Analytic Culture in the Us Intelligence Community: an Ethnographic Study/

The CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence is to be commended for having the good sense to find Johnston and the courage to support his work, even though his conclusions are not what many in the world of intelligence analysis would like to hear. He reaches those conclusions through the careful procedures of an anthro-pologist-conducting literally hundreds of interviews and observing and participating in dozens of work groups in intelligence analysis-and so they cannot easily be dismissed as mere opinion, still less as the bitter mutterings of those who have lost out in the bureaucratic wars. His findings constitute not just a strong indictment of the way American intelligence performs analysis, but also, and happily, a guide for how to do better.