People need to know what intelligence is. Having some graduate studies in intelligence collection and analysis, and having worked in an “intel-lite” field, I’ve got an opinion on what intelligence really is.
Forget they intelligence cycle, or the textbook definition of “distilled knowledge”. Intelligence is an effort to create an informed opinion about a whole system, using only the available, incomplete pieces of that system.
Think about a puzzle. If you have a 1000 piece puzzle, and you’ve got 500, but you can only see the first 10 pieces in front of you, you might not have any idea what the picture will look like. Maybe your ten pieces fit together to give you a distinctive looking feature. Hypothetically, lets say you get a tan face of Teddy Roosevelt, and think the picture is Mount Rushmore. So, you go to the box and pull of the tan pieces and start putting them together to see if you have the rest of the faces. So, if you have some of Washington and Lincoln, and it’s big enough to cover the whole puzzle, then you might be confident you’re puzzle is Mount Rushmore. If it’s only 1/4 of the right size, maybe Rushmore is only part of it, and you start looking for pieces that look like other monuments. If you get tan pictures of other presidents, maybe it’s not Rushmore at all. That’s as good an analogy for intel collection and analysis as I can come up with, with the warning that you may have pieces from other puzzles, that don’t belong, in there too. Oh, except you never have time to finish the puzzle, and lives can be at stake.
Really, when you think about it, you can be reasonably sure about something with incomplete information. You can also be wrong, because you’ve got information that doesn’t actually belong in your analysis, or because people have lied to you, or because you just happened to get all of the pieces that didn’t fit first, and you can’t know they didn’t fit.
What we should expect from our intel folks is that they find the best processes and follow them as well as they can. That will give them the greatest likelihood of being right as often as possible. It never guarantees 100% accuracy, and you cannot create an atmosphere that discourages people from throwing out their own conclusions and starting over. The worst mistakes are continuing with bad thinking, because you can’t see past it, or you are afraid to admit you are wrong (not just intel, but any analysis work). Very often I’m wrong at work (no one dies because my work isn’t important), but almost always, my answers were the best I or anyone else could come up with given our time and information limits. (BTW, wrong doesn’t mean what I said was going on wasn’t happening, it usually means time frames or magnitude, etc. were off) Every time I figure out that I’m wrong, I try to make my estimates better. That’s all you can do.
Whether is another good analogy. I change my plans based on the chance of a specific kind of weather, and how much that weather impacts on my plans. For example, I’ll make travel plans if there is a 40% chance of light snow, I might not if it’s 90%. I wouldn’t stain my deck when there was a 10% chance of rain, because that would ruin it, and I had the time to push back my deck staining. But we know that the weathermen aren’t right all the time, and we’d be crazy to assume they were wrong all of the time, or to completely ignore them.
President Bush has said he hopes it's true, but the US won't give up on it's surveillance of Iran. As Reagan used to say, "Trust, but verify".