Introduction
Recently, the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence (DI) has seen a spate of new thinking on its mission and on how it conducts that mission. Notable examples are the mandatory Tradecraft 2000 course and the publication of a paper entitled Intelligence Changes in Analytic Tradecraft in CIA. As well-meaning and insightful as all this new thinking is, however, most is coming from senior DI managers, not from the analysts and other junior and midlevel officers who carry out the DI’s mission on a daily basis.
In addition, some frontline DI officers, myself included, would take exception to the idea that the concepts put forth in Tradecraft 2000 truly represent new thinking. Much of it is merely a return to the basics of DI tradecraft that many of us in the Directorate seem to have forgotten.
Before leaving the DI on a rotational assignment, I endeavored to set down some of the axioms by which I have tried to live in my career. Initially, this exercise was begun to provide some practical advice to a new analyst joining my branch, but I eventually decided that these axioms might be of interest to officers throughout the DI. Although I have not rigidly adhered to them, they
have served me well as general guides to professional conduct as a DI analyst. To experienced analysts, many of the principles will sound like truisms and, if that is the case, all the better. I just tried to codify, general rules that guide what we in the DI do on a daily basis, and I would not invent presume to new tradecraft. But the new DI analyst, and more than a few old hands, would be well served by remembering these 15 principles in their everyday conduct, that I suspect will never be adopted officially.