THE PSYCHOLOGY OF INTELLIGENCE FAILURES: DISARMING COGNITIVE TRAPS
Michael Medina
Physical Security & Business Continuity | Threat & Crisis Management | Creative Strategist | Veteran
This article originally appeared in my blog, The Reflection Bank.
In May of 1998, India carried out a series of five nuclear bomb tests that took the American intelligence community and U.S. government leaders by surprise. Pokhran-II, as the incident came to be called, led to congressional hearings and internal investigations regarding the CIA’s intelligence gathering shortcomings. Ultimately, the Senate Intelligence Committee called the incident a ‘colossal failure’ that robbed the U.S. of diplomatic opportunities that may have prevented introducing added tensions into a region already overwhelmed with political strife. While a variety of factors played a role in this failure, it highlighted the personal and cultural challenges faced by individuals within the intelligence community (IC) and its consumers that most often prevent success.
Intelligence failures can occur at all stages of the process: from the collectors, to the analysts, and on to the consumers, but it is the perceptual and cognitive biases of these individuals that play the most damaging role in sabotaging operations. Understanding these psychological impediments is vital to the success of the IC and those who rely on their work to make critical foreign and defense policy decisions.