Constructing Cassandra: Reframing Intelligence Failure at the CIA, 1947-2001 - Hardcover

Jones, Milo; Silberzahn, Philippe

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804785805 ISBN 13: 9780804785808

Verlag: Stanford University Press, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

Constructing Cassandra analyzes the intelligence failures at the CIA that resulted in four key strategic surprises experienced by the US: the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, the Iranian revolution of 1978, the collapse of the USSR in 1991, and the 9/11 terrorist attacks-surprises still play out today in U.S. policy. Although there has been no shortage of studies exploring how intelligence failures can happen, none of them have been able to provide a unified understanding of the phenomenon.

To correct that omission, this book brings culture and identity to the foreground to present a unified model of strategic surprise; one that focuses on the internal make-up the CIA, and takes seriously those Cassandras who offered warnings, but were ignored. This systematic exploration of the sources of the CIA's intelligence failures points to ways to prevent future strategic surprises.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Milo Jones is Managing Director of a consulting firm and teaches geopolitics and strategy as a Visiting Professor at IE Business School in Madrid, Spain. Philippe Silberzahn is Professor of Strategy at EMLyon Business School in France and a Research Fellow at Ecole Polytechnique in France.

Milo Jones is Managing Director of a consulting firm and teaches geopolitics and strategy as a Visiting Professor at IE Business School in Madrid, Spain.Philippe Silberzahn is Professor of Strategy at EMLyon Business School in France and a Research Fellow at Ecole Polytechnique in France.

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Constructing Cassandra

REFRAMING INTELLIGENCE FAILURE AT THE CIA, 1947–2001

By Milo Jones, Philippe Silberzahn

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2013 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8047-8580-8

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments................................................
vii
Abbreviations..............................................................
ix
Introduction...............................................................
1
1 The Work of Intelligence.................................................
17
2 How the CIA Is Made......................................................
38
3 The Iranian Revolution...................................................
80
4 The Collapse of the USSR.................................................
102
5 The Cuban Missile Crisis.................................................
135
6 The Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001..............................
192
7 The CIA and the Future of Intelligence...................................
234
Notes......................................................................
255
Bibliography...............................................................
335
Index......................................................................
361

CHAPTER 1

THE WORK OF INTELLIGENCE

THIS CHAPTER HAS FOUR SECTIONS. The first section makes the case that intelligenceis a social problem, a recognition that has significant implicationsfor the work of the CIA. The second section introduces the theoretical viewpoint,social constructivism, and explains why it is well suited to investigatethe CIA's work. In sum, this is because intelligence work happens not merelyin the minds of individual analysts but in a distinctive community, the CIA.This section also spends time illuminating the details of exactly what is meantby "intelligence work," especially "intelligence analysis," to demonstrate itsessentially social nature. The third section introduces a crucial distinction betweentwo types of strategic surprises, secrets and mysteries. The fourth andfinal section introduces the intelligence cycle, a model that we use to examinethe impact of the CIA's identity and culture on its work.

THE SOCIAL FOUNDATIONS OF INTELLIGENCE

Explicit recognition of the social nature of intelligence analysis has emergedonly in the last few years. In the following pages, however, we examine theactual process of intelligence analysis in detail and expose it as an almost entirelysocial process and therefore one well suited to a social constructivistexamination. Time spent laboring over the social nature of intelligence analysisin this section illuminates an activity that those outside the world of intelligencehave difficulty picturing precisely. A close look at the actual processesof analysis here also introduces documentary material that Chapter 2 drawson to elucidate the social mechanisms that create and maintain the agency'sidentity.

Anecdotal accounts of both intelligence analysis and of specific strategicsurprises have always contained accounts of social interactions, but scholarsand practitioners have explicitly recognized the essentially social nature ofintelligence analysis only in the last few years. The literature targeting improvedanalysis has usually consisted either of collections of practical analytictechniques for the individual analyst (essentially, what an individual "shoulddo") or descriptions of the various psychological traps to which individualanalysts are prone (essentially, what an individual "should not do"). One canobserve this social void in both CIA publications about intelligence analysisand in external sources.

The slighting of the essentially social basis of U.S. intelligence analysisbegan at its birth. Sherman Kent, in Strategic Intelligence for American WorldPolicy, describes a seven-step process of intelligence analysis. None of Kent'sanalytical steps overtly recognizes the social nature of analysis. Quite the contrary:Step One of Kent's process of analysis reads, "1. The appearance of aproblem requiring the attention of a strategic intelligence staff." Note a peculiarthing about this step: The problem to be analyzed simply "appears"—theanalyst and the agency as a whole are unproblematically presented by the exogenousenvironment with this problem; they do not participate in its definitionor creation.

This uncritical, deus ex machina introduction of a discrete intelligenceproblem is even more peculiar considering Step Two of Kent's process:"2. Analysis of this problem to discover which facets of it are of actual importanceto the U.S., and which of several lines of approach are most likelyto be useful to its governmental consumers." Clearly, Kent is describing anessentially social process as unproblematically as if intelligence issues wereatomic particles.

For the readers of his book, Kent's positivistic approach is not a surprise.In the preceding paragraphs (by the man, one may note, called "the godfatherof National Intelligence Estimates," after whom the CIA's school for analystsis named, and whose "Principles of Intelligence Analysis" analysts still use intraining), Kent says:

A medieval philosopher would have been content to get his truth by extrapolatingfrom Holy Writ, an African chieftain by consultation with his witchdoctor, or a mystic like Hitler from communion with his intuitive self. But weinsist, and have insisted for generations, that truth is to be approached, if notattained, through research guided by a systematic method. In the social scienceswhich largely constitute the subject matter of strategic intelligence, thereis such a method. It is much like the method of the physical sciences. It is notthe same method but it is a method none the less.

Kent then elucidates in a footnote the qualification to this naked positivismmade in the final sentence quoted above: namely, that in the social sciencethere is "enormous difficulty" in "running controlled and repetitive experiments."This idea, while true, does not reveal any appreciation by Kent forthe distinction between natural and social facts or any insight into the socialnature of analysis.

One might object that Kent's book is a 1950s relic. As far as its attitudes tosocial facts are concerned, it is not. To offer but one example, Abram Shulskyand Gary Schmitt's Silent Warfare: Understanding the World of Intelligence, a2002 book still widely respected among analysts and used in many courses onintelligence, says:

Analysis refers to the process of transforming bits and pieces of informationthat are collected in whatever fashion into something that is usable by policymakers and military commanders. The result, or "intelligence product," cantake the form of short memorandums, elaborate formal reports, briefings, orany other means of presenting information.

Silent Warfare then goes on to describe cryptanalysis, telemetry analysis,photo interpretation, and the production of scientific and technical intelligence,military intelligence, political intelligence, and economic and (even)"social" intelligence (sic) without addressing the social aspects of the analyticalprocess. The closest that the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2013
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804785805
• ISBN 13: 9780804785808
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 392
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande