Douglas J. Brown
Tuesday, Sept. 24, 2002

So what. It's a meaningless fact.

The issue is how good are the five analysts? Do they have the right support staff, IT systems and access to the rest of the intelligence community? Five? Four? Three? Two? One could be perfectly sufficient given the right workflow. If he or she proved capable of handling the task, how does dumping 100 or 200 new people into a room or center who don't have the regional, cultural, linguistic or historical expertise to understand a subject help to analyze it?

Of course, one analyst might be pushing it when you have to have backup and some redundancy built into the workflow process. But anyone who has ever done any serious, in-depth research knows that five experts working on a problem in which everyone knows their assignments and responsibilities, where everyone respects and feeds off of each other's abilities, is not a ridiculously low number to be working on a major problem.

How many 'analysts' or reporters does the Washington Times have covering the entire intelligence community? Well, the Washington Times might not be the best example, because half the intelligence community seem to moonlight for Bill Gertz's leakshop. But the point is that the numbers game, which reporters, commentators and politicians love to harp on, is a canard.

I cite an anonymous source, "Through Our Enemies' Eyes," written by Anonymous. (Brassey's 2002) Anonymous is a senior intelligence official "with nearly two decades of experience in national security issues related to Afghanistan and South Asia."

"Through Our Enemies' Eyes" is a brilliant, superbly written analysis of Osama bin Laden and the radical Islamic threat to America. The book should be required reading for every senior policy-maker in the government. And it was written by one person, one analyst.

There is a fundamental flaw in Anonymous' analysis, but it does not take away from providing one of the best analyses of radical Islam available. Consequently, whether it was five or nine or 29, as CIA spokesman Bill Harlow frantically stated in his Sept. 19, 2002, press release, the numbers game played by the press and the politicians is a con game played on the American public.

The frantic and panicky press release put out by the CIA's Public Affairs Office, pressed no doubt by senior officials, is a sad comment on how little faith the higher-ups have in their own people and how little they understand the process they are managing.

Oh – the fundamental flaw? It was somewhat surprising coming from a diplomatic historian. The title should read "Through Osama bin Laden's and Radical Islam's Eyes," because Anonymous leaves out a few of our other enemies. Calling state-sponsored terrorism "a stale old analytical framework" doesn't make China, Cuba, Iraq, Iran, Syria, etc., go away.

Nor can Anonymous simply ignore other legacies of the fall of the Soviet Union. Because Islamic radicalism sees the world simply and clearly doesn't mean the world in which it operates is.

Why must we understand the influence of ideas and beliefs going back several hundred years on one of our enemies, yet ignore the influence of ideas and beliefs of the last 60 or 70 years on our other enemies? Or, for that matter, ignore our other enemies?

Call in the next five-person team.

Douglas Brown is Research Director at The Nathan Hale Institute, www.nathanhaleinstitute.org. He may be reached at nathanhale@comcast.net.

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