EVALUATION OF INTELLIGENCE DATA SOURCES

Usually the credibility of information is graded from 1 to 5, and the expertise of the observer is graded from A to D.

So, a statistician reporting on overall accounts picture would be B.
A statistician reporting on statistics would be A.
A statistician giving you a factual report on the medical aspects of certain drugs which have nothing to do with Statistics and that one doesn’t even know if they exist, would be D.

This is an Order and it is particularly marvelous; it has been in use for the last century or so, which doesn’t make it the classic example: 1 to 5 and A to D was given something in this office of Naval Intelligence system and

A-1 Naval Officer reporting on a Japanese battleship in Yokohama Harbor would be A-1. A Naval officer. He knows what he is looking at. Yokohama Harbor, Japanese naval vessel. Sure Mud Creek, Iowa, would be D-5. A German naval vessel seen two thousand miles up A-1. A farmer, reporting on a housewife has reported on
an airplane, near an airport Definitely D 1; You would expect an airplane to be near an airport.

So the evaluation of information has a great deal of bearing on the acceptability of it. But your best prevention—because you could make mistakes with any of these systems—is the repetitive character of information. And this is the value of a Thursday report.

The stats are down in the area. Along reliable lines some flap is reported and you look in the Thursday reports to find out what else is going on in the area and you will generally find that the same fact is reported several times. In combat information they seldom accept a report. Some German army unit has study two other reports, and the country and he sends in that the believe there unless he’s moved up front have it’s interesting that the generals never are out there thinking he’s doing and dying for it.

This causes them many times to lay many eggs. But it is a system of a sort and it is a very elementary system to begin with. Even a general can understand it, so you get the idea that it is very simple system. You could start in with a simple system and get into a more sophisticated point of view.

Famiarity with the scene is really important in the evaluation of information. So data from Russia is turned over to Russian experts—who are normally KGB operatives in the CIA. But they’re experts on the subject. Whether they tell the truth or not never gets mentioned.

Computerized intelligence is useless as far as I’m concerned. That’s all the CIA and the other outfits do. They call it overt intelligence which is what is readily available. Then they get expert opinions on this and analysis against the past and then they think they have evaluated it and they feed it in. Of course the Russians know this so they just print what they want to go into the CIA files in Pravda. It’s a very elementary system.

So the fact that you can get false reports laid into your lines must not be overlooked. Anybody who has an axe to grind is liable to give you the fanciest packet of false reports you ever saw in all your life.

There are many reasons why people would want to grind an ax, but the reason you get false reports is not always a ground ax. It can be simply a stupid observer.

DATA IMPORTANCE

It’s the source of the information, the credibility of the information and its importance.

This is one of the things the Germans never whipped. They had thousands and thousands of thousands of people evaluating up to seven tons a day of clippings in North America. And they had literally hundreds of thousands, actually probably upwards of a million and a half, Germans who were enforced into the intelligence service even though they were just local residents. They clipped everything and sent it to a Central Bureau somewhere in the United States. But the crucial thing considered is and that at that point it was supposed to be evaluated by mail where it was of the matter that the bird who was there at that time, Von Papen, or somebody like this, had a reputation for being a louser. He did a lousy job. In intelligence, a guy who walks in very often does a good job. But he just did a lousy job. He really probably had a louse in the room every morning and saw the morning mail and said, “The hell with it!”

In many instances they loaded down the North German Lloyd ships and just shipped it all to Germany. It was going on, individuals who were picking up information that was possible or impossible, that had no relationship to, or importance in relationship to anything that was untrained.

Somebody in Mexico says, “I have heard the peons of Argentina are greasing the wheels lately of their carts.” Well, it’s just nonsense. And yet they considered it actually intelligent. Their lines are jammed. You can jam intelligence line by taking incompetent observation. You are used to hearing from staff who are fairly competent at observing what is going on, they’ve got some idea what is going on, but they are not competent enough to spot working independently get into one.

Unskilled executives and executives outnesses unless you tell them to look for one screaming information which is incredible. Or they handle information. Or they act on and ignore the one that is.