Espionage: A Writer's Guide IV
The Cycle: How intelligence works.
Requirements-Collections-Analyses.
Understanding the intelligence cycle is important to understanding how intelligence collection works. It’s so important, in fact, that it’s worth talking about it in a bit more detail. It consists of three steps.
1. Collection Requirements: First, policy makers formulate a requirement: in other words, the Bigwigs have a question to which they want or need an answer. And if what they seek is the kind of information that can’t be gathered thru more conventional channels (the Library, diplomacy, Google), they task intelligence agencies to collect this information, either through overt or covert methods. This tasking (as it sometimes is called) can come in any form, written or verbal. (Such things might be called Collection Requirements (CR) or sometimes Intelligence Requirements (IR). The fact is that any number of names might be applied to such taskings, so, again, don’t get hung up on terminology.)
Collection requirements change often, as the need of the policymaker changes, but there also are continuing requirements that policymakers might find important. Continuing requirements, which are long-term and change only rarely, consist of things national leaders and senior security officials invariably would want to know, things such as a) imminent attacks against national assets abroad, b) foreign troop movements near international borders, c) the location of specific military units of rival nations, d) coup attempts against friendly governments. The list goes on and is nigh endless. The nub is this: the policy maker (an elected official, cabinet secretary, senior military officer, etc.) needs a piece of information, and they issue a formal order for the intelligence assets to whom they have access to seek that information out.
2. Collection: It is worth mentioning again: Contrary to what one sees in the movies, intelligence officers almost never find a silver bullet, a single earthshaking piece of information that prompts a ‘Eureka’ moment in the Intelligence Community. Such finds occur only once in a blue moon. Intelligence almost always is collected by tiny little nuggets at a time.
Imagine the whole collection process is sort of like going out and finding pieces of an enormous and ever-changing jigsaw puzzle. Intelligence collection is merely the finding of jigsaw pieces, most of them mundane and only a few of them highly classified secrets of foreign governments.
Intelligence agencies find these jigsaw puzzle pieces (i.e., they fulfill collection requirements) by using a variety of tools, including those mentioned in the previous section (HUMINT, SIGINT, etc.). Choosing how to address the collection requirement is a decision on which policy makers usually defer to intelligence agencies, since such agencies are the ones with the knowledge and experience. Often, a multi-disciplinary approach is adopted.
For example, let’s imagine a scenario. It goes like this:
Jack Rassendyll—you’ll get to know more of Jack, later—works for the Operations Division (OD) of the Ruritanian Directorate of Intelligence (RDI), one of many national intelligence agencies in the world. Currently, Jack is assigned to an OD HUMINT team operating under diplomatic cover in the Ruritanian Embassy in Vienna, Austria.
Policy makers in Ruritania are interested in information on troop movements along that country’s border with the Republic of Fredonia during a time of heightened political tension. Such information might be collected in a number of ways. For example, Jack’s bosses at the RDI might task officers of Ruritanian Signals Intelligence (RSI), which is Ruritania’s SIGINT branch, to listen for radio and telephone chatter and identify the GPS coordinates of communication devices know to belong to the Army of Fredonia; or the RDI may have the Ruritanian Imagery Intelligence Office (RIIO) create a set of reports on the results of satellite and drone flyovers of the area in question.
Likewise, RDI might task OD HUMINT teams worldwide to begin answering a set of Collection Requirements about Fredonia’s capabilities and intentions along the Ruritania-Fredonia border.
Jack’s small HUMINT office would receive a set of Collection Requirements over classified electronic channels. The CR would provide the specific set of information the RDI is seeking and would give suspense date (which you might call an expiration date) indicating the date after which the information collected is no longer useful. Jack’s team then would have a specific amount of time a) to find one or more sources (people) to answer this CR, b) to plan an engagement with that source, c) to execute that plan, and d) to draft and submit any reports to RDI on what they’ve collected for analytical review. (FYI, intelligence collectors like Jack positively hate short suspense dates. Despite how it is portrayed in Hollywood movies, successful Human Intelligence requires time and meticulous planning. But sometimes speed is essential.)
Let me take that example a little further.
The tasking Jack’s team receives from headquarters of RDI on the Fredonia problem has a short suspension date (the policy maker needs the information within one week), so they have little time to plan, a situation that all HUMINT collectors hate, and they can’t come up with much: none of their current intelligence sources have knowledge of Fredonian military movements in that area.
After some brainstorming, Jack and his team make a hasty plan and endeavor to monitor and collect information at one or more clubs and taverns they happen to know are frequented by army officers assigned to the military attaché’s office at the Fredonia Embassy in Vienna.
Jack and his team have a collection plan consisting of this: Jack and one other HUMINT agent from the embassy, a young woman named Sophie Cloy, encounter three off-duty officers from the Army of Fredonia at a sports bar just off downtown Vienna and chat them up, buy a few rounds, and invite the officers to a game of darts. (It sometimes is that simple.) On its surface, the encounter is a casual meeting, but Jack and Sophie planned and rehearsed the encounter for nearly ten hours, after carefully selecting and casing the site. Still, it is just a one-off, and neither Jack nor Sophie intend to develop a deeper relationship with the three men they meet.
Of course, these three men don’t know Jack and Sophie are intelligence officers, but from their accents, Jack and Sophie are obviously from Ruritania. (Residents of Ruritania and Fredonia speak the same dialect of English with slightly different accents.) Also, the Fredonian officers likely have had numerous briefings on counterintelligence, so they are on their guard about discussing sensitive information around strangers.
But one of the officers does let something slip at the dartboard after a few beers. His brother is a captain in 316th Hussars, a unit of the Army of Fredonia, and the officer was disappointed his brother couldn’t come to party with them in Vienna that weekend because he was helping with a regiment-wide inspection at his home garrison on the days in question.
That piece of information isn’t much—it seems downright trivial, in fact—but it’s the kind of nugget that intelligence officer of all kinds, including HUMINT officers, find on a regular basis. Most intelligence consists of trivial little dribs, drabs, and drams of information.
The beauty is that Jack and his HUMINT collection team at the embassy are not the only ones out there rummaging around in the refuse; other Ruritanian assets are hard at work. And things add up—virtually every little tidbit of information contributes to a larger operating picture within the intelligence community. And all of those tiny little puzzle pieces are funneled to the same analytical shop for comparison, vetting, and analysis.
3. Analysis: So, what happens to all those tiny little nuggets, those thousands of little jigsaw puzzle pieces, including Jack and Sophie’s modest piece, that various intelligence teams collect each year?
All of it goes to analytical cells for processing, vetting, and for the creation of reports for digestion by the policy makers who requested it. (Such reports, unless deemed too highly sensitive, also are circulated throughout the entire intelligence community for comment and for the use of other departments.)
Small analytical cells are located at all echelons and in all offices within the intelligence community. In fact, there is even a billet for an analyst at Jack’s small office at the embassy in Vienna. (Since that slot is unfilled, a HUMINT collector named Arthur Van Dyke, as low man on the totem, ends up getting tasked to do most analytical work in the office.) Most analytical heavy lifting, though, takes place at secure and highly classified facilities like the RDI general headquarters in Strelsau, the capital of Ruritania. Information collected by the RDI and by Ruritania’s Military Intelligence Branch (MIB) also is exchanged freely on a series of classified computer servers to which only RDI, MIB, and policy makers have access.
As is common, Jack happens to know the analyst who covers the political and military situation between Ruritania and Fredonia. When he finishes his tiny report and has his supervisor, Ernst Grocer, review it, he sends it to the analytical bureau via a classified computer network and then gives the analyst in question a short phone call to touch base and make sure he gets the report. The touching base isn’t part of protocol, but it’s something Jack and most collectors do to keep the channels of communication open between themselves and the analysts in the rear. (Such people can make a Human Intelligence collector’s life incredibly easy.)
This particular analyst, Serge Portnoy, a fifty-seven-year-old civil servant who has over thirty years at the same office, lives and breathes his job, which is to work the Fredonia desk. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of Fredonia, from its politics and military to its history, art, literature, and sports. He can rattle off the names and credentials of all senior, and many junior, members of the Fredonia government and military by name. He understands the economy better than does Fredonia’s own minister of treasury.
Serge’s job is impressive. He takes Jack’s tiny little report about the captain in the 316th Hussars and compares it to everything he previously knew about that unit of the Army of Fredonia and compares it to the hundreds of other reports that are now flooding his office about the Army of Fredonia and its current operations along the border with Ruritania.
The analyst gets numerous reports on voice intercepts of conversations in Fredonia via Signals Intelligence, he gets drone and satellite imagery on sensitive locations via IMINT, and he gets hundreds of HUMINT reports like Jack and Sophie’s from intelligence collectors who are tapping their sources all over the region, including many who are located in Fredonia itself. He even gets reports about troop movements from MASINT ground surveillance stations and technical reports on air quality along the Fredonia border that measure the amount of diesel exhaust in the atmosphere, attempting to ascertain the number and type of Fredonia military vehicles present.
Some of these reports are more detailed than others, but none of them are definitive by themselves. Serge and the small team of analysts he leads vet those reports and determine which are true, which are simple errors, and which might be bogus information put forward by Fredonia counterintelligence to muddy the waters.
It is a complex and mind-numbing process, one that is never one-hundred percent accurate, but the reports Serge and his team generate provide a much clearer picture for Ruritanian policy makers about the capabilities and intentions of the Army of Fredonia along their shared border.
Also, the feedback Serge and his team provide HUMINT collectors like Jack helps those collectors develop a better sense of how accurate their sources are. Many sources used in HUMINT collection are persons with whom collectors have ongoing relationships, and a constant vetting and assessment of such sources is essential for accuracy and for operational security. Sources sometimes lie, for a variety of reasons, and there is always the possibility information provided to a HUMINT collector has been planted by foreign counterintelligence. (Foreign intelligence assets can even transmit or display false information to be discovered by SIGINT, IMINT, and other technical collectors.)
As it ends up, Serge determined the nugget of information the Fredonian officer let slip to Jack and Sophie was true and, along with a half a thousand other nuggets of information provided via SIGINT and IMINT, convinced Serge and his team that reports of large military buildups along the Fredonia-Ruritania border were what intelligence professionals jokingly refer to as RUMINT (simple rumors). There was no military buildup, planned or otherwise.
But the intelligence cycle goes on, and the information policy makers gathered from this episode prompted an entirely new set of questions that formed new Collection Requirements, new Collection Operations by intelligence assets, and new Analytical products.
The Intelligence Cycle never ends.
Thanks for reading. Next time we'll talk a little about Operational Security and Counterintelligence. You won't want to miss that.
Until then.
Requirements-Collections-Analyses.
Understanding the intelligence cycle is important to understanding how intelligence collection works. It’s so important, in fact, that it’s worth talking about it in a bit more detail. It consists of three steps.
1. Collection Requirements: First, policy makers formulate a requirement: in other words, the Bigwigs have a question to which they want or need an answer. And if what they seek is the kind of information that can’t be gathered thru more conventional channels (the Library, diplomacy, Google), they task intelligence agencies to collect this information, either through overt or covert methods. This tasking (as it sometimes is called) can come in any form, written or verbal. (Such things might be called Collection Requirements (CR) or sometimes Intelligence Requirements (IR). The fact is that any number of names might be applied to such taskings, so, again, don’t get hung up on terminology.)
Collection requirements change often, as the need of the policymaker changes, but there also are continuing requirements that policymakers might find important. Continuing requirements, which are long-term and change only rarely, consist of things national leaders and senior security officials invariably would want to know, things such as a) imminent attacks against national assets abroad, b) foreign troop movements near international borders, c) the location of specific military units of rival nations, d) coup attempts against friendly governments. The list goes on and is nigh endless. The nub is this: the policy maker (an elected official, cabinet secretary, senior military officer, etc.) needs a piece of information, and they issue a formal order for the intelligence assets to whom they have access to seek that information out.
2. Collection: It is worth mentioning again: Contrary to what one sees in the movies, intelligence officers almost never find a silver bullet, a single earthshaking piece of information that prompts a ‘Eureka’ moment in the Intelligence Community. Such finds occur only once in a blue moon. Intelligence almost always is collected by tiny little nuggets at a time.
Imagine the whole collection process is sort of like going out and finding pieces of an enormous and ever-changing jigsaw puzzle. Intelligence collection is merely the finding of jigsaw pieces, most of them mundane and only a few of them highly classified secrets of foreign governments.
Intelligence agencies find these jigsaw puzzle pieces (i.e., they fulfill collection requirements) by using a variety of tools, including those mentioned in the previous section (HUMINT, SIGINT, etc.). Choosing how to address the collection requirement is a decision on which policy makers usually defer to intelligence agencies, since such agencies are the ones with the knowledge and experience. Often, a multi-disciplinary approach is adopted.
For example, let’s imagine a scenario. It goes like this:
Jack Rassendyll—you’ll get to know more of Jack, later—works for the Operations Division (OD) of the Ruritanian Directorate of Intelligence (RDI), one of many national intelligence agencies in the world. Currently, Jack is assigned to an OD HUMINT team operating under diplomatic cover in the Ruritanian Embassy in Vienna, Austria.
Policy makers in Ruritania are interested in information on troop movements along that country’s border with the Republic of Fredonia during a time of heightened political tension. Such information might be collected in a number of ways. For example, Jack’s bosses at the RDI might task officers of Ruritanian Signals Intelligence (RSI), which is Ruritania’s SIGINT branch, to listen for radio and telephone chatter and identify the GPS coordinates of communication devices know to belong to the Army of Fredonia; or the RDI may have the Ruritanian Imagery Intelligence Office (RIIO) create a set of reports on the results of satellite and drone flyovers of the area in question.
Likewise, RDI might task OD HUMINT teams worldwide to begin answering a set of Collection Requirements about Fredonia’s capabilities and intentions along the Ruritania-Fredonia border.
Jack’s small HUMINT office would receive a set of Collection Requirements over classified electronic channels. The CR would provide the specific set of information the RDI is seeking and would give suspense date (which you might call an expiration date) indicating the date after which the information collected is no longer useful. Jack’s team then would have a specific amount of time a) to find one or more sources (people) to answer this CR, b) to plan an engagement with that source, c) to execute that plan, and d) to draft and submit any reports to RDI on what they’ve collected for analytical review. (FYI, intelligence collectors like Jack positively hate short suspense dates. Despite how it is portrayed in Hollywood movies, successful Human Intelligence requires time and meticulous planning. But sometimes speed is essential.)
Let me take that example a little further.
The tasking Jack’s team receives from headquarters of RDI on the Fredonia problem has a short suspension date (the policy maker needs the information within one week), so they have little time to plan, a situation that all HUMINT collectors hate, and they can’t come up with much: none of their current intelligence sources have knowledge of Fredonian military movements in that area.
After some brainstorming, Jack and his team make a hasty plan and endeavor to monitor and collect information at one or more clubs and taverns they happen to know are frequented by army officers assigned to the military attaché’s office at the Fredonia Embassy in Vienna.
Jack and his team have a collection plan consisting of this: Jack and one other HUMINT agent from the embassy, a young woman named Sophie Cloy, encounter three off-duty officers from the Army of Fredonia at a sports bar just off downtown Vienna and chat them up, buy a few rounds, and invite the officers to a game of darts. (It sometimes is that simple.) On its surface, the encounter is a casual meeting, but Jack and Sophie planned and rehearsed the encounter for nearly ten hours, after carefully selecting and casing the site. Still, it is just a one-off, and neither Jack nor Sophie intend to develop a deeper relationship with the three men they meet.
Of course, these three men don’t know Jack and Sophie are intelligence officers, but from their accents, Jack and Sophie are obviously from Ruritania. (Residents of Ruritania and Fredonia speak the same dialect of English with slightly different accents.) Also, the Fredonian officers likely have had numerous briefings on counterintelligence, so they are on their guard about discussing sensitive information around strangers.
But one of the officers does let something slip at the dartboard after a few beers. His brother is a captain in 316th Hussars, a unit of the Army of Fredonia, and the officer was disappointed his brother couldn’t come to party with them in Vienna that weekend because he was helping with a regiment-wide inspection at his home garrison on the days in question.
That piece of information isn’t much—it seems downright trivial, in fact—but it’s the kind of nugget that intelligence officer of all kinds, including HUMINT officers, find on a regular basis. Most intelligence consists of trivial little dribs, drabs, and drams of information.
The beauty is that Jack and his HUMINT collection team at the embassy are not the only ones out there rummaging around in the refuse; other Ruritanian assets are hard at work. And things add up—virtually every little tidbit of information contributes to a larger operating picture within the intelligence community. And all of those tiny little puzzle pieces are funneled to the same analytical shop for comparison, vetting, and analysis.
3. Analysis: So, what happens to all those tiny little nuggets, those thousands of little jigsaw puzzle pieces, including Jack and Sophie’s modest piece, that various intelligence teams collect each year?
All of it goes to analytical cells for processing, vetting, and for the creation of reports for digestion by the policy makers who requested it. (Such reports, unless deemed too highly sensitive, also are circulated throughout the entire intelligence community for comment and for the use of other departments.)
Small analytical cells are located at all echelons and in all offices within the intelligence community. In fact, there is even a billet for an analyst at Jack’s small office at the embassy in Vienna. (Since that slot is unfilled, a HUMINT collector named Arthur Van Dyke, as low man on the totem, ends up getting tasked to do most analytical work in the office.) Most analytical heavy lifting, though, takes place at secure and highly classified facilities like the RDI general headquarters in Strelsau, the capital of Ruritania. Information collected by the RDI and by Ruritania’s Military Intelligence Branch (MIB) also is exchanged freely on a series of classified computer servers to which only RDI, MIB, and policy makers have access.
As is common, Jack happens to know the analyst who covers the political and military situation between Ruritania and Fredonia. When he finishes his tiny report and has his supervisor, Ernst Grocer, review it, he sends it to the analytical bureau via a classified computer network and then gives the analyst in question a short phone call to touch base and make sure he gets the report. The touching base isn’t part of protocol, but it’s something Jack and most collectors do to keep the channels of communication open between themselves and the analysts in the rear. (Such people can make a Human Intelligence collector’s life incredibly easy.)
This particular analyst, Serge Portnoy, a fifty-seven-year-old civil servant who has over thirty years at the same office, lives and breathes his job, which is to work the Fredonia desk. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of Fredonia, from its politics and military to its history, art, literature, and sports. He can rattle off the names and credentials of all senior, and many junior, members of the Fredonia government and military by name. He understands the economy better than does Fredonia’s own minister of treasury.
Serge’s job is impressive. He takes Jack’s tiny little report about the captain in the 316th Hussars and compares it to everything he previously knew about that unit of the Army of Fredonia and compares it to the hundreds of other reports that are now flooding his office about the Army of Fredonia and its current operations along the border with Ruritania.
The analyst gets numerous reports on voice intercepts of conversations in Fredonia via Signals Intelligence, he gets drone and satellite imagery on sensitive locations via IMINT, and he gets hundreds of HUMINT reports like Jack and Sophie’s from intelligence collectors who are tapping their sources all over the region, including many who are located in Fredonia itself. He even gets reports about troop movements from MASINT ground surveillance stations and technical reports on air quality along the Fredonia border that measure the amount of diesel exhaust in the atmosphere, attempting to ascertain the number and type of Fredonia military vehicles present.
Some of these reports are more detailed than others, but none of them are definitive by themselves. Serge and the small team of analysts he leads vet those reports and determine which are true, which are simple errors, and which might be bogus information put forward by Fredonia counterintelligence to muddy the waters.
It is a complex and mind-numbing process, one that is never one-hundred percent accurate, but the reports Serge and his team generate provide a much clearer picture for Ruritanian policy makers about the capabilities and intentions of the Army of Fredonia along their shared border.
Also, the feedback Serge and his team provide HUMINT collectors like Jack helps those collectors develop a better sense of how accurate their sources are. Many sources used in HUMINT collection are persons with whom collectors have ongoing relationships, and a constant vetting and assessment of such sources is essential for accuracy and for operational security. Sources sometimes lie, for a variety of reasons, and there is always the possibility information provided to a HUMINT collector has been planted by foreign counterintelligence. (Foreign intelligence assets can even transmit or display false information to be discovered by SIGINT, IMINT, and other technical collectors.)
As it ends up, Serge determined the nugget of information the Fredonian officer let slip to Jack and Sophie was true and, along with a half a thousand other nuggets of information provided via SIGINT and IMINT, convinced Serge and his team that reports of large military buildups along the Fredonia-Ruritania border were what intelligence professionals jokingly refer to as RUMINT (simple rumors). There was no military buildup, planned or otherwise.
But the intelligence cycle goes on, and the information policy makers gathered from this episode prompted an entirely new set of questions that formed new Collection Requirements, new Collection Operations by intelligence assets, and new Analytical products.
The Intelligence Cycle never ends.
Thanks for reading. Next time we'll talk a little about Operational Security and Counterintelligence. You won't want to miss that.
Until then.
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