Making Sense of Transnational Threats

Global Futures Partnership, part of the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence Sherman Kent School for Intelligence Analysis, and the RAND Corporation convened a series of four one-day workshops from February to September 2003 to examine how to better integrate alternative analysis into the analytic process. The basic assumption of the workshops was that “transnational” issues, such as terrorism, present a different set of analytic challenges than more traditional intelligence topics targeted primarily on nation states. This document contains the reports from those four workshops. Participants in the first workshop probed how transnational issues differ analytically from “traditional” state-centric issues. The second session examined the difficulties that transnational issues pose at the individual-analyst and small-working-group level. The third session was focused on the following question: Does the existing shape of intelligence organizations advance or impede analysis of transnational issues? The concluding workshop focused on how to deal and communicate with intelligence’s consumers, from law enforcement officials, to foreign states, to the American public.