Marc Polymeropoulos
Atlantic Council, Aug. 27, 2024
“… the preemptive strike, based on the extraordinary collection, was de-escalatory in nature.”
In my twenty-six-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), I found that there were many misnomers in the intelligence business that were shared by the public and even policymakers. One is the notion that the CIA should be able to foresee world events, a concept that I termed (with some derision) “predictive certainty.” Policymakers would quite naturally welcome—and likely push—the US intelligence community to tell them precisely what will happen on any given subject. That of course rarely occurs; it is a notion derived from espionage books and movies.
Instead, I always believed that as operations officers, we must strive to collect intelligence that can ultimately provide a warning to policymakers. That warning function was—and still is—key in any CIA station’s job description. The CIA performed admirably if we sent up the bat signal, so that policymakers can decide on various courses of action if or when something went down. An event may seem likely to occur (with signs, never definitive, that an invasion or a coup was planned, for example), so the intelligence collected must spur on policymakers to consider several options. “No surprises” was the mantra I would follow. During management stints in Washington, and while serving abroad as an operations officer, I would tell my State Department, White House, and Department of Defense colleagues that my collection missions should be judged as successful if they were never blindsided. … [To read the full article, click here]