Diagnosing Distortion in Source Reporting: Lessons For HUMINT Reliability From Other Fields

DIAGNOSING DISTORTION IN SOURCE REPORTING:
LESSONS FOR HUMINT RELIABILITY FROM OTHER FIELDS
GEORGE P. NOBLE, JR.
A Thesis
Submitted to the Faculty of Mercyhurst College
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for
The Degree of
MASTER OF SCIENCE
IN
APPLIED INTELLIGENCE
DEPARTMENT OF INTELLIGENCE STUDIES

MERCYHURST COLLEGE
ERIE, PENNSYLVANIA
MARCH 2009
DEPARTMENT OF INTELLIGENCE STUDIES
MERCYHURST COLLEGE
ERIE, PENNSYLVANIA
DIAGNOSING DISTORTION IN SOURCE REPORTING: LESSONS FOR

HUMINT RELIABILITY FROM OTHER FIELDS
A Thesis
Submitted to the Faculty of Mercyhurst College
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for
The Degree of
MASTER OF SCIENCE
IN
APPLIED INTELLIGENCE
Submitted By:
GEORGE P. NOBLE, JR.
Certificate of Approval:
_____________________________________
Stephen Marrin
Assistant Professor
Department of Intelligence Studies
_____________________________________
William Welch
Instructor
Department of Intelligence Studies
_____________________________________
Phillip J. Belfiore
Vice President
Office of Academic Affairs
March 2009
Copyright © 2009 by George P. Noble, Jr.
All rights reserved.
iii
DEDICATION
This work is dedicated to my dear friend and colleague Nancy Calzaretta, who taught me
most everything I know about the handling of sensitive source information.
iv
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank Allen Bostdorff for his encouragement and ideas. I would also like
to thank my primary reader, Stephen Marrin, for his adroit direction and many hours of
wise counsel. Finally, I am grateful to my family and my employer for allowing me this
time for dedicated study and reflection on the field of intelligence.
v
ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS
Diagnosing Distortion in Source Reporting:
Lessons for HUMINT Reliability from Other Fields
By
George P. Noble, Jr.
Master of Science in Applied Intelligence
Mercyhurst College, 2009
Assistant Professor Stephen Marrin, Chair
The views expressed in this thesis do not necessarily represent the views of the FBI.
This paper explores how source reporting can be distorted at each stage of the
human intelligence (HUMINT) process within the United States Intelligence Community
(USIC) and how that distortion may impact perceptions of source reliability. It first
explores the many, sometimes conflicting, meanings of reliability, seeking useful
descriptions from other fields to bolster the definition within intelligence. The paper
continues with a look at the HUMINT process, followed by detailed discussions of the
potential for distortion of source reporting by and between the source, collector, analyst,
and editor, again looking at other fields for contributions to understanding. It concludes
with observations and recommendations.
The target audience includes the USIC, especially the Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which both rely heavily on
HUMINT collection. Social scientists, journalists, and legal scholars may be interested in
the discussion of reliability and how their fields compare with intelligence.
vi
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
COPYRIGHT PAGE………………………………………………………………. iii
DEDICATION…………………………………………………………………...... iv
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS……………………………………………………...... v
ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………...... vi
TABLE OF CONTENTS………………………………………………………….. vii
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS…………………………………………………....... x
CHAPTER
1 INTRODUCTION……………………………………...... 1
2 LITERATURE REVIEW………………………………... 3
3 PROCEDURES….……………………………………..... 8
4 RESULTS………………………………………………... 10
The HUMINT Process…………………………………… 10
The HUMINT Source……………………………………. 18
The HUMINT Collector…………………………………. 29
The Editor………………………………………………... 56
5 CONCLUSION……….………………………………….. 61
Recommendations………………………………………... 65
Conclusions………………………………………………. 67
BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………. 68
APPENDICES……………………………………………………………………... 74
Appendix A………………………………………………. 75
Appendix B………………………………………………. 77
Appendix C………………………………………………. 78
Appendix D………………………………………………. 79
Appendix E………………………………………………. 80
Appendix F………………………………………………. 81
vii
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
BCE Before the Common Era

BND German Intelligence Service
CIA Central Intelligence Agency
CPUSA Communist Party USA
D&D Denial and Deception
DCIA Director, Central Intelligence Agency
DIA Defense Intelligence Agency
DNI Director of National Intelligence
FI Foreign Intelligence
FBI Federal Bureau of Investigation
FCI Foreign Counterintelligence
GRU Russian/Soviet Military Intelligence
HIS Hostile Intelligence Service
HUMINT Human Intelligence
INFOSEC Information Security
IMINT Imagery Intelligence
ISR Intelligence, Surveillance and
Reconnaissance
JAG Judge Advocate General (USAF)
KGB Committee for State Security (Soviet)
MACE Method for Assessing the Credibility of Evidence
MID Military Information Division; Military
Intelligence Division (US Army)
NTSB National Transportation Safety Board
ONI Office of Naval Intelligence
OPC Office of Policy Coordination (CIA)
OPSEC Operational Security
OSS Office of Strategic Services
viii
RIP Recruitment-in-Place
SS Surveillance Specialist (FBI)
SSG Special Surveillance Group (FBI)
SVR Foreign Intelligence Service (Russian)
TECHINT Technical Intelligence
US United States
USAF US Air Force
USIC US Intelligence Community
USN US Navy
WFO Washington Field Office (FBI)
WMD Weapons of Mass Destruction
ix
1
INTRODUCTION
This paper explores how the routine development of source reporting within the
USIC through targeting, acquisition, documentation, evaluation, and exploitation can lead
to the deterioration of product reliability wholly unrelated to purposeful deception by
sources. The source reliability caveat contained in most reporting and finished
intelligence products1 speaks only to the characteristics of the spy, including his/her
trustworthiness, competence, accuracy, and duration of service, while failing to address
the loss of reliability that emerges in the intelligence process itself.
The collector and/or dedicated evaluators use the caveat to sum up their
evaluation of the asset’s motives, abilities, access, and the accuracy of his/her actual
output. But are there others involved in the HUMINT process who may potentially distort
source reporting? Do intelligence agencies misrepresent the reliability of the source
reporting they pass through liaison channels to other domestic and foreign agencies?
This paper will explore the many, sometimes conflicting, meanings of reliability,
seeking useful descriptions from other fields to bolster the definition within intelligence.
It will continue with a look at the HUMINT cycle, followed by detailed discussions of the
potential for distortion of source reporting by and between the source, collector, analyst,
and editor. It concludes with some observations and recommendations.
The target audience for this thesis includes the United States Intelligence
Community, especially the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI), which both rely heavily on HUMINT collection. Social scientists,
1
In the writer’s experience, when an analyst draws from a segment of source reporting for use in certain
intelligence products, the analyst inserts a warning notice ahead of the specific text to highlight the
sensitivity and reliability of the source of that part of the overall text. A brief end of warning statement lets
the reader know that the highlighted text is complete.
2
journalists, and legal scholars may be interested in the discussion of reliability and how
their fields compare with intelligence.

3
LITERATURE REVIEW
This writer has discovered nothing written specifically on how HUMINT from
clandestine sources might be distorted by those who collect, analyze, and publish it.
No discussion of human reconnaissance and surveillance intelligence was found
in the context of the vulnerability of their data to distortion as they are collected,
processed, analyzed, and disseminated. In this age of spy satellites, the literature tends to
focus on TECHINT and dismisses human reconnaissance and surveillance as only
tangential to HUMINT collection. Richard A. Best, of the Congressional Research
Service (CRS), focuses exclusively on TECHINT in his 2005 review of surveillance and
reconnaissance.2
No literature was uncovered that outlines a specific HUMINT process and how
the reliability of source reporting can be distorted through that process. Such a process
would apply the collection, processing, analysis, production, and dissemination nodes of
the traditional intelligence cycle. Biographies of Aldrich Ames, Robert Hanssen, John
Walker, among others, tell individual stories of espionage but say little about the elements
of the intelligence cycle beyond the interaction between source and handler. Even general
studies of HUMINT, like Frederick Hitz’s Importance and Future of Espionage,3 focus
primarily on operational security (OPSEC) and covert operations.
Literature was found on quantitative assessment of human source evidence in
intelligence, but it focuses on assessing the source and thus has little applicability to this
thesis. In particular, David A. Schum and Jon R. Morris developed the MACE (Method
2
Best, Richard A., Jr. Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) Programs : Issues for
Congress, CRS Report for Congress, 22 February 2005.
3
Hitz, Frederick P. “The Importance and Future of Espionage,” in Strategic Intelligence Vol. 2: The
Intelligence Cycle, ed. Loch K. Johnson (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger Security International, 2007).
4
for Assessing the Credibility of Evidence) system, which uses Baconian and Bayesian
analysis to rate incremental pieces of evidence to discern the probability that a human
source is providing competent and credible information. Schum and Morris’s interest in
applying lessons learned in cross examination of witnesses may have some application in
future research based on this paper’s conclusion that asset vetting ought to adopt the
courtroom model.4
The intelligence literature lacks coverage of the operational side of the HUMINT
process, especially the period between the meeting of source and handler and the
production of source reporting and finished intelligence. CIA methodologists such as
Sherman Kent5 and Arthur Hulnick6 from the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence (DI), and
even Richards J. Heuer, Jr.7 from the CIA Directorate of Operations, have written much
of the scholarly literature on the intelligence process over the past fifty years from the
inside the Beltway perspective of national intelligence analysis. Their writings have a DI-
centric view that focuses on the CIA’s obligation to communicate with the highest levels
of government. They do not elaborate on the operational side of the intelligence cycle.
The DI perspective has so overwhelmed the literature that intelligence method has
begun to normalize the analytical priority of the intelligence cycle. Hulnick’s dismissal of
4
Schum, David A. and Jon R. Morris. “Assessing The Competence and Credibility Of Human Sources Of
Intelligence Evidence: Contributions From Law And Probability.” Law, Probability, and Risk, Vo. 6 No. 1-
4, pp. 247-274, 7 April 2007.
5
For further information, see "Sherman Kent and the Profession of Intelligence Analysis." (Davis, Jack.
Occasional Papers 1, no. 5. Washington, DC: CIA, The Sherman Kent Center for Intelligence Analysis,
November 2002). Davis says, "Of the many individuals who paved a pathway for the development of
intelligence analysis as a profession, [Sherman] Kent stands out -- both for his own contributions to
analytic doctrine and practice, and for inspiring three generations of analysts to build on his efforts to meet
changing times.... If intelligence analysis as a profession has a Founder, the honor belongs to Sherman
Kent.” Prominent writings include his Strategic Intelligence For American World Policy (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1949).
6
Hulnick’s writings include “The Intelligence Producer-Policy Consumer Linkage: A Theoretical
Approach” (Intelligence and National Security, vol. 1 no. 2, 1986); “Managing Analysis: Strategies For
Playing The End Game” (Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, vol. 2 no. 3, 1988).
7
Heuer is especially well known for his Psychology of Intelligence Analysis (Washington, DC: CIA, Center
for the Study of Intelligence, 1999).
5
the intelligence cycle writ large suggests that the absence of writings about fieldwork
have made the distortion complete. With a strong DI bias, Hulnick finds the intelligence
cycle unrepresentative of how national intelligence analysis operates and he offers no
possibility that the model may be useful to operations.8
Frederick P. Hitz, a classmate of Aldrich Ames with a successful career at the
CIA, provides a good example of how the available writings lack coverage of the internal
process. His book, The Great Game: The Myth And Reality of Espionage, compares what
the author knows and can say about the real world of espionage with its coverage in spy
fiction. Unfortunately, spy novels do not delve into the HUMINT process beyond the
more exciting operational interactions between intelligence and counterintelligence
officers and their assorted agents and contacts. The internal elements of the construction
and processing of source reporting will not sell many books. HUMINT reliability is more
likely affected in an agent handler’s boring struggle with word processing software as
he/she recounts the details of a clandestine meeting than in his/her adventures with
signals, dead drops, and countersurveillance.
One book that does cover the internal process, if to a limited degree, is Ronald
Kessler’s Spy vs. Spy, the sensational 1988 exposé of FBI counterintelligence operations
against the Soviets.9 Unfortunately, while Kessler set the scene and told stories of arrests,
expulsions, and prosecutions, he offered little description of the inner workings of the
HUMINT process at the Washington Field Office. Kessler was not seeking to write an
academic piece, so it is probably unfair to suggest that he squandered his opportunity, but
8
Hulnick, Arthur S. “What’s Wrong With The Intelligence Cycle?” in Strategic Intelligence (Vol. 2): The
Intelligence Cycle, edited by Loch K. Johnson (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger Security International,
2007), pp. 1-21.
9
Kessler, Ronald. Spy vs. Spy: Stalking Soviet Spies In America. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1988.
6
few other books have gotten that close to operations. This report gleans what it can from
Kessler’s book.
In conclusion, the existing literature fails to look at how the intelligence
community might distort source information through its collection and processing.
As an aside, the writer found the sociologist Erving Goffman10 and his study of
small-scale human social interactions11 to have considerable potential applicability to
analysis of the HUMINT process. Goffman puts life’s players on an imaginary stage and
examines their social behavior in assorted contexts12, so it is easy to overlay the roles and
behaviors of intelligence sources, their handlers, and analysts on these social situations
and learn something new and useful.13
Goffman’s chapters on performances, teams, and discrepant roles are prime
examples of the overlay of intelligence players. In one example, Goffman describes an
indiscreet informer who plays a discrepant role by going backstage on opening night to
discover the exciting secret climax of the show (performance) that the cast (team) has
been keeping from the public for months. Goffman says that when the informer goes back
to his seat to expose the big secret to his neighbors in adjoining rows, he/she spoils the
surprise for the audience and ultimately ruins the opening.14
10
Goffman’s works include The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life New York: Doubleday Anchor Books,
1959; Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. New York: Harper Colophon Books,
1974; Interaction Ritual: Essays in Face-to-Face Behavior. Chicago: Adline Publishing Co, 1967;
and Strategic Interaction. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1969. Goffman’s work, rooted in
philosophy’s phenomenology, prompted the development of both ethnomethodology and symbolic
interactionism.
11
His field is called microsociology.
12
Goffman, The Presentation of Self, p. 72.
13
Goffman, The Presentation of Self, p. 72. The author is famous for examining life’s interactions as if
people were players on a stage, something called the dramaturgical perspective. As he says, “All the world
is not a stage, of course, but the crucial ways in which it is not are not easy to specify.”
14
7
Goffman’s book is useful because it specifically discusses information secrecy,
espionage, and the negative results of an inadequate defense against a potential threat in a
model of human interaction that can be readily overlaid on intelligence themes.15 His
microsociological framework offers a valuable tool for future intelligence researchers
attempting to fill gaps in the discussion of source reliability.
15
Goffman, The Presentation of Self, p. 141-145.
8
PROCEDURES
Given that the existing literature is deficient in the study of how the intelligence
community can distort source reporting as it targets, acquires, documents, evaluates, and
exploits HUMINT sources, this paper will conduct an interdisciplinary exploration of a
rich body of books, scholarly articles, media, and other qualitative sources in the social
sciences, journalism, and the law to see how other fields deal with this problem. The
paper will look at a variety of meanings of reliability, then review the elements of the
HUMINT process before moving on to examine the players in that process: source,
collector, analyst, and editor. It will conclude with observations and recommendations.
This paper will be non-experimental.
Definitions and examples will be drawn from an array of published works
resulting from a literature search. The writer’s thirty years of on-the-job experience in
FBI counterintelligence qualify him to make expert observations of field operations. A
degree of bias is inevitable given that the researcher will personally select the writings to
be included. Such bias will be mitigated by the inclusion of a wide assortment of
writings, most of which are authored by specialists in their fields.
Since the preponderance of writings on HUMINT source reliability is unavailable
at the unclassified level, this researcher intends to examine the writings of other
disciplines with substantially similar framing and attempt to reach useful conclusions for
the benefit of the USIC.
The interdisciplinary aspect of this research assumes that the HUMINT process
has its equivalent elements in other fields. For example:

9
• The Courtroom: The eyewitness to a crime (source) provides information to the
prosecutor (collector), who is challenged by the defense attorney (analyst) before
a judge (editor) and jury (decision maker).
• The Newsroom: The source of a news story (source) provides information to the
reporter (collector) covering a story. The journalist (analyst), who may be
identical with the reporter, writes the article and submits it to fact checkers and
the news editor (editor), who publishes the article for his/her organization’s
readership (decision maker).
• Social Research: In sociology and anthropology, a researcher (collector/analyst)
observes and interviews a target society (source), creating and maintaining logs
and notes, and then publishing his/her findings. The logs and notes are eventually
processed and published for use by other researchers (analyst). A peer review
board (editor) oversees the publication of social research studies in a journal for
their readership (decision maker). The social scientist – sociologist,
anthropologist, or ethnographer – and the person or people he/she studies, are the
final comparison in this study.

10
RESULTS
The HUMINT Process
The collection, writing, analysis, and editing of source reporting within the
intelligence community can have as negative an affect on source reliability as an enemy’s
purposeful deception campaign. While a source might provide incorrect reporting or
outright lie, a collector can just as easily misquote the source, fail to make note of
something critical, or even misrepresent a source’s information for personal reasons. It is
important for all concerned to recognize that the HUMINT process can be led astray by
the collector as well as the source.
Of the sixteen US intelligence agencies, less than a third have a significant
HUMINT focus, but that effort is sizeable and important. Each develops an individuated
internal process for day-to-day operations geared to its agency’s particular responsibilities
for meeting national intelligence requirements. To overcome these differences in process,
the military intelligence services, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the Federal
Bureau of Investigation (FBI) coordinate their inter-agency obligations in this area
through the CIA’s National HUMINT Manager. According to General Michael Hayden,
who introduced the position to the Congress, “This official will set Community-wide
policies, guidelines, and tradecraft standards, ensuring that our human intelligence
collectors are well-trained and effective.”16
The CIA’s HUMINT process might be called the Foreign Intelligence (FI) Model.
In his article “What’s Wrong With the Intelligence Cycle?”17 Arthur S. Hulnick explains
16
Office of the DNI. General Michael V. Hayden Before House Permanent Select Committee Subcommittee
on Oversight, 28 July 2005, (http://www.dni.gov/testimonies/20050728_testimony.htm)
17
Hulnick, Arthur S. “What’s Wrong With The Intelligence Cycle?” in Strategic Intelligence (Vol. 2): The
Intelligence Cycle, edited by Loch K. Johnson (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger Security International,
11
some elements of the CIA’s HUMINT process. The most remarkable part is his
discussion of the alienation between agent handlers and analysts, who were for years
compartmented from each other for security reasons. Even though the two elements have
now been commingled, Hulnick opines that the union of forces remains shaky, a situation
that bodes ill for the reliable conveyance of source reporting through the HUMINT
process. Undoubtedly his discussion is focused on all-source analysts, who in any
intelligence organization can feel isolated from recruitment operations due to OPSEC
considerations. With a focus on the Directorate of Intelligence, Hulnick fails to mention
in the above article whether CIA operational analysts work closely with agent handlers. 18
Ronald Kessler offers a rare glimpse into the HUMINT process in Spy vs Spy:
Stalking Soviet Spies in America, in which he describes Soviet foreign counterintelligence
(FCI) work at the FBI’s Washington Field Office (WFO) late in the Cold War.19 The FCI
model discussed below provides a useful vehicle to discuss the basic outline of a
HUMINT process.
The Foreign Counterintelligence Model
The FBI’s FCI Model contains the elements of a typical HUMINT cycle and
serves adequately to show how source reliability fits into the process. FCI-related
HUMINT collection responds to national intelligence requirements, which target the
three main facets of the threat faced by the United States from any sophisticated hostile
intelligence service (HIS): 1) its officers and their agents, especially their recruitments
within the USIC; 2) its collection requirements; and 3) its operational methodologies.
Since HIS officers are traditionally found under diplomatic or commercial cover in
2007), p. 2. Hulnick seems to mistakenly limit the definition of HUMINT to the operation of clandestine
agents.
18
Hulnick, pp. 2-5.
19
Kessler, Ronald. Spy vs. Spy: Stalking Soviet Spies In America. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1988.
12
Washington, DC; New York, NY; and a few other major cities, the FBI’s largest FCI
operations are found in these locations. The HUMINT collection effort involves FBI
Special Agents conducting double agent and recruitment operations, interviews,
interrogations, surveillance, and reconnaissance against known or suspected HIS officers,
their agents and contacts. 20
In the 1980s, Special Agents and analysts at FBI headquarters conducted all-
source analysis, the vetting of clandestine foreign sources, and the dissemination of
finished intelligence outside of the agency. The FBI’s Washington and New York field
offices dedicated Special Agent staff to work with FCI squads as operational analysts. In
the mid-1990s, and especially since 9/11, the Bureau’s ranks have filled with professional
intelligence analysts conducting all-source and operational analysis both at FBI
headquarters and in the field.
Special Agents and operational analysts work in the following three areas of
HUMINT collection to produce and refine source reporting: observation, interaction, and
reporting and evaluation.
Observation
Surveillance Specialists (SS)21 and Special Surveillance Group (SSG) personnel
routinely watch FCI targets from fixed-site and mobile surveillance platforms and make
note of their observations in formal reports. Special Agents occasionally conduct their
own surveillance and reconnaissance. The activity is described as HUMINT because
human observations are filed in official reports. While photography and beacons may be
used to support these observations, the activity is not overwhelmingly photographic in
20
Kessler, Spy vs. Spy, p. 16.
21
Fixed site surveillance is typically conducted from a convenient office or apartment nearby. Within the
FBI, the operation, the site, and the operator can each be referred to colloquially as a lookout.
13
nature, like aerial photography and satellite imagery, and is therefore not labeled as
imagery intelligence (IMINT). Operational analysts sort through the collected
observations seeking patterns of behavior and assorted anomalies to provide additional
perspectives on FCI targets and their contacts. 22
Interaction
Information can be lost or misconstrued once contact is made with a source, so it
is important to comprehend the scope of the interaction phase of the HUMINT process. A
Special Agent, for example, might discern HIS collection requirements by interviewing a
target’s recent contacts to learn what sort of questions the target is asking. The FBI would
control the target’s contacts in any future meetings. The Special Agent might even dangle
a military officer as a potential contact, such as WFO’s successful SHOCKER case
against Soviet military intelligence (GRU) in the 1950s. In that operation, the FBI used a
US Army master sergeant “as a double agent channel to supply deceptive information to
mislead, disrupt, and reduce the effectiveness of the Soviet chemical weapons
program.”23
Established informants, walk-ins and volunteers from the general public can
provide the Special Agent with a goldmine of useful information. Unreliable sources in
this category can just as easily redirect a case to disastrous and embarrassing results, such
as the volunteer who led the FBI to an unwarranted but wide-ranging investigation of
terrorism charges against the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador
(CISPES). “[T]he key informer in the investigation, Frank Varelli, on a number of
occasions provided F.B.I. agents with information that was later found to be 'blatantly
22
Kessler, Spy vs. Spy, pp. 36-37.
23
Bennett, Michael and Edward Waltz. Counterdeception Principles and Applications For National
Security. Norwood: Artech House, 2007, pp. 131-132.
14
false’ or ‘concocted,’ ” according to a senior FBI official in testimony before the US
Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.24
Occasionally a Special Agent will recruit a foreign official as a clandestine
foreign agent. A reliable recruitment-in-place (RIP)25 can provide restricted information
and valuable insights on HIS planning and operations. A RIP can be both a feedback and
feedforward channel in a deception operation, letting the FBI know what is happening
inside an HIS operation and injecting new information meant to confuse that operation
still further. A disloyal source in such a position can upend the deception operation by
turning those channels in a direction favorable to the HIS, turning advantage into defeat.26
A Special Agent can become an undercover operative or serve in a liaison
capacity and thus be both collector and source. An undercover operative can be doubled
back against the USIC, fed controlled or deceptive information, or fail to maintain
discipline and begin to report unreliably. An FBI liaison officer provides the opportunity
for an HIS to run a deception operation against the USIC.
Operational analysts rarely interact with an asset during a debriefing, but all-
source analysts occasionally attend to interview the asset about one or more topics
pertinent to the completion of a pending finished intelligence product. Their relative
inexperience in an operational environment can theoretically result in distortion of
interview results or observations.
Reporting and Evaluation
A Special Agent will routinely document a source debriefing soon after the
meeting to minimize the loss or misrecollection of data. Such reports contain an

24
Shenon, Philip. “FBI Admits Informer Misled Inquiry.” The New York Times, 24 February 1988.
25
A recruitment-in-place is an agent of a foreign intelligence service who remains in his/her job in order to
collect and provide current information, typically through clandestine meetings with an agent handler.
26
Bennett and Waltz, pp. 129-131.
15
intelligence section, which provides the objective product of the interview – what was
asked and what was said in response – as well as the interviewer’s opinions and
extrapolations from the event. Notation is also made of any documents or other items
passed between the parties during the meeting. Source reporting also includes an
administrative portion, which speaks to the asset’s health and mental state, the time and
place of the meeting, attendees, countersurveillance, and other such details. Operational
analysts sort through this reporting to fill in incomplete or unclear information, develop
follow up questions, confirm accuracy, discern inconsistencies, and verify that collection
is pertinent to requirements and worth the costs of the operation.
The Special Agent and operational analyst will collaborate to judge the source for
reliability. Headquarters analysts may also review the file to determine source reliability.
All-source analysis is used to vet an asset’s information against reliable sources. If a
source is determined to be controlled and deceptive, the operation may be continued or
stopped. If most or all sources are deceptive, these confirmations can be meaningless.
Multiple sources saying the same thing proves reliability, not validity.
Editing and Approval
Source reporting can lose reliability as editors and managers review the document
prior to dissemination. Editors can be peers, team leaders, or reports officers.
Management can include the collector’s immediate supervisor or any lateral or vertical
management colleague that the approving official shows deference towards. The editing
and approval processes can each distort HUMINT through alterations made to source
reporting without sufficient referral back to the original. Details may be added or
removed, or changes made in emphasis, not merely edits for grammar and style. Haste
16
causes many errors at this stage, as draft versions proliferate and reviews become more
cursory. Politics and expediency can be insidious factors of distortive change. Some
reporting has something to say that is deemed inconvenient or otherwise not supportive
of management’s agenda. Managers can resist the novel, innovative, or counter-intuitive
out of an overabundance of caution. Reliability might not survive the argument, “It has
never been done that way before.”
The next stage of the process is when all-source analysts write finished
intelligence products relying at least in part on this clandestine foreign HUMINT source
reporting. The all-source analyst is typically compartmented from the original source, so
the declaration of reliability of the intelligence is based on a source caveat.
Parallel Processes
The HUMINT process has its equivalents in other fields, from which this paper
hopes to draw out useful parallels and contrasts. The roles of source, collector, analyst,
and editor are not only found in intelligence work. In a social science like anthropology,
the villagers are both target and source, the anthropologist is the collector and analyst,
and the scientific journal is the editor. In the television entertainment news business, the
starlet is the target, her neighbor is the source, the reporter is the collector, the TV news
anchor is the analyst, and the Nielsen ratings are the editor. In the criminal courtroom, the
defendant is the target, the witness is the source, the police are the agent handler and
operational analysts, the district attorney is the case agent/officer, the defense attorney is
the strategic analyst, the jurors are those who evaluate the reporting, and the judge is the
oversight element. The vetting process takes place during cross-examination.

17
This paper will briefly explain the HUMINT process from the perspective of the
collector, analyst, and editor, and then elaborate on the lessons learned by their effective
counterparts in anthropology, journalism, and the courts.

18
The HUMINT Source
A HUMINT source conducts collection clandestinely or overtly; commits specific
operational acts or simply observes things of strategic value; can be a government
employee, soldier, fellow countryman, or a foreign government official or other
foreigner; recruited or a volunteer; and be sent on a mission or tapped for what he/she
happens to already know due to circumstances or position. A HUMINT source may be a
soldier on reconnaissance, a lookout on surveillance, an émigré with target knowledge, a
recruited foreign clandestine agent with access, or a trained intelligence officer.
Diplomats, defense attaches, liaison, émigrés, travelers, target contacts, established
informants, and prisoners can also provide useful HUMINT.
A valuable HUMINT source provides accurate, useful, sensitive, and timely
information to a foreign intelligence service. The information is often of restricted access
and sensitive, often about his/her own intelligence service, armed forces, terrorist
organization, leadership, or critical national assets.
A human source of intelligence is called an agent, an asset, a recruitment, a
trusted contact, or, colloquially and somewhat pejoratively, a spy. His/her espionage is
admired by the collector and despised by the victimized state.
The major known American traitors by espionage have been USIC insiders:
Aldrich Ames, Robert Hanssen, John Walker, Jonathan Pollard, and Christopher Boyce.
They each volunteered, meaning these sources stepped up and offered their services to a
foreign government without a recruitment approach. And each served clandestinely, some
for many years, working “in place” for a foreign intelligence service from within their
respective organizations.
19
At the other end of the scale are intelligence-controlled volunteers, such as the
dangle, the turned recruitment (double agent), and the turned double agent (triple agent).
Before representatives of an intelligence organization have the chance to distort
source reporting through the HUMINT Process, reliability can suffer from a more basic
flaw: the source may be deceptive or unintentionally provide incorrect information. One
way or the other, the information funneled into the system is wrong from the very
beginning. The interaction between source and collector as a nexus for loss of reliability
is addressed elsewhere in this paper.
The unreliable source can be categorized based on his/her motives. The source
can intentionally lie or provide a potent admixture of half-truths and fabrication as part of
a wider deception campaign. Such disinformation can cause intelligence services or
armies to direct valuable resources towards bogus threats and leave nations vulnerable to
genuine dangers. Or the source can be well meaning but unintentionally provide
misinformation, causing equal harm to intelligence and national defense. Problems of
recollection, perspective, and self-deceit are some of the causes of misinformation.
Schum and Morris suggest parallels between HUMINT reliability and witness testimony
in law, as well as between HUMINT and source statements in journalism. They probe the
history of the “testimony credibility problem” in some depth, but give little attention to
the journalism issue. They proceed to explain aspects of probability calculations of
credibility using the MACE system.27
Misrepresentation and Deception
There are many purposeful deceits in the world of HUMINT. For example, a
counterintelligence service can dangle a faux volunteer to an HIS in the hopes of

27
Schum and Morris.
20
establishing a double agent case. A corrupt volunteer can cause the opponent to expend
valuable resources and make incorrect threat assessments. And once the deception is
discovered, the HIS is less willing to readily accept the next volunteer.
The KGB defector, Anatoliy Golitsyn, sowed seeds of paranoia that prompted the
CIA to dismiss subsequent Soviet defectors, like Yuriy Nosenko, as agent provocateurs
and its director, James Jesus Angleton, to launch a damaging mole hunt within the
agency.28
The victim of an HIS recruitment pitch can report the approach and be doubled
back under counterintelligence control to provide useless and misleading information to
the recruiting agency. The reliability of a developmental can only be assessed over time.
For example, in the last days of the Cold War, the CIA thought its recruitment-in-
place nicknamed CURLY was its East Berlin station’s first active duty asset in East
German surveillance. But CURLY was controlled by the Stasi and only feigned
recruitment. The CIA met with this double agent for months “as the German poured out
everything he knew about Stasi surveillance.” An unexpected gap in CURLY’s regular
meeting pattern was quickly resolved with a warm personal meeting between the source
and the agent handler. The latter wrote in his report to headquarters, “I looked into his
eyes and I realized that he was good.”29 Oddly enough, internal reporting of what the CIA
was willing to pay such an asset provoked another Stasi officer to offer his services and
expose the double agent operation. “He in turn would soon become the most important
American spy in East Germany, turning over thousands of pages of documents from
inside the Stasi….”30

28
Hitz, “The Importance and Future of Espionage,” pp. 82-83.
29
Bearden, Milt and James Risen. The Main Enemy: The Inside Story of the CIA’s Final Showdown With
the KGB. New York: Random House, 2003, pp. 388-389, 394, 437.
30
Bearden and Risen, p. 394.
21
The maverick Juan Pujol (Appendix B) dangled himself to the Nazis during
World War II without the assistance of an Allied intelligence agency.31 Desperate to
deceive a hostile government, Pujol was eventually taken under the control of Allied
intelligence and successfully operated against the Germans. Operation GARBO would
become famous for its role in the deception of the Nazis during the Normandy invasion.
Convinced that Normandy was a diversionary tactic, Chancellor Adolf Hitler maintained
his powerful tank divisions near the Pas de Calais in anticipation of a main invasion force
that would never come.
Effective deception can be disorienting. Soviet spy Richard Sorge infiltrated the
German Embassy in Tokyo, providing Joseph Stalin with highly valuable intelligence
throughout the pre-war period.32 When the Japanese arrested Sorge in October 1941, the
German diplomatic corps in Japan found the betrayal unfathomable. Major-General
Eugen Ott, Ambassador of Germany to Japan, was shocked, having assessed Sorge as a
patriot and friend. (Appendix C) 33
The audience is in large part to blame for any connivance that they allow,
according to the sociologist Erving Goffman. He suggests that those around such a person
“may be suitably impressed by the individual’s efforts to convey something, or may
misunderstand the situation and come to conclusions that are warranted neither by the
individual’s intent nor by the facts.”34 He suggests that more deceptions would be
exposed were it not for social graces, like tact, and fear of embarrassment on the part of
31
Pujol, Juan and Nigel West. Operation GARBO: The Personal Story of the Most Successful Double Agent
of World War II. New York: Random House, 1985, pp. 44-46.
32
Sorge is particularly renowned for his timely but unheeded warning of Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi’s
surprise attack against the Soviet Union.
33
Deakin, F. W. and G. R. Storry. The Case of Richard Sorge. New York: Harper and Row, 1966, p. 17.
34
Goffman, Presentation of Self, p. 6.
22
the victims. The eventual exposure of false identity, Goffman says, causes a “definitional
disruption” for its victims. 35
Goffman’s sociological scale of misrepresentation allows for the ranking of
deception and betrayal along a scale of audacity that ranges from the bald-faced lie to the
white lie.36 A skillful communicator can misdirect while avoiding lies altogether through
the use of “innuendo, strategic ambiguity, and crucial omissions….”37
Goffman suggests that humans are constantly projecting and receiving
impressions of themselves and others, and to varying degrees are aware of each other’s
actions. The projection can be purposeful, even when unwitting, and the reception can be
effective, even if it the activity is deemed repugnant.38
With the addition of an intelligence context, Goffman’s theories of social
interaction can be transposed to accurately describe elements of a standard Denial and
Deception (D&D) operation:
[An intelligence source] may wish [his/her intelligence collector and

associated agency] to think highly of him, or to think that he thinks highly
of them, or to perceive how in fact he feels toward them, or to obtain no
clear-cut impression; he may wish to ensure sufficient harmony so that the
interaction can be sustained, or to defraud, get rid of, confuse, mislead,
antagonize, or insult them.39
Irrespective of his/her intentions, an intelligence source, not unlike Goffman’s
individual, will find it to his/her benefit to control the collector and his/her agency,
especially how they define the relationship, how they respond to him/her, and,
fundamentally, how they treat him/her.40

35
Goffman, Presentation of Self, pp. 13-14.
36
Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self In Everyday Life.Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1959, p. 62.
37
Goffman, Presentation of Self p. 62.
38
39
40
Goffman, Presentation of Self, pp 3-4. Goffman states that the author owes much to an unpublished paper
by Tom Burns of the University of Edinburgh. “He presents the argument that in all interactions a basic
23
An unreliable HUMINT volunteer may turn out to have had little or no access and
questionable motives. Some sources offer information out of a sense of patriotism, while
others seek to bolster their ego or image. Some want to be part of the game, while others
seek to be helpful. Despite a lack of useful information, the informant may either dangle
his/her nonexistent access as a carrot to the authorities or manufacture information out of
whole cloth. A volunteer who files a false report is not only deceitful, he/she misdirects
the intelligence process and, if not discovered early, can waste valuable investigative and
analytical resources. In criminal cases, filing a false report can even be illegal.41
Journalists encounter deceptive news sources that rival those in the world of
espionage. Business executives may stonewall or mislead the media during critical
periods in the company’s life to preserve goodwill and protect the corporate image. Word
of changes in leadership in the boardroom or regulator inquiries can damage individual
reputations and lead stockholders to flee and prices to plummet.42
Popular entertainers may toy with veracity when confronted by the media,
according to John Brady, former editor-in-chief of Writer’s Digest.43 John Lennon started
the ball rolling, Brady says, when the popular member of the Beatles rock group on a US
tour was asked, “How do you find America?” Lennon teasingly replied, ”Turn left at
Greenland.” And not unlike a defector who has tired of endless debriefings, or the
prisoner under unceasing interrogation, Brady says a star may “lie you blind” just to pass
the time through a tedious interview. Brady quoted Alice Cooper, another rock star, as
underlying theme is the desire of each participant to guide and control the responses made by the others
present….”
41
Bobo, Jeff. Would-be Informant Charged With Filing a False Report. Kingsport, Tennessee: Kingsport
Times-News, 14 February 2007. http://www.timesnews.net/article.php?id=3731380
42
Adams, Sally, and Wynford Hicks. Interviewing For Journalists. London: Routledge, 2001, pp. 63-64.
43
Brady, John. The Craft of Interviewing. Cincinnati: Writer's Digest, 1976, p. 189; Brady’s biography is
currently available online at the website of the E. W. Scripps School of Journalism, where he is a visiting
professor. http://scrippsjschool.org/faculty/faculty_details.php?oak=bradyj
24
saying, “I really like lying…. Vogue magazine asked me what was the biggest lie I had
ever told, and I could not think of one, so I lied about that.”44
Error and Misinformation
Sources need not be deceitful to lead an intelligence agency astray. Even well
intentioned sources can be wrong due to poor recollection or lack of perspective. As
Francis Wellman wrote of eyewitnesses in court over a hundred years ago, “People as a
rule do not reflect upon their meager opportunities for observing facts, and rarely suspect
the frailty of their own powers of observation.”45
Recollection
Before the early twentieth century, few challenged the reliability of those who
were by all appearances well-meaning citizens offering eyewitnesses testimony in court.
According to Hugo Munsterberg, the first sociologist to study the dismal record of
eyewitness testimony, anyone can grasp intentional lying, but “confidence in the
reliability of memory is so general” that no one in court is prepared to accept that a
witness “could remember the wrong thing.” 46
In recounting his own flawed testimony as witness to the burglary of his home,
Munsterburg makes the point that the source need not be deceptive, only misinformed, or,
as in his case, encouraged by the police to reach conclusions useful to the prosecution’s
case through the power of suggestion. 47
44
Brady, p. 189.
45
Wellman, Francis L. The Art of Cross-Examination. New York: Macmillan Company, 1904, p. 25.
Reprint, Birmingham: Legal Classics Library, 1983.
46
Munsterberg, Hugo. On The Witness Stand. (1908) (http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Munster/Witness/)
47
Munsterburg, On The Witness Stand, “The Memory of the Witness.”
(http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Munster/Witness/memory.htm)
25
In 1974, Elizabeth Loftus wrote Reconstructing Memory: The Incredible
Eyewitness for Psychology Today, which launched her career as an expert defense witness
on the fallibility of eyewitness testimony.48
Loftus says that humans participate in a never-ending process of memory
reconstruction, not unlike “playful, curious children” packing and unpacking dresser
drawers. Memories are not a filmed record that is stored deep in the brain but snippets of
recollection that must be adjusted to resolve the details that do not seem to fit until “a
coherent construction of the facts is gradually created that may bear little resemblance to
the original event.”49
Loftus says that each time a human summons a memory, he/she processes the
available elements through a subjective filter that may fill in the gaps, remove some or all
of the uncomfortable aspects, and/or even recombine the snippets to tell a more
convincing tale. The memories that surface through this interpretative process vary from
those previously packed away and over time gradually obscure our original impressions.
“[O]ur representation of the past takes on a living, shifting reality,” Loftus explains,
adding, “[Our memory] is not fixed and immutable, not a place way back there that is
preserved in stone, but a living thing that changes shape ….”50
In 1983, Arye Rattner, of Ohio State University, reported in his doctoral thesis
that mistaken eyewitness testimony was responsible for over half of wrongful convictions
in US cases involving indexed crimes, resulting in as many as 8,500 incarcerations of the
innocent.51
48
Loftus, Elizabeth and Katherine Ketcham. Witness For the Defense: The Accused, The Eyewitness, And
The Expert Who Puts Memory On Trial. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991, p. 7.
49
Loftus and Ketcham, p. 20.
50
Loftus and Ketcham, p. 20.
51
Loftus and Ketcham, pp. 26-27.
26
Loftus suggests that some witnesses can be expected to modify their recollections
of events to make better sense of what they’ve seen or to bring their recollections more in
line with the testimony of other witnesses. As they permanently alter their long-term
memories through this reconstruction process, these witnesses become more and more
confident that their altered recollections are an accurate record of what actually occurred.
Witnesses to violent crime may desperately want to be helpful but are traumatized by the
event and possess only a vague mental image of the culprit. In such cases, witnesses are
vulnerable to improperly conducted photo arrays, line-ups, and show-ups52 that suggest
the culpability of the authorities’ prime suspect.53
Loftus tells the story of how Bobby Joe Leaster spent sixteen years in prison for
the murder of a storeowner based solely on the faulty eyewitness testimony of the widow
in a one-person show-up outside the hospital where her husband had just died. The police
walked her up to the car window and asked her to make the identification. Trembling and
still shaken from all that had happened, the widow peered into the car and said he “looks
like the man who shot and killed my husband.”54
Misinformation from eyewitnesses abounds after a plane crash, hold up, or school
shooting. It is typically set aside as the authorities seek out forensic evidence and other,
firmer clues. Witness testimony often leads in conflicting directions, so it is not a priority
when evidence from a surveillance camera or a black box can provide solid
documentation.
52
Lipton, Jack P. “Legal Aspects of Eyewitness Testimony,” in Psychological Issues in Eyewitness
Identification, ed. Siegfried Ludwig Sporer, Roy S. Malpass, and Guenter Koehnken,. (Mahwah: Lawrence
Eerlbaum Associates, 1996.) According to Lipton, a photo array allows the police to verify the
identification of a suspect with the help of an eyewitness through the use of a set of mug shots. A line-up
substitutes live subjects for photographs but otherwise has the same purpose. A show-up involves the
witness and the suspect and is often done on the scene of the crime.
53
Loftus and Ketcham, pp. 20, 23-25.
54
27
“For many investigators, the only infallible witness is a twisted piece of metal,”
one correspondent said, summing up the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB)’s
feelings about first reports. Ted Lopatkiewicz, an NTSB spokesman, remarked, ''I do not
think I'm making any news by saying that eyewitness testimony at a plane crash and
55
probably at many traumatic events is unreliable.'' Eyewitnesses often provide wildly
varying reports in a crisis, such as in the wake of the 12 November 2001 crash of
American Airlines Flight 587 in Far Rockaway, New York.56 (Appendix D)
Dr. Charles R. Honts, a professor of psychology at Boise State University and the
editor of The Journal of Credibility Assessment and Witness Psychology, says “The
biggest mistake you can make is to think about a memory like it's a videotape; there's not
a permanent record there.'' Instead, Honts suggests that plane crash witnesses fill in what
they do not understand. And they apply previous experience to a current situation, even if
all they know about plane crashes is what they’ve seen on television or in the movies.57
This is not to say that first reports of witnesses are not accepted and eventually
processed by federal, state, and local agencies. ''Can you imagine if we did not interview
the witnesses?'' an unidentified NTSB official said incredulously in a comment to The
New York Times, which was covering the board’s investigation of the Flight 587 crash. 58
Perspective
55
Cable News Network. “Breaking News: Gunman Fires On Another San Diego School.” CNN.com
Transcripts, 22 March 2001. (http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0103/22/bn.09.html)
56
Woodberry, Jr, Warren. “Many Saw Flight 587 On Fire Before Crash.” The New York Daily News, 5 June
2002. (http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/news/2002/06/05/2002-06-
05_many_saw_flight_587_on_fire_.html)
57
Wald, Matthew L. “Ideas and Trends: For Air Crash Detectives, Seeing Isn’t Believing.” The New York
Times, 23 June 2002.
(http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A04E6DB133FF930A15755C0A9649C8B63&scp=33&
sq=%22twa+flight+800%22&st=nyt)
58
“Gunman Fires On Another San Diego School.” CNN.com Transcripts, 22 March 2001.
28
A legitimate source can misapprehend events due to distortions resulting from the
source’s physical vantage point or biases stemming from the source’s circle of associates,
experience, or access to information.
Investigators of the mid-air explosion of TWA Flight 800 on Long Island Sound
found that the physical vantage point of witnesses affected their perception of events in
the sky. The physics of sound and light caused witnesses at varying distances from the
explosion to look up to see what was happening as much as a minute earlier. What they
heard at the relatively slow speed of sound triggered witnesses to turn their eyes skyward
to view what was happening in virtually real time with their eyes. According to Matthew
Wald, “[H]undreds of people saw an upward streak that they assumed was a missile,
although investigators said it was the body of the plane itself, streaking upward after the
forward portion had fallen off following a fuel tank explosion.”59
Bias also played a role in suggesting testimony to potential witnesses. The NTSB
criticized the FBI’s witness interview process in the TWA Flight 800 investigation after
receiving testimony that for some period of time FBI agents had inappropriately led
witnesses to support the so-called missile theory through their questioning and failed to
collect other information.60
The HUMINT Collector
The use of foreign spies is the most rare and least reliable of the HUMINT
options. While it can yield rich rewards, it can also lead to utter disaster or accomplish
59
Wald, Seeing Isn’t Believing.
60
National Transportation Safety Board. Aircraft Accident Report: In-flight Breakup Over the Atlantic
Ocean, Trans World Airlines Flight 800 Boeing 747-131, N93119 Near East Moriches, New York July 17,
1996 (NTSB/AAR-00/03 DCA96MA070 PB2000-910403 Notation 6788G Adopted 23 August 2000),
Witness Document Issues (1.18.4.2). Washington, DC: Diane Publishing, pp. 233-234.
(http://books.google.com/books?id=Sd9rSiFtSwIC&pg=PA232&lpg=PA232&dq=%22twa+flight+800%22
+%22sound+to+travel%22&source=web&ots=n6Rq6W-bCn&sig=5T5tTMMg6l2b-6uE-ex52g34-
Is&hl=en#PPA233,M1)
29
nothing. For thousands of years, source reliability merely involved the proper training
and use of a decision maker’s own staff, soldiers, or other fellow countrymen, who would
be sent on missions to reconnoiter the opponent and return with information of strategic
importance. Only in modern times have nations routinely developed, recruited and
operated clandestine foreign sources using agent handlers. (Appendix F)
Reliability of the HUMINT source can be problematic for the collector. Consider
for a moment the sorts of nagging questions that an agent handler would like to ask about
his/her source’s latest nugget of information.
• CONTENT: What exactly do you know? How do you know it? When and
where did you learn it? Whom did you learn it from? This includes issues of
source access, accuracy, knowledgeability, qualifications, and validity.
• MOTIVE: Why do you know it? And why are you telling me? Are you
genuine? This includes issues of source authenticity, calculability, credibility,
motivation, trustworthiness, and veracity.
• ABILITY: Can and will you continue to get information for me? This includes
issues of source stability, availability, willingness, capability, and trainability.
But there is also the issue of source reporting reliability, a diminishment of value through
inaccuracy or distortion that can be caused by the collector.
There are two critical junctures beyond the source’s control where the HUMINT
collector can distort source reporting. The first point is during the interaction between
source and collector, when the latter receives and absorbs intelligence from the former
through an interview, interrogation, or overt/covert participant observation. The second
critical nexus is that moment when the collector sets down his/her memories, notes,
30
and/or recordings of the interaction phase in an official written form called source
reporting. The second phase may include the participation of an operational analyst, who
helps to sort, assemble, and otherwise make sense of raw collection as it is processed for
dissemination as source reporting.
Sociological fieldwork involves “people studying people”. Whether the collector
is an outsider or a member of the group being studied, and whether the culture and
appearance of his/her subjects is utterly familiar or quite different, he/she may still distort
information through the collection phase. 61
The collector and operational analyst use what limited time is available to them to
refine and exploit the HUMINT yield prior to its official documentation and
dissemination. This process can introduce distortion to source reporting as collector and
analyst hastily resolve the inevitable ambiguities and incomplete thoughts resulting from
the typical exchange between source and collector. A supervisor or reports officer, serving
as editor, will offer corrections and elaborations that can also potentially distort the
source reporting before its dissemination.
Interviewing
Clandestine meetings in the intelligence world are a dangerous, nerve-wracking
business that can affect the reliability of source reporting. The well-trained agent handler
maintains the source’s relative calm by keeping the support team out of sight and the
meeting place comfortable and quiet. Any number of other agents, intelligence analysts,
and technicians participate in the staging of the debriefing of a HUMINT source, but the
handler always minimizes exposure of the team to the source. A secure meeting under
61
Georges, Robert A. and Michael O. Jones. People Studying People: The Human Element In Fieldwork.
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980, p. 23.
31
hostile conditions can ramp up the source’s anxiety and lead to errors and
misrepresentations. The agent handler’s team can also become anxious as they arrange
OPSEC for the debriefing of a RIP or defector at a safe house. Despite everyone’s best
efforts, the overall emotional noise level can be high.
Errors and omissions can also emerge when the collector takes notes during a
source meeting, as well as when he/she later converts his/her notes and memories to
formal reporting. While technical means can capture an audiovisual recording of a
debriefing, there is no guarantee that the collector will more carefully summarize a
recording than a live person. Either way, the completion of a successful clandestine agent
interview can make its documentation seem tedious in comparison, leading to potential
errors and omissions.
Use of the interview as a form of human inquiry is so common in the United
States today that some label America the “Interview Society”. 62 The interview has
"become the most feasible mechanism for obtaining information about individuals,
groups, and organizations in a society characterized by individuation, diversity, and
specialized role relations.”63 But the collector can take the interview process for granted
and not prepare adequately, leading to errors and misjudgments.64 Its routine usage belies
how difficult it is to conduct a good interview, how easily both the questions and the
responses can be misunderstood. Andrea Fontana and James H. Frey suggest that there is
62
Fontana, Andrea and James H. Frey. “The Interview: From Structured Questions to Negotiated Text,” as
Chapter 24 of Handbook of Qualitative Research, edited by Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln
(Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2000), p. 646.
63
Mishler, E. G. Research Interviewing: Context and Narrative. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1986, p. 23.
64
Mishler, p. 23.
32
“always a residue of ambiguity, no matter how carefully we word the questions and how
carefully we report or code the answers.”65
We have come to rely on the interview and tend to trust its results as valid,
dismissing the possibility that bias might creep into source reporting due to the
relationship that inevitably develops between the interviewer and source.66
Collection of qualitative research in the social sciences can be conducted first-
hand, with the fieldworker participating as an embedded observer or interviewing
individuals in-depth. Data collection consists of the observations and quotes the
fieldworker records, like the coded survey responses collected by the quantitative
researcher. Unlike a survey, the fieldworker’s detailed notes are more individuated and
the results more varied in both quality and substance. 67
In the social sciences, according to Cole, in-depth interviews allow the researcher
and source to freely discuss a few selected topics in a less structured manner. 68 Cole says
this technique can encourage the source to expound on issues that might get only cursory
coverage in a standard interview with a list of questions.69 This can be especially useful
when the topic is unfamiliar to the agent handler, who can feel free to interact with the
source and learn more.70 While this might produce an interview report with uneven
coverage of the scheduled topics for discussion, Cole suggests the richer results can
easily be extracted for use in specific research.71
65
Fontana and Frey, p. 645.
66
67
Cole, Stephen. The Sociological Method (Second Ed.). Chicago: Rand McNally College Publishing
Company, 1976, p. 161.
68
Cole, The Sociological Method, p. 161.
69
Cole, The Sociological Method, p. 161.
70
Cole, pp. 193-194.
71
Cole, p. 161.
33
On the other hand, Cole cautions that in-depth interviews can encourage the
source to fabricate information that will please the interviewer and/or make the source
seem important. The source can also elaborate from a poor vantage point, responding to a
line of questioning with opinions that lack a competent perspective.72
An intelligence collector can only use the in-depth interview technique when time
is relatively abundant for asset meetings, as with a defector. An agent handler typically
has to prioritize a veritable battery of questions for an RIP, so the only way to make room
for in-depth interviewing in such a case would be to meet longer or more frequently with
the source, a rare luxury under typical OPSEC procedures. Depending on the case, it may
be impossible to delve deeply into individual questions, but an agent handler should be
open to the prospect.
The sociologists Fontana and Frey encourage the investment of time in give and
take discussions between the collector and source. Feedback in the interview process,
including the presentation and correction of field notes, assures the collector that he/she
has developed valid and reliable information. The source also gains confidence that the
collector has understood his/her message.73 Interactive communication can actually
transform a collector and his/her source into collaborators in the construction of new
knowledge, according to Fontana and Frey.74
Feedback in the interview process is also valued in journalism. Brady
recommends the “stop-and-go method” to clarify issues as they arise, unless “a
verification, however important, would distract the interviewee who is beginning to open
72
Cole, pp. 193-194.
73
74
34
up.”75 If “rapport is good and your subject methodical,” Brady adds, “your man would
probably be flattered by your close listening, and by your attention to detail.”76
Due to laziness or bias, a journalist may produce routine source reporting that is
shallow and misleading to his/her audience. Biased reporting can also express a world
view that protects and defends the political interests of the journalist’s native land. The
foreign press corps covered Japan's offensive at Shanghai in November 1937, by
publishing the sensational accounts of personal tragedy favored by their editors and
readership. They developed a callous routine, providing daily coverage of the Japanese
front and Japanese and Chinese press conferences from their "ringside seat" in and near
the International Settlement. "For a break in this routine, they could sit in the Park Hotel,
drinks in hand, and watch the Japanese dive-bombers, or go up on the roofs of apartment
blocks and see Japanese gun batteries in action." Their newspapers sought stories like:
"Corpses are as thick as flies on fly paper in the summer-time. Limbs and mutilated
bodies are piled high in utter confusion."77
A reporter has a responsibility to dig deep enough to develop the important stories
and not be misled. Talking to the wrong sources (or no sources) and not asking the
difficult questions of the right sources will often result in a distorted view of affairs.
According to Phillip Knightley, news correspondent Edgar Snow reported the
politics behind the Japanese invasion of China while his colleagues sensationalized the
gruesome carnage. Knightley says Snow was the first to interview Mao Tse-Tung and
75
Brady, p. 186.
76
Brady, p. 186.
77
Knightley, Phillip. The First Casualty: From the Crimea to Vietnam: The War Correspondent as Hero,
Propagandist, and Myth Maker. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1975, p. 270.
35
Chou En-lai, taking great risks to find them in the field and bring their Communist
viewpoint to a Western news audience for the first time.78
Wall Street reporters likewise must probe deeply for the story or be fooled by self-
serving pundits. James Surowiecki, in his reporting on the sub-prime loan crisis and one
particularly loathsome offender, says there is no dearth of biased financial gurus with
conveniently timed insider information to mislead the media on Wall Street.79 Surowiecki
decries the poor reporting methods of his colleagues, saying, “[T]he picture we’re getting
of the market—and of the economy as a whole—may reflect what people want to happen
as much as it reflects what is actually happening.”80
An exasperated Marek Fuchs, pursuing this same story, complained that the media
and investors did not exercise due diligence when accepting the “one-man campaign of
self-interest” of this one source, noting that the source “did not get to where he is by
lacking the gift of blarney.”81
Participant Observation
Participant observation is one of a number of approaches social scientists can use
towards the collection of reliable qualitative research.82 That collection can be overt or
covert, depending on whether or not the sociologist chooses to disclose his/her collection
activities, not unlike the declared vs. undercover work of a HUMINT collector.83
78
Knightley, The First Casualty, pp. 271-272.
79
Surowiecki, James. “Profits of Doom,” The New Yorker, 3 September 2007.
(http://www.newyorker.com/online/2007/09/03/070903on_onlineonly_surowiecki)
80
Surowiecki, James. “Profits of Doom,” The New Yorker, 3 September 2007.
(http://www.newyorker.com/online/2007/09/03/070903on_onlineonly_surowiecki)
81
Fuchs, Marek. “Media Taken For a Ride by Countrywide CEO.” TheStreet.com, 24 August 2007.
(http://www.thestreet.com/newsanalysis/maven/10376247.html)
82
Cole, p. 161.
83
Cole, p. 161.
36
The major nineteenth century European powers developed today’s system of trading
military attaches to conduct what Maureen O’Connor Witter calls sanctioned spying in
both times of war and peace.84 Armed forces intelligence services routinely task their
military attachés, who are declared intelligence officers for all practical purposes, to
passively collect while on assignment overseas. This may or may not preclude
recruitment operations, depending on the sensitivity of the bilateral relationship. They
must take extraordinary care in the conduct of espionage operations, for fear of causing
an international incident if they are caught. Declared intelligence officers are known to
the host country and are expected to nose around a bit but otherwise behave themselves.
Such was the story of James Lilley, the first US intelligence officer in China and a
85
declared CIA operative. As Henry Kissinger’s man in Beijing, nothing Lilley might
collect clandestinely would be worth the loss of the new relationship between the United
States and China, so his extracurricular duties, while productive, were decidedly
unprovocative.86 He limited his HUMINT activities to surveillance and reconnaissance
related activities, as well as the development of Eastern European officials based in the
Chinese capital.87
A covert agent, like any good performer, works hard to leave a highly consistent
impression on an audience that is contrary to reality in some significant ways and thereby
achieve his/her objectives. 88 The traitor is committed to the selected persona because the
84
“Sanctioned Spying: The Development of the Military Attaché in the Nineteenth Century,” contained in
Intelligence and Statecraft: The Use and Limits of Intelligence in International Society, Peter J. Jackson and
Jennifer L. Siegel, ed. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2005, pp. 87-103.
85
Lilley, James with Jeffrey Lilley. China Hands: Nine Decades of Adventure, Espionage, and Diplomacy
In Asia. New York: Public Affairs (Perseus Group), 2004, p. 177.
86
Lilley, p. 177.
87
Lilley, p. 177.
88
37
web of deceit is too complex to absorb haphazard alterations.89 “[A] discreditable
disclosure in one area of an individual’s activity will throw doubt on the many areas of
activity in which he may have nothing to conceal.”90 Once his/her legend has been
developed, the undercover agent can and should expect to be treated according to the
cover story persona. At the same time, the undercover agent should be competent to
perform competently in the role he/she has accepted.91
According to Kenneth S. Goldstein, a sociologist may choose nondisclosure of
his/her position and/or intentions and use confederates as fieldworkers in order to “induct
natural context” through deception. This is much the same as an intelligence officer
utilizing an operational asset against a target to prompt a response.92
The use of notetaking materials or audiovisual technology “can facilitate the
fieldworker’s information-gathering tasks and provide the potential for more thorough
descriptions and analyses because of the comprehensiveness and permanency of the
records they produce,” according to sociologists Georges and Jones.93 But unlike a
sociologist, an intelligence collector is unlikely to take notes in the company of his/her
target or use overt surveillance techniques like a camera or tape recorder. Intelligence
professionals can still learn from the problems faced by sociological fieldworkers related
to the use of observation technology. Georges and Jones provide the following four
examples.
1. The presence or suspected presence of fixed site, mobile, or technical
surveillance may have “deleterious” effects on the behavior of a target.94

89
90
91
92
Georges and Jones, p. 142.
93
94
38
2. Undue curiosity or other attentive behaviors by a collector can cause a target
to become suspicious, prompting guardedness and even deception.95
3. Feelings of guilt over perceived intrusions can prompt the collector to alter or
discontinue his/her behavior, affecting the collection results.96
4. A heavy reliance on the memory and note-taking capabilities of the collector
can introduce gaps in coverage and distortion of information in a participant
observation situation. “[I]ndividuals who rely exclusively upon memory and
notes always stand the chance of being charged with incompleteness or
bias.”97
Beyond the use of technology, the intelligence target may simply become
resentful of collectors altogether, not unlike the tribesmen in New Mexico who rejected
observation after accusing a group of anthropological researchers of “always sneak[ing]
about [to] learn secrets about people and write funny stories.”98
The observed may even completely turn the tables on the collector, effectively
reversing the direction of information flow away from the collector and diminishing the
collector’s effectiveness in meeting requirements. The distinction between collector and
observed is never as clearly drawn in the field as it is in the literature, Georges and Jones
explain. “[It can be] a continual reversal of roles … that [leaves] sometimes one, and
sometimes another, party to the act …in a position of dominance or control.”99
95
96
97
98
Georges and Jones, pp. 19-20.
99
39
The observed may have had previous negative encounters with collectors,
prompting anticipation of similar treatment or simply bad memories, neither of which is
likely to promote collaboration towards a productive relationship.100
The target community or its leadership may become annoyed at the intrusions of
collectors into their privacy, causing the censure or expulsion of fieldworkers and
possible long-term damage to the operation itself.101 In the case of the Zuni, a tribal
leader offered his overall disappointment with the arrangement when he said, ”Nobody
comes here to help us. Everyone who comes has his own self-interest at heart.”102
Unlike the rapid-fire feedback that occurs in an interview, a social scientist only
requests feedback on participant observation reports after memorializing his/her
commentary for the record. 103 Feedback can prompt defensive responses from the source,
according to Miles, and is thus generally not productive as a means towards refining
collection validity. Reliability instead rests not on feedback but on the skills of the
collector and the initial cooperation of the source. 104
Documenting
The agent handler memorializes each asset meeting by summarizing the pertinent
intelligence collected, recording all the administrative details surrounding the particular
debriefing event, and evaluating the overall operation. The handler creates separate
reports for administrative and intelligence purposes, the latter typically being referred to
as source reporting. The asset never sees this documentation, which restricts HIS
100
101
102
Georges and Jones, pp. 19-20.
103
Miles, Matthew B. “Qualitative Data As An Attractive Nuisance: The Problem of Analysis,” in
Qualitative Methodology, edited by John Van Maanen (Newbury Park, California: Sage Publications, 1979,
1983, sixth printing 1990), p. 128.
104
Miles, p. 128.
40
evaluation of internal methods and capabilities through a double agent; however, there is
also less chance for collection errors to be caught and corrected.
Before disseminating source reporting to a wider audience, the agent handler or
an analyst will edit for singularity by removing obvious details that tend to identify the
clandestine source. The writer may even break up the reporting into smaller, disseminable
pieces and/or disguise the origination point of the intelligence to disguise a sudden inflow
of intelligence that could put a source at risk. Persons other than the agent handler, his/her
operational team, and selected managers and staff ought not to see unexpurgated
debriefing documents.
The administrative portion contains the handler’s periodic assessment of the
source's reliability, both in context of the source's entire reporting record and any recent
incremental changes the handler or others have observed. The handler looks at criteria
such as access, accuracy, motives, etc, as part of a vetting process.
The handler and his/her supervisor, along with analysts and other managers, will
develop a formal statement of source reliability called a caveat, which is paired with the
information whenever it is disseminated. Such ratings have been commonplace since
President Truman established permanent intelligence organizations in the United States
some sixty years ago.
A consumer relies heavily on the source caveats within disseminated documents
for accurate evaluation of source reliability. Consumers want to know that the
intelligence they are reading is worth the paper it is written on. Beyond that, consumers
who routinely read the latest intelligence reports will inevitably attempt to discern trends
in the underlying source reporting that might boost their confidence in the intelligence.
41
The typical consumer of journalism bestows great confidence in the reliability of
high profile media organizations. An analyst citing a Washington Post piece, for example,
may value the vaunted reputation of the newspaper over the records of the individual
journalists, research assistants, and editors who prepared, checked, and tweaked the
article before it was approved for publication. Yet journalists continue to be caught
fabricating their stories at reputable publications, such as Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair,
at New Republic and The New York Times.
Abuse of Authority
Source reporting can be distorted through official malfeasance. An agent handler
can manipulate source reporting to advance his/her career and/or political objectives.
Depending on the objective, this abuse of authority can reach into management and
beyond. Such a breakdown of integrity in the HUMINT process can boost the face value
of unreliable sources and lead to bad outcomes.
The 1982 investigation and trial of two men for an Oklahoma murder is a perfect
example of such prosecutorial malfeasance. Due to poor detective work and the misuse of
confidential sources, two innocent men ended up in prison, one on death row, while the
real murderer received scant investigative attention despite obvious connections to the
case. The murderer even provided evidence against one of the defendants.105 Later
investigations revealed that the local police regularly relied on jailhouse snitches to
provide convenient if dubious testimony against their fellow prisoners to aid the
authorities in the conviction of defendants.106
105
Grisham, John. Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town. New York: Doubleday, 2006.
106
Grisham, Innocent Man, p. 161.
42
Alan M. Dershowitz laments the widespread practice of police perjury in a 1994
op-ed piece in the New York Times. Familiar to those in judicial and legal circles in New
York and elsewhere, this abuse of authority is referred to colloquially as “testilying,” a
blend of the words testifying and lying. Dershowitz blames the lawyers that routinely take
advantage of such tainted testimony as well as the judges who look the other way.
Dershowitz says the police compel false testimony from coerced witnesses and shore up
illegally obtained evidence with their own dubious sworn statements.
Dershowitz told the story of one police officer who was caught on tape
threatening a witness with bodily harm (“he would run him over ‘with a truck’”) if he
testified truthfully in court. The tape clearly contained the police officer’s promise to
deny having ever made this threat if it came out. When the recording was played in
Federal court in New York, the police officer stood his ground and denied having said it,
“and despite the tape the judge pretended to believe him.”107
Abuse of authority can reach the highest levels of government. Consider the case
of Vice President Dick Cheney, who orchestrated a system of leaks through which he
infused unreliable source reporting with the credibility of The New York Times and other
major national media outlets in order to promote his goal of war in Iraq. 108 Speaking to
Frontline, Tom Rosenstiel, Director, Project for Excellence in Journalism, pointed out
how the Times’ unique position as an authoritative outlet for national security stories
107
Dershowitz, Alan M. “Controlling the Cops: Accomplices To Perjury.” The New York Times, 2 May
1994.
108
Buying the War, Bill Moyers Journal, 25 April 2007.
(Full video, description, and transcript http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/btw/watch.html)
(Pertinent section from You Tube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1TliKIRcy4)
News War: Part II: The Reporting on Iraq’s WMD, Frontline, 13 February 2007.
(Full series, with description http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/newswar/view/)
(Pertinent section from You Tube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnMW4K-JYgs)
43
offered an “echo effect” that bolstered the credibility of the administration’s
intelligence.109 This questionable deception practice, which could also be called source
reliability augmentation, is a HUMINT process with five identifiable stages:
1. Stretch classified source reporting to tell a version of the story that
supports your goals and objectives;
2. Leak your version of the story off the record to a credible but hungry
reporter of a reputable media outlet;
3. Once published, use your leaked information as an unclassified and
seemingly independent secondary source with quality credentials to
bolster your media campaign in support of your goals and objectives;
4. Be sure to cite the reputable media source in public forums to bolster
the credibility of your leaked information;
5. Give one or more speeches, buoyed by the new public awareness of
your version of the story, to promote your goals and objectives.
Abuse of authority includes a journalist’s abandonment of objectivity,
which can occur as a result of political considerations. Knightley suggests that a
newspaper’s readership can remain totally unaware that their correspondent’s
dispatches resemble government news releases and should be met “with some
skepticism.”110
In the rush of patriotic fervor, a collector can take sides and lose all
impartiality in his/her reporting. What level of objectivity could be expected in the
reporting from intelligence collectors and embedded war correspondents in
109
News War: Part II: The Reporting on Iraq’s WMD, Frontline, 13 February 2007.
110
Knightley, The First Casualty, p. 319.
44
Afghanistan and Iraq in the wake of the September 11 th terrorist attacks?
According to Knightley, some World War II war correspondents flew bombing
missions, carried and used guns, parachuted behind enemy lines, captured whole
towns, and even received medals.111 Knightley tells the extreme example of
Ronald Monson, a war correspondent who "became so angry after seeing Belsen
concentration camp that, as he said, 'I drove my car into a column of German
112
prisoners. My God, did they scream!" Reporting can become distorted in such
emotional environments.
Personnel and the Personal
The quality of source reporting depends heavily on the collector. A host of
circumstances surrounding the collector can negatively affect collection and reporting.
For example, a new agent handler may find the job difficult to master, maybe even
distasteful or otherwise unsuitable. This collector may produce unreliable reporting for
several years until a new assignment comes along. Turmoil in a veteran collector’s
personal life can bring on sudden changes in product quality that may distort source
reporting. The collector may lack an appreciation for the target nation’s culture. Or the
rigors of the operational environment may be so personally abhorrent that the collector
becomes distracted and unintentionally distorts reporting.
Likewise the novice anthropologist might get the impression in training that the
job is fairly straightforward. But, according to Georges and Jones, the newcomer to
fieldwork can be startled to learn that mastering the basics of the interview and
observation were only the beginning of learning. They note, “Fieldwork guides tend to
111
112
45
leave the impression that the logic of inquiry, which the authors have reconstructed, is the
same as logic-in-use.” Whether in intelligence or anthropology, apprentice or
journeyman, adequate supervision is required lest the reliability of source reporting
suffer.113
Bias and Subjectivity
Intelligence collection can be victimized by the personal bias and subjectivity of a
collector. Lowenthal, in his Intelligence: From Secrets to Policy, says diverse collection
on the all-source model can provide a synergy that helps overcome the shortcomings of
particular collection methods114, but this only pertains to scope and depth of coverage and
not bias and subjectivity. It is important to remember that there is no average collector;
each has his/her own personal background, interests, and desires.
Georges and Jones suggest that anthropologists are encouraged to document their
personal biases and subjectivity in their reporting to illuminate for the consumer the
collector’s perspectives and mindsets. Even issues such as the reasons for the collector’s
choice of assignment could affect reporting and were therefore listed.115 In intelligence,
this could be an addition to the administrative portion of source reporting. It would
require a bit of personal reflection on the part of the collector.
Georges and Jones favor the recording of methodology as well as substance in
order to document possible biases. For example, they complain that the anthropologist
Ruth Benedict “implies in her writings that she had probed the minds and actions of
individuals […] but evaluation of her work is difficult without knowledge of her
113
114
Lowenthal, From Secrets To Policy, pp. 70-71.
115
Georges and Jones, p. 33
46
methods.” Benedict relied on interpreters, they added, but she “never identifies them,
explains how they were chosen, or indicates their role in her investigations.”116
In conclusion, a HUMINT collector can distort source reporting while conducting
an interview, during overt or covert observation of behavior or communications, or when
documenting his/her reporting. A collector may also distort reporting by letting power,
personal difficulties, or bias interfere with the proper fulfillment of his/her duties.
The Analyst
The analyst wrestles with others’ estimates of source reliability in his/her daily
reading of current intelligence reporting and carries forward others’ source reliability
caveats while researching and composing new intelligence products for dissemination.
But the analyst can also affect the reliability of source reporting.
Low Tolerance for Aggregation and Generalization
In the opening chapter of Quantitative Approaches to Political Intelligence,
Richards J. Heuer, Jr. says that CIA analysts simply do not believe that HUMINT data
can be standardized and aggregated because too much detail is lost in the process.
Intelligence analysis contends with many distinct pieces of information that are often
difficult to generalize and aggregate for broader study. Attempts to quantify data in
individual HUMINT cases can lead to data distortion and loss of reliability. Government
analysts do not believe that unique events can be uniformly measured and processed,
Heuer explains, leading many to favor subjective distortion over the statistical kind.117
In most of science, reliability is approached quantitatively. Experiments must be
repeatable in order to test hypotheses, so measurements are taken and the data aggregated
116
117
Heuer, “Adapting Academic Methods,” pp. 4-5.
47
so other scientists can repeat the research and attempt to disprove a theory. Reliability is
based on repeatability and consistency. Distortion is factored into the results as a margin
of error. Unfortunately, standardized measurement does not guarantee validity or avoid
distortion. It also tends to generalize and weaken the evidence regarding specific
individuals or groups.
Heuer describes the work of government intelligence analysts as qualitative
research, something fundamentally different from the quantitative analysis done by most
social scientists at the time.118 Social science scholarship has in fact broken free of its
bindings to scientific measurement, according to Valerie Janesick, developing new
descriptive terminologies that allow more precise study of people, places, and events.119
This is especially valuable for intelligence, where the behavior of specific humans in their
native environments is often preferable to estimates regarding average populations.
Kirk and Miller make the point that “the description of reliability and validity
ordinarily provided by nonqualitative social scientists rarely seems appropriate to the way
in which qualitative researchers conduct their work.”120 While they admit that the
numbers vs. no numbers argument is a bit of a contrivance, Kirk and Miller stress the
unique path that qualitative methodology has taken in the social sciences and how vital
the method is to field research.121 Sociological methodologies, including “analytic
induction, content analysis, semiotics, hermeneutics, elite interviewing, the study of life
118
Heuer, Richards J., Jr. “Adapting Academic Methods and Models to Governmental Needs,” as Chapter 1
of Heuer, ed. Quantitative Approaches to Political Intelligence: The CIA Experience. Boulder: Westview
Press, 1978, pp. 1-10.
119
Janesick, Valerie J. “The Choreography of Qualitative Research Design - Minuets, Improvisations, and
Crystallization,” as Chapter 13 of Handbook of Qualitative Research, 2nd edition, edited by Norman K.
Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2000, p. 393.
120
Kirk, Jerome and Marc L Miller. Reliability and Validity in Qualitative Research. Beverly Hills: Sage
Publications, 1986, p. 14.
121
Kirk and Miller, p. 10.
48
histories, and certain archival, computer, and statistical manipulations,”122 share a
common goal with intelligence research.
Low Tolerance for Inaccuracy
Kirk and Miller explain the difference between reliability through repeatability
versus validity by using the story of two thermometers and a pot of boiling water (100
degrees C). In their example, a malfunctioning thermometer registers the same incorrect
82 degree C temperature each time, while a more accurate one provides a range of
temperatures that average the correct 100 degree C temperature. “The second
thermometer would be unreliable but relatively valid, whereas the first would be invalid
but perfectly reliable,” they conclude, adding, “It is easy to obtain perfect reliability with
no validity at all.”123 In the realm of intelligence analysis, a series of reinforcing errors
and misperceptions can quickly become a foundation for unreliable knowledge.
A pair of analysts that favor opposing (quantitative vs. qualitative) research
approaches often lack a common vocabulary to help regulate their expectations for
reliability.124 Sam D. Sieber stresses the importance of validity in qualitative research and
argues against strict adherence to repeatability, suggesting that “[c]ertain kinds of
reliability must be intentionally violated in order to gain a depth of understanding about
the situation.” 125
Validity is important in much of HUMINT, so distortion cannot be relegated to a
percentage margin of error. Tests for repeatability are inadequate to detect deception and
122
123
124
Sieber, Sam D. "A Synopsis and Critique of Guidelines for Qualitative Analysis Contained in Selected
Textbooks,” Project on Social Architecture in Education. New York: Center for Policy Research, 1976.
Sieber is cited by Matthew B. Miles in “Qualitative Data As An Attractive Nuisance: The Problem of
Analysis,” in Qualitative Methodology, edited by John Van Maanen. Newbury Park, California: Sage
Publications, 1979, 1983, sixth printing 1990; p. 126.
125
Sieber, p. 126.
49
error. Users of HUMINT demand that a source not just be consistent in his/her reporting
but that accurate in that reporting. The USIC favors knowledgeability, accuracy, and
veracity in its HUMINT sources. Repeatability is used as a validation tool, comparing
and contrasting information provided by multiple sources, but it certainly isn’t a
foolproof methodology. When most sources are lying as part of an active deception
campaign, repeatability serves deception, not validity.
Fact Checking
An operational analyst familiar with a case can play an important collaborative
role with an agent handler, both before and after an asset meeting. Preparation for the
interview can prompt the development of good questions for the agent handler. More
importantly, the analyst can research pertinent topics and make sure the agent handler is
well briefed. The operational analyst can also help the agent handler check through the
results of the asset meeting, crosschecking details with other source reporting and
clarifying incomplete names, vague dates, and unfamiliar places and organizations. The
process can include an assessment of the asset’s bona fides, the status of INFOSEC if not
OPSEC, and the ultimate direction and value of the case.
In journalism these notions are called research and fact checking. Allan E
Goodman, the chief presidential briefing coordinator for Jimmy Carter, testified before
the Commission on the Roles and Capabilities of the United States Intelligence
Community on how much more rigorous journalistic fact checking was in comparison to
what he had experienced in government. For a Foreign Policy article, Goodman said,
“The intern [assigned to fact-check his article] proceeded to ask for the source of virtually
everything that I was saying in the article that could be construed to be a matter of fact as
50
well as the interpretations based on those facts that I was presenting. She also said she
would be calling other experts in the field to verify both my sources and my analysis.”126
Goodman recommends that intelligence analysts fact check an equivalent number of their
peers’ intelligence products to the number they themselves produce.127
According to Brady, some Hollywood reporters who interview famous movie
stars do their homework and things go smoothly, while others risk disaster because they
fail to conduct adequate preliminary research. A journalist like Gloria Steinem “reads
everything of importance written about her interviewees, and talks to their
acquaintances,” Brady says, adding, “[S]he starts her interviews by asking her subjects
what they think has been accurate and inaccurate in previous writings about them.” 128 An
exasperated Humphrey Bogart expressed his frustration with journalists circulating
gossip and innuendo when he told a cub reporter, “'Let it be known around town that just
because someone says something -- regardless of how big a star he is -- you are not
necessarily going to accept it on face value.”129 Whether in journalism or intelligence,
diligent research preparation, followed by an interview consisting of thoughtful and
properly formed questions, can develop useful information as well as stop the
perpetuation of erroneous information.
Fact checking takes place after the reporter’s interview. If fact checking is weak
or nonexistent, published articles will likely be incomplete or perpetuate inaccuracies
found elsewhere in the media. According to Neil MacNeil of The New York Times, "The
reporter who believes all that he is told will not last long. The competent reporter takes all
126
Goodman, Allan E. “Testimony: Fact-checking at the CIA.” Washington: Foreign Policy, Spring 1996,
p. 180.
127
Goodman, p. 181.
128
Brady, p. 191.
129
Brady, p. 186.
51
the data he can get. He may ask embarrassing questions. He checks one person's
statement against another's and against the known facts. ... He makes certain that he has
exhausted all available information before he writes a word of his story."130
“Reasonable journalism” encourages weak libel laws to address the media’s fear
of litigation but leads them at the same time to poor fact checking practices and
ultimately unreliable reportage. The Canadian courts have lightened the burden on the
media in a recent judgment: if the source provides misinformation but a reasonable effort
is made by the journalist to discern the facts—and that reasonableness is defined by the
courts – then libel cannot be charged. This is an unfortunate development, considering the
major cases of reporter misrepresentation at major media outlets in recent years.131
Fact checking is incorporated in the courtroom through cross-examination. The
defense attorney challenges the witness much the same as an analyst challenges reporting
from a HUMINT source. The courtroom parallel offers much to the study of distortion in
the field of intelligence.
Low Tolerance for Decisions Based on Stale Information
When current intelligence is unavailable, the most recent piece of dependable
source reporting is asked to fill the void until something fresher can be collected. A long
gap in applicable current intelligence can leave that last useful strand of reporting dog-
eared and strained.
The perpetuation of truly dated but once reliable HUMINT is a sign of poor
analytic methodology. Director of the CIA (DCIA) Michael Hayden recently stressed
how the Iraq War intelligence failure was caused in part by the perpetuation of dated
130
Brady, p. 185.
131
McQueen, Mark. Has Justice Robert J. Sharpe Put Process Before Truth in Libel Ruling? Best Way to
Invest, 19 November 2007. http://www.bestwaytoinvest.com/display/6733.
52
source reporting. A continual lack of fresh intelligence should have prompted analysts to
lower their confidence levels, but this did not happen. “Even though our recent reporting
had been very thin, we still kind of carried the old conclusions forward without frankly
holding them up enough to the light in order to see whether or not they were still valid.”
Hayden mentioned that his analysts have now learned to recalibrate analytic confidence
in intelligence estimates in such cases, citing one example in particular where a CIA
analyst told him that an estimate was downgraded “because the intelligence on which it
was based has aged off.” 132
Freshness of source reporting can affect the reliability of advice given to combat
pilots seeking legal justification for a pending air strike, according to Judge Advocate
General (JAG) Charles Dunlap (USAF). JAG lawyers are embedded in military
operations centers to grant pilots permission to launch weaponry and kill people. They
must remain aware of the latest source reporting and cannot rely solely on the highly
technical equipment in front of them. A blip on a television screen is not sufficient
information to authorize the taking of a life. Dunlap says the military must apply the
lesson of poor eyewitness accuracy to this command post situation. Embedded JAG
lawyers must develop “other intelligence indicators that would tell [them] that that [blip]
really is the enemy and that [the pilots] really do need to kill that human being.”133
Exclusion from a Privileged Relationship
There is a privileged relationship between agent handler and source that an
analyst cannot easily pierce. The handler and source develop an exclusive bond of trust
132
Meet The Press, 30 March 2008. (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/23867579#23867579)
133
CSPAN. JAG Charles Dunlap (USAF) spoke on 16 November 2007 at the American Bar Association,
Washington, DC on the subject "Law In Times of War,” as part of the America and the Courts series on
CSPAN. (The video begins with Sandra Day O'Connor speaking at another event. JAG Dunlap begins
speaking at 45:14. Link auto-invokes Real Player: javascript:playClip('rtsp://video.c-
span.org/60days/ac012708.rm')
53
that promotes reliable communication. The source depends on the handler for security,
and they spend much time together. The agent handler has legitimate OPSEC concerns
and will limit outside contacts with the source to minimize risk, effectively becoming the
source’s guardian and overseer. Beyond this, a agent handler’s career may skyrocket
through the development of a major recruitment case, so there are personal reasons for
keeping the asset cloistered.
This custodial relationship can make it difficult for analysts to discern a source’s
reliability first hand, to study non-verbal cues and mannerisms that do not appear in
reporting documents. As Goffman says, "Many crucial facts lie beyond the time and place
of interaction or lie concealed within it. For example, the 'true' or 'real' attitudes, beliefs,
and emotions of the individual can be ascertained only indirectly, through his avowals or
through what appears to be involuntary expressive behavior."134
Low Tolerance for Individual Perspectives
Six blind men in an Indian proverb (Appendix A) failed to discern that they
beheld an elephant because they each assessed a different part of the beast and could not
reconcile their findings from their unique perspective. They failed to realize that the scale
and complexity of their problem made their individual reports appear in conflict and
unreliable. Intelligence analysis requires a framework or theory of cognition through
which to evaluate collection collaboratively. Only then can reliability be rated. 135
In open source intelligence, an analyst can stumble on idle rumor or speculation
parading as fact simply because the media published irresponsible remarks. Arthur
Herzog, author of the B. S. Factor, said, 'When people sound knowledgeable, others
134
135
Kirk and Miller, pp. 49-51.
54
believe them. ... So much in modern life is guesswork and confusion that almost anybody
who seems to know what he is talking about will be promptly smuggled between
quotation marks."136
Jack D. Douglas, an early ethnomethodologist137, asserts that sociologists
unintentionally index138 even the most mundane aspects of social life, producing
hopelessly biased reporting in the process.139 While criticized by some, Douglas seems
particularly appropriate for the study of intelligence collection.140
A source will sometimes make strong, persistent claims but lack evidence that
might substantiate his/her dog-eared hypothesis. While it is the duty of the agent handler
to make a serious effort to separate fact from supposition while composing source
reporting, it becomes the responsibility of the analyst to meticulously avoid including any
such assertions in his/her finished intelligence products. This is not an ideal situation, as
all-source analysts often have no contact with sources and may inadvertently distort the
meaning of original reporting.
136
Brady, p. 185.
137
A term coined in the 1960s by sociologist Harold Garfinkel, ethnomethodology suggests that social
investigators impose their own frameworks and values on the components of life.
138
Indexicality derives from pragmatics, a field of linguistics, which suggests that meaning can be inferred
in other ways than direct semantic argument.
139
Douglas, Jack D. Investigative Social Research: Individual and Team Field Research. Beverly Hills:
Sage, 1976.
140
Bainbridge, William Sims. Review. Social Forces. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
September 1977, Vol. 56, No. 1, pp. 300-301. Bainbridge, of the University of Washington, gave Douglas’s
book a harsh review, dismissing it as emotional in its substance (“The only proper aim of social science, we
are told, is the discovery of the human experience.”) and deficient in its measurements (“No talk of
variables, causal models, or hypothesis testing here.”), not to mention its tendency to be autobiographical in
its nature. Bainbridge seems to criticize it for its qualitative aspects. The very qualities of the book that
Bainbridge found most dangerous to the probationary sociologist (“The neophyte may come away … with
a dangerous and unscientific superspy model of how field work should be done.”) are particularly
applicable to this thesis.
55
The Editor
The reliability of HUMINT can be negatively affected through the editing
process, which can occur at several points after clandestine source information has been
received and before it is sent to consumers. The writer has unpacked the dissemination
stage to see where the distortion of clandestine source information might occur after
agent handlers and analysts have completed their drafts of source reporting and finished
intelligence products. This chapter is thus designated The Editor, which captures this
level of the publication process in journalism and the social sciences.
Peer Review
Informal peer review and other report editing schemes, as well as the formal fact
checking and standardization procedures of reports officers, play important intermediate
roles in the preparation of intelligence drafts heading to management.
When editors, reports officers, and management make revisions to drafts, they too
can potentially distort the HUMINT in source reporting and finished intelligence
products. It is incumbent upon the submitting writer to review any changes to the draft to
assure that the revised document continues to convey the spirit and substance of the
source’s original statements.
In journalism, reporters submit their drafts to fact checkers so statements
regarding people, places, and events can be verified. The media are motivated by a fear of
lawsuits. New Republic reporter Stephen Glass was able to manipulate his publication’s
fact checking system by conducting personal interviews, which were not subject to
review under the magazine’s guidelines. An online magazine’s fact checkers discerned
56
the deception and published an embarrassing exposé, criticizing both Glass and the
editors of the New Republic. 141
Along those same lines, management is responsible to watch for employee
misconduct. The New York Times correspondent Jayson Blair created sources out of thin
air, embarrassing the reputable newspaper. It is important that all intelligence personnel
remain vigilant for such excesses, which can misdirect operations and cause untold
harm.142
Where the Buck Stops
The management review and approval process provides the USIC with its final
bulwark against the dissemination of HUMINT that is either purposely deceptive, well
meaning but erroneous, or distorted by agent handlers and analysts in their collection,
processing, and writing of source reporting and finished intelligence products. The
obligation of management to assure quality disseminations is real but cannot substitute
for quality workmanship by collectors and analysts in the preparation of drafts, especially
given the many other responsibilities of today’s intelligence managers.
The dissemination of improperly caveated HUMINT, and inadequate vetting by
receiving agencies, can lead to catastrophe. Consider the case of international liaison
between Germany and the United States regarding Germany’s CURVEBALL source.143
141
60 Minutes. “Stephen Glass: I Lied For Esteem.” 17 August 2003.
(http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/05/07/60minutes/main552819.shtml); Ebert, Roger. Review of
“Shattered Glass”
(http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20031107/REVIEWS/311070305/1023)
142
Editors of The New Atlantis. “Technology: The Great Enabler? How Jayson Blair Conned The New York
Times.” The New Atlantis (No. 2, Summer 2003), pp. 110-111
(http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/technology-the-great-enabler) ; Nwazota, Kristina. “Jayson
Blair: A Case Study of What Went Wrong At The New York Times,” Online NewsHour (Website of the PBS
program NewsHour With Jim Lehrer)
(http://www.pbs.org/newshour/media/media_ethics/casestudy_blair.php)
143
The Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) internally assessed this Iraqi defector source as unreliable but
circulated dozens of reports to the USIC anyway, according to David Kay. Kay noted that the German
intelligence agency refused access to the source for proper vetting. The CIA, which used this source to
57
Error and confusion in the international transference of one source reliability assessment
caused the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and CIA to produce shaky intelligence
that became the basis for war in Iraq in 2003. In a New York Times Book Review article on
Robert Drogin’s Curveball: Spies, Lies, and the Con Man Who Caused A War,
Christopher Dickey details the incomprehensible failure of the HUMINT vetting process
in this case, both within individual intelligence agencies and in international and
interagency liaison.
The Germans warned the Americans [CURVEBALL] might be unreliable

but would not let any American intelligence officer interview him. After
9/11, as the Bush administration focused its “war on terror” against
Saddam Hussein as well as Osama bin Laden, and despite all the warning
signals, the Central Intelligence Agency bought into Curveball sight
unseen. Its experts in weapons of mass destruction endorsed his deception
as truth. The skeptics within the agency were ignored.144
David Kay, charged with finding Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction
(WMD) as head of the Iraq Survey Group, heaps a significant share of the blame for the
confusion caused within the USIC regarding Iraqi WMD on the BND and the more than
100 unreliable CURVEBALL reports it issued. The Germans not only failed to properly
vet their asset, but they inexplicably complicated the matter by failing to identify him to
the USIC or provide access to him, according to Kay, adding, “It was a blockade that
made it impossible for any other service to validate his information. The German service
did not live up to their responsibilities or to the level of integrity you would expect from
such a service.”145
support part of Secretary of State Colin Powell’s presentation to the United Nations in the US justification
for war, is chastised for its assumption of the source’s reliability.
144
Dickey, Christopher. “Artificial Intelligence”. The New York Times Book Review, 18 November 2007.
(http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/books/review/Dickey-t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin)
145
Goetz, John and Marcel Rosenbach. “Spiegel Interview With Iraq WMD Sleuth David Kay,” Spiegel
Online International, 22 March 2008. (http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,542888,00.html)
58
While CURVEBALL was an obvious fabricator and source reporting based on
this asset should unquestionably have been labeled unreliable, the intelligence agencies
involved so mishandled the HUMINT process that current accusations of CURVEBALL’s
unreliability miss the point. Within the concept of source reliability must be an
assessment not only of the asset but the HUMINT process employed, including the
responsibility of the final editors. Management bears the burden to assure that source
reliability caveats are accurate on outgoing disseminations and that their staff do
everything within their power to detect deceitful and erroneous foreign sources, as well as
the distortions of source reporting by foreign handlers and analysts.
Office Politics and Career Advancement
Management may be tempted to alter content or quash the dissemination of source
reporting or HUMINT-based analytical pieces when they either disagree with the
prevailing views or fail to support the known positions of higher-level authorities. There
can be considerable pressure on managers to be team players, avoid rocking the boat, and
not make trouble. Approving innovative intelligence products that fly in the face of upper
management’s conventional wisdom can be fatal to mid-level managers’ careers,
especially if these products diminish the perceived threat and/or negatively affect budget
allocations.
Eugen F. Burgstaller suggests that analysts might err on the side of caution and
undervalue or ignore critical reporting if it is “at variance with a larger body of
information available from other collection sources, diplomatic reporting and public
media.” And he allows that policymakers might choose to show “effective disregard for
the substance of … reports simply because an administration is firmly committed to an

59
established general line of policy … or judges that basing a policy decision on such
intelligence reports would conflict seriously with domestic political considerations
deemed of overriding importance….”146
One should also assume that intelligence management, set squarely between
analysis and policymaking, might tinker with intelligence output in order to reduce
uncomfortable conflict, avoid career-ending mistakes, and/or curry favor in important
places towards career advancement.
146
Burgstaller, Eugen F. “Major Future Problems and Limitations Of Human Collection” in Intelligence
Requirements for the 1980’s (No. 5): Clandestine Collection, edited by Roy Godson (New Brunswick,
USA: Transaction Books, 1982), pp. 78-79.
60
CONCLUSION
This paper has explored how source reporting can be distorted at each stage of the
HUMINT process within the USIC and how that distortion may impact perceptions of
source reliability. It is clear that source reliability pertains not only to the trustworthy,
deceptive, or misinformed human source of intelligence but also to the process through
which HUMINT is collected, analyzed, and disseminated.
The writer found no specific writings on this subject. The field of operational
practices is severely underrepresented. There is a bias towards writings on the “inside the
Beltway” battle between analysts and policymakers, with little focus on the HUMINT
process, a problem that needs to be remedied (see Recommendation #5 below).
History (Chapter 4) demonstrates that decision makers who use HUMINT for
answers have always preferred to deploy their own agents, resorting to the use of
clandestine foreign sources only when agent access is denied. National leaders as far back
as Moses sent soldiers, diplomats, and executive agents into the field to see what an
opponent is up to.
The United States spends most of its intelligence budget on technical collection,
so there is an understandable focus on ISR, but many intelligence writers discount or
completely ignore human reconnaissance and surveillance, a problem that ought to be
remedied (see Recommendation #4 below).
But HUMINT collection in times of war is more challenging. American
spymasters have recruited spies against the British in the American Revolution, the
Confederacy in the US Civil War, and the Soviets in the Cold War. As non-governmental
61
organizations, today’s terrorist groups are a new and particularly difficult type of
HUMINT target, but the basics of HUMINT collection against a hard target in time of
war remain the same: the recruitment and operation of dependable foreign spies, and that
process demands special skills that only a dedicated spymaster or intelligence
organization can provide.
It may seem a truism, but espionage also requires an opponent. Today’s world
requires estimates of national threat and a steady stream of indicators and warning, but
decision makers will reduce efforts in clandestine HUMINT collection and revert to
surveillance and reconnaissance whenever the diminished sense of threat allows it. This
writer expects that, once the War on Terrorism has passed fifty years hence, the USIC will
have insufficient clandestine HUMINT collection in place, reliable or otherwise, to shift
directions and avoid the next surprise attack. As concerned as he was about Osama bin
Laden and Al Qaeda, Richard A. Clarke offers no “lessons learned” from the build up to
9/11 that might teach the USIC how to smoothly shift directions.147
HUMINT collection (Chapter 5) is fundamentally a qualitative process, which can
draw from the experiences of other fields with similar frame works, such as
anthropology, journalism, and the law. The intelligence field has only begun to look to
other social sciences, journalism, and the courtroom to bolster its theory and application.
Future researchers must venture into the best practices of anthropologists, sociologists,
criminologists, district attorneys and defense lawyers, reporters, and their editors and
overlay what they have learned onto the intelligence realm. Goffman’s The Presentation
147
Clarke, Richard A. Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror. New York: Free Press (Simon
& Schuster), 2004.
62
Of Self In Everyday Life and other microsociological writings ought to be required
reading for new USIC analysts.
Further exploration of the definition and scope of source reliability in intelligence
seems warranted before attempts to quantify reliability, including the development of a
source reliability scale, can be made. The writer hopes that this thesis provides the
foundations for work on such a scale.
The collection of HUMINT (Chapter 6) includes observation, interaction, and the
conversion of those observations and interactions into source reporting. The HUMINT
process involves the development of that source reporting, which is then pooled for the
use of all-source analysts to develop finished intelligence products. Distortion of source
reporting can occur anywhere in the process, including the editing and approval stages
prior to final dissemination of source reporting or finished intelligence products.
The role of the source in HUMINT reliability (Chapter 7) is a matter of intent:
what are the motives of the source in providing this information? The reliable source
provides accurate and useful information. The unreliable source either misrepresents the
facts or unintentionally gets the information wrong, often due to poor recollection or
perspective.
The distortion of HUMINT reporting begins with the collector (Chapter 8) and
his/her interaction with the source during an interview. Anthropologists recommend a
thorough exchange of ideas between the two parties to an interview, including feedback
and follow up (see Recommendation #2 below).

63
An embedded collector can clarify information more readily in a participant
observer situation but lacks the interviewer’s ability to promptly record his/her findings.
Delays in report writing can cause distortion of information.
A poorly supervised collector can abuse his/her authority or become distracted or
disgruntled over personal issues and generate an assortment of distorted source reporting.
Unchallenged bias and subjectivity can produce great distortion of HUMINT collection.
The analyst (Chapter 9) plays the role of journalistic fact checker or the defense
attorney cross-examining an errant witness (see Recommendation #3 below). The analyst
also keeps an eye on the shelf life of old, once reliable source reporting. Access to the
source may be limited to the agent handler, putting the analyst outside the privileged
relationship, thus limiting the analyst’s ability to assess both source reliability and the
quality of source reporting. The analyst may use source information to buttress an
unsupportable argument, thereby casting a shadow on the reporting itself.
Source reporting and finished intelligence products go through an editing process
(Chapter 10), which can cause distortion. Writers are encouraged to offer their
publications for peer review. Reports officers may adjust a document for content or style
before disseminating it to other agencies. And the supervisor and his/her upper
management can weigh in on the writings of their staff. A manager might take the “better
safe than sorry” approach and tone down particular statements for political reasons, or the
manager may seek rapid advancement by exaggerating findings to support his/her
agenda.
Finally, the consumer needs a better awareness of the pitfalls of source reporting.
The courtroom’s experience with false eyewitness testimony provides a unique solution
64
to this problem. Jurors are either instructed by the judge or provided an overview by an
expert defense witness (see Recommendation #1 below).
Recommendations
The writer makes the following recommendations based on his research.
Awareness Training
Intelligence consumers need to be better informed regarding the potential
unreliability of HUMINT sources in finished intelligence products. The Director of
National Intelligence (DNI) might offer awareness training to legislators, executive
branch appointees, and their staffs. The curriculum could include an explanation of
caveats and a review of case studies.
We learn from Loftus that her expert court testimony and/or a judge’s detailed
instructions can warn jurors of their vulnerability to mistaken or deceptive eyewitness
testimony. Increased awareness, especially in capital crime cases, can ratchet down the
prejudicial nature of eyewitness testimony, especially where a witness is key to the
prosecutor’s case.148 A similar advantage might be gained in the intelligence field.
Feedback and Follow-up
The information flow between agent handler and source is necessarily one-way.
No collector wants expose his/her list of intelligence gaps to a double agent, for example.
But journalism and anthropology can teach the intelligence field something about
improving the reception of source information through feedback and logical follow-up. A
participant observer in a tribal village might bring his/her report back to the subject to
verify that his/her observations are accurate and complete. There may be follow-up
questions on both sides that can be addressed in such secondary discussions. A journalist
148
65
may do extensive research and then present his/her findings to the subject of the
investigation, as well as witnesses and contacts. This feedback and follow-up is noted in
the final report. Too often this is not done in the intelligence realm. To be sure, both
anthropology and journalism have some cautionary tales of this sort of practice backfiring
on collectors, but writers never encourage its abandonment.
Cross-Examination
Asset vetting could be conducted in a model courtroom, with the agent handler
taking the role of the prosecuting attorney and representing the operational side of the
house, and an all-source analyst playing the defense lawyer would represent the
analytical position. On the witness stand would be someone well versed in the asset’s
testimony, demeanor, and overall situation, preferably someone, as they say, without a
horse in the race. The judge, another independent role, could be the master of ceremonies
and prompt the flow of discussion. Operational and analytical management would play
the more political roles of the district attorney’s office and public interest groups.
Surveillance and Reconnaissance
Human surveillance and reconnaissance deserve a place in the HUMINT process
yet receive barely a mention in most intelligence publications. The US Army’s
Intelligence Field Manual ought to include surveillance and reconnaissance as specific
HUMINT techniques and separate it from their attempts to incorporate TECHINT into
operations. Recent popular intelligence analysis books by Mark Lowenthal (From Secrets
to Policy) and Robert M. Clark (A Target-Centric Approach) totally ignore the role of
human surveillance and reconnaissance in the intelligence cycle.
Operational Theory
66
There need to be more scholarly writings from the operational perspective.
Sources and methods must be protected, but a way must be found to open the discussion
of the fundamentals. This writer suspects there may be a structural bias within the USIC
that encourages analytical writing at the cost of operational exposition.
Conclusions
The reliability of source reporting is affected not only by the character of the
HUMINT source but also by the process through which that reporting is collected,
analyzed, and edited. The fields of journalism, sociology, and the law provide a rich base
of experience through which the IC can learn more about the obtaining and delivering of
source information.
67
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Wald, Matthew L. “Ideas and Trends: For Air Crash Detectives, Seeing Isn’t Believing.”
The New York Times, June 23, 2002
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A04E6DB133FF930A15755C0
A9649C8B63&scp=33&sq=%22twa+flight+800%22&st=nyt (accessed March
18, 2009).
Wellman, Francis L. The Art of Cross-Examination. New York: Macmillan Company,

1904. Reprint, Birmingham: Legal Classics Library, 1983.
Woodberry, Jr, Warren. Many Saw Flight 587 On Fire Before Crash. New York Daily
News, June 5, 2002.
http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/news/2002/06/05/2002-06-
05_many_saw_flight_587_on_fire_.html (accessed March 18, 2009).
72
APPENDICES
A. Blind Men and the Elephant (Indian Proverb)
B. Juan Pujol (GARBO)
C. Richard Sorge
D. American Airlines Flight 587
E. Edgar Snow
F. A Brief History of HUMINT

73
A - An ode by John Godfrey Saxe, based on an Indian proverb
It was six men of Indostan

To learning much inclined,
Who went to see the Elephant
(Though all of them were blind),
That each by observation
Might satisfy his mind
The First approached the Elephant,

And happening to fall
Against his broad and sturdy side,
At once began to bawl:
“God bless me! but the Elephant
Is very like a wall!”
The Second, feeling of the tusk,

Cried, “Ho! what have we here
So very round and smooth and sharp?
To me ’tis mighty clear
This wonder of an Elephant
Is very like a spear!”
The Third approached the animal,

And happening to take
The squirming trunk within his hands,
Thus boldly up and spake:
“I see,” quoth he, “the Elephant
Is very like a snake!”
The Fourth reached out an eager hand,

And felt about the knee.
“What most this wondrous beast is like
Is mighty plain,” quoth he;
“ ‘Tis clear enough the Elephant
Is very like a tree!”
The Fifth, who chanced to touch the ear,

Said: “E’en the blindest man
Can tell what this resembles most;
Deny the fact who can
This marvel of an Elephant
Is very like a fan!”
74
The Sixth no sooner had begun

About the beast to grope,
Than, seizing on the swinging tail
That fell within his scope,
“I see,” quoth he, “the Elephant
Is very like a rope!”
And so these men of Indostan

Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right,
And all were in the wrong!
Moral:
So oft in theologic wars,
The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean,
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen! 149
149
Saxe, John Godfrey. Blind Men and the Elephant. (Word Info)
(http://www.wordinfo.info/words/index/info/view_unit/1/?letter=B&spage=3)
75
B - An excerpt from Operation Garbo, by Juan Pujol with Nigel West
My humanist convictions would not allow me to turn a blind eye to

the enormous suffering that was being unleashed by this psychopath Hitler
and his band of acolytes… Unable to express my feelings, I yearned for
justice. From the medley of tangled ideas and fantasies going around and
around in my head, a plan slowly began to take shape. I must do
something, something practical; I must make my contribution toward the
good of humanity.
One January day in 1941, I presented myself without further ado at
the British embassy in Madrid…. No one at the British embassy seemed
interested in me, so out of amour propre I decided to prepare the ground
more carefully before I approached them again; clearly I must be much
more specific about exactly what I was going to do and how it would
adapt itself to the end I had in mind: helping the Allies.
I decided to attempt to sound out the opposite side, but using a
different approach to the one I had tried with the British, which had ended
in rejection. Bit by bit I worked out my plan of attack until I thought it was
good enough. I did not ask anyone else’s advice.
In order to offer myself to the Nazis, I first studied their doctrines;
then I telephoned the German embassy [and said] I was willing to offer my
services to the Axis cause and to that of the “New Europe.”150
150
Pujol with West, pp. 44-46.
76
C - Soviet spy Richard Sorge at German Embassy in Tokyo
[[Major-General Eugen Ott, Ambassador of Germany to Japan]] had

known [Richard Sorge] since 1934 when Ott had been military attaché in
Japan. Sorge was a constant visitor to the Embassy, and a member of the
Ambassador’s circle of friends. The two men often played chess together,
dined in the same houses, breakfasted together in the Embassy compound,
and traveled in the Japanese countryside.
Sorge’s views, and sources of information, were received and

discussed regularly with the Ambassador and his advisers. He was treated
and accepted as a personal friend and a reliable compatriot.
After the outbreak of the European war, Sorge was invited to edit a
German Embassy news bulletin, and occupied an office for this purpose,
where he read the official press telegrams from Berlin. He received a
formal payment for this service. As an enterprising newspaperman, and as
a former soldier with a brilliant war record, he established close relations
with the successive military and naval attaches, and exchanged with them
material and opinions on technical problems.
It seemed inconceivable that a man with this reputation and social

connections could be the subject of the present accusations. 151
151
Deakin, F. W. and G. R. Storry. The Case of Richard Sorge. New York: Harper and Row, 1966, p. 17.
77
D - New York Daily News Excerpt on Flight 587 Witnesses
More than 180 people reported seeing American Airlines Flight

587 on fire before it slammed into the Rockaways after takeoff from
Kennedy Airport last fall, according to a new report.
The National Transportation Safety Board says 181 witnesses -
52% of the 349 interviewed - said they saw the jet on fire before it
plunged into the Belle Harbor, Queens neighborhood on the morning of
Nov. 12. Twenty-two percent interviewed reported seeing flames near the
plane's fuselage.
Other witnesses reported seeing fire on an engine or wing of the
Airbus A300-600 jet.
The findings were released yesterday as investigators continue to
examine why the jet broke apart in midair and crashed, killing all 260
people on board and five on the ground.
The report said that 8% of witnesses interviewed saw an explosion;
20% reported seeing no fire at all; 22% observed smoke, and 20% said
they saw no smoke at all.
Also, 74% of witnesses reported seeing the plane descend; 57%
said they saw something separate from the plane; 13% reported seeing the
right wing, left wing or an unidentified wing separate, and 9% reported
seeing no parts separate. 152
152
Woodberry, Jr, Warren. Many Saw Flight 587 On Fire Before Crash. New York Daily News, 5 June 2002.
(http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/news/2002/06/05/2002-06-
05_many_saw_flight_587_on_fire_.html)
78
E - An Excerpt from Knightley’s The First Casualty
With eye-witness and personal-exploit stories at a premium, only one

correspondent looked beyond the immediate story to what was really
happening in China -- Edgar Snow. ... He was the first foreign
correspondent to make the trip to Red Army headquarters, where he met
Mao Tse-Tung and Chou En-lai, personal contacts that lasted until Snow's
death in 1972. His account of the meeting, printed in the China Weekly
Review and then widely reprinted, gave the world the first news of the
Long March and the first idea of the Communist leaders, their life, and
their intentions. Snow saw the hypocrisy of the British and American
expressions of sympathy at what was occurring in China. Although
newspapers gave prominence to the Japanese aggression, they did not
write that the United States was the main supplier of war materials to
Japan until as late as July 1939. They did not mention the British
companies that had contracts to supply the Japanese in China or the
common British view that Chinese resistance was delaying a restoration of
trade in the area. Snow saw through Chiang Kai-shek's publicity, arranged
for him by Hollington K. Tong, a graduate of the Columbia School of
Journalism, to the corruption and brutality of the Nationalist regime, and
he documented Chiang's ruthless suppression of Chinese trade unions. He
even saw beyond the immediate horror of the rape of Nanking ... to the
fact that this would lessen political antagonisms between various Chinese
groups and intensify the opposition to Japan. You cannot disembowel men
at one end of the town, he wrote, while preaching Pan-Asianism at the
other.153
153
Knightley, The First Casualty, pp. 271-272.
79
F - A History of Human Intelligence
Distortion in the HUMINT process can be better understood by looking back at its
historical context. Before the emergence of intelligence organizations in the late 19 th
century to handle HUMINT collection, analysis, and dissemination, the decision maker
and his/her immediate staff would handle source reporting directly, or, most recently, with
the coordination of a designated spymaster. While deception could be introduced through
the foreign travelers and soldiers subjected to interview, interrogation, and tortured, the
main risk to source reliability was through HUMINT collection and processing by the
decision maker and his/her staff.
Soldiers and Agents
Before the modern era of intelligence collection, distortion was primarily an
internal problem as most sources were on the government’s payroll. Government sources
have always included the soldiers who watch vigilantly at the borders and report unusual
events. But before intelligence organizations and spymasters created elaborate systems
for the collection, analysis, and dissemination of intelligence, decision makers would
dispatch soldiers and private agents to answer specific intelligence requirements. They
were their personal spies, selected for their skills of cunning, stealth, and observation, as
well as their loyalty to the regime and overall trustworthiness. The early decision maker
would thus rely on the most basic forms of surveillance and reconnaissance to collect the
HUMINT he/she required for strategic planning.
In large part, the decision maker achieved HUMINT source reliability by using
his/her own people to collect and by keeping the collection tasks exceedingly simple and
80
straightforward. Initial intelligence reports from combat patrols and border guards would
have typically been delayed and distorted in their transmission to the leadership through
the chain of command, but these were unsophisticated systems and little thought would
have been given to such weaknesses. As for spies sent abroad, early leaders could hardly
have considered using what were often untrained and inexperienced spies for the
development of clandestine foreign agents or the conduct of covert operations abroad.
History had yet to devise the agent handler or insurgency coordinator. The decision
maker would have been content to have loyal domestic agents who could be trusted with
the spy mission’s reconnaissance goals and expected to return with raw, unfiltered
strategic information about the opponent that was reasonably accurate, timely, and
applicable to planning objectives.
Surveillance and Reconnaissance
History documents intelligence collection through surveillance and
reconnaissance as early as the 16th century BCE, when, Biblical scholars estimate, Moses
sent men from his tribe to reconnoiter the land of Canaan. 154 Moses provided them with a
detailed list of economic and military collection requirements to assess the land, its towns
and its people.155 In preparation for the Battle of Jericho, Joshua also sent spies on a
reconnaissance mission. A woman of ill repute hid Joshua’s men from the authorities
while they made their strategic observations, and she abetted their departure from the
walled city in exchange for promises of protection during the coming Israeli attack.156
In these cases, the spies were fellow countrymen and well known to Moses and
Joshua, making them exceedingly trustworthy agents. The Bible makes no mention of
154
Numbers 13:1–14:9.
155
Numbers 13:17-20.
156
Joshua 2:1-22.
81
their skills as observers and notetakers, nor does it attribute to them any ability to recruit
and operate clandestine foreign agents. Presumably they accomplished their objectives
through passive reconnaissance methods and returned with adequate notes. The Bible
suggests that the tribe assessed their reporting, but there are no details of the process
involved.
Espionage through reconnaissance by a reliable fellow countryman surfaces again
in Greek mythology’s coverage of the 11th century Trojan War. The story of the Trojan
spy Dolon (“the trickster”) appears in both the tenth book of Homer’s 8th century BCE
classic Iliad and Euripedes’ 5th century BCE The Rhesus. 157 Homer tells the story of the
pre-emptive ambush of Dolon by Odysseus behind his own lines. While Dolon is also
captured and killed in the Euripedes version, he is by contrast in Greek-held territory
disguised as a wolf, intent to fool their sentinels and overhear the plans of the Greek
leadership in war council.158
Surveillance and reconnaissance were the preferred forms of HUMINT collection
for centuries. While the term spy is used in the above instances, these men were not
clandestine foreign sources. J. A. Richmond debates whether Dolon’s actions constituted
reconnaissance or espionage. He defines the first as an open effort to view the enemy,
either alone, with ground forces, or aboard ship. Espionage is the realm of “disguised or
otherwise hidden agents,” according to Richmond. While Richmond weighs the evidence
and decides that when Dolon cloaked himself in animal skin garb this “put him more
157
Myres, Sir John, F.B.A., review of Emile Miriaux: Les Poemes d’Homere et l’Histoire Grecque, II.
L’Iliade, l’Odyssee, et les rivalites colonials , by Albin Michel, Greece and Rome, Vol. 21 No. 61 (January
1952), pp. 1, 8; G. Richards. “The Problem of the Rhesvs”. Classical Quarterly, Vol. 10, No. 4 (1916), p.
192; Adele J. Hart. “ ‘The City-Sacker Odysseus’ in Iliad 2 and 10”. Transactions of the American
Philological Association (1974-), Vol. 120 (1990), pp. 50-52; G. Elderkin. “Dolon’s Disguise in The
Rhesus,” Classical Philology, Vol. 30, No. 4 (1935), pp. 349-350.
158
Myres review; Richards, “The Problem of the Rhesvs”; Hart. “The City-Sacker Odysseus”; Elderkin,
“Dolon’s Disguise”.
82
clearly in the category of a disguised, despised spy!” 159, it seems clear that Dolon was a
soldier on a covert reconnaissance mission and not a spy in today’s sense of the word.
In another example, the Macedonian king Alexander the Great prepared for war
with the Persian Empire in the 4th century BCE by dispatching trusted diplomats into the
region as his spies, according to Donald Engels.160 Alexander would have also counted
upon intelligence gleaned from high-ranking Persian exiles living comfortably in
Macedonia, who owed their existence in large part to Alexander’s father and would have
had no motivation to betray his son, Engels explains. Alexander would have also relied
on reporting from Greek soldiers who had previously waged war in the area, Engels says,
as well as the published accounts of previous visitors to Persia. “[S]trategic information
might also have been obtained from merchants, travelers, artisans, and Macedonian and
Greek diplomats to the Persian royal court and satrapal courts.”161
There are current examples of the routine collection of HUMINT through the use
of dedicated, well-trained reconnaissance and surveillance personnel, both civilian and
military. The FBI employs lookout and Special Surveillance Group (SSG) personnel as
surveillance and reconnaissance specialists to maximize the reliability of HUMINT
collection.162 The jury is out on their effectiveness in major cases, as Soviet agents
Aldrich Ames (CIA officer), John Walker (US Navy), Robert Hanssen (FBI agent), and
Felix Bloch (State Department official) respectively ignored, tempted, avoided, and
159
Richmond, J. A.. Spies in Ancient Greece. Greece & Rome, 2nd Ser. Vol. 45, No. 1, 1998, pp. 2-3.
160
Engels, Donald. “Alexander’s Intelligence System,” Classical Quarterly, New Series, Vol. 30, No. 2
(1980), pp. 328-329.
161
Engels, “Alexander’s Intelligence System,” pp. 328-329.
162
Walker, David M., Comptroller General of the United States, in testimony before the Subcommittee on
Commerce, Justice, State, and the Judiciary, Committee on Appropriations, House of Representatives, in
FBI Reorganization: Progress Made in Efforts to Transform, but Major Challenges Continue. (GAO-03-
759T, 18 June 2003) (http://www.gao.gov/htext/d03759t.html); Wise, David. Spy: Inside Story Of How The
FBI’s Robert Hanssen Betrayed America. New York, Random House, 2002, pp. 208-209.
83
outlasted FBI surveillance and reconnaissance operations directed against them.163 In
today’s US military, human surveillance164 and reconnaissance165 have been subsumed by
and virtually lost in the new Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR)166
concept, which is substantially a technical intelligence (TECHINT) systems
terminology.167 The US Army’s Intelligence Field Manual mentions that combat patrols
and other ISR operations must report their findings to HUMINT collectors, but it does
not label surveillance and reconnaissance among its six specific HUMINT techniques.168
Mark M. Lowenthal’s From Secrets to Policy makes only one reference to surveillance
and reconnaissance, in which it equates ISR with the totality of intelligence collection. 169
Robert M. Clark’s Intelligence Analysis: A Target-Centric Approach makes no mention of
surveillance or reconnaissance, period.170
Foreign Spies
163
Crime Library. “CIA Traitor Aldrich Ames,” p. 3
(http://www.crimelibrary.com/terrorists_spies/spies/ames/3.html); Peter Earley. Family of Spies: Inside the
John Walker Spy Ring. Toronto: Bantam Books, 1988, pp. 62, 66.
Wise, Spy, pp. 54, 116-117. Hanssen used the mail and traditional spy methods (dead drops) to avoid
entering a diplomatic establishment. Bloch was surveiled by FBI agents.
164
“Surveillance: The systematic observation of aerospace, surface, or subsurface areas, places, persons, or
things, by visual, aural, electronic, photographic, or other means.” (DOD Dictionary of Military Terms
http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/doddict/)
165
“Reconnaissance: A mission undertaken to obtain, by visual observation or other detection methods,
information about the activities and resources of an enemy or adversary, or to secure data concerning the
meteorological, hydrographic, or geographic characteristics of a particular area. Also called RECON.”
(DOD Dictionary of Military Terms http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/doddict/)
166
“Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance: An activity that synchronizes and integrates the
planning and operation of sensors, assets, and processing, exploitation, and dissemination systems in direct
support of current and future operations. This is an integrated intelligence and operations function. Also
called ISR.” (DOD Dictionary of Military Terms http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/doddict/)
167
Best, Richard A., Jr. Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) Programs : Issues for
Congress, CRS Report for Congress, 22 February 2005, p. 1.
168
Intelligence Field Manual (FM 2.0), Headquarters, Department of the Army, May 2004, Chapter 6. The
field manual names six HUMINT techniques: debriefing, screening, liaison, HUMINT contact operations,
document exploitation (DOCEX), and interrogation.
169
Lowenthal, From Secrets to Policy, p. 68. Lowenthal’s definitions of intelligence, surveillance, and
reconnaissance come directly from a footnote to CRS Report For Congress RL 32508.
170
Clark, Robert M. Intelligence Analysis: A Target-Centric Approach, Second Edition. Washington, DC:
CQ Press, 2007.
84
Distortion of source reporting becomes more likely when Sun Tzu, the 6th century
BCE Chinese author of The Art of War, suggests that decision makers begin to rely on
foreigners for some of their intelligence needs. Sun Tzu recommends that a ruler turn
foreign spies against their governments and use this newfound access to examine the
reliability of other spies. Sun Tzu felt that a government must also recruit natives of
foreign lands, especially key government insiders. He encouraged leaders to provide
great rewards to their spies to maintain loyalty. His writings provide possibly the first
guidance to decision makers on the value of using foreigners as clandestine sources of
intelligence.171
The 9th century Chinese poet Tu Mu commented on the writings of Sun Tzu,
elaborating on the subtleties of managing clandestine foreign sources.172 Tu Mu points out
that recruited foreign government officials can be “two-faced, changeable, and deceitful,”
so they must be properly compensated to assure dedicated and reliable service as
informants. The collector must be “deep and subtle” to discern what is accurate and
useful (and what is not) in such source reporting, so as to avoid paying great rewards for
empty words.173
Spymasters
In the 16th century, Francis Walsingham took an enormous step forward in the use
of HUMINT as Queen Elizabeth I of England’s principal spymaster as he developed and
maintained a surprisingly effective covert collection program. Through his use of a
reliable network of spies and his significant oversight of information within the kingdom,
Walsingham preserved Elizabeth’s reign against numerous plots hatched by the
171
Griffith, Samuel B., The Art of War. trans. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971, Chapter 13.
172
Martin Frost website. http://www.martinfrost.ws/htmlfiles/sun_tzu.html
173
Griffith, Chapter 13.
85
imprisoned Mary Queen of Scots and aided by France, Spain, and the Catholic Church at
Rome.174
According to Stephen Budiansky, Walsingham put himself at the center of all
information flow at the palace so as to be informed of virtually every rumor, plot, and
tryst.175 Walsingham kept all manner of book, guide, and directory in his office. His
people monitored arrivals from abroad and checked correspondence they might be
carrying. His minions were at the ports and on horseback in the countryside to inquire
into the travels of both strangers and the well known. And, to collect the latest
intelligence from abroad, he maintained a stable of clandestine sources “who, out of
desperation or vanity or longing to believe in their own importance – or, the cooler ones,
out of simple business calculation of what they possessed and what someone else would
be willing to pay for – were prepared to undertake more shadowy tasks.”176
Most of his agents, however, were “men of affairs and men of the world … not
even paid for their troubles … less spies than reporters.”177 These were simply expatriates
residing overseas and foreigners living in England. They wrote to him constantly of what
they had seen and heard.178
Few of these spies were under Walsingham’s control as an agent handler, although
some were obliged to him by remuneration. As can be seen in his examination of the case
of treason against Sir Edward Stafford, Walsingham could weigh the reliability of his
sources against each other’s reporting. By having so many spies, he gained a great many
174
Andrew, Christopher. Her Majesty's Secret Service: The Making of the British Intelligence Community.
New York: Elisabeth Sifton Books (Viking), 1986, p. 1.
175
Budiansky, Stephen. Her Majesty's Spymaster: Elizabeth I, Sir Francis Walsingham, and the Birth of
Modern Espionage. New York: Viking Books, 2005, pp. 90-94.
176
Budiansky, pp. 93-94.
177
178
86
perspectives on what was happening and could discern trends and isolate lies and
distortions. With his sources and through his position near the throne, Walsingham could
cross check source reporting, elicit clarifications from sources, witnesses, and even the
accused, and thereby fill gaps in his knowledge better and faster than anyone else in the
kingdom.179
180
Nearly two centuries after Walsingham first began tracking spies in London,
George Washington entered that same world through his HUMINT experiences in the
French and Indian War, eventually becoming America’s first spymaster during the
American Revolution. According to Douglas Southall Freeman, Washington “had never
seen a day’s service as a soldier” when he approached Governor Dinwiddie and his
Council at Williamsburg to deliver their message to the French regarding the latter’s
unwelcome encroachment into the Ohio country.181 Washington had clear intelligence
collection requirements: to “procure all the information he could of the numerical
strength, armament, defenses, communications, and plans of the intruders. … and to
‘return immediately back’.”182 Distortion was at a minimum as Washington met the
French, passed the message and received the French reply. Dinwiddie and the Council
were the primary consumers of Washington’s reporting, including his observation of
French preparations for a larger incursion into northwestern Pennsylvania.183
179
Neale, J. “The Fame of Sir Edward Stafford.” English Historical Review, Vol. 44, No. 174 (1929), pp.
203-219.
180
Pollard, A. F. “Sir Francis Walsingham,” in Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th ed. Vol. XXVIII (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1910), pp. 295-296
(http://www.luminarium.org/encyclopedia/walsingham.htm)
181
Freeman, Douglas Southall. George Washington, Vol. 1: Young Washington. New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1948, pp.266, 268, 273, 275-276.
182
Freeman, pp.266, 268, 273, 275-276.
183
Freeman, pp.266, 268, 273, 275-276; Fort Huachuca. Masters of the Intelligence Art: Major George
Washington’s Reconnaissance. (http://huachuca-www.army.mil/History/PDFS/mwashing.pdf)
87
When the American Revolution began twenty years later, Washington applied his
HUMINT skills against England and found his intelligence operation effective and its
sources reliable. For example, Washington pursued clandestine source operations,
personally running recruitment-in-place (RIP) operations, such as James Rifington, the
Royal Printer of New York, as well as local patriots like John Honeyman. Washington
built a HUMINT network by assigning several spymasters to head reconnaissance
operations throughout the greater New York City area, including New Jersey,
Connecticut, and New York State. Major Benjamin Tallmadge ran the Culper Ring,
Colonel Elias Dayton operated the Merserau Ring, and Lieutenant Colonel Thomas
Knowlton managed Knowlton’s Rangers. Washington’s manipulation of intelligence,
including the use of HUMINT, denial and deception (D&D) and counterintelligence, was
vital to the war effort and the British defeats at both Trenton, which saved the American
cause, and Yorktown, which sealed its victory.184
Washington maintained a sizable intelligence budget during his term as President
of the United States to facilitate reliable HUMINT collection. Named the Contingent
Fund of Foreign Intercourse by Act of Congress in 1790 (and later called the Secret
Service Fund), this money was used by the Executive branch for years, primarily to send
agents abroad or to pay bribes to foreign officials.185 Doubtless few of the funds were
applied to improving the intake and processing of HUMINT by the government. In a
February 1831 debate in the US Senate, US Senator John Forsyth tells a colleague quite
184
Finley, James P., ed. US Army Military Intelligence History: A Sourcebook. Fort Huachuca: US Army
Intelligence Center, 1995, p. 16. http://huachuca-www.army.mil/History/PDFS/reader.pdf; Lawson, John.
“The Remarkable Mystery of James Rivington, Spy.” Journalism Quarterly, 35 (1958), pp. 316-323;
Holloway, Charlotte Molyneux. “The First Sacrifice of the Revolution: Nathan Hale, The Patriot Martyr
Spy.” Connecticut Magazine, 6 (May-June 1900), pp. 224-236.
185
Miller, p. 57.
88
plainly that the fund is “[f]or spies, if the gentleman pleases,” providing a healthy roster
of common uses involving agents, messengers, and diplomats.186
Despite the establishment of this fund, the development and use of clandestine
foreign sources could not be managed by the chief executive and so went on hiatus. With
the exception of the Civil War period, the US government would not conduct effective
HUMINT collection until the armed forces established intelligence organs in the 1880s.187
Instead, the President and Governors preferred to nominate their own agents for specific
situations and analyze the intelligence reporting themselves. Distortion was once again
confined within the government’s own HUMINT process as foreigners were excluded.
In the aftermath of the Louisiana Purchase, for example, the Thomas Jefferson
administration dispatched Zebulon Pike, a second-generation military man with
considerable experience on the frontier, to explore the southwest border of the new
territory. Napoleon had only recently compelled Spain to sign over its Louisiana
holdings, so the borders of the purchase from France were still in dispute. The Spaniards
captured Pike as he explored the origins of the Arkansas and Red rivers, but he eventually
returned with much needed reconnaissance of the Spanish defenses at Santa Fe after his
186
Benton, Thomas Hart. Abridgement of the Debates of Congress, from 1789 to 1856, Vol. XI, pp. 244-
245.http://books.google.com/books?id=SicPAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA244&lpg=PA244&dq=%22Contingent+F
und+of+Foreign+Intercourse%22&source=web&ots=hqqT7S1dFt&sig=ZCy8dCCwXGcsiv_HGVJ9pcqG
xNA&hl=en#PPA244,M1 “It was given for all purposes to which a secret service fund should or could be
applied for the public benefit. For spies, if the gentleman pleases; for persons sent publicly and secretly to
search for important information, political or commercial; for agents to carry confidential instructions,
written or verbal, to our foreign Ministers, in negotiations where secrecy was the element of success; for
agents to feel the pulse of foreign Governments, to ascertain if treaties, commercial or political, could be
formed with them, and with power to form them, if practicable.”
187
Bethell, Elizabeth. “The Military Information Division: Origin Of The Intelligence Division,” in James
P. Finley, ed. US Army Military Intelligence History: A Sourcebook. Fort Huachuca: US Army Intelligence
Center, 1995, pp. 62-63. http://huachuca-www.army.mil/History/PDFS/reader.pdf According to Bethell, the
US Navy’s Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), founded in 1882, is the longest continuously running
intelligence organ in the USIC. The US Army’s Military Information Division (MID), established in 1889,
oversaw the military attaché program, which was established by Act of Congress in 1888 and began in
1889 with the placement of attaches in London and Berlin. MID was abolished in 1908 and was replaced in
1917 by the Military Intelligence Division (MID).
89
captors thoroughly exposed their operations to Pike while holding him prisoner.
Distortion of source reporting was likely as Pike’s handler, Governor of the Upper
Louisiana Territory James Wilkinson, turned out to have been a double agent for Spain
and a “scoundrel.” Wilkinson and Aaron Burr would later conspire in an attempt to use
the military to split the western territories from the rest of the United States.188
The occasional volunteer would submit reporting, which was accepted by the
government without significant interaction or distortion. Hunter/trapper Jedediah Smith
submitted a detailed letter to the US Secretary of War in 1830 to announce his discovery
along the Oregon Trail of the South Pass to the Pacific Ocean. As an aside, he also
provided the results of his reconnaissance of British operations at Fort Vancouver.
Smith’s letter was praised by the US Senate as an “excellent intelligence report” 189 and
prompted the War Department to adopt similar methods, if with a more reliable source.
The US Army sent its own man, Benjamin Bonneville, under deep cover as a fur trader,
to reconnoiter California and other western lands. For deniability purposes, Bonneville
officially separated from the US Army but took with him a long list of the military’s
intelligence requirements. His wide-ranging report, submitted to the department upon his
return in 1833, assured America’s westward expansion.190
Early in the Civil War, the US Army continued to find reliable sources only from
within the military. Union General Winfield Scott sent Lafayette C Baker to Richmond on
a covert reconnaissance mission. Baker’s cover was as an itinerant photographer, the son
188
Ameringer, Charles D. US Foreign Intelligence: The Secret Side of American History. Lexington,
Massachusetts: Lexington Books, 1990, pp. 35-36; US National Park Service. Zebulon Pike: Hard-Luck
Explorer or Successful Spy? The Lewis and Clark Journey of
Discovery.(http://www.nps.gov/archive/jeff/LewisClark2/Circa1804/WestwardExpansion/EarlyExplorers/Z
ebulonPike.htm)
189
Ameringer, pp. 36-37.
190
Ameringer, pp. 36-37.
90
of a Tennessee judge. He was captured and suspected of espionage, but eventually
convinced President Jefferson Davis of his innocence and escaped back to the North.191
Intelligence Organizations
For a few years the Civil War became too complex to manage without the
establishment of intelligence organizations. When General Grenville M. Dodge was
appointed by General Ulysses S. Grant to head the US Army’s Military Intelligence
Bureau, the use of HUMINT became noticeably more sophisticated. Dodge was rated
highly innovative and effective for his use of African-American slaves as spies and
couriers to travel and observe the enemy throughout Alabama, Missouri, and Tennessee.
These former slaves were not unlike foreign sources to a heretofore-white military, but
their reliability was proven as Dodge’s intelligence reports received high praise. These
Negro agents were formed into the First Alabama Infantry Regiment and the First
Alabama Cavalry, both units dedicated to intelligence work. Among their many credits,
they proved effective at Vicksburg, where they supported General Grant by infiltrating
the city and providing the Union command with the latest assessments on the impact of
the siege.192
Dodge was also willing to rely on reporting from Union sympathizers in the
South. He recruited Phillip Henson, a supporter of the Union living in Vicksburg. Henson
not only provided reconnaissance reports to Union forces but, due to his Southern roots
and cultivated connections, was able to infiltrate Confederate military planning and
provide useful strategic intelligence as well.193 Likewise, Elizabeth Van Lew, a wealthy
191
Schlup, Leonard. “Lafayette C. Baker and His Association with Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson.”
Lincoln Herald, vol. 98, 2 (summer 1996), 54-59.
192
Miller, Nathan. Spying for America: The Hidden History of U.S. Intelligence. New York: Paragon House,
1989, pp. 138-140.
193
Markle, Donald. Spies and Spymasters of the Civil War. New York: Hippocrene Books, 1994, pp. 126-
130.
91
resident of Richmond and a fervent Abolitionist, used her own money and risked her life
to establish a large spy ring, pass intelligence out of the city to Union forces, and help
both Union prisoners and escaped slaves make their way to the North.194
Henry S. Sanford, a US minister in Belgium, ran a covert network of Union spies
in Europe to track Confederate diplomatic and commercial efforts across the Atlantic.195
The United States established its first permanent intelligence organization with
the founding of the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) in 1882. The Army would follow
in 1884, but would not resolve its need for continuous intelligence operations until the
eve of America’s entry into World War I in 1917.
For the acquisition of intelligence information during the Spanish American War,
the US Navy sent its own agents to conduct human collection. Commodore George
Dewey dispatched his personal aide to Hong Kong to interview arriving ships’ crews
regarding the Spanish naval position in the Philippines. Dewey also relied for intelligence
on O. F. Williams, the US Consul in Manila. Naval operatives were active in Cuba,
conducting reconnaissance and covert action with insurgents.196
But the US Navy also saw the importance of clandestine foreign sources. ONI
sent undercover naval intelligence officers William Buck and Henry Ward to Spain and
assigned Lieutenant William Sims, the naval attaché in Paris, to oversee them as they
developed a sophisticated HUMINT collection operation against the Spanish. “Sims
organized an intelligence network that stretched from the Canary Islands to Port Said and
194
Intelligence Collection – The North. Central Intelligence Agency, 2007.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/additional-publications/civil-war/p11.htm
195
Miller, p. 116.
196
Casey, Dr. Dennis. A Little Espionage Goes A Long Way. Air Intelligence Agency (AIA)
http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/aia/cyberspokesman/99-11/history1.htm ; Miller, p. 167.
92
to several locations in the Mediterranean. Sims even had spies working in the Spanish
Naval Depot in Cadiz.”197
When Europe exploded into the First World War, the United States was soon
drawn into the fray. There were rumors of possible German involvement in the Mexican
detention of a US naval vessel at Veracruz in 1914, yet the United States was unable to
effectively respond. The US Army’s HUMINT program consisted of military attaché
reports being filed at the Army War College from 1908 until 1917. And ONI’s HUMINT
collection was focused on foreign navies. Eventually Argentina, Brazil, and Chile
intervened to retrieve the United States from its embarrassing predicament.198
Foreign governments were now sending covert intelligence officers to the United
States to conduct HUMINT operations in peacetime, a “disreputable and underhanded”
activity that “no state openly admitted” at the time.199 Lacking diplomatic relations with
the US, Soviet intelligence established Amtorg Trading Corporation in New York in 1924
as commercial front for its spying operations.200 The FBI suddenly found itself in the
foreign counterintelligence (FCI) business in earnest in 1929, when Amtorg spy Georgiy
Agabekov defected and exposed the operation.201
With the onset of the Second World War, the US military and naval intelligence
services, joined by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), began to use all manner of
HUMINT collection vehicles: diplomatic and commercial officials; military attachés;
clandestine intelligence officers and their agents; émigré interviews; prisoner
interrogations; reconnaissance; and surveillance.

197
Casey.
198
Miller, pp. 182-183.
199
Rafalko, Frank J. A Counterintelligence Reader, Vol. III, Chapter 1, p. 21.
(http://www.fas.org/irp/ops/ci/docs/ci3/index.html)
200
Ropes, E. C. “American-Soviet Trade Relations,” Russian Review, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Autumn 1943), p. 91
201
Rafalko, pp. 21-22.
93
The British were prominent wartime specialists in the use of HUMINT as
deception. Of particular note, they ran two now famous bogus spy networks: The Twenty
Committee (XX or Double Cross) system and Operation: GARBO. The Double Cross
system began with a Welshman named Arthur Owens, who briefly explored working with
the Germans but changed his mind and turned himself in. A Spaniard named Juan Pujol
took the personal initiative to dangle himself to the Germans and was eventually run by
the British as the double agent GARBO. The British ran both operations throughout the
war, along with some doubled Nazi spies, disinforming and misdirecting countless Nazi
operations. Pujol was especially valuable to Operation FORTITUDE in the lead up to the
D-Day invasion, when he reinforced the deception of the Calais landing and the
Normandy feint.202
While the level of clandestine HUMINT collection expanded with the onset and
expansion of the Cold War, “the slow, painstaking process of recruiting spies” was
discounted and the butt of jokes from those who favored the high profile realm of covert
action. “[S]py recruiters and handlers … were dubbed ‘the patient professionals’ and
were not as esteemed or promoted as quickly as the … ‘action’ types.”203
The West’s most prominent HUMINT penetrations of the Soviet Union and
Russia include the operation of these clandestine sources: Oleg Penkovskiy (AGENT
HERO), Adolf Tolkachev, Dmitriy F. Polyakov (BOURBON/ROAM/TOPHAT), Sergey
Tretyakov, and Morris Child (SOLO) of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). 204 The
202
Pujol, Juan with Nigel West. Operation GARBO: The Personal Story of the Most Successful Double
Agent of World War II. New York: Random House, 1985, pp. 56-67, 115-151.
203
Hitz, Frederick P. “The Importance and Future of Espionage,” in Strategic Intelligence Vol. 2: The
Intelligence Cycle, ed. Loch K. Johnson (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger Security International, 2007),
pp.76-77.
204
Penkovskiy, Oleg. The Penkovskiy Papers. New York: Random House, 1982; Hitz, “The Importance and
Future of Espionage,” pp. 78-79, 86. Earley, Pete. Comrade J: The Untold Secrets of Russia’s Master Spy
in America After the End of the Cold War. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2007; Barron, John. Operation
94
East’s best-known recruitments include Kim Philby of the Cambridge Five, Aldrich Ames
(CIA), Robert Hanssen (FBI), and John Walker (USN).205
For the last ten years of the Cold War, the USIC emphasis was on technical
collection. While the Soviets devoted five times the personnel to intelligence collection,
the United States used its financial wherewithal to build spy satellites and other devices
to mechanically observe the Soviets and the Warsaw Pact. As America increased its use
of spy satellites for military and arms control treaty verification purposes in its rivalry
with the East, Christopher Andrew virtually rang the death knell for HUMINT when he
wrote, “The role of humans in intelligence collection will no doubt decline still further.
… Defense attaches as intelligence gatherers belong to a by-gone day of gentlemen
amateurs. … Even professional spies are on the decline. The limited range of human eyes
and ears compares rather poorly with the ability of spy satellites…. Worse still, spies can
never be entirely trusted.”206
A great many spy handlers and area specialists left the intelligence services, both
East and West, when the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War ended. . Russia’s
Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) alone lost 40% of its senior staff between 1991 and
1993.207 It was a time of transition, an inter-regnum in which the community downsized
its Soviet operations and sought to expand its efforts against terrorism, drugs, crime, and
weapons proliferation.208
SOLO: The FBI’s Man in the Kremlin. Regnery Publishing, 1997.

205
Hitz, “The Importance and Future of Espionage,” pp. 81-82, 83, 85-86.
206
Andrew, Christopher. “Whitehall, Washington, and the Intelligence Services,” International Affairs
(Royal Institute of International Affairs 1944-), Vol. 53, No. 3 (Jul., 1977), pp. 391-392. To be sure, Andrew
might be credited with being the first to predict the reinvigoration of HUMINT post 9/11 with these words,
“Spies will not disappear altogether. But their decline will doubtless continue. Their future uses lie perhaps
more in infiltrating terrorist groups than in penetrating foreign governments.”
207
Earley, Comrade J, p. 158.
208
Hitz, “The Importance and Future of Espionage,” p. 87.
95
In the wake of terror attacks in New York and Washington, DC, the 9/11
Commission recommended that the CIA pick up the pieces of its dysfunctional
clandestine HUMINT capabilities.209 And the FBI began to reorganize itself.210
As Andrew predicted in the late 1970s211, the emphasis of clandestine
HUMINT collection was redirected to the infiltration of terrorist groups, where
decision makers desperately need reliable sources. Low-budget, highly disciplined
non-state actors were a new kind of target for an Intelligence Community that had
dealt for years with nation states with large armed forces and intelligence
bureaucracies like their own. Even the lines between domestic and foreign
intelligence were now blurred.212
And due to the poor performance of interagency communication in the
lead-up to the al-Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11
September 2001, the USIC was mandated to maximize intelligence sharing
through the use of risk management techniques that weigh the consumer need for
reliable access to source reporting against the potential loss of valuable
clandestine sources.213
The jury is still out on whether the USIC can perpetuate the development
and use of reliable clandestine HUMINT sources in the present environment.

209
The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the
United States. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, p. 415.
210
Walker, David M. Statement of the Comptroller General of the United States, in testimony before the
Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, State, and the Judiciary, Committee on Appropriations, House of
Representatives, released on 18 June 2003 as GAO report number GAO-03-759T, entitled FBI
Reorganization: Progress Made in Efforts to Transform, but Major Challenges Continue.
(http://www.gao.gov/htext/d03759t.html).
211
Andrew, “Whitehall, Washington, and the Intelligence Services,” pp. 391-392. “Spies will not disappear
altogether. But their decline will doubtless continue. Their future uses lie perhaps more in infiltrating
terrorist groups than in penetrating foreign governments.”
212
Hitz, “The Importance and Future of Espionage,” pp. 87-88.
213
DCID 8/1, Intelligence Community Policy On Intelligence Information Sharing, effective 4 June 2004.
(http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/dcid8-1.html)
96

Diagnosing Distortion in Source Reporting: Lessons For HUMINT Reliability From Other Fields

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DIAGNOSING DISTORTION IN SOURCE REPORTING:

LESSONS FOR HUMINT RELIABILITY FROM OTHER FIELDS

GEORGE P. NOBLE, JR.

Submitted to the Faculty of Mercyhurst College

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

DEPARTMENT OF INTELLIGENCE STUDIES

DIAGNOSING DISTORTION IN SOURCE REPORTING: LESSONS FOR

GEORGE P. NOBLE, JR.

most everything I know about the handling of sensitive source information.

time for dedicated study and reflection on the field of intelligence.

Diagnosing Distortion in Source Reporting:

Lessons for HUMINT Reliability from Other Fields

George P. Noble, Jr.

Master of Science in Applied Intelligence

Mercyhurst College, 2009

Assistant Professor Stephen Marrin, Chair

explores the many, sometimes conflicting, meanings of reliability, seeking useful

with observations and recommendations.

BCE Before the Common Era

to the deterioration of product reliability wholly unrelated to purposeful deception by

trustworthiness, competence, accuracy, and duration of service, while failing to address

the loss of reliability that emerges in the intelligence process itself.

source reporting? Do intelligence agencies misrepresent the reliability of the source

and editor. It concludes with some observations and recommendations.

their fields compare with intelligence.

No discussion of human reconnaissance and surveillance intelligence was found

focus on TECHINT and dismisses human reconnaissance and surveillance as only

tangential to HUMINT collection. Richard A. Best, of the Congressional Research

primarily on operational security (OPSEC) and covert operations.

Literature was found on quantitative assessment of human source evidence in

production of source reporting and finished intelligence. CIA methodologists such as

cycle unrepresentative of how national intelligence analysis operates and he offers no

possibility that the model may be useful to operations.8

Frederick P. Hitz, a classmate of Aldrich Ames with a successful career at the

more exciting operational interactions between intelligence and counterintelligence

signals, dead drops, and countersurveillance.

In conclusion, the existing literature fails to look at how the intelligence

small-scale human social interactions11 to have considerable potential applicability to

and learn something new and useful.13

Goffman’s chapters on performances, teams, and discrepant roles are prime

examples of the overlay of intelligence players. In one example, Goffman describes an

surprise for the audience and ultimately ruins the opening.14

Goffman’s book is useful because it specifically discusses information secrecy,

microsociological framework offers a valuable tool for future intelligence researchers

attempting to fill gaps in the discussion of source reliability.

exploits HUMINT sources, this paper will conduct an interdisciplinary exploration of a

This paper will be non-experimental.

Definitions and examples will be drawn from an array of published works

FBI counterintelligence qualify him to make expert observations of field operations. A

be included. Such bias will be mitigated by the inclusion of a wide assortment of

writings, most of which are authored by specialists in their fields.

Since the preponderance of writings on HUMINT source reliability is unavailable

the benefit of the USIC.

has its equivalent elements in other fields. For example:

• The Courtroom: The eyewitness to a crime (source) provides information to the

prosecutor (collector), who is challenged by the defense attorney (analyst) before

a judge (editor) and jury (decision maker).

reporter (collector) covering a story. The journalist (analyst), who may be

readership (decision maker).

• Social Research: In sociology and anthropology, a researcher (collector/analyst)

their readership (decision maker). The social scientist – sociologist,

final comparison in this study.

The HUMINT Process