When companies become part of a cleared program, the first thing they ask for is a threat assessment. Who is out to get their program, and how? Few laymen know the work that goes into these documents. This is because access to the information analysts provide is normally highly classified. Requests for threat assessments go through your supporting FBI counterintelligence agents or military intelligence investigators to official threat assessment teams.
Producing a Threat Assessment
How threat assessments are produced is fascinating. Their story begins with an American success story. This tale evolved from the Second World War and is carefully, even cleverly recounted in “Book and Dagger,” by Professor Elyse Graham. Graham is an historian at Stony Brook University and a highly regarded author. She shows where our intelligence research and analysis began, and how it evolved to what it is today.
Professor Graham reveals how the OSS, predecessor of our current CIA, recruited scholars, scientists, and academics to discern current intelligence from European publications collated abroad. Such information revealed where Axis war defenses were emplaced, equipment built, and capabilities developed. Graham’s study draws upon previously unexplored records, as well as primary and secondary sources, to reveal the origins of our national intelligence Research and Analysis program. From such origins our CIA evolved to become the most significant intelligence analysis system on earth. And not for the reasons you might think. Here you will read dozens of previously unrevealed stories that will utterly astound you. Not spies alone, but academics sitting in libraries reading vast amounts of tedious literature revealed where the Axis were vulnerable.
Scupulous Investigation
Professor Elyse Graham has done masterwork discerning how these university scholars and academics, together with corporate and government scientists, were recruited. Their mission was to discern, through research of thousands upon thousands of collated European newspapers, social journals, industrial documents, tedious business reports, and newsletters the answers to specific questions about Axis intentions and capabilities. Indeed, these scholars weaponized data so obscure few even thought to read them in the first place. Graham shows how those trained in major American and European Universities were well versed in distilling incredibly valuable facts about enemy industrial, economic, military, scientific, and cultural conditions from social articles, business publications, and other exceedingly dry materials. Indeed, the scholars were motivated, as many were on the run from Hitler’s empire. Many were liberals, Jews, and dissenters identified as ‘enemies of the Germanic people.’
Astounding too is how these scientists were able, for example,to discern which German factories to bomb where the most damage could be done to ball bearings. Ball bearings made all the Axis vehicles’ wheels spin properly, and incredibly boring literature revealed where they could be most damaged. Also, reviews of returned or lost aircraft allowed Allies to know where to reinforce armor on bombers.
Missinformation to Good Use
False radio transmissions designed by academics confused enough German commanders to keep tanks and reinforcements away from Normandy beaches on D-Day. Without bureaucratic precedent to hamstring these researchers,imagination and innovation allowed our scholars to apply any number of new ideas to assist our military on the battlefield. Proper mapping became a hallmark of their research, such that invasion plans could overcome unexpected depths on landing beaches, or heights of mountain passes. Most significant, the development of the atomic bomb came about through mind numbing research in a deadly race against Axis scholars on the same quest. Ironically, the very scholars hounded from Germany were leaders in our Manhattan project.
Nowadays, the fruit of this early organizational R&A development gives us capable research teams who evaluate adversarial all source collectors. They tell us who might try to collate our own secrets to defeat us on the battlefield. Of course, new collection capabilities are available today. Drones, overhead collection, and massive open-source data are but a few such capabilities. All this and more are now included in modern threat assessments. But we can see how allowing innovation made it possible to better protect our own secrets, and reveal the enemy’s capabilities.
Graham follows the scholars she highlights to show how after the war their research for detailed answers to specific questions became a part of CIA’s primary mission. We owe a magnitude of praise to Graham. She’s revealed how not just spies, but researchers and analysts, make up our great national security apparatus. Now we have numerous government threat assessment organizations. All who rely on these men and women for their classified defenses would do well to befriend them. They, just like spies, keep us protected.
