Following Pakistan's ISI comes Mossad in the number 2 slot, MI 6 taking third and the CIA following up in fourth place.
In addition to the Top Ten list, most of the graphic outlines a series of assassinations, explosions, spying, cyber spying and "convenient accidents" that the Post ties to various intelligence organizations over the last ten years.
Finally, there are some charts which claim to be based on some of Richards Heuer's work regarding the demographics of spies; where they come from in government, how much education they have, etc. The graphic provides no comparative data to see if any of the categories identified are larger or smaller than they are in the relevant population from which they are drawn so it is difficult to draw conclusions but intriguing nonetheless.
Given the nature of the article and difficulty associated with making these kinds of judgements, I am not surprised at the results but it is still an interesting question to ask: Who has the world's best intel service?
One of the questions that has really bothered me over the years concerns the size of the national security intelligence "industry" worldwide. When you add it all up, how much money do the states of the world spend on intelligence and how many people are involved in government intelligence work?
These questions are important. There is a popular impression in much of the world that "intelligence is everywhere", that it is both all powerful and omnipresent. Creating or encouraging this impression in dictatorial countries might even be part of the system of repression. Knowing the answers to these questions could help reformers more accurately assess their risks.
Even in democratic countries, however, understanding the resource limits of the national security intelligence apparatus at the broadest possible levels, where the need for citizens to know where their money is being spent can be appropriately balanced with the legitimate operational concerns of the working intelligence professional, seems to make sense.
From a more provincial standpoint, it also seems important for educational institutions to have some sort of a feel for the need for trained professionals in intelligence work if the university model is ever going to supplant government training as the primary way into the intelligence communities of the world.
The answer to this question, however, is obviously difficult to uncover. Most countries do not want to discuss how much they spend on intel each year. Oftentimes, it is even difficult to figure out which organizations within a country are actively engaged in intelligence work.
It is with great pleasure, then, that I announce the final results:
The national security intelligence industry accounts for about $106 billion dollars a year and employs about a million people worldwide.
While Chris has done a good (extraordinary, really) job of collecting as many facts and figures as he could regarding the intel budgets of every country on the planet, he had to rely on estimates for many of them.
These estimates are based on GDP and on the spending patterns of countries where the data is available, a method which Chris readily admits is fraught with some difficulty (I note with some interest, though, that Chris has posted a note to his online thesis encouraging people to send him more accurate figures. It will be interesting to see how many people take him up on the offer...).
I am also sure that Chris has missed some organizations. It is virtually certain that there are organizations out there which are well known to people living in a particular country to be wholly controlled by that country's intelligence apparatus for which Chris has not accounted. Such errors are essentially unavoidable given the global scope of his thesis work.
Likewise, Chris simply did not have time to examine either the growing presence of intelligence units in law enforcement or business (My own guess is that this would approximately double the total value of the industry).
All that said, this thesis does exactly what needed to be done -- give us all a starting point for further research and refinements.
A full copy of the thesis is located below or you can go to Chris's site on Scribd.com for other viewing and download options.
Imagine a brilliant piece of intelligence analysis -- well-researched, well-written and actionable. Now imagine that same report written in an 8 point Gothic font over multiple pages with half inch margins. No title, no paragraphs, no sub-sections, no indentations; just a single block of text. Would you read it? Would anyone else?
Point 1:Form matters. How we say something is often as important, if not more important, than what we say. __________________
Now, take a look at this video:
It is a fake. It was originally created with some off the shelf software by a CGI artist and then modified by someone to look like a NASA video. Here is the original:
The most distressing thing about the two videos, however, is not the fakery. It is the number of views. Again, you have to go to the YouTube sites to confirm this but the original has only 23,000 or so views while the fake has over 150,000 views.
Furthermore, cleverly modified videos are not the only way to twist, spin, modify and deceive. Check out FactCheck.org's Whoppers of 2009 for other ways that people have cleverly manipulated the form of the message to lie to us.
Which leads to Point 2: It is getting easier and easier to lie with form. ___________________
Richards Heuer pointed out in his classic, The Psychology of Intelligence Analysis, that "once information rings a bell, the bell cannot be unrung." He was capturing a phenomena that is well known to psychologists: People continue to act as if a piece of information were true even after the piece of information has been proven to be false.
Over and over again, people have been put in experiments that make them falsely believe that they have a capacity to do something -- distinguish the effect of risk-taking and success as a firefighter, for example -- that they do not have. Even after they have been shown conclusive proof that the experiment has been manipulated to give the subjects the impression that they have an ability they do not, in fact, have, these subjects continue to act as if the original information were correct.
All that is bad enough but when you combine this psychological effect with the power of visualization, you get an absolutely scary combination. Check this video out:
Which leads to Point 3: Lies persist and visual lies likely persist more strongly than textual lies. ______________________
So what does this all have to do with communicating the results of intelligence analysis?
The US national security intelligence community has been accused of trying to sell its intelligence. The 2005 WMD Commission report accused the intelligence community of this with regards to the President's Daily Brief (PDB): "The daily reports seemed to be ‘selling’ intelligence—in order to keep its customers, or at least the First Customer, interested."
Which leads to Point 4: Good intelligence doesn't "sell" its products. __________________________
When I took my first job as an analyst (back in the 80's...), I didn't make my own slides. PowerPoint was deemed to be too complicated and tricky. It required a specialist, trained in its vagaries, to generate the slides necessary to brief the decisionmakers who pulled my strings.
That did not last long. Very quickly it went from rare to common to expected that analysts would be able to generate their own slides. What's more, today analysts are increasingly being asked to create visuals to supplement or replace the results of what was previously text-based analysis.
Yet, analysts get very little training in appropriate ways to visualize information and virtually no training in how not to lie or mislead with colors and graphics, how to spot photoshopped pictures or fake video, or how to ensure that the form is as objective as the content.
Which leads to My Question: How do we know when we are lying (or misleading) with the form of our intelligence products? ________________________
It seems to me that we spend a good bit of time analyzing text for evidence of bias or puffery or misleading statements. In virtually every intelligence organization of any size, there is a quality control process to ensure that the content -- the words going out the door -- conform to the standards of the agency.
Within the US national security intelligence community these standards are laid out in ICD 203 and I suspect that other intelligence agencies and organizations worldwide have something similar.
But who makes sure the same thing is true for the form?
All of this is a very long precis to an exercise I do in my Intelligence Communications class. In the vast majority of the exercises and assignments in that class, I ask students to focus on the elements of good intelligence communication: Bottom-line up front estimates, concision, clarity, decisionmaker focus, accuracy, etc.
In one exercise, though, I ask them to take a written report and re-imagine it as a primarily visual product. I task them to keep all the elements of a good intelligence product but to visualize those elements rather than put them in print.
Over the years, I have received some wonderfully innovative products. This year was no different. One of the products stood out, however. Nimalan Paul, using online software from Xtranormal.com, created an amusing and compelling animated video that contains virtually exactly the same content as the written product on the same topic.
Before you see the video, I will share the written version of the report with you. It follows the generic form guidance that we use here at Mercyhurst in our intelligence communications classes for written products:
Which report is better at communicating the results of the analysis? One of our grad students actually did a study on this a number of years ago. His findings showed that if you are above a "certain age", the text document is the best at communicating but that if you are below that certain age, then the animation is likely to be more effective.
Beyond the age distinction, what else makes one format better than the other? Is it all personal preference? Is one more "honest" than the other or is one just more traditional?
Finally, if one of these forms is more honest than the other, shouldn't we be teaching how to recognize that difference?
Henley-Putnam University is sponsoring a free webinar on careers in intelligence analysis on 17 DEC at 1100 (PST). Registration is required but the webinar is free.
According to Henley-Putnam: "Author and Henley-Putnam adjunct professor Thomas B. Hunter will provide an introduction to careers in intelligence analysis, including a discussion of counterterrorism, human factors in terrorism, weapons systems, detainee support and Homeland Security. He will also offer a breakdown of the different agencies and their missions. Prior to joining Henley-Putnam, Mr. Hunter served as an intelligence officer with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), where he specialized in a variety of analytical areas, including Homeland Security, Detainee Support, and South American narcoterrorism."
Philip Tetlock's Expert Political Judgment is required reading here at Mercyhurst. While some analysts take issue with Tetlock's findings, I have yet to see anyone create as compelling a study as his regarding the essential qualities of a good forecaster.
So, I pay attention whenever Tetlock writes something, even a book review. Thanks to my colleague, Steve Marrin (who knows of my interest in all things Tetlockian...), I recently had a chance to read Tetlock's review of three new books by people who claim to have an inside track when it comes to predicting the future.
I will let you read Tetlock's review of the books on your own. Suffice it to say that his critique of all three works is based on his research and, as a result, is skeptical (in varying degrees) of the claims of accuracy in the three books.
What really fascinated me about this review is buried at the end of it, though. Tetlock worries about how to improve forecasting, about how we can know which forecasters are worth listening to and which are modern day snake oil salesmen. Then, he makes a point that I agree with in whole:
"There is one potential savior on the horizon: a big institutional purchaser of forecasting services that has the financial clout and technical-support staff ready to run forecasting tournaments that would shed light on the relative performance of competing approaches—a big player that also has powerful incentives to discover superior analytical strategies, for even small improvements in its prediction accuracy can translate into billions of dollars and millions of lives saved. And that player is the Office of the Director of National Intelligence."
Right on, Professor T! The DNI has every reason to want to improve forecasting and has the purchasing power to insist upon it. Specifically, according to Tetlock:
"Players high up in the political system—who really do want the best-possible forecasts—could decide that it is worth investing a nontrivial share of their intelligence agencies’ budgets into a series of long-term forecasting tournaments designed to distinguish the more from the less promising forecasting approaches across policy problems."
The DNI dipped its toes in this water back in 2008 when it sponsored the Open Source Challenge. Since then, of course, we have not had another Challenge or another Open Source Conference. This does not bode well for Tetlock's very reasonable suggestion.
Still, it is a great idea. If we are ever to break out of the "two-thirds right" trap we are in, we need a robust research program aimed at validating intelligence methods and the DNI will have to be the one to sponsor it.
Just when I was about to wrap this series up, all of a sudden a new report comes out that contains a number of juicy details about where jobs will be in the Federal Government over the next three years -- including amazingly, specifically, jobs in intel analysis!
The Partnership For Public Service, a well-funded and well-connected non-profit with the stated mission to "revitalize our federal government by inspiring a new generation to serve" put the report together based on information provided by the 35 government agencies that participated.
The level of participation by the intel agencies is unclear. The CIA, for example, did not participate. The Department of Defense (DOD) and all of the services did participate, however, and this is important because nearly all (80% or more) of the intel budget falls under DOD.
Maddeningly, it is unclear what the numbers provided by the services actually represent. For example, I am pretty sure that the numbers on the site are for DOD civilian jobs and do not include military positions but I am not positive. Likewise, I am pretty sure that the DOD numbers include subordinate agencies like DIA and NSA but I cannot be sure since the CIA clearly opted out and these other agencies may have done the same.
Beyond the services, I have other questions about what the numbers actually mean. For example, the line item in the report labels the "Professional Field" as Intelligence Analysis. Does this include anyone associated with the intelligence analysis function? Or just analysts?
"Intelligence agencies expect to hire 5,500 people in the next year and "in the same order of magnitude" over the following two years, according to Ronald P. Sanders, chief human capital officer for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Such agencies include the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency. "It's a combination of how much turnover we expect and how much growth we expect in our budget," Sanders said."
With the data provided by the report and the Post's article, it is possible to go back to the back of the envelope again and do some more analysis.
Any way you add up the numbers you get a reasonably consistent answer to the question of how many intel analysts the federal government needs each year:
If you add up the numbers for the agencies listed needing professionals in the Intelligence Analysis field in this new report, you get 3676 over the next three years (or about 1200 a year).
Previous info suggested that about 17% of the intel workforce are analysts. Using Sanders' 5500 total number, this translates to 935 new-hire analysts (17% of 5500) across the entire national security IC each year for the next three years.
Both these numbers triangulate pretty well with my own, earlier, estimate of about 1000 total (as the median. The range was between 400-2000).
The Department of Justice (DOJ) is undeniably the place to look for jobs as an analyst. More than a third of the total 3676 projected hires in intel analysis over the next three years are coming from DOJ according to the report.
The factors mentioned by Sanders in the Post article were turnover and budget. Intel budgets are likely to remain flat so my guess is that this is mainly due to turnover and that much of this is driven by retirement. There is some support for this in the new report (see the Turnover Tab on the Security And Protection page).
The factor not mentioned was a shift away from contract hires in intel (i.e. closing down contracts and making those workers move to the government side). Contractors currently add another 30+% to the total intel workforce. It is hard to imagine much widespread growth in the contract sector but there is no recent evidence to suggest that there will be a decline next year either (For more info on estimates with regard to contract hires see this post).
Previous info suggests the US national security intelligence community has about 100,000 government employees. 5500 new employees each year based mostly on voluntary turnover translates to roughly a 5.5% turnover rate. If accurate, this places the US national security intelligence community in the same general category as other low turnover rate industries such as biotechnology and other high-tech industries.
A high altitude survey of the intelligence job market yields some pretty interesting observations. The first is that the intelligence job market is finite. There are some pretty distinct boundaries and limits to the size of it and knowing these limits and boundaries helps you understand the potential for jobs in this market.
Let's start with the basics. How many intelligence jobs are there in the US and the world? How many people are actually employed in intelligence? We will start with the most famous of the job markets -- the US Intelligence Community.
For example, how many analysts does the US IC need each year? Well, if you imagine a 25 year career for an analyst and all of them stay until retirement, then you are looking at about 700 a year (17,000/25 = 680).
It is virtually certain that only a few of these analysts stay all the way until retirement, however. More importantly, the number of analysts in each year group is not equal. In fact, one of the common comments about the intel community is that there are a number of "old" analysts soon to reach retirement and an even larger number of young analysts who have been hired since 9/11. This creates what has been called a "bathtub curve" (where the surge of new analysts is at one end of the time line and the large number of soon-to-be retirees is at the other end. In the middle is a smaller number of people who were hired between the end of the Cold War and 9/11).
All this makes it even more difficult to estimate how many entry-level jobs (including analyst jobs) there are in a given year. I would guess (and it is only a guess) that the "normal" number of analyst positions that need to be filled each year in the US government falls somewhere between half this idealized replacement rate to twice that rate or from about 350 to 1400.
These replacement rate numbers are particularly important as the halcyon days of the hiring boom in intelligence over the last 8 years are likely over. Budget strains are virtually certain to put a damper on significant levels of hiring beyond the replacement rate although the importance of the intelligence mission and the continued emergence of new threats (we are hearing that there will continue to be a growth market in cyber threat analysts into the next year and beyond, for example) will likely ensure that replacements get hired for those analysts and others who retire or quit.
The situation gets even worse, though, when you look at some of the agencies. The CIA is reporting a record number of applications this year -- 180,000 -- for the jobs they have open. The CIA has about 20,000 people in it and, if the overall percentage of analysts in the IC holds true for the CIA, then that means that there are about 3400 (17% of 20,000) analysts housed at Langley. Without any growth and if 5% of them are leaving or retiring this year then there are roughly (very roughly) 170 analyst positions available.
Furthermore, if 17% of the 180,000 applicants are trying to fill analyst positions then getting an analyst job at the CIA is about 18 times harder than getting accepted to Harvard as an undergrad (Harvard's acceptance rate in 2007 was 9.2%. 17% X 180,000 = 30,600. 170/30,600 = .6%).
All of these are just logical guesses but even if I am wrong by half (in other words, the number of jobs is twice what I estimate it to be) the total number of jobs and jobs available each year in the US Intelligence Community (and the number of analyst jobs in particular) is by no means enormous.
Including the number of analyst and other jobs available through contractors does not actually improve the picture that much. If recent numbers are accurate, then there are only about 37,000 contract employees in the US IC. Again, how many of these are analyst positions is unknown but if the 17% rule holds true here as well, it means an increase of a little more than 6000 analysts positions available through various contractors.
While not insubstantial, the number of entry-level positions through contractors is probably even more limited as we go into 2010 than through the government directly. In the first place, a significant number of intelligence professionals take jobs through contractors when they retire. In the second place, the days of large contracts for intelligence services seems to be coming to an end. I suspect that many of these contract jobs may get "converted" to government positions rather than go away (the government is going to still need the analysts regardless of who the analysts work for) over the next several years but the absolute number of positions that will need to be filled each year is probably in lower half of the 75-450 range.
In short, if you add up everything and round it all off to make it easy to wrap your head around it, there are likely about 1000 analyst jobs a year in the combined government and contractor worlds supporting the US IC. The number could be as low as around 400 or as high as about 2000 but given limited prospects for growth and some guess-timates for replacement rates, 1000 seems about right.
A couple of other things come out of this analysis. First, the competition for these jobs is fierce. I strongly suspect that the CIA gets the lion's share of attention when it comes to job applications but I would also guess that, in this economy, all 16 members of the intel community and the contractors that support them have seen an increase in the number of applications.
Likewise, not all of these 1000 or so positions are truly "entry-level". It is inevitable that some, perhaps many, of these positions are limited to people with significant levels of experience or who speak Farsi fluently or whatever.
Finally, I may well be off by a significant amount here. In addition to being terrible at math, the numbers I am basing this analysis on may be gross under- or over-estimates (it IS the intelligence community after all...). I am hoping that some of the readers of this blog will post a comment or two pointing us all to some major hiring binge that I have missed.
Even if I am wrong, however, I think the first thing that job seekers need to fully understand is that the US national security market is both limited and competitive.
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