a discovery of the error demanded hours of time
from the most studious and professionally competent man who might have
had the hours to spend. Even so the damage was irreparable, for his more
correct and cautious appraisal of airfields in Y's colony could not possibly
reach all the consumers of the erroneous reports, or convince all those whom
it did reach that his was the truer picture.
The methodological problems which I have discussed above appear to
be the most vexing ones, but my catalogue is not exhaustive. There are other
problems and there are other facets. Taken together they make the calling
of intelligence a difficult one, and cause the results of the intelligence process
often to fall below necessary standards of quality.
- 15 -
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
Chapter 3
PRODUCERS AND CONSUMERS OF INTELLIGENCE
There is no phase of intelligence more important than the proper re-
lationship between producers of intelligence and the people who use its prod-
uct. Oddly enough, one would expect this relationship to establish itself
automatically, but it does not do this. It only results from persistent and
conscious effort, and is likely to disappear when effort is relaxed.
Proper relationship between intelligence producers and consumers
is one of utmost delicacy. Intelligence must be close enough to policy, plans,
and operations to have the greatest amount of guidance, and must not be so
close that it loses its objectivity and integrity. To spell out this meaning is
the task of the next pages.
The Problem of Guidance
One of the main propositions of this paper may be summarized as
follows: Unless the kind of knowledge herein discussed is complete, ac-
curate, and timely, and unless it is applicable to a specific problem or one
coming up, it is useless. In short, intelligence is knowledge solely for the
practical matter of taking action, and this requires that the intelligence staff
know a great deal about what is under discussion in other units of, say, the
department charged with policy, plans, and operations, and that it have all
the guidance and cooperation from them which can be afforded. The need
for guidance should be evident, for if the intelligence staff is sealed off from
the action to be planned and carried out, the knowledge which it produces
may not fill the bill.
Let me be precise about my use of the word guidance. To be properly
"guided" in a given task intelligence must know almost all about it. If you
wanted to find out from a road contractor how big a job it was to build a
particular piece of road, you should not go to him and ask: "How hard is it
to make a road?" Before you could expect any meaningful answer you must
stipulate what two points the road was to connect, what volume of traffic
you wished to run over it, the axle loading of your heaviest vehicle, and so on.
After you had made your specifications clear the contractor might still be
unable to give you the final answer. He might give a rough estimate but re-
fuse to commit himself until he had investigated the terrain to be traversed,
the weather with which he would have to contend while putting in the road, the
local labor force, etc. When he had made these investigations he might come
up with a figure answering all preliminary specifications but which was pro-
hibitively high in cost. At this point he must return to you to begin conver-
sations on compromises. Will you accept two lanes instead of three of four?
Will you accept a more circuitous route with fewer cuts, fills, and difficult
grades? Will you accept a less expensive surface? As you talk these matters
- 16 -
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
over with him you find yourself, although you are not a professional road-
builder, batting up suggestions on how he can avoid this or that technical
difficulty, and he, though no professional transportation man, begins asking
questions about your problems. If things go well, you fetch your technical
people in to the discussion, and he does also. Before you are done, your
two organizations are working together straight across the board and a com-
munity of interest and understanding emerges that produces a workable plan
and a smooth operation. Naturally and unconsciously the guidance which was
mandatory for his (and your) success has been brought into being.
Now this guidance is essential at all levels of strategic intelligence.
Intelligence does not formulate objectives; does not draft policy; it is not the
maker of plans; nor does it carry out operations. Intelligence, to use the
dreadful cliche, performs a service function. Its job is to see that the doers
are generally well-informed; to stand behind them with the book opened at the
right page, to call their attention to the stubborn fact they may be neglecting,
and--at their request--to analyze alternative courses without indicat-
ing choice. Intelligence cannot serve if it does not know the doers' minds; if it
has not their confidence. It cannot serve unless it can have the kind of
guidance any professional man must have from his client. The uninitiated
will be surprised to hear that the element of guidance present inthefull at
the lowest operational levels becomes rarer and rarer as the job of intelligence
mounts in augustness.
Without proper guidance and the confidence which goes with it, the
surveillance operation, while relatively certain to keep its eye on obvious
foreign problem areas may well neglect the less obvious though significant
ones. There will be a playing of hunches: "Watch Bolivia, they'll be screaming
for information on it in a month", "Isn't it about time we began watching for
unrest in Madagascar or Soviet activities in India"; "Say, how about the
Spanish underground, how about West African nationalism?" There will be
plain and fancy guess work on what is to be watched and what can be left to
cool off. There will be differences of opinion as to what is and is not impor-
tant; on where this, that, and the other matter belongs on the priority list.
This striving to anticipate the trouble spot is not to be discouraged, but it
certainly should be supplemented continuously by the very best advice that
intelligence consumers can offer.
Research in intelligence suffers even more than surveillance when
improperly guided. In the first place the knowledge which it purveys 'may
be inapplicable to the use it is to serve, incomplete, inaccurate, and late.
It is not reasonable to expect otherwise, when through lack of guidance intel-
ligence is asked to do in a week's or a day's.time what may be simplybeyond
human competence. To be able to deliver would demand a research staff
large enough to codify and keep up to date virtually the sum-total of universal
knowledge. Even then it is doubtful if what was required would emerge unless
intelligence had had some advance warning.
- 17 -
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
In the second place, the want of sharp and timely guidance is chief
contributor to the worst sickness which can afflict intelligence -- that of
irresponsibility. When intelligence knows little or nothing of what lies behind
a request, it loses desire to participate in the thing to be accomplished; it
loses the drive to make exactly the right contribution to the united effort.
When this stage is reached, men cease to be either intelligent or sensitive;
they begin behaving as dumb and unhappy automatons who worry, if at all,
about the wrong thing. What they hand on of knowledge is strictly non-
additive; it must be worked over by someone else up the line, less well-
informed, before it has value. It may even be out of date or inadequate be-
cause long ago they quit caring.
There are a number of reasons why intelligence producers and con-
sumers have difficulty in achieving the proper relationship. Some of these
are perhaps less typical of civilian departments than of the armed services.
The services, of course, are organized on the well-known staff pattern. This
is composed of six divisions responsible respectively for: personnel,tntei-
i ience, organization and training, service-supply-procurement, plans and
operations, and research and development. Now it is to be expected that
loyalties, as they jell in this organizational structure, will jell first up and
down the vertical administrative line of the division. Only secondarily, will
loyalties spread horizontally to coordinate divisions under the commander.
Thus there is reason inherent in staff structure why Intelligence might ex-
perience difficulty in getting the proper guidance on plans, projected opera-
tions, the strength of one's own forces, etc., from its coordinate staff as-
sociates. Some critics of staff organization then go further and point to a
doctrine buried deep in service formulae called "The Estimate of the Situ-
ation." They assert that herein lies something which further adds, and in no
small way, to an unsatisfactory relationship between intelligence producers
and consumers.
The estimate of the situation is what a military commander must
make before he decides upon a course of action. In the preparation of this
estimate each staff officer has a clearly defined role: personnel, operations,
and logistics tell the commander precisely about his own force; intelligence
tells him about the physical environment and the enemy force, etc. However,
the degree to which intelligence is permitted knowledge of his commander's
own forces and the courses of action which the commander may be mulling
over are not spelled out in the formula. It has been argued, however, that the
G-2 (intelligence officer) should approach his job of estimating the enemy with
complete objectivity, and that if he has full knowledge of his own forces and
how they may be employed, his thought may jump ahead to the showdown of
strength. He will see his side about to win or lose, and his elation or fear
will effect his estimate of the enemy. If he sees his side the easy winner,
the argument runs, he will tend to underrate the enemy; if the loser, to over-
rate the enemy. The commander, having enough difficulties conquering his
own subjective self, may not wish to complicate his task by having to screen
out that of his intelligence officer. He may feel justified in keeping his whole
intelligence arm in ignorance; or he might tell his G-2 everything but only on
- 18 -
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
the expressed condition that the information be withheld from all subordinate
members of the G-2 staff.
It must be said, however, that no matter how good this reasoning may
appear to the commander, it rarely seems good or compelling to his intel-
ligence officer. The latter will always be miffed at the thought that his chief
doubts his ability to overcome his subjective self, or that his chief holds him
or his organization as a poor security risk. To top it all, he will be even
more than miffed feeling that no matter how hard he works, he runs the risk
of turning out a useless product.
Those who argue that staff structure and the doctrine of the estimate -
of -the -situation have within them the means of stultifying a free give and take
between intelligence producers and consumers have a point. I would be more
impressed if this doctrine were the only discernible cause and if civilian de-
partments which have inherited no such doctrine did not also have their dif-
ficulties in the producer-consumer relationship. There are other causes and
the first of these arises as a psychological by-product of intelligence practice
itself.
This practice separates out the thing called intelligence from all other
elements necessary to accomplish an end, and then bestows upon one group of
men, to the formal exclusion of others, all contact with the various steps
necessary to the intelligence process. Deep in their subconscious selves,
then, the excluded may well harbor the feeling that someone has told them
they are not quite bright?has said, in effect, 'Now don't worry, your thinking
is being done for you. We've arranged to give you an externalbrain. When-
ever you want to know something, just ask Intelligence."
If Intelligence were staffed with supermen and geniuses who promptly
and invariably came up with a correct and useful answer, the sting might
wear off; intelligence might come to be revered by its users as a superior
brain. But so long as intelligence is not so staffed (what is?) the relation-
ship between producers and consumers will continue a troubled one.
Another cause for a not too happy relationship is again that of "se-
curity" which I have discussed in other contexts heretofore. Policy makers
and planners will, in the nature of things, deal with secrets of state. The
disclosure of such secrets would amount to a national calamity. (What if
one month before the Allied assault on Normandy or the American landing at
Leyte, the enemy learned the exact time, place, and magnitude of the pro-
jected attack?) Likewise, intelligence must have its secrets. A powerful
intelligence organization can develop sources of information of value beyond
price. They themselves can even become the points of departure and the
guarantors of success for a policy, a plan, or an operation. The revelation
of such sources or even a hint of their identity will cause their extinction.
Their loss can be likened to the loss of an army or all the dollars involved
in the Marshall Plan, or, upon occasions, the loss of the state itself.
- 19 -
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
Approved For Release 2003/07/10: CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
The stakes being what they are, security and its formal rules are an
absolute essential and, as I have said before, the first rule of security is
to have the secret known by as few people as possible, all of established
discretion. What is the effect of this rule in the intelligence producer-
consumer relationship?
When the rule is rigidly applied the consumers are entitled to a le-
gitimate doubt as to the validity of the producers' findings. Suppose you,
as a planner, were told something which was contrary to all previous Imow-
ledge and belief and contrary to the laws of common sense? Would you
accept it blindly and stake a policy or a plan upon it? What would be your
emotions, your considered judgment, and your final decision if, after re-
ceiving such information, you went back to the producer and got "Sorry,
but I cannot say more than I put in the memorandum"?
Likewise, when the consumers--the policy 'people and planners--
rigidly apply the rule, they give the intelligence producers good cause for
non-compliance; or the production of useless knowledge. Suppose you were
an intelligence producer and one of your consumers appeared with a re-
quest for everything you could find out about Java. Suppose the request was
phrased just this way. Suppose your entire staff were occupied on other
high-priority jobs and that you could not put any of them on this request
without some justification. Suppose you told him this. It might be that he
would feel he could not give you the justification without a breach of security.
You are at cross-purposes. Possibly the consumer would drop the matter
there. But then again he might carry his request up through two echelons
and see to it that it came back to you through two higher echelons of yours.
You would be given your orders to get to work on Java.
The chances are excellent that a request thus routed is one in which
security is paramount. The consumer does not really want to know all about
Java; he wants to know merely about some tiny fraction of it. But he dares
not stipulate the fraction for fear of revealing his intent. So he asks for all
of it, hoping to get his information out of one paragraph or chapter of your
encyclopedia. He has no guarantee that this paragraph or chapter is not the
very one you consider unimportant and accordingly leave out. Nor have you
any guarantee that if you write the paragraph or chapter you will write it in
the way that will best serve his interests.
Now what I have said above is the extreme. When the issues are of
highest importance both producers and consumers go to all permissible
lengths to help each other forward the success of the common task. But
this very leaning over backwards merely confirms the basic problem which
security throws in the way of a perfect relationship. Furthermore, when
the substantive issue is of some lower order of importance no one may lean
over backwards and something akin to an impasse can easily develop.
- 20 -
Approved For Release 2003/07/10: CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
Approved For Release 2003/07/10: CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
I am not playing down in these paragraphs the importance of security
regulations and their observance. I am concerned with the point that se-
curity is like armor. You can pile on armor until the man inside is absolutely
safe and absolutely useless. Both producers and consumers of intelligence in
safeguarding their secrets can so insulate themselves that they are unable to
serve their reasons for being. This problem is critical and it deserves the
continuing study of a high-powered board. It cannot be met by the earnest,
informal but sporadic efforts current today. Nor do I believe it would vanish
with the passage of an official secrets act. Such an act would help enor-
mously, but it would not be the all-powerful panacea its proponents would
have it.
A final reason for misunderstandings between intelligence producers
and consumers is the understandable reluctance of consumers to embark
upon a hazardous task on the basis of someone else's say-so. After all, if
anyone is going to be hurt it probably will not be the producers. I will war-
rant that the Light Brigade's G-2 was high on the list of survivors in the
charge at Balaclava. The casualties, in both the literal and figurative senses,
will be to the intelligence users first, and to the producers late down the line.
Hence it is easy for the users to adopt the attitude expressed in the rhetorical
question: "Why should intelligence worry about doing a perfect job, after all
it's not their neck?" From this there can emerge a disrespect, perhaps even
a derogation, for the opinion of thosewho do not carry the weight of operational
responsibility. Let intelligence make any mistake from which a penalty
follows and relations are likely to worsen.
One last word: intelligence is bound to make mistakes. Some of the
questions it must answer demand a divine omniscience; others demand more
painstaking work than can be accomplished in the time allotment; still others
can be had only with the most elaborate of undercover preparations which have
never been made. But let intelligence make a mistake or come up with an in-
adequate answer and all too often the reaction of the consumers is on the
bitter side: "I wouldn't ask those geniuses to tell me how many pints there
were in a quart." When intelligence errs there seems to be less tolerance
than for the error of other specialists. For example, when a dentist pulls
out the wrong tooth (as the best dentists have done) or a lawyer loses a case,
the client's reaction is not that he, himself could have done a better job, and
that hence forth he will do his own dental and legal work. Yet in intelligence,
pardonably wrong diagnosis and understandably inadequate presentation very
often arouse just such reaction. For good reason or bad, an intelligence fail-
ure seems to rankle out of proportion to its importance, and to justify the con-
sumer in doing his own intelligence henceforth.
Thus there are a number of reasons why the relationship between pro-
ducers and users may at times be extraordinarily difficult. The result is that
the all-important element of guidance is lost. Once this occurs, intelligence
must remain innocent of the consumers' requirements, and the consumers in-
nocent of intelligence's capacity to contribute to their problems. In wartime
the closer to the fighting front and the smaller the operating unit, the better
- 21 -
Approved For Release 2003/07/10: CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
the relationship and the keener the guidance; the more remote and the larger
the unit, the worse the guidance. There are few situations even comparable to
the fighting front, and where they exist they lack that element of common phy-
sical peril which makes all men of one side friends and brothers. Thus in
peacetime, top-level intelligence must function in the very worst area of
wartime relations without the leaven of what you might call front-line tol-
erance. The relationship is likely to remain poor. This danger of intelligence
being too far from the users appears to be a lesser danger than that of being
too close. But what of this other danger?
The Problem of Objectivity and Integrity
The danger of being too close to the consumers is not to be readily
dismissed. In a moment of intense exasperation intelligence producers and
consumers might agree to knock down the administrative barriers and move
intelligence piecemeal into the policy, plans, or operations section, or to
break up intelligence into its regional and functional units and disperse them
among appropriate parts of the operating organization. If this were done, in-
telligence would likely acquire all the guidance it could wish, perhaps even
more than it could legitimately stomach. There will be great and obvious
advantages; there will also be costs, some of them prohibitive.
Intelligence is likely to be diverted from its essential task. I mean
this in its most crude sense: the intelligence personnel who are profession-
ally studious yet possessed of some of the talents of the doer are going to
find themselves asked to share a non-intelligence burden of office. Personnel
raids of this sort are very familiar to intelligence people; practically every-
one not in intelligence has a way of fancying the best intelligence staff as a
pool of unencumbered and elite manpower ready to be tapped at will. Fight-
ing off such raids is a well-known necessity. Once the intelligence man has
crossed into operations he will have much difficulty arranging his return.
He will soon find himself engulfed in the day-to-day business of the new job.
Soon the intelligence staff is whittled down to its least valuable members and
has thus lost its identity and its functional integrity. This very thing has
happened enough times to be worthy of serious consideration.
Intelligence, if brought too close to its consumers, is likely to be di-
verted in a less crude sense, but scarcely a less damaging one. For instance,
the detailed problems of an operating office can be many and compelling. A
great many of them require the production of "spot intelligence." The tend-
ency will be to divert intelligence personnel to this kind of work. This is not
to argue the work's unimportance, but it is to argue that too much diversion
of this kind makes poor use of an intelligence staff and deprives it of those
long stretches of uninterrupted time required to carry out important long-
range projects.
Finally, if intelligence is brought into and dispersed among appropri-
ate planning or operations sections, the substantive integrity of intelligence
can be seriously injured. Under these conditions the components (regional
- 22 -
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
II
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
or functional) of the former intelligence organization become relatively free
agents responsible solely to the planning or operations chief. They are then
under no compulsion to coordinate their views with other intelligence groups
with cognate interests. It thus becomes increasingly difficult to be sure that
all resources are brought to bear on the problem. Indeed, it is highly prob-
able that it will be dealt with solely by those expert in but a single sector of
the subject.
This, and the want of substantive give and take which it implies, is
not the only disadvantage. In addition there are the contrasting standards
of performance as a price of dispersal. An intelligence outfit, which is
administratively separated from its consumers and unified within itself, is
able to strive for a uniformly excellent product. The best work will inevitably
become the scale against which other work is measured. Destroy that cen-
tralization and unity and you destroy the best and most natural method of
competition and the good deriving from it.
To all the foregoing, there may be administrative remedies. They
will not be wholly effective, but they may be able to meet the worst objections.
There is, however, one high-order disadvantage in bringing the producers
and consumers too close together which will elude the most ingenious ad-
ministrative devices.
Almost any group of men confronted with getting something planned
or done will sooner or later hit upon what they consider the single most
desirable course of action. Usually they will try to reach this solution as
quickly as possible. It is not unlikely, therefore, that they may have arrived
at this solution in ignorance of many relevant and important facts; with their
prejudices and cliche's of thought discriminating in favor of the facts which
they do use. This kind of off-the-cuff solution tends to harden; Their "view"
is thus and so; their "position" therefore, thus and so; their "line"in sup-
port of the "view" and "position" thus and so. Now add the ingredients of
time and opposition and you have something which may be termed "policy."
Now it's rather easy for an intelligence staff itself to fall into this
error; .to have its own difficulties with that view, position, slant, and line
which tends to harden into policy. In spite of the fact that professional schol-
ars, i.e., intelligence officers are supposed to have acquired a technique in
guarding against their own intellectual frailties; they are by no means always
111 successful. Intelligence is full of battles between the pro-I0ihailovitch and
pro-Tito factions, between the champions and opponents of aid to China, be-
tween defenders and detractors of the Jewish nation home in Palestine.
10 The fact that there have been such differences of opinion among supposedly
objective and impartial students who have had access to substantially the
same material, is evidence of someone's surrender to his irrational self.
If intelligence separately administered and thus under the best of
conditions finds itself guilty of hasty and unsound "policy", it is likely to
find itself doing more of this sort of thing when it is under the administrative
111
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
control of its consumers in plans or operations. I do not see how, in human
nature, it can be otherwise. Nor under these conditions do I see how intel-
ligence can escape, every so often, from swinging behind the "policy" of
the operating unit and prostituting itself in the production of what the Nazis
used to call kampfende Wissenchaft (roughly, knowledge to further aims of
state policy.)
I cannot escape the belief that where intelligence is under the ad-
ministrative control of consumers, it will find itself right in the middle of
policy, and that upon occasions it will be the unabashed apologist for a given
policy rather than its impartial and objective analyst. As Walter Lippmann
sagely remarks, "The only institutional safeguard (for impartial and ob-
jective analysis) is to separate as absolutely as it i possible to do so the
staff which executes from the staff which investigates. The two should be
parallel but quite distinct bodies of men, recruited differently, paid if pos-
sible from separate funds, responsible to different heads, intrinsically un-
interested in each other's personal success." (quoted from Public Opinion,
The Macmillan Co., New York, 1922 with the kind permission of the pub-
lisher. Chapter XXVI, Section 2).
For these reasons, when intelligence is too close to operations what
is unquestionably gained in guidance may well be lost in integrity and ob-
jectivity. The absorption of intelligence producers by the consumers may
prove to be too heroic a cure for both disease and patient.
The only way out of the dilemma seems to lie in the very compromise
that is usually attempted: guarantee intelligence its administrative and sub-
stantive integrity by keeping it separate from its consumers; keep trying
every known device to make the users and the producers familiar with each
others organization.
The Problem of Intelligence and Policy Formulation
Intelligence must not be the apologist for policy, as I have said, but
this does not mean that intelligence has no role in policy formulation. Intel-
ligence's role is definite and simple and might be described in two stages:
(1) the exhaustive examination of the situation for which a policy is required,
and (2) the objective and impartial exploration of all the alternative solutions
which the policy problem offers.
It goes without saying that intelligence can skew its findings, so that
one alternative will appear many times more attractive than the others. It
is not heartening to reflect that just this has been done, though it would be
hard to prove that each such crime was one which intelligence embarked
? upon entirely on its own responsiblity. For instance, during the war British
intelligence could prove at the drop of a hat that there was such a thing as
a soft underbelly and that compared to it all other portals to fortress Europa
were as granite. Merely because intelligence is capable of getting off the
- 24 -
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
beam is not sufficient reason to exclude it entirely from policy considerations
or to condemn it as unprincipled. As long as its complement of professional
personnel is of high intellectual and moral caliber, the risks which the policy-
making users run in accepting its analysis of alternatives are far less than
those they would run if intelligence is excluded from councils.
The Problem of IntellWnce (the Product) and its Acceptance
What intelligence desires above all else is that its findings prove use-
ful in making decisions. There is, however, no universal law which obliges
policy, plans, and operations to accept and use these findings. If intelligence
is guilty of poor method or errors in judgment, there is nothing to coerce its
consumers into acting upon its advice. This fact has its benefits and its evils.
The benefits are almost too obvious to mention: for example, no one would
advocate taking a course of action which evidence, not considered by intel-
ligence, indicated to be suicidal. Just because an intelligence aberration
happens to indicate the law of gravity is inoperative in Lent does not constitute
sufficient reason to jump off a high roof on Good Friday. But in this very
laudable liberty to discount intelligence lies a source of danger. Where is one
to start and stop discounting intelligence?
In one of the books for children written by James Willard Shultz there
is a story of some Indian tribes readying themselves for the warpath. The
combined chiefs met to discuss the operation and instructed headquarters
G-2 (a medicine man named White Antelope) to give an estimate of enemy
capabilities. In a couple of days' time White Antelope, having gone through
the necessary professional gyrations, came back to the combined chiefs. It
seems that the gods had favored his ceremonial by granting him a vision in
which he saw alone raven seated on the carcass of a dead deer. As the raven.
feasted he did not notice a magpie who slipped into a tree overhead and took
some observations,nor did not notice that the magpie gave the signal for the
concentration of his deployed force. When the magpies' build-up in strength
was sufficient, they dropped down upon the raven and attacked. The raven
put up a game fight, but as things moved from bad to worse decided to re-
treat to prepared positions. If White Antelope were an irresponsible G-2 he
might have left it at that, but being responsible and feeling that he should
make his contribution to the common cause, he hazarded an interpretation.
To him the raven was the allied force and the magpies were the enemy--
the facts would justify such an interpretation--and plainly the enemy's cap-
abilities were more than adequate. The allies were in for a licking. But Bull
Head who was supreme commander spoke up and said in effect, "What you
tell us is not much more than that the expeditionary force will be in danger.
This we already know. As to the raven and the magpies, it is my belief that
we are the magpies, and the enemy, the raven. We start tomorrow." The
G-2's estimate had not been accepted.
It is important to notice that White Antelope had done his best accord-
ing to a method which was standard operating procedure. Bull Head himself
would have admitted as much. Bull Head did not override his G-2 because of
- 25 -
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
a reasoned distrust of his data or a rational doubt of his objectivity; he over-
rode him on the basis of a hunch and probably a wishful one at that.
Now I do not wish to reject all hunches and intuitions as uniformly
perilous, for there are hunches based upon knowledge and understanding
which are the stuff of highest truth. What I do seek to reject is intuition
based upon nothing and which takes off from the wish. The intelligence corn-
sumer who has been close to the problem of the producer, who knows it
inside out, may have an insight denied the producer. His near view of the
broad aspects of the problem and his remoteness from the fogging detail
and drudgery of surveillance or research may be the very thing which per-
mits him to arrive at a more accurate synthesis of truth than that afforded
the producer. But let the consumer beware. If he overrides the conclusions
of his intelligence arm, and makes a correct estimate, let him deeply ponder
why this came about. Let him not get the notion that he need only consult his
stars to outdo his G-2. If he gets that notion, he will destroy his intelligence
organization--its members will not seek truth if a mere soothsayer may
negate their conclusions.
Adolf Hitler was such a consumer. There is every reason to think
that his intelligence at both surveillance and research levels was technically
adequate, and that his general staff was technically competent. There is
every reason to believe that he got accurate knowledge from his intelligence
and good advice from the staff which based its judgments upon this know-
ledge. But Hitler had his hunches and the first few of them were brilliant.
Because of luck, or because of a profound and perhaps subconscious knowledge
of what was at issue, he called the turn correctly andin opposition to his
more formal advice. But the trouble was that he apparently did not try to
analyze the why of his successful intuition. He went on as if it were a natural,
personal, and infallible source of truth. When he ordered a cut-back in
German war production in the fall of 1941 he began to reap the penalties for
his own errors, i.e., overestimating the Luftwaffe's capabilities and under-
estimating the capabilities of the Soviet Union. Thus, he not only took some
direct and positive steps, but he also took indirect and equally hurtful steps
to lose the war. He succeeded in damaging severely the continuing utility
of his staff and intelligence service.
Where intelligence producers realize that there is no sense in for-
warding knowledge which does not correspond to the consumer's precon-
ceptions, there ceases to be intelligence. The consumer is out on his own
with no more guide than the tea leaf and the crystal ball. He may do well
with them, but for the long haul I would place my money elsewhere. Without
discarding intuition as a false friend, I would urge the consumer to use it
with full knowledge of its frailties. When the findings of the intelligence arm
are regularly ignored because of intuition, the consumer should recognize
that he is turning his back on the instruments by which western man has,
since Aristotle, steadily enlarged his horizons- -those of reason and scientific
method.
- 26 -
Approved For Release 2003/07/10 : CIA-RDP80R01731R003100040071-0
Ap
Ap
FORM NO.
!El ease J.IT.041 i ro D i ? - 1:41-,;,Torim 1 - II
rue Asili -
(SENDER WILL CIRCLE CLASSIFICATION TOP AND BOTTOM)
CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY
OFFICIAL ROUTING SLIP
TO
INITIALS
DATE
i
DDCI
.
3
4
5
FROM
INITIALS
DATE
1
D/Tr ? Matthew Baird
2
3
SIGNATURE
RETURN
DISPATCH
FILE
a series
APPROVAL xINFORMATION
IIACTI ON DIRECT REPLY I I
I 'COMMENT 1 REPLY
PREPARATION OF
CONCURRENCE RECOMMENDATION ,
REMARKS:
-Maid
Copy of -
"The Intelligence Process" - second
of three booklets briefing KENT'S
Intelligence for use in indoctrination
of
Strategic
and
Content of
training. (first booklet "The
Intelligence")
?
Fbr Re MAW 2603/0011 0 : 0114ROPEIGRO1731111:01091f0MICO"
30-4
SEP 1947
'1