Westerfield, H. Bradford, ed. Inside the CIA's Private World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995.
Nearly thirty-five years ago, in 1962, former Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles highlighted in The Craft of Intelligence "discipline and technique in the intelligence field what we call the tradecraft of intelligence." He did not provide new disclosures of the tradecraft. Now we have Inside the CIA's Private World, which gives us the best glimpse to date into it, from the writing of stellar practitioners. This volume shows that the discipline of intelligence is extremely rich and varied. Indeed, the discipline seems to approximate the breadth of academic study of international relations, defying understanding of its overall aspect by any single individual or specialty.
This volume collects some of the best articles selected by H. Bradford Westerfield, a long-time student of intelligence tradecraft, from the CIA's internal journal Studies in Intelligence. Off-limits to the general public because of its mostly security-sensitive contents, the journal was the brain-child of Sherman Kent, chief of the CIA's Office of National Estimates from 1952 to 1967, who desired it to provide "the institutional mind and memory of our [intelligence] discipline." The 32 articles here, declassified except for a few security excisions, are divided into seven categories: imagery intelligence collection; overt human intelligence collection; clandestine human intelligence collection; human intelligence and its consumers; intelligence analysis; intelligence analysis and its consumers; and counterespionage. Within these categories, the articles provide unparalleled understanding of the principal concerns, techniques and standards of intelligence practitioners.
Most of the articles were apparently intended as broad overviews in specialized areas primers for the uninitiated and exemplars for those engaged in the field (for example, the importance of photographic interpretation; the interpreter as a source of intelligence; eliciting information without revealing intent; the role of the intelligence reports officer; improving basic intelligence). Others are case studies of intelligence discipline at work (determining Soviet tritium and lithium production; reviews of how a Swedish naval official was recruited by the KGB and later found out, how an American Army official came to be involved in a counter-intelligence operation, and how intelligence backup enhanced American performance at a UNCTAD conference). Since Studies in Intelligence was circulated primarily to career practitioners, it appears the primary purpose of these pieces was to show the maturation of a discipline.
Just how the discipline matured is less clear from these pages. The articles only rarely address the same topic; they do not build upon each other. A few particularly good pieces (on the Nosenko case, on newer techniques of intelligence analysis, on the growing merger between current intelligence and clandestine intelligence acquisition, and on the "secret war" between State Department diplomats and CIA embassy operatives) air out controversies suppressed from public literature. The articles show the clashing perspectives of practitioners in different areas. For example, an article on "Basic Psychology for Intelligence Analysts" points to the intervention of policy interests as the biggest problem for intelligence analysts, while other articles deal with the need to better understand the political process and with selling the intelligence product better. Some essays propound firm "laws of conduct," while others emphasize improvisation.
Missing from these articles are such significant topics as the so-called "Crown Jewels," the strategic impact of intelligence, the noise factor in intelligence estimation, the fruits of covert action, the CIA's "mid-1970s firestorm" (as Westerfield terms it), domestic accountability, and signals intelligence. Westerfield points out in his introduction to the volume that from the journal's inception in 1955, Studies in Intelligence persistently slighted covert action and heavily emphasized intelligence analysis.
Two general questions can be asked after a reading of this volume. First, how can the articles be substantively integrated? The pieces presented here need overall assessment and structure if there is to be better appreciation of the evolution of intelligence as discipline. Discipline, moreover, requires broader coherence so that the constituent elements serve a purpose transcending their individually absorbing thrusts. Efforts to build on these pieces will be hampered by the absence of an index in this volume. Yet the need for coherence and interconnections seems all the greater to this observer because the overall impression from the essays as with other studies officially commissioned or assisted by the CIA is one of a world removed from the normal realm of domestic or world affairs.
A second and related question deals with validation: are the essays in this volume to be evaluated according to the standards of any academic discipline, or instead by distinctive attributes? According to the first interpretation, the intelligence discipline whatever its outlines and techniques is fundamentally similar to any other sustained intellectual pursuit, with well-accepted foundations, standards of evidence, methods and rewards. This was Sherman Kent's abiding belief, and the ideal he set for tradecraft. Yet there are repeated references in these essays to the excessive caution of intelligence analysts, their bias toward the status quo, and their use of relatively simplified models to protect them against uncertainty. These tendencies are shared by intellectuals outside the intelligence field, as Thomas Kuhn has shown.
The other interpretation argues that the discipline of intelligence is fundamentally different from others. Certainly it is less open, more compartmentalized, more prioritized, and more consequential for national security than other disciplines. Although one piece in the collection, on basic intelligence, emphasizes the connections with outside scholarship and the general fund of ideas, the other pieces apply wider-employed methodologies, the thrust of the papers is one of separation from broader norms. Inasmuch as the CIA and KGB waged world-wide war against each other for nearly fifty years, whatever heroic reflection of the intelligence discipline is contained in these pages must be judged in light of the enormous strain in waging that war. Tested by war, the craft of intelligence has certainly justified and vindicated itself, but the foundations of the discipline remain uncertain. War was not the best breeding ground for unity and coherence in discipline. Indeed, the growth in the craft, coupled with the weakness of foundations, gives us and intelligence practitioners plenty to worry about.
Barry H. Steiner
California State University, Long Beach