re: "Wanted: Robust Intelligence and Diplomatic Reporting"

James Bruno at Diplo Denizen ("Author and ex-diplomat comments on foreign affairs & writing") explains the importance of diplomatic reporting.

Money quote(s):

"After I completed my assignment, I unexpectedly received kudos from analysts in the intelligence community. They pointed out how much the atmospherics I described in my reporting helped them put together their analyses.

Diplomatic and intelligence reporting work hand-in-hand. Put together, they flesh out a fulsome picture of events, players, and issues. When one component is lagging or missing, the other suffers. When policymakers ignore one or both, they are flying blind."

Throughout the IC we have some incredible analysts who are great in their various specialties, all-source and fusion-cell sorts not excluded, so it can be a very pleasant surprise to learn from them how they value diplomatic reporting.  Even some of our publicly-available "open source" contributions, that convey the basic ground truths which may be common knowledge in a particular country, are valuable to analysts working inside (or near) the beltway.

"One noteworthy fallout of the WikiLeaks publication of State Department cables, leaked by Chelsea Manning, was the compliments about diplomatic reporting from journalists, academics, and others. The New York Times noted, “curious diplomats can turn out to be accomplished reporters, sending vivid dispatches to deepen the government’s understanding of exotic places,” and “the drama in the cables often comes from diplomats’ narratives of meetings with foreign figures, games of diplomatic poker in which each side is sizing up the other and neither is showing all its cards.” "

If there was a silver lining to that debacle it was this; however short-lived it may turn out to be, our reporting officers garnered some "street cred" for their work.

"(A) senior Foreign Service officer said, “It’s infuriating that even after WikiLeaks, the ‘thinking’ world and journalists in general, to say nothing of politicians, don’t understand that our stuff is America’s true bedrock intelligence.” "

It truly is.  Although it may seem thankless or even pointless to draft what may seem obvious from where the writer sits abroad, what "everyone knows" in Timbuktu will be anything to an analyst struggling to understand a new portfolio.

"Practitioners know that the value of intelligence is the marrying of open source information with reporting and data collection obtained through spying. The success of U.S. intelligence is the layering of SIGINT [signals intelligence], HUMINT [human intelligence], overhead imagery, open source, and other data, with diplomatic reporting. All are necessary. One without the other yields an incomplete picture.

It is no surprise that the places where the U.S. has had intelligence and diplomatic failures over the years are places where it had no diplomatic representation – hence no diplomatic reporting and the kind of on-the-ground knowledge necessary to make informed decisions. Iraq [between 1990-2003], Iran, and North Korea are notable examples."

Read the whole thing.