13 December 1999. Thanks to DN.

The Washington Post, December 13, 1999

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38322-1999Dec9.html

## Inside Information

By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer

As digitized data proliferates wildly and moves across the globe at cyberspeed, growing numbers of commercial intelligence entrpreneurs say the CIA is losing its analytic edge.

Their claim makes a certain amount of intuitive sense, since information the CIA used to have to steal from Soviet bloc countries now gets offered up for free on the World Wide Web. No less an authority than Richard Kerr, a former CIA deputy director, is already on record as saying, "The intelligence community has got to get used to the fact that it no longer controls most of the information."

CIA critics have long faulted the agency's Directorate of Intelligence (DI) for churning out Pablum or worse, cooking the books to tell presidents what they want to hear. Now the "open source" entrepreuners have a new plaint: DI analysts miss the forest for the trees by obssessing on "secrets" gleaned from satellites and spies as they devalue information from open sources, precisely because it isn't secret.

John E. McLaughlin, the CIA's deputy director for intelligence, has heard it all many times and responds in a word: nonsense.

"There is a tremendous volume of data that everyone is dealing with these days," McLaughlin said in a recent interview. "But to me, the information age hasn't produced a convergence on truth, it's produced a cacophony about what's really happening."

Best in the world

Not suprisingly, McLaughlin argues the opposite case: The DI is not only the world's best analytical intelligence shop, he said, it's investing large amounts of money to maintain its lead.

"What makes us different?" McLaughlin asked. "First, this may sound dumb, but this is the Central Intelligence Agency. This is the CIA. The key thing is central. This is where everything ought to come together. And my analysts are distinguished by several characeristics that I don't think any other group of analysts in the U.S. government share."

He names four:

They're multi-disciplinary. "I can pick up the phone and have a world class expert come up here on a military issue, a political issue, an economic issue, a scientific and technical issue, a chemical issue, a physical science issue, a missile issue. You name a country or subject."

They're global. "We're not excused from anything."

They're independent. "We're not attached to anyone. Our job is to stand apart and call it as objectively and clearly as we can."

And, perhaps most importantly, they have access to secrets. "What defines who we are is the blending of open source and classified data."

"Practically every intelligence success I can think of," McLaughlin said, "resulted from what I would call all-source analysis. That is, someone who sat down and pieced together the open source data with data from satellites, data from intercepts, data from agents, and got the picture."

To illustrate what he's talking about, McLaughlin tells the story of the CIA engineer who burst into his office with startling news in July 1997: Iran had just knocked seven or eight years off the development program for its intermediate range ballistic missile. McLaughlin's point: the engineer's discovery wasn't something he found on the Web through Yahoo.

"I think we have deep expertise here," McLaughlin said. "And we have the resources to build that expertise."

Investing in the future

Whatever became of that CIA engineer?

McLaughlin proudly notes that he is now doing graduate work in engineering, one of 70 DI analysts off studying on college campuses twice the number on paid academic sabbatical a year ago.

The increase has been financed out of an investment fund created, under Tenet's overall strategic plan for the CIA, by skimming funds off all the DI's other accounts. The investment fund, McLaughlin said, has also been tapped to double language training for DI analysts.

"One of every three analysts in this Direcotrate has taken, within the last 18 months, some kind of language training, either part-time or full-time," he said. "And we've increased our language training by embedding language instructors right here in our programs. So if you work on China, for example, you will have a Mandarin instructor right down the hall from you so you can go study at your lunch hour if you want."

Finally, money from the investment fund has also gone to increase McLaughlin's travel budget by 35 percent so increased numbers of analysts can soak up "ground truth" in their countries of expertise. "You can have a Ph.D. in Egyptian politics," McLaughlin said. "But if you haven't been lost in Cairo, you don't know."

But all of this represents only the back end, McLaughlin said, of the DI's expertise building efforts. The front end, he said, is being fueled by the CIA's largest recruiting effort in a decade. Of the 250 new hires joining the DI this year, McLaughlin said, 30 percent have at least five years experience in the private sector, often overseas; 35 percent have college grade point averages of 3.7 or higher; 75 percent have graduate degrees, and 90 have competency in a foreign language between the two and five level, with five being native.

"I've managed to increase our language competence in Arabic and Mandarin by over 100 percent in those two programs just through our recruiting over the last year and a half," McLaughlin said.

A lack of long-term research?

Melvin A. Goodman, a Soviet expert and former CIA colleague who is now a senior fellow at Center for International Policy, calls McLaughlin "fair-minded and open." But he faults the DI, on McLaughlin's watch and those of his predecessors in the 1990s, for doing too little substantive long-term research.

"Over the last several years, the directorate has been turned into an intelligence wire service," Goodman said. "They'll brief anybody in town, and they write their President's Daily Brief items, but long-term research and strategic analysis they do very little of that."

Goodman buys the argument that DI analysts are too obsessed with the agency's own secrets. "They put too much weight on clandestine reporting that cache, need to know, sources and methods, they have some great belief in that. There is a lot of open data that they're not using or know how to use. And they're too close to the [Directortate of Operations]. They're two different institutions. One needs to be objective and detached from policy, and the DO is right in the middle of policy. There's a lot of fundamental steps that have to be taken, and they're just not being done."

McLaughlin demurs.

One of his priorities, he said, is "to really restore the tradition of doing long-range strategic analysis here." The DI is now doing 20 such studies a year, he said, on topics like "what will South Africa look like five years from now? How will the Korean Penninsula ultimately end its division and what will the consequences of that be? What will China's economy look like in the 21st century?"

McLaughlin also took exception with Goodman's contention that the DI lacks independence. "In fact, I tell my analysts, 'Look, the strength of our product comes from the tension between praise and criticism," McLaughlin said. "Thinking about why does something prove to be helpful to [a policy maker], why does something not?

"The strong ethic is to draw a distinction between three things: what we know, what we don't know, and what we think. So people have some basis for understanding literally what we concretely, indisputably know, and what we infer from that. I've dealt with other intelligence services, many of which are very good. I would say that among the things that distinguish us is that commitment to that kind of tradecraft."

When McLaughlin was a young analyst trainee at the agency, Sherman Kent once came and addressed his class. Kent was a legendary DI figure who helped define modern intelligence analysis at the CIA before going on to teach at Yale.

At one point, McLaughlin recalled, he raised his hand and said, "Mr. Kent, I've just joined the CIA. Can you define for me in a phrase or two what you think our mission is as analysts?"

"Our job," Kent replied, "is to raise the level of debate."

Reflecting on that moment, McLaughlin said Kent's words ring as true today as they did 27 years ago.

"At the end of the day, fundamentally," McLaughlin said, "you have to know what you're talking about."

© 1999 The Washington Post Company