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Title: The Art of Intelligence Authors: Henry A. Crumpton Category:supplementals Number of Highlights: 30 Date: 2025-11-14 Last Highlighted: **
Highlights
The challenge for the operations officer: how to exercise self-awareness and self-discipline so emotions inform and strengthen greater intellectual knowledge, improve judgment, and empower a relationship to render acts of skill and courage that deliver valuable intelligence.
Clausewitz in his classic On War stressed the courage of responsibility over all other forms of courage. Without that type of bravery, there can be no leadership and no victory.
Tags:leadership
Not a theological point, but rather an enduring lesson of warfare: You need to know yourself. The better you understand yourself, your team, and your nation, the better you can triangulate friend and foe in the human terrain of combat. Sun-tzu had taught this.
Tags:self-awareness,war
There is a tendency in our planning to confuse the unfamiliar with the improbable.
Tags:favorite,perspective,problem_solving,strategy
Self-awareness through self-examination is essential for a successful intelligence officer, especially a recruiter. Without a solid, central reference point of yourself, every other assessment and judgment is skewed.
The instructors outlined the ingredients of a recruitment operation: MICE. This stood for money, ideology, compromise, and ego. I thought of another, revenge, perhaps an extension of ego but nonetheless powerful enough to warrant its own designation. Later in my career, in the universe of counterterrorism and war, I would learn and apply coercion, from the intricately subtle to the massively kinetic.
Intelligence collectors and analysts without empathetic intuition, or ādeep intelligence,ā can yield deeply flawed conclusions, bungled operations, and catastrophic policy decisions. In contrast, by understanding local norms in a human intelligence context and by working to build common policy purpose with local partners, risks diminish and rewards grow. Self-awareness through self-examination is essential for a successful intelligence officer, especially a recruiter. Without a solid, central reference point of yourself, every other assessment and judgment is skewed.
Tags:perspective
Those operations officers who best understand themselves, their own motivations, their own ignorance, while exploring the ideologies, faults, anger, fears, hopes, and aspirations of others, are the ones who recruit the best spies. Those who realize what they donāt know acquire the best intelligence.
Tags:intelligence
In all fighting, the direct method may be used for joining battle, but indirect methods will be needed in order to secure victory.
Tags:problem_solving
I do not like that man. I must get to know him better.
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Tags:favorite,perception
We had failed to achieve the three strategic objectives of counterinsurgency that Franks and I had first discussed in September 2001: nullification of enemy leadership, denial of safe haven, and amelioration of conditions that the enemy exploits.
āCovert action means influencing conditions and behavior in ways that cannot be attributed to the sponsor.
Tags:influence
Communication, especially the crucial but sometimes mundane work of writing reports, is fundamental to espionage.
Tags:communication
He maintained that each student must train with diligence, learn good habits, and go pitch prospective agentsāand keep learning. He maintained that all great recruiters constantly refined their craft. They always experimented and they always adjusted because all targets and all environments were different.
Our leaders will needĀ relevant information in a timely manner, information analyzed with the leadersā specific objectives in mind so it is actionable. So it is valued and used. So that it is more than information. It is good intelligence, like fine art, understood and treasured by the beholder.
Tags:intelligence
What are the ideal experiences for the development of a top-flight intelligence officer? There was an overwhelming consensus, according to James, that whether in operations or analysis, the best officers were usually those who had accumulated a broad range of diverse and enlightening experiences prior to joining government service.
Tags:perspective
Sun-tzu emphasized that the art of war is necessary for the state. He added that āAll warfare is based on deceptionā and that āIf you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.ā He was referring to the value of intelligence.
Tags:intelligence
Our collective, channeled, disciplined emotional response was as important as the strategy we had forged. Without the will to win, strategy is moot. We all intuitively understood this. This concept, of course, was nothing new. More than two thousand years ago, Thucydides emphasized the paramount importance of understanding and harnessing the passions of men at war.
The best partners and sources, though, are those who embrace the mission, not those compelled to cooperate. Thatās the beauty and the strength of U.S. civil liberties in the espionage business.
Tags:problem_solving
Second, the role of nonstate actors was increasing.
Uncovering and understanding the targetās vision and enabling him to render an intelligence service is the ultimate objective.
CIA officers usually operated aloneācertainly in the development, assessment, recruitment, and handling of sources.
Communicating who you are and what you believe may be the most compelling aspect of a recruitment operation, even if the officer is working undercover or calibrating his views for the intended audience.
The Farmās instructors tested us repeatedly, through a variety of exercises, to discern fact-based intelligence from inference, speculation, and opinion.
When President Obama assumed office in January 2009, his Justice Department threatened CIA officers with jailābecause they had carried out lawful orders under the previous administration.
The first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make is to establish by that test the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its nature. This is the first of all strategic questions and the most comprehensive.
āOfficers wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages. Bitter cold. Long months of complete darkness. Constant danger. Safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in case of success.ā
Some of the best agents began collaboration with the CIA in isolated, stressful hardship posts where help from their own governments was often limited.
The intelligence reportsā customers did not need to know, but they did need to understand the quality of the source and the information.