You have to hand it to three US intelligence amigos: Donald Kerr , Tom Fingar and Mike McConnell. They don’t just subscribe to the concepts of need to share and the responsibility to provide intelligence. They are systematically trying to embed new processes across the intelligence architecture.
One of the key areas they are currently eyeing up is diversity – for pretty obvious reasons. The agencies need to better understand countries like Indonesia and China, find and develop new technologies and listen to and share from different experiences (think more outreach to think tanks and academic institute). In a speech to The 2nd Annual Intelligence Community/Heritage Community Summit Donald Kerr gives an example of diversity in action:
In this work there are countless stories about the importance of diversity. There’s one I recently learned from an FBI intelligence analyst who had worked on Saddam Hussein’s debriefing team in Iraq. While Saddam was being interviewed, a key component of the strategy was to keep him isolated from people outside of the FBI agencies who were questioning him, but he was fluent in several languages. Not deeply so, but sufficiently, and the interviewers needed to find guards who could speak a language that he wouldn’t understand.
It turned out to be really difficult. He knew bits of Spanish, but not the rapid fire Spanish of Puerto Rico. So Puerto Rican speakers would really flummox him, they certainly do me. And that’s what the FBI settled on for his guards. US military members who were native Puerto Ricans in terms of the Spanish that they spoke.
