ABSTRACT
The day-to-day, seemingly mundane interactions between analysts and their supervisors have major influences on the ultimate quality and usefulness of the analysis that intelligence agencies provide to their policymaking consumers. These influences can have positive or negative effects, but they become enduringly pernicious when poor analyst/ manager relationships are systematized into a dysfunctional ‘culture’. The mechanics and significance of these relationships have received scant attention from academics and public policy commentators. The aim here is to describe and assess the relationship between analysts and their managers in the United States Central Intelligence Agency's Directorate of Intelligence (DI) in the 1980s and early 1990s. The CIA's culture changed markedly in this period from that of previous decades, which most external observers and CIA professionals consider generally effective at producing good analysis. 1
