{"id":27818,"date":"2016-07-22T11:00:21","date_gmt":"2016-07-22T01:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=27818"},"modified":"2016-07-21T15:36:20","modified_gmt":"2016-07-21T05:36:20","slug":"the-intelligence-jigsaw","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/the-intelligence-jigsaw\/","title":{"rendered":"The intelligence jigsaw"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Image<\/p>\n

I\u2019d like to add a different perspective to the post on the limitations of intelligence that was offered by my colleague, John Coyne. I write as someone who worked at the Office of National Assessments for over 11 years, although I left ONA in late 1996, and have no personal or specific knowledge to offer on the character of the supposed \u2018flawed intelligence\u2019 about Iraqi WMD that\u2019s said to have provided the basis for the invasion of Iraq in 2003.<\/span><\/p>\n

Let me begin by agreeing with John\u2019s analogy on<\/span> the nature of intelligence assessment<\/span><\/a>\u2014it\u2019s like being given 10,000 jigsaw pieces within which an indeterminate number of pieces from a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle are hidden. Intelligence assessment has much of that \u2018puzzle-within-a-puzzle\u2019 quality to it, where you don\u2019t have all the pieces\u2014typically you may have only half\u2014and you aren\u2019t even fully certain that the pieces you do have are entirely authentic. Casting it like that provides a better sense of what intelligence assessment can and can\u2019t do.<\/span><\/p>\n

The analogy\u2019s not meant to belittle the role that intelligence collection and assessment agencies play. In reality, what ONA offers is \u2018all-source assessment\u2019: that is, it merges information that\u2019s publicly available (whether in the form of readily-available media reporting or less accessible \u2018grey literature\u2019), with information that comes through confidential government channels, and with reporting that comes in through more arcane sources (what we commonly call \u2018secrets\u2019). As you go up that chain, information becomes more expensive\u2014and harder\u2014to collect. In essence, then, the government has spent a tidy sum of money to get the analyst the initial 10,000 jigsaw pieces. The eventual incomplete puzzle might seem a weak foundation for grand conclusions, but typically the analyst has access to more pieces of that puzzle than anyone else.<\/span><\/p>\n

Still, the incompleteness of the intelligence analyst\u2019s knowledge is, I believe, the best explanation for why it\u2019s wrong to think\u2014as many do\u2014that the US, UK and Australian government \u2018lied\u2019 about Saddam\u2019s possession of WMD in 2003. \u2018Lying\u2019 would mean they had the complete jigsaw puzzle, and consciously misrepresented what the jigsaw showed. I think they never had the full picture. Intelligence doesn\u2019t offer a perfect understanding of the world\u2014and Iraq was a hard collection target.<\/span><\/p>\n

So, let\u2019s assume that strategic analysts in 2003 started with an incomplete puzzle. What happens next? Here, I think, is where the going gets even tougher. The job of an intelligence analyst is to call it as s\/he sees it\u2014that is, to give the government the best assessment of what they think the puzzle\u2019s actually about. Because the puzzle\u2019s incomplete, good assessment turns upon good pattern recognition skills, expertise and experience. But let me make one thing plain: analysts are not paid to tell the government that they don\u2019t know what the puzzle shows. Nor are they paid to offer a string of conflicting and ambiguous judgments to their ministerial readers. If ONA were to do that, it would\u2014and should\u2014be closed down.<\/span><\/p>\n

Good assessment turns on good judgment. And for that reason, when we think about how to \u2018get the process right\u2019, I think that\u2019s essentially done by hiring the best people. I\u2019m opposed to the idea that analytical tradecraft should fall under the purview of the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security. It\u2019s fictitious to believe that an external agency should stand over ONA analysts qualifying their judgments. If an analyst writes \u2018Iraq probably has weapons of mass destruction\u2019, and someone else comes along and\u2014in the spirit of contestability\u2014 adds \u2018but it might not\u2019, I really don\u2019t see how that helps. I don\u2019t think it even adds any new information.<\/span><\/p>\n

The myth of the \u2018lie\u2019 means that lots of people over the years have come to believe that Saddam Hussein never had weapons of mass destruction. That\u2019s simply wrong. The Iraqis used chemical weapons against the Iranians in the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. Further, the existence of a biological weapons program was dragged from the Iraqis in 1995, when the Iraqis confessed not merely to manufacturing biological agents but to weaponising them.<\/span><\/p>\n

Yes, the UN Special Commission did good work in tracing and destroying the bulk of the Iraqi arsenal in the 1990s. But Saddam frequently led UNSCOM inspectors on a protracted game of hide-and-seek. And in 1998 he threw them out altogether. True, the inspectors returned in 2002. But the question that surely rebounded around all three Western governments in 2003 was \u2018Why would Saddam go to such lengths to conceal the status of his WMD stocks unless he had something to hide?\u2019 Richard Haass has<\/span> answered<\/span><\/a> that for us: Saddam didn\u2019t want it known that he <\/span>didn\u2019t<\/span><\/i> have any WMD. If that\u2019s the real explanation, Saddam Hussein was playing a decidedly risky game\u2014not least because he was relying on the ability of Western intelligence analysts to separate out the pieces of two distinct jigsaw puzzles from within the 10,000 pieces. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019d like to add a different perspective to the post on the limitations of intelligence that was offered by my colleague, John Coyne. I write as someone who worked at the Office of National Assessments …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":27819,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1524,170,191,1030],"class_list":["post-27818","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-chilcot-inquiry","tag-intelligence","tag-iraq","tag-ona"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe intelligence jigsaw | The Strategist<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/the-intelligence-jigsaw\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The intelligence jigsaw | The Strategist\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I\u2019d like to add a different perspective to the post on the limitations of intelligence that was offered by my colleague, John Coyne. 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