Intel Community Directives (ICDs)
The importance of maintaining the legal rights, civil liberties, and privacy interests of US persons (USPERs) is emphasized by this ICD
What is ICD 102
This step may involve listing what one knows about an issue and determining what requirements are needed to fill the gaps
This type of SAT makes analytic assumptions, arguments, or intelligence gaps explicit
Diagnostic
This 1941 event resulted from inadequate intelligence-sharing among government agencies, faulty assumptions about the enemy, and rivalries within the US intelligence community
Attack on Pearl Harbor
Information that is vivid, concrete, and personal has a greater impact on our thinking than pallid, abstract information that may actually have substantially greater value
Vividness Criterion
This ICD established an approach for how the IC warns about threats to specific individuals or groups of murder, serious bodily injury, and kidnapping
ICD 191
In this step, Intel analysts review a vast body of intelligence reports to make assessments about a larger picture as it relates to their key intelligence question
Analysis & Production
Explicitly challenging current thinking is the hallmark of this SAT
Contrarian
This event in 1961 resulted from faulty assumptions, lack of communication between the CIA and the White House, and damaged the relationship between the President and the Intel Community
Bay of Pigs
When two events or changes co-occur, and the time sequence is such that one always follows the other, people often infer that the first caused the second
Illusory Correlation
Analytic standards, such as objectivity and brevity, are outlined in this ICD
ICD 203
The gathering of information—most of it in open source—is vital to the intelligence cycle, specifically for this step
Collection
Developing new insights, different perspectives, or alternative outcomes results from performing this SAT
Imaginative
The Israeli intelligence community (IC), along with the US IC, incorrectly believed Israel's superior military power would deter its Arab neighbors from initiating a war, resulting in this 1973 conflict
The Yom Kippur War
When the behavior or attributes of a single person are mistakenly applied to a group of people
Representative bias
IC policy for maximizing utility of analytic products by wider dissemination and enhancing quality of information shared is outlined in this ICD
ICD 208
At this point in the cycle, analysts take the data and information and put it together in an intelligence report. Could be anything from simple alert to complex bulletins and assessments
Processing
This is a simple model for how to think about complex problems
Analysis of Competing Hypotheses (ACH)
This Russian example illustrates the problem that intelligence analysts could be great counters—of missiles, weapons factories, and so on—but the underlying political and social dynamics in a society are much harder to read
Collapse of the Soviet Union
Occurs when the context framed around information encourages the reader to a desired interpretation and to discourage other possibilities