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Historically, this tradecraft has been passed on in the form of unwritten rules learned on the job and in agency-specific training classes, but increasingly since the intelligence reforms of 2004, they have been codified IC-wide under the direction of the Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Mission Integration.

A RAND study of U.S. intelligence tradecraft notes that the “vast majority of intelligence analysts reside outside the Central Intelligence Agency and do work that is tactical, operational, and current.”** The study goes on to note that the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) has as many analysts as the CIA has and that the National Security Agency (NSA) has several times as many analysts, as does the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), indicating both the breadth of the IC’s technical collection and its emphasis both on developing analysts who can interpret secret human or technical intelligence in quick-turnaround pieces and on countering tactical, asymmetric threats like terrorism.

During the Cold War, however, there was a more balanced analytic focus with greater emphasis on strategic intelligence issues as a means of outcompeting the Soviet Union. This kind of analysis deals not only in secrets, but also in mysteries—making well-founded but ultimately unknowable predictions about future actions by acompetitor or adversary. The tradecraft necessary to succeed in strategic analysis requires substantive regional and topical expertise developed over the years to supplement experience in the daily collection and understanding of secrets. Institutionally, it also requires that agencies’ analytic processes be open to discussion, debate, and dissent because analysts must work together to describe a probable range of future outcomes and warn about unproven current threats rather than using the collection to solve a single puzzle with a definitive answer.

Regarding its mission to follow longer-term issues, the IC is falling short in resourcing and in openness to dissenting opinions, which (if taken seriously) can help responsible officials respond more effectively to threats and threat actors. The IC Analytic Ombudsman has expressed concern that hyperpartisanship “has threatened to undermine the foundations of our Republic, penetrating even into the Intelligence Community.”*°

For example, the Ombudsman noted in a report on the IC’s handling of election-threat analysis in 2020 that, in his view, CIA officials had deliberately downplayed dissenting views and coordination comments expressed by experts at the National Intelligence Council and elsewhere who felt there was evidence of Beijing’s intent to exert at least some influence on the 2020 election as opposed to the consensus view that Beijing did not interfere in U.S. elections. Senior CIA analysts and leaders made it “difficult to have a healthy analytic conversation in a confrontational environment” while violating multiple official IC tradecraft standards. By not allowing dissents or considering alternatives, the CIA exercised

“undue influence on intelligence.”*” Subsequent exposure of China-linked online