BOOK REVIEW: Leading Intelligence Analysis: Lessons from the CIA’s Analytic Front Lines
By Bruce E. Pease
Reviewed by Christopher A. Corpora, PhD., Professor of Practice in Intelligence Studies, Mercyhurst University
Many industries, governments and other complex social environments present a wide range of challenges to those who might lead in these spaces. Leaders of intelligence analysis and serious research organizations face one of the most complex variations on this theme, as the subjects and objects of their inquiry and missions are often purposefully deceitful and deceptive or remote and chaotic.
Intelligence analysts and others who practice the art and science of sense-making, estimation and warning perform their duties and tasks through an equally turbulent array of methods, rules and fashionable ideas of the day. The trick, as Bruce Pease so artfully explains in this book, is in balancing the collision of these worlds, institutions and cascade of will and intent.
Balance is the central theme of this thoughtful and practical reflection on the practice of leadership in intelligence analysis. Pease properly captures the unique nature of leading professional thinkers and appropriately demonstrates the further complications faced by intelligence analysts. He moves the reader quickly through the standard barrage of contemporary, general leadership theory – highlighting relevance and warning of dead-ends and detours. A primary challenge he identifies in the first chapter is the need to differentiate between the analyst and the leader – especially important in a community where most of its leaders come from within the ranks. Pease appreciates that many who will read this book closely were once, or are currently, line, journeyman or senior analysts. This critical differentiation between leader and analyst establishes the centrality of balance as the navigating conceptual vehicle for the entire book and establishes the leader’s responsibility to manage the relationship between customer and analyst as a crucial point of equilibrium – reprised throughout the book.
Pease practices what he preaches to the analytic leader by moving his own analysis forward, considering each facet of the analytic enterprise with balance. He explains that leaders need to understand their analysts – the things they respect, revile and what motivates them to find the proper balance in their own practice, while establishing a trustful relationship. Chapters 2-7 are a quiet call for introspection to the aspiring leader as Pease reflects both on his work as a functioning analyst (as USN Lt.) and leader at all levels in the CIA. Throughout this part of the book, he exposes key tensions in the analytic practice:
- A need for focus and attention to the analytic environment and various approaches -- individual, team, hybrid and which approach fits what type of question most appropriately
- Attributes and challenges of data and technology, structured and unstructured techniques – critical thinking, creativity, intuition and systems 1 and 2 thinking
- The importance of asking the proper questions, requirements refinement and the need to frame analysis appropriately from the very start
- Vulnerabilities found in the minefield of prediction and warning -- especially considering new, faster technologies
Pease provides excellent examples and a focused discussion of the relevant literature pertaining to each of these areas in this “heart” of the text -- all while reminding the reader that balance is essential in navigating these spaces.
The book rounds out with the discussion of several important, current issues facing the intelligence leadership in the post-Snowden United States. Importantly his short, but well-crafted reflection on ethics and values in intelligence analysis (Ch 8) is an important contribution to the recent literature on this topic.
The last three chapters of the book are more time-bound thoughts around leading analysis in an increasingly chaotic and cluttered world. Pease rightly points out that change – organizational, technological and political – is an unavoidable reality, which requires mindful resistance to being swept away on a new wave within the maelstrom and losing the poise this book argues for so successfully.
Leading Intelligence Analysis earns a prestigious four out of four trench coats.
Christopher A. Corpora, PhD is a Professor of Practice in Intelligence Studies at Mercyhurst University and spent 25 years as a national security practitioner with the Departments of Defense and State, as well as the ODNI and FBI. His areas of expertise are counterintelligence, counter-transnational crime and anti-corruption.
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