A Tradecraft Primer (2009)

[photochemsyn]

If you want the real story on current CIA tradecraft (at least on the digital side):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vault_7

For the rest of it, see books like "Legacy of Ashes" by Tim Weiner, or "Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA and the Sixties". A lot of that is about CIA recruitment and influence operations, which is perhaps not the kind of 'tradecraft' the CIA likes to popularize, e.g.:

https://coffeeordie.com/charles-manson-cia

[pinkcan]

I understand this document is from 2009, not secret, and probably contains information known elsewhere.

Still, what is the intent of the CIA in publishing this on the open web? I assume they would be able to distribute this to US nationals even in other orgs through internal networks.

[dmbche]

My reasoning is that this, to people not as well versed on the subject, indicates that the CIA shares anything that it doesn't absolutely need to keep hidden from the public. It indicates that they are trustworthy.

Also, everything in there is somewhat "common knowledge" as in if you sat down for 4 hours thinking on the subject you'd probably get most of whats written here. So this has little impact on risk - anyone that would be a serious risk doesn't need this, so it's a neat read for the public instead.

[dredmorbius]

Among other possiblities: working with independent assets for whom some modicum of tradecraft is advisable, but who would not able to attain standard clearances, and for whom the fact that the content is openly available online might itself serve as plausible cover should it be determined they've viewed or accessed it.

There's also the open source (software, not intelligence) model of many eyes and being able to achieve open review of techniques.

[polytely]

Recruitment, they need to be cool to attract the people they want as employees

[logicallee]

>Still, what is the intent of the CIA in publishing this on the open web?

I think this is great for branding. All you ever hear is negative stuff. They should publish more in their own name and on their own site.

[Animats]

Have you seen the CIA World Facebook?[1] That goes much further.

[1] https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/

[boppo1]

Maybe it’s bad advice that ne’er-do-wells will try to employ, leaving them susceptible to the CIA.

[gogogendogo]

Personally I prefer the bureaucratic sabotage manual the OSS (the predecessor of the CIA) published during WWII, to advise Nazi-occupied workers on how to slow business to a crawl. Which, funny enough, sometimes reads like a description of bad management practices in general!

https://www.hsdl.org/c/abstract/?docid=750070

[dredmorbius]

An HN favourite, with 35 submissions.

Amongst the top discussions:

- 7 years ago 64 comments <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35448090>

- 3 years ago 89 comments <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22322041>

- 11 years ago 68 comments <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4831363>

- 6 years ago 32 comments <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15109771>

- 1 year ago 55 comments <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31676964>

- 8 years ago 68 comments <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10493881>

- 14 years ago 29 comments <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=833443>

[paganel]

> 2003 Iraq’s WMD Programs

> Saddam failed to cooperate with UN inspectors because he was continuing to develop weapons of mass destruction.

Apparently this "analysis" was written in 2009, a good 6 years after the start of the Second Iraq War, and still the CIA followed the political manoeuvre of not challenging their leaders' lies about Iraq's WMD.

This is one of the most vulnerable points of any "intelligence" agency, i.e. they're at the whims of those holding actual power in any given State.

[jboy55]

I love the explanation as to what 'really' happened.

>If Iraqi authorities had destroyed their WMD stocks and abandoned their programs, they might refuse to fully acknowledge this to the UN to maintain Iraq’s regional status, deterrence, and internal regime stability.

How about

> If the current US Administration needs to invade Iraq for their domestic political agenda and requires a narrative of existing WMD stockpiles. They will ignore any evidence that counters this, and even create a completely fictional narrative to justify the invasion.

[Vecr]

Sadam tried to be ambiguous about having WMDs so he could used them as a deterrent without the problems with actually deploying them (kind of like Israel does, but less credible). Sadam was violating UN orders in regards to WMDs, but there was no automaticity so the US was not actually supposed to go in. I think it's plausible the UN would have gone in anyway if the US had waited.

[HFguy]

Probably for the best.

Don’t really want your various 3 letter agencies operating apart from elected leaders.

[_yo2u]

I think fundamentally, if you have incomplete information and have to make some actions or judgements, either you are:

1. doing things to reason about or uncover more useful datapoints to increase certainty

2. you are accepting the probability that you are right/wrong at face value

The direction in which you decide to uncover datapoints is the "bias" that they are talking about. This process if further influenced by institutionalized assumptions or priors you are working with.

I really don't like lists like "Strategic Assumptions That Were Not Challenged" because they are factually true but also reek of survivorship bias.

[sneak]

If you told me I'd be parsing PDFs from cia.gov on my main mobile device 24 hours ago, I wouldn't have believed you.

[B1FF_PSUVM]

Hey, a couple of decades ago you could be buying The CIA World Factbook as a paper almanac at a gas station.

Pretty good, now online, of course: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Factbook

[pinkcan]

virustotal says it's good: https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/48fe6cd5ef2cb9779db5bf16...

[einpoklum]

I would think that when people in the CIA manage to understand international developments well enough, they typically become highly critical of US policies and then leave...

[euroderf]

I would like to see a CIA counterpart to "War is a Racket" by Smedley Butler of the USMC.

[greenyouse]

Shows some helpful ways to reason about open problems with incomplete information.

[greenyouse]

Ah, this missed the mark since the domain is all political/state related. I saw the mental liquidity story from today and it reminded me of an old book they published about how to think. That one has better theory based talk. This article has too many references to conflicts so it's kind of distracting from the interesting stuff.

psychology of intelligence analysis book link: https://www.cia.gov/static/9a5f1162fd0932c29bfed1c030edf4ae/...

previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14852250

[hm-nah]

Dare ya to download that PDF!!

[forgetfreeman]

Not today, CIA.

[dang]

Anyone know the year?

[pinkcan]

It says in the PDF: 2009