IV.

How the CIA Gathers and Analyzes Intelligence

The excitement of spying and secret operations sometimes leads people to assume that a piece of information is important just because it is secret. In reality, CIA analysts spend much of their time gathering and analyzing information from newspapers, television and radio broadcasts, speeches by foreign leaders, and other public sources. CIA analysts call these open sources, and they are sometimes adequate to predict how a country is likely to act in the future. This enables the president, Congress, and other important officials to formulate effective U.S. policy. In many cases, however, open sources provide only an incomplete picture of how a country will act. In some instances, in fact, governments may deliberately disseminate false information in order to fool the United States and other countries.

In many cases open sources do not provide enough information to enable analysts to draw firm conclusions. A piece of the picture will often be missing or unclear. Analysts must find the missing piece of the picture, which is often deliberately concealed by potential enemies of the United States. Once the analysts have found the piece, they must rely on their training and judgment to recognize where it fits into the overall picture. To help CIA analysts develop a complete understanding of world events, the CIA supplements open sources with three clandestine (secret) sources. The clandestine sources include human intelligence provided by CIA field officers, electronic intelligence gathering, and intelligence provided by other agencies. Analysts sift through and evaluate all the open and clandestine sources to develop a general assessment of how a country will act. The analysts pass these assessments to their superiors, who forward important reports to the director of central intelligence, who takes responsibility for keeping the president informed.

A.

Field Officers

The CIA deploys hundreds of field officers all over the world to gather intelligence for the United States. The field officers report to CIA headquarters through the station chief in the country where they are placed. Each station chief supervises several field officers, assessing the information they have gathered and sending it to CIA headquarters. Field officers are expected to have detailed knowledge of the country where they are stationed and to be able to speak its language, although the CIA has sometimes been criticized for sending out unqualified and poorly trained personnel. Field officers must be United States citizens.

Field officers rarely break into foreign military bases, infiltrate political parties, or otherwise try to collect sensitive information themselves. Instead they usually persuade foreign citizens to provide information. Sometimes foreign citizens volunteer to give secret information to the CIA. In oppressive regimes, their motive is sometimes altruistic and even patriotic—they feel they can best serve their country by providing the CIA with information that will help bring about social and political change or diminish the possibility of war. Such a spy is known as a defector in place.

In other situations CIA field officers use money or blackmail to convince foreign citizens to betray their country. The CIA field officer’s most difficult job is figuring out who might be willing to spy for the United States, and then using the right amount of persuasion and coercion to turn the foreign citizen to the American cause. The process of identifying and turning a foreign citizen is delicate because the best sources of information are often senior government and military officials. Approaching the wrong official might lead the foreign government to arrest or even kill the field officer. Even after a subject has been turned, field officers must constantly assess the accuracy of the information that he or she provides.

Because turning a foreign citizen is difficult and the intelligence received is sometimes unreliable, the most valuable spy is often not someone who has been turned, but a defector in place. At times, such “human assets” have supplied vital information that could not have been obtained by technical means. For example, from 1953 until his execution by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) sometime in 1959 or 1960, Pyotr Semyonovich Popov, a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet army, supplied the CIA with important information about USSR missile systems. Popov’s information helped the CIA understand the Soviet military threat before the advent of satellites made it possible to spy on the USSR from space.

B.

Electronic Intelligence Gathering

The CIA Science and Technology Directorate uses a wide variety of electronic techniques to gather intelligence. These include planting bugs (microphones or other listening devices), intercepting radio transmissions, and using seismic sensors and satellites to monitor military activity around the world. The CIA relies on the National Security Agency for a large portion of its electronically gathered data, but also conducts some electronic intelligence gathering on its own. During the Cold War—the period from 1945 to the early 1990s, when the United States and the USSR vied for global dominance—the CIA operated its own “listening stations” in Norway, Iran, Australia, and other places. But since the end of the Cold War, the CIA has reduced its electronic intelligence operations and relied more heavily on the NSA. The CIA Science and Technology Directorate still contributes significant research, such as developing techniques to detect and measure dangerous gases from long distances.

C.

Information from Other Agencies

The CIA receives and analyzes information from several other elements of the U.S. intelligence community. These elements include the DIA, NSA, the intelligence branches of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines, the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, the Treasury Department and its Secret Service, and the FBI. The CIA also manages some joint programs with other parts of the intelligence community. The CIA and the NSA, for example, work together to provide eavesdropping equipment to the CIA’s stations around the world. Similarly, the CIA works with the Air Force to coordinate satellite reconnaissance. The CIA also receives information from the intelligence services of friendly powers. Britain’s MI6 and Israel’s Mossad are the most notable examples. Although the CIA sometimes has disputes with MI6 and Mossad over when and how to share intelligence, the generally close cooperation between these agencies reflects the strong ties that link the United States with Britain and Israel.

D.

Analysis and Reporting

CIA analysts have the difficult task of sorting through information from open sources, field officers, electronic intelligence, and intelligence from agencies in the United States and other countries. In many instances most of the information is a jumble of irrelevant facts that analysts refer to as noise. But buried in the noise there may be a critical signal, giving an insight that can prove crucial to U.S. national security. Once the analysts have sorted and assessed the available information, they prepare secret reports that are passed on to policy makers. CIA analysts also prepare overall reports for the president and his staff on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Although the DNI is now the president’s main intelligence adviser, the CIA director may also brief the president personally when requested to do so, or in the event of a sudden crisis.

In most cases the CIA has little role beyond providing information to the president and other policy makers. These leaders must take the responsibility for responding to threats to the country’s national security. But the CIA’s reports may sometimes prod policy makers in a certain direction, and in that way the CIA can have a large impact on the country’s policies. In 1998, for example, the CIA produced a report indicating that a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan was producing chemical weapons, leading U.S. president Bill Clinton to order the bombing of the plant. The bombing became controversial when outside experts disputed the CIA’s claim.