REFLECTIONS ON PREMONITORY INTELLIGENCE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP93T01132R000100010007-6
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: S
• Document Page Count: 8
• Document Creation Date: December 27, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 27, 2012
• Sequence Number: 7
• Publication Date: April 6, 1971
• Content Type: MEMO

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3iteRIT
6 April 1971
N2KORANDUK: Reflections on Premonitory Intelligence
1. The current intelligence analyst, caught in a relentless flood
of paper and events, often finds it difficult to reserve the time and
energy required for one of the primary missions of intelligence--warning
and anticipation. OCI over the years has refined the techniques and
methods of current reporting to a high degree of professionalism. It
might be useful, however, to take an occasional look at the special
problems posed by premonitory intelligence--a function that tends to
fall between the routine missions of estimative and current intelligence
and one that has been neglected in recent years by the intelligence
community generally, perhaps in part because of the growing diffusion of
functions and specialisation and because of the preoccupation with military
hardware and strategy.
2. There are two aspects of the problem of premonitory intelligence
that might be characterized as the "nature of the beast" and the "human
factor." The following quotations from observers who have pondered this
problem may help to illuminate these features:
Nature of the least
It is much easier after the event to sort the relevant from
the irrelevant signals. After the event, of course, a signal is
always crystal clear. tut before the event it is obscure and
pregnant with conflicting meanings. It comes to the observer
embedded in an atmosphere of 'noise,' i.e., in the company of all
sorts of information that is useless and irrelevant for predicting
the particular disaster. We failed to anticipate Pearl larbor
not for want of the relevant materials, but because of a plethora
of irrelevant ones....There is a difference between having a signal
available somewhere in the heap of irrelevancies, and perceiving it
as a warning.
Roberta Wohlstetter Pearl larbor--
Warning and Jecision
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The historian can never quite forbear to make retrospective
prophecies, because he knows the end. %it let us humbly remember,
when we look at the past, that as far as the future goes the
historian can foresee little and that his occasional predidtions
usually fail to come true."
--Colo Mann
Politicians act from one day to the next, from one year to the
next; their improvisations are what historians later mistake for
a grand design.
--A. J. P. Taylor
Foreign policy is largely irrational and comes up against
elements that are also irrational. If it were rational, if there
were not alwgys behind it the urge to gamble, determination to have
power, and deadly fear, it might be possible to find a compromise.
-- Colo Mann
The luman Factor
What these examples illustrate is the very human tendency to
pay attention to the signals that support current expectations about
enemy behavior. If no one is listening for signals of an attack
against a highly improbable target, then it is very difficult for the
signals to be heard. For every signal that cane into the information
net in 1941, there were usually several plausible alternative explana-
tions, and it is not surprising that our observers and analysts were
inclined to select the explanations that fitted the popular hypotheses.
Apparently human beings have a stubborn attachment to old beliefs and
an equally stubborn resistance to new material that will upset them.
There is a good deal of evidence, some of it quantitative, that
in conditions of great uncertainty people tend to predict that events
that they want to happen actually will happen. Wishfulness in condi-
tions of uncertainty is natural and is hard to banish by exhortation--
or by wishing. Further, the uncertainty of strategic warning is
intrinsic, since an enemy decision to attack might be reversed or the
direction of the attack changed.
-- Roberta Wohlstetter
There is a tendency in our planning to confuse the unfamiliar
with the improbable. The contingency we have not considered seriously
looks strange; what looks strange is thought improbable; what is
improbable need not be considered seriously.
surprise, when it happens to a government, is likely to be a
complicated, diffuse, bureaucratic thing. It includes neglect of
responsibility, but also responsibility so poorly defined or so
ambiguously delegated that action gets lost. It includes the alarm
that fails to work, but also the alarm that has gone off so often it
has been disconnected. It includes the unalert watchman, but also the
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one who knows he'll be chewed out by his superior if he gets
higher authority out of bed. It includes the inability of
individual human beings to rise to the occasion until they are
sure it is the occasion?which is usually too late.
Whether at Pearl 'arbor or at the Berlin Wall, surprise is
everything in a government's failure to anticipate effectively.
The danger is not that we shall read the signals and indicators
with too little skill; the danger is in a poverty of expectations--
a routine obsession with a few dangers that may be familiar rather
than likely. The planner should think in subtler and more varie-
gated terms and allow for a wider range of contingencies.
-- Thomas C. Schelling
In the preparation of estimates with regard to soviet policy,
their actions and reactions, it is always well to have among the
estimators one or two persons who are designated to play the roles
of the devil's advocate, who can advance all the reasons why a
Khrushchev could take an unusual, dramatic or, as viewed from
our own vantage point, even an unwise and unremunerative course
of action. Of course, one would reach rather ridiculous conclu-
sions, and certainly wrong conclusions in most cases, if one al-
ways came up with an estimate that the abnormal is what the Soviet
rnion will probably do. It is well, however, that the policy
makers should be reminded from time to time that such abnormalities
in soviet action are not to be excluded.
-- Allen Dulles The Craft of
Intelligence
3. In the field of political intelligence, the primary task of
premonitory intelligence is to identify and interpret those turning points,
decisions and indications of imminent shifts in policy and intentions that
may signal developments of direct interest and concern to the U. A sub-
stantial part of the premonitory mission can be performed satisfactorily
through routine reporting and comment based directly on field reports and
all-source coverage. Almost any current intelligence article can be said
to be "premonitory" in the sense that it identifies problems, issues,
vulnerabilities, assets, initiatives and plans or prospects for future
action that carry a warning/anticipation dimension. This memorandum, of
course, is addressed to the relatively small number of high priority questions
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on which "hard" information or "documentary" evidence is rarely, if ever,
available. To confine political intelligence on these questions to the
base of available documentary evidence would be to condemn intelligence
to failure to provide some warning of almost every significant shift in
the policies and intentions of major intelligence targets. Any strengthen-
ing of our capacities to provide warning intelligence in these areas must
rest primarily on the analyst's personal skills and on methodologies that
will enable him to extend his analytical reach and insights beyond the
limits set by documentary evidence.
4. Part of the problem in improving performance of the warning
mission is to find ways to deal with a "poverty of expectations" and an
almost instinctive inertia that lead analysts to reject or downgrade the
likelihood of change or departues frost the well-established and the
familiar. (This memorandum will not deal with another major part of the
problem?organisational arrangements and coordination procedures that
inject an additional element of inertia, inhibit alert and imaginative
analysis, and hold interpretation within the limits of prevailing "popular
hypotheses.")
S. The Office has experimented over the years with a variety of
procedures to help guard against ex post facto charges of having been
surprised by an important turn of events. The blanket approach of
attempting to draw up lists of evil events that could occur all over the
globe did not prove particularly useful. The "indications of political
instability" experiment was a more promising venture in some ways but it
had the disadvantage of focusing on a range of contingencies that was too
narrow and too vaguely defined. A more useful approach--and one addressed
to questions of greatest concern to our consumers--would concentrate
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primarily on policy analysis.
6. The core of this approach would be a systematic examination of
policy options available to the target government. The first step would be
to define the problem in a way that reduces it to essentials; this would
include a brief summary of the background and development of the problem.
The second step would identify issues, both foreign and domestic, that
must be considered if a government's pblicy and intentions are to be
understood. A key element of this step would be an examination of the
relationship of the government's foreign interests and options to its
domestic political/economic situation and exigencies. The third step
would articulate alternative courses of action and judge their relative
advantages and disadvantages. The final step would rank the options in
order of probability, indicate the likely preferred solution, and identify
the main imponderables and elements of greatest uncertainty that might
lead to a rapid or major reordering of probabilities.
7. Many analysts go through a sorting out and weighing process along
these lines as a routine part of their work. Others are more reluctant to
"stretch their minds"; they tend to allow their conception of a problem
to be shaped primarily by the information and judgments gleaned from the
flow of paper. The main value of a systematic, orderly procedure outlined
above is that it would oblige the analyst to confront questions, possibilities
and contingencies he might otherwise ignore if his attention were riveted
exclusively on his in-box. This approach would help to stimulate a disci-
plined search for alternatives to the prevailing "conventional wisdom"
and sharpen the analyst's capacity to ask important questions. It would
act as a safeguard against the hazards of intellectual inertia that gives
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rise to a "poverty of expectations." it would help the analyst in the
essential task of placing himself "in the shoes" of the target regime and
of trying to see problems, dilemmas and options through their eyes.
8. The systematic analysis of options proposed here should be
applied to all major intelligence questions and targets--to both foreign
and domestic policies. As a general rule, an options paper should be set
in motion at an early stage of a newly emerging problem (for example, the
outer or death of a major political leader, the Sast-Aest Pakistan crisis)
or when the stakes and issues in a long-standing problem seem to be altered
by an initiative by one of the parties or by changes in the internal state
of affairs of the countries concerned (for example, the Arab-Israeli contest,
korth Vietnamese political/military policy, ',qest Germany's Ostpolitik and
the Nerlin talks).
9. Since the principal purpose of the options approach is to stimulate
a constant and systematic search for new and "relevant" signals, and since
the capacity to play the devil's advocate role with regard to one's own
work tends to be rare in any organization (particularly one that operates
under the kind of pressures inherent in OCI's mission), the options study
system should take place at several levels. OCI's existing structure and
procedures contain a variety of safeguards in the review process. 3ut
this process should be supplemented and balanced by an "options monitor"
who is detached both organizationally and "intellectually" from the normal
OCI production and review chain. is function would be to pose questions
and formulate alternative interpretations from the vantage point of an
"outsider" who is free of the pressures of daily production and therefore
in a better position to resist the tendency to "select the explanations
that fit the popular hypotheses." In a word, the "options monitor" would
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play the role of the devil's advocate prescribed by Mr. Dulles. Senior
officers in OCI should be encouraged to contribute their own insights,
suggestions and hunches to this multi-layered process--on any subject
on the current agenda.
10. One way to stimulate such thinking and contributions would be
to circulate brief options papers prepared by the branches to all division
chiefs and deputies and staff officers. The monitor should be charged
with canvassing the views of specialists in other DDI offices and OSE.
Finally, the options monitor should be responsible for conducting postmortem
examinations of intelligence production on a periodic basis on a limited
number of priority questions, as well as special post mortems on "crisis"
episodes. These postmortems would have the sole purpose of refining and
developing the options study system through retrospective evaluations of
OCI's record and performance in the premonitory mission.
11. A substantial portion of the options papers probably could be
transformed into intelligence memoranda. Some of these would qualify for
formal publication as memoranda or FD1 items. Others could be circulated
within the Agency or passed up the line to our masters as informal briefing
papers. These premonitory memoranda would provide a device for breaking
free of the limitations imposed by the V311 coordination process on the
relatively few and infrequent occasions when OCI sees an obligation or
opportunity to issue a warning item that probably could not be coordinated
for CII publication. These papers would be useful in calling attention again
to those difficult and ambiguous areas of political intelligence where there
will never be reliable "hard" information on the polities and intentions
of major V3 intelligence targets--and in serving as reminders that alert
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and experienced analysts can, on occasion, fill crucial warning intelligence
gaps with their insights and informed projections.
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