On top of that, INR has no spies abroad, no satellites in the sky, no bugs on any laptops. But it reads the same raw intel as everyone else, and in at least a few cases, was the only agency to get some key questions right.
Almost as soon as Avery arrived at INR in 1962, she and her supervisor Allen Whiting proved their mettle by predicting that China and India would engage in border clashes, then pause, then resume hostilities, then halt. All of that happened.But INR also had messages that the Kennedy and Johnson administrations of the time didn’t want to hear. In 1963, the bureau prepared a report of statistics on the war effort: the number of Viet Cong attacks and the number of prisoners, weapons, and defectors collected by the South. All of the trendlines were negative. The report prompted a furious protest from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who argued that the South Vietnamese were succeeding.
The evidence that Hussein was reconstituting Iraq’s nuclear program — a contention that fueled Bush administration officials’ arguments for war, like national security adviser Condoleezza Rice’s famous quip, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud” — had two primary components. One was a finding that the Iraqi military had been purchasing a number of high-strength aluminum tubes, which the CIA and DIA thought could be used to build centrifuges for enriching uranium.On September 6, 2001, five days before the 9/11 attacks, INR issued a report disagreeing with that finding. For one thing, scientists at the Department of Energy had looked into the matter and found that Iraq had already disclosed in the past that it used aluminum tubes of the same specifications to manufacture artillery rockets, going back over a decade. Moreover, the new tubes were to be “anodized,” a treatment that renders them much less usable for centrifuges.
INR’s successful call on the 2022 Ukraine invasion reportedly came because OPN’s polling found that residents of eastern Ukraine were more anti-Russian and more eager to fight an invasion than previously suspected. The polling, Assistant Secretary Brett Holmgren says, has “allowed us to observe consistently, quarter over quarter, overwhelming Ukrainian will to fight across the board and willingness to continue to defend their territory and to take up arms against Russian aggression.”
While no single ingredient seems to explain its relative success, a few ingredients together might:INR analysts are true experts. They are heavily recruited from PhD programs and even professorships, and have been on their subject matter (a set of countries, or a thematic specialty like trade flows or terrorism) for an average of 14 years. CIA analysts typically switch assignments every two to three years.INR’s small size means that analyses are written by individuals, not by committee, and analysts have fewer editors and managers separating them from the policymakers they’re advising. That means less groupthink, and clearer individual perspectives.INR staff work alongside State Department policymakers, meaning they get regular feedback on what kind of information is most useful to them.
But the flat structure, combined with the agency’s tiny size, means analysts get a great deal of freedom. Vic Raphael, who retired in 2022 as INR’s deputy in charge of analysis, notes that analysts’ work “would only go through three or four layers before we released it. The analyst, his peers, the office director, the analytic review staff, I’d look at it, and boom it went.” Very little separates a rank-and-file analyst from their ultimate consumer, whether that’s an assistant secretary or even the secretary of state.
The bureau also stands out as unusually embedded with policymakers. Analysts at other agencies aren’t working side by side with diplomats actually implementing foreign policy; INR analysts are in the same building as their colleagues in State Department bureaus managing policy toward specific countries, or on nonproliferation or drug trafficking, or on human rights and democracy. Goldberg, who led INR under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, notes that “we could respond much more quickly than farming it out to another part of the intelligence community, because on a day-to-day basis, we had an idea of what was on her mind.”
Fingar told me yet another favorite win. "The specific issue was, would Argentina send troops to the multinational force in Haiti?" in 1994, as the US assembled a coalition of nations, under the banner of the UN, to invade and restore Haiti’s democratically elected president to office. "Our embassy had reported they'd be there. Argentine embassy in Washington: they'll be there. The State Department, the Argentine desk: they'll be there. [The CIA]: they'll be there.” But, “INR said, no, they won't.” The undersecretary running the meeting, Peter Tarnoff, asked which analyst at INR believed this. He was told it was Jim Buchanan.At that point, as Fingar remembers it, Tarnoff ended the meeting, because Buchanan’s opinion settled the matter. That’s how good Buchanan’s, and INR’s, reputation was. And sure enough, Argentina backed out on its promise to send troops.
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