Most public discussions of intelligence address operations—the work of spymasters and covert
operators. Current times, in the wake of September 11th and the intelligence failure in the run￾up to the war in Iraq, are different.1 Intelligence analysis has become the subject. The Weapons
of Mass Destruction (WMD) Commission was direct, and damning, about intelligence analy￾sis before the Iraq war: “This failure was in large part the result of analytical shortcomings;
intelligence analysts were too wedded to their assumptions about Saddam’s intentions.”2 To be
sure, in the Iraq case, what the United States did or did not collect, and how reliable its sources
were, were also at issue. And the focus of post mortems on pre-September 11th was, properly,
mainly on relations between the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI) and on the way the FBI did its work. But in both cases, analysis was also
central. How do the various agencies perform the tradecraft of intelligence analysis, not just
of spying or operations? How is that task different now, in the world of terrorism, especially
Islamic Jihadist terrorism, than in the older world of the Cold War and the Soviet Union?