The Directorate of Intelligence, or DI, is the CIA’s analytic arm and one of its four directorates, alongside Operations, Science and Technology and Administration.[1]
John Kiriakou entered it on joining the CIA and describes it plainly as “the analytic cadre of the agency.”[2] He had multiple offers on entry — two offices in the Directorate of Intelligence and one elsewhere — and chose analysis first because he was a Middle East specialist, spending seven years on the Iraq account before switching to counterterrorism operations.[3]
The culture
Kiriakou’s characterisation of the directorate is affectionate but pointed. Analysts, he says, believe “that they’re always the smartest people in the room. And most of the time, frankly, they’re not.”[4] The contrast with the Directorate of Operations, where he later worked, is one he draws repeatedly: the two halves of the agency have wildly different cultures.
Movement between the DI and the wider intelligence community was routine in his time — he describes liaising with the National Reconnaissance Office and NRO analysts transferring across into the Directorate of Intelligence.[5]
In the abolition argument
That duplication is exactly what Kiriakou uses when arguing that the CIA should be abolished. Other bodies, he says, do precisely what the Directorate of Intelligence does — DARPA and NSA and half a dozen Defense Department organisations among them — so the analytic function could be distributed rather than housed in one agency.[6][7]
The long view, and what displaced it
Kiriakou describes the analytic side as the part of the agency licensed to think past the week. “This was one of the things that I enjoyed the most when I was serving in the Middle East as an analyst — because your job was to look at the long-term view. I was interested in, let”s say, Saudi stability over the next 30 years. That”s interesting to me. What”s not interesting is what”s going to happen in the next 24 hours in Sudan.”[8][9]
His objection is that the short view has crowded the long one out, and that this makes the product redundant: the policymaker “can get that information by reading the New York Times or Al Jazeera or the Washington Post. So the CIA is not adding anything to the body of intelligence.” The other half of the problem is that the collectors will not answer the analysts” questions at all — the case he cites being the hot dog lady cable.[10][11]