Hey, Let's Play Ball
The insular world of intelligence reaches out for a few new ideas
Fingar's office is spearheading the charge. The DNI's new plan, "A Strategy for Analytic Outreach," reviewed by U.S. News, calls for a major effort at building "communities of interest" with outside experts and revamping security regulations to allow far greater contact with the outside world. Fingar hopes to replicate what he accomplished as head of the State Department's small but respected intelligence arm, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. INR is widely credited with having gotten issues right that other agencies missed and having provided some of the government's only skeptical reporting on Saddam's banned weapons. A key reason for INR's success, Fingar says, is its marked openness compared with most other intelligence agencies. Last year, the bureau held 280 conferences and seminars with outside experts-nearly one a day. "Part of INR's success was their Rolodexes," says Fingar. "The intelligence community can't stay closed and do its job."
Going Hollywood. CIA officials are taking the cue and expanding their outreach efforts. "It's part of the job," says one official. "You're expected to reach out." CIA analysts last year met with academics and outside experts at some 100 conferences or meetings each month, according to the agency's chief of intelligence, John Kringen. Among the more active groups: the CIA's secretive Red Cell unit, formed after 9/11 to think up "out of the box" scenarios, and the little-known Global Futures Partnership, which runs a handful of invitation-only conferences around the world to look at long-term trends and strategic issues. With Rand, the GFP ran a series of one-day workshops on how to encourage critical analysis, bringing in over 30 outside experts from fields as varied as artificial intelligence, diplomatic history, and cognitive psychology. Also active is the CIA's Office of Transnational Issues, whose conferences have focused on infectious diseases, "unconventional" security threats, and U.S. global competitiveness in information technology. The CIA has also sponsored a Cyber-Influence Conference Series, which has met, among other places, in Hollywood to discuss the "strategic use" of the Internet, computer games, movies, and entertainment against U.S. adversaries.
Despite all the efforts at outreach, the push to gain outside expertise remains controversial. Distrust of outsiders is rife among many intelligence professionals, who are fearful of violating secrecy pledges and tend to discount information not marked classified or secret. Some also worry about openly expressing their views at a time when intelligence work has become something of a political football. Take, for example, a recent conference on Vietnam sponsored by the CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence and Texas Tech University. Analysts at the center slated to attend were warned not to make comparisons to Iraq, sources tell U.S. News.
Many outside experts, too, are wary of contact with intelligence agencies, worried that such ties will discredit them, imperil their work, or skew scholarship. Among the hot buttons: CIA sponsorship of social scientists' work abroad. Critics say this kind of contracting, now being pushed by some in the intelligence world, risks endangering scholars' sources and informants, while tainting fieldwork by American researchers around the world.
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