Pat:
I enjoyed reading your Bush’s War interview segments on Frontline's website. Your description of how one selects and manages the minds who are necessary to create the finished intelligence product was interesting. It is similar in concept to the basic Organizational Development stuff taught to wanna-be managers in every B-School in the country.

You also reminded me that intelligence mavens now use the same techniques in arriving at decisions as do successful managers in private corporations. Before, I’d always had in mind the stereotypes of the omniscient Yale professor or BletchleyPark’s Alan Turing from whose mouths perpetually dropped golden truths. That even their work needed to be discussed, cross-checked, and subjected to the review of other experts in order to ensure that the information being gathered was relevant to the question being asked just didn't occur to me.

Nor did the fact that it was necessary to look on these knowledge experts as human resources who needed to be cultivated and nurtured if they were to be maximally effective.
I don't know whether a text exists that specifically addresses the general and unique management needs of the intelligence world but your description of the management and other problems within our existing intelligence agencies implies that it wouldn't hurt to have one. In addition to giving guidance about how to manage people needs, a text that defines in easily operationalized terms how best to develop judgments about the meaning of data especially when the validity of the conclusions can't be confirmed with statistical certainty could only help.

It could even include something like a Daubert standard; a yardstick that would measure whether the process used to make decisions meets intelligence community standards. This would go a long way to restoring the confidence of both Congress and the American people in the quality of the policy decisions that are made on their behalf and for which they are ultimately accountable.

Your concerns about recruiting, maintaining and managing people resources reminded me of an old psychology professor of mine, Joseph Gengerelli, who was one of the three California psychologists initially tasked to put the OSS assessment program together in 1943. They eventually used the assessment program developed by the Brits as a template even though it did not address the issue of predictive validity. Selection and assessment must have been difficult for some of the recruits, particularly those who might not be going overseas; the men you describe as ". . . out-of-the-box thinking, freewheeling intellectuals."

In his statistics classes ‘Ginger’ used to talk about the general problem of validity and its implications for selection Because of constraints such as not knowing where recruits would be assigned, their existing skills sets, or even anything about the skills required in their possible assignments,the OSS psychologists couldn't establish any criterion measures either for selection itself or that might relate selection to subsequentsuccess in the field.
Gengerelli’s primary responsibilitywas in recruiting and training field agents. He never talked in detail about training and certainly never mentioned anything about specialized training designed to optimize the quality of an agent’s decisions. He did discussthe OSS group decision-making field exercises that required member participation in order for a competent solution to be reached. From my own observations, the pattern for training laid down by the OSS became the model for the training of Peace Corps Volunteers 20 years later.

This was a different time in our history. Infuriated by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the country quickly united in the war against the Axis Powers. Everyone grew victory gardens and some of us raised chickens.Washington was full of dollar-a-year men who literally gave of their time and expertise in order to ensure victory.

The government asked the citizenry to be part of the war effort and they did so willingly; allowing themselves to be subjected to food and fuel rationing and exhortations to conserve in a manner almost unbelievable in today's society, which now possesses an all volunteer military, a belief in preemptive war, and an ideological fight as to whether we are living in the biblical end days thus making conservation itself irrelevant.

Before war was declared in December of 1941, however, we were still trying to cope with a depression and the isolationist position that we should not get involved in foreign wars was popular. Congress had authorized conscription in October of 1940 and the following year by just one vote the House of Representatives extended the term of duty of existing conscripts beyond 12 months.
Since the heady, inspirational days of the OSS and its post-war transformation into the CIA there have been more and more instances in which the policy needs of the country have not been well served by the decision-making processes used by our intelligence agencies.

In your interviews you imply that this came about becausethe country's intelligence bureaucracies have become institutionalized and therefore risk averse: a kind of institutional regression to the mean. You describe them as having become “. . . players in the Washington game of defending appropriations, getting authorities, making sure you got enough money, making sure people got promoted" to the point where it has become difficult to tell the difference between intelligence agencies and the Department of Agriculture.

On a broader scale, I think the country has also engaged in its own kind of regression to the mean. It has lost what it used to have; a sense of trust and reliance on values that encouraged people to deal fairly with each other and to expect to be dealt with fairly in return. This unspoken sense of community obligation to a moral standard is what defined us in WWII.

Since then, "Just win, baby," has evolved as an accepted laissez-faire maxim which plays up the threads of personal independence and autonomy while playing down if not ignoring the threads of citizen responsibility and accountability to a broader community. Common goals and common foes have given way to individualism so discrete that everyone has their own opinion as well as their own facts to back it up.

This unfortunate evolution of our national mores like the increased institutionalization and risk averse nature of our intelligence agencies has made it easier to ‘fiddle’ with the data, ‘cook’ the books, and generally make a mess of what should be a straightforward decision-making process.

On occasion this has happened more by accident than by design. The Bay of Pigs fiasco is a good example. The social psychologist Irving Janis points out that JFK’s expert-group that was responsible for the decision to attack the Bay of Pigs created a decision-making process that led to disaster not because they were knaves and fools but because they were preoccupied by their interest in preserving secrecy.
Janis describes this group behavior as “Groupthink.” Although he did not coin the term he is closely identified with the idea. He defines it as "A mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members' strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action." (Wikipedia)
He believes that this kind of group cohesion leads to Groupthink if one of the following antecedent conditions is present:

  • Structural faults in the organization: insulation of the group, lack of tradition of impartial leadership, lack of norms requiring methodological procedures, homogeneity of members' social background and ideology.
  • Provocative situational context: high stress from external threats, recent failures, excessive difficulties on the decision-making task, moral dilemmas. (Wikipedia)

By observation, aspects of both of these conditions were present in the group that decided in favor of invading the Bay of Pigs.

On occasion, we have also made a mess of what should be a straightforward decision-making process by conscious and deliberate plan. Paul Pillar, former CIA senior analyst for the Middle East, makes this point succinctly in his discussion of the flawed decision-making process that led up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He states baldly in his March/April 2006 Foreign Affairs article titled Intelligence, Policy, and the War in Iraq, ". . .the Bush administration disregarded the [intelligence] community's expertise, politicized the intelligence process, and selected unrepresentative raw intelligence to make its public case [for a war against Iraq].

Like Janis, Pillar writes that future solutions to these problems rest on repairing the structural faults within the intelligence agencies including improving their communications with both Congress and the American people, “(fettered only by security considerations, rather than by policy agendas)” and ensuring that the data used to reach decisions are not culled to conform to desired policy.

He concludes:

These changes alone will not fix the intelligence-policy relationship. But if Congress and the American people are serious about "fixing intelligence," they should not just do what is easy and politically convenient. At stake are the soundness of U.S. foreign-policy making and the right of Americans to know the basis for decisions taken in the name of their security.

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What a challenge! Can we ever go home again? Can we throw off the risk averse, self-protective institutionalization of our government? Can we create a political environment that supports making decisions in a rational, principled way? Can we reframe our social identity so that winning regardless of the impact on others is no longer necessary? Can we acknowledge our responsibilities to each other and our communities? Can we figure out how to get around the angry and churlish cynicism of politics as usual; wedge issues and triangulation? Can we find leaders whose skills are equal to the task of governing, and who inspire us by challenging us to become better?

Where do we go from here? The need to repair our Republic is self-evident. By all accounts, however, the citizenry has become energized in this election cycle to take back its civic responsibilities and to re-engage in the process of governing the country. Unlikely to reach the heights of the unfettered optimism or the enthusiastic and eager can-do involvement of WWII, we can hope that the positive examples of a history where mistakes and failures were opportunities, and where doing something for your country was more than a slogan, will not be lost in a still memorable past.