Lessons In HUMINT Reliability For Intelligence Professionals (Thesis)

It is that special time of year again; when theses begin to bloom! That's right, as usual, our grad students here at Mercyhurt are busily writing and defending a whole new crop of interesting theses on a variety of topics relevant to intelligence and intelligence analysis.

The first up this season is one by George P. (Pat) Noble titled, Diagnosing Distortion In Source Reporting: Lessons For HUMINT Reliability From Other Fields. Pat states, in his abstract, that his intent is to explore "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."

Pat takes a hard look at not only the distortions but also how practitioners in fields as diverse as journalism and medicine, jurisprudence and anthropology, correct for these issues. He pushes his analysis one step further, though, and seeks to generalize these lessons learned for the intelligence collector, analyst, editor and consumer.

Pat is an intelligence analyst for the FBI with a lengthy resume and quite a bit of experience in a variety of fields. He came to us from the FBI on a sabbatical a few years ago to get his Masters and is now back with the FBI. He says he can be found on Intellipedia and A-Space for anyone who is interested.