DHS's new order banning Acronis AG from federal systems also sheds new light on security concerns U.S. officials have about the company's products and services.

© AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais

Economic statecraft has become a primary instrument of US national security, deployed with a frequency and ambition that outpaces the intelligence architecture built to support it. For sanctions, tariffs, investment screening, export controls, and development finance to succeed, the United States must fully leverage the data and intelligence available to it. Now is the time for the IC to organize itself around the discipline of economic and financial intelligence.

The IC has long struggled to prove its value to economic customers: the Secretaries of Treasury, Commerce, Defense, and State, as well as the US Trade Representative and financial regulators. One frequent explanation is the IC’s historic orientation toward military and diplomatic support. Another is the perception that classified economic analysis lacks distinctive value. I spent most of a twenty-three-year intelligence career inside the economic discipline, ultimately leading Treasury’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis (OIA). While this may once have been true, the IC is doing better than ever to meet growing demand.

The problem is no longer the quality of the analysis—which has matured immensely—but the IC’s decentralized approach to serving its economic customers. No IC agency is specifically responsible for the discipline of economic and financial intelligence. The closest is OIA.

Congress created OIA in statute in 2004 with an eye toward sanctions support and countering terrorism finance. Its role has since expanded across economic, financial, and cyber issues for customers across government and industry. However, OIA is not the designated IC lead for US economic statecraft—no IC agency is. One consequence is that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) remains the statutory lead for analytic support to the Treasury-led Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). That made sense in 2007, when the Foreign Investment and National Security Act codified CFIUS and assigned the Director of National Intelligence that role. At the time, OIA was in its infancy and consumed by counterterrorism. That is no longer the case.

The instinct in Washington is to solve a challenge like this by first creating a new organization, then fixing the functions. Congress should start with the functions instead, then address where the discipline sits. To improve IC support to economic statecraft, Congress must first act on six fronts.

Designate a functional manager. One IC element must own economic and financial intelligence as a discipline: collection priorities, analytic standards, a hiring and training pipeline, and a framework for systematic engagement with allies and industry. Nothing about that role requires a new agency.

Clarify authorities. Explicitly authorize collaboration between the designated lead and both its government customers and the private sector, including exchange of expertise and data.

Supercharge private sector engagement. Many of the best national security solutions in economics and finance will come from industry. Create a permanent path for its ideas, expertise, and capabilities.

Work with what exists. Use OIA as the foundation and keep the number of IC agencies flat, but cap its size so it stays nimble as economic statecraft evolves.

Revisit ODNI’s CFIUS role. IC support to CFIUS sits with ODNI because in 2007 no one else could carry it. Whether it should move depends on where the discipline lands, but Congress should not view the 2007 answer as permanent.

Fund it as a national mission. Economic intelligence should not have to compete for a share of a domestic department’s topline. Give the discipline a dedicated budget line, with the investment in people and AI that exploiting economic data at scale requires.

That leaves where the discipline sits—and there are three answers, not one.

The easiest first step is a designation: name OIA the functional manager, leave it in Treasury, and make clear in statute and to policy customers that OIA is the center of gravity for economic and financial intelligence. That is available now and beats the status quo. Nevertheless, an IC office answering to the Secretary of the Treasury will always be seen—correctly—as Treasury’s first. This is why Commerce and others periodically press for shops of their own, an outcome that grows the IC rather than optimizing it.

The achievable reform is bureau status. Treasury did this with FinCEN in 2002, and FinCEN is now treated as a government-wide and international resource rather than Treasury’s alone. Done properly it means a separate appropriation, a director accountable to both the Secretary and the DNI, and a statutory mission naming service to the whole government, the private sector, and our allies.

The stretch option is to elevate OIA to become an independent National Geo-Economic Intelligence Agency—still my own preference, because only independence settles the question of whose intelligence office it is. But where the discipline sits is the last decision, not the first. Under any of the three, the proximity OIA has built with Treasury policymakers is a design problem with a known solution: dedicated, co-located teams at each major customer department.

Economic intelligence is a core national security capability and should be organized and resourced like one: purpose-built to track, anticipate, and disrupt adversary financial and commercial threats in real time. The playbook has changed. Our competitors are more agile, emboldened, and shaping markets and supply chains to their advantage while we debate whether the threat qualifies as strategic.

All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the U.S. Government. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying U.S. Government authentication of information or endorsement of the author's views.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.

Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief

"What we're finding in today's warfare — we see it with Ukraine, we see it with U.S. operational units — that targeting cycle is much faster," Will Cocos said.

© Federal News Network

Picture an intelligent analyst's screen. Data about troop movements, a port closure, a terrorist attack, or a weapons transfer sits at the center of a clean interface, with a confidence indicator glowing green. Two hundred outlets are carrying it, and the platform has counted every one. It looks like a corroboration. In many cases, it is a single Telegram post, copied, translated, summarized, and republished until its origin disappeared behind its own echo.

Nobody must be negligent for this to happen. It is what you get when a product or platform is built to measure volume and the user is tempted to read volume as truth.

I say this as someone who works with open-source material and believes in it. Commercial imagery, ship-tracking data, procurement records, leaked databases, and social media have changed what is knowable about conflicts and illicit networks; but the market that has grown up around these sources is selling something different from the discipline that makes them valuable, and governments and companies are buying it without noticing the difference.

A Crowded Market and a Thin Product

Open-source intelligence platforms are multiplying quickly. Walk through the company stands at any security conference and you will find dozens of them, each promising to fuse, monitor, and surface threats across the open internet, now almost always with an AI layer that summarizes, ranks, and alerts.

Strip away the interface and most of them offer little that a competent analyst couldn't already do with a search engine, a handful of specialist tools, and some patience. Reverse image searching, scraping social platforms, pulling corporate registry data, and geolocating an image are all learnable skills, and many of the best practitioners picked them up in public, often as volunteers. What the platforms add is convenience and scale, which is genuinely useful, but convenience is not analysis. The real product, in most cases, is the dashboard.

Dashboards are persuasive by design. They squeeze a messy information environment into something that looks like a picture of the world, with counts, trend lines, heat maps, and sentiment scores. Each of those findings implies that someone has already done the hard work of deciding what matters and what is true. Usually, no one has. The system has counted things, and counting is the easy part.

Counting Sources Is Not Testing Them

The core flaw is in what these systems reward. They tend to measure the number of sources behind a claim, not the independence of those sources. The two are very different things.

Independence is the foundation of corroboration. Two witnesses who saw an event separately make a claim stronger. Two witnesses who heard about it from the same third person do not. The same logic applies to reporting. A claim that traces back to a single channel but appears in two hundred outlets has one source and two hundred echoes.

Intelligence tradecraft has a name for this: circular reporting. It is among the oldest and best-documented ways analysts go wrong. The failures that most damaged the credibility of Western intelligence in the past generation involved, among other things, uncorroborated claims that were repeated, cross-referenced, and eventually treated as established because they seemed to come from many places. The lesson drawn at the time was that provenance matters more than prevalence. An aggregator that treats prevalence as confirmation is rebuilding the vulnerability that analysts spent years learning to guard against.

AI makes this problem fourfold. First, language models summarize and synthesize, and in doing so they take away the provenance trail that an analyst needs. A fluent paragraph that blends fifteen sources does not tell you that twelve of them are derivative. Second, the cost of generating plausible content has collapsed. Fabricated articles, cloned news sites, and coordinated amplification networks can now create the appearance of breadth cheaply, which is exactly the signal these platforms are built to count. Third, as more web content is produced or recycled by automated systems, the pool that analytics tools draw from becomes more self-referential. The echo chamber is increasingly populated by machines quoting each other. Lastly, AI can make uncertainty harder to see. Language models are designed to produce coherent answers, not to preserve the ambiguity of the evidence on which those answers are based. Contradictory sources can be reconciled into a smooth narrative, gaps can disappear beneath plausible inference, and tentative conclusions can acquire the tone of established fact. The danger is therefore not simply that an analyst receives false information, but that the uncertainty surrounding otherwise legitimate information becomes less visible.

None of this means the technology is useless. Entity extraction, translation, deduplication, and pattern detection across large data sets are real contributions. But the same tools that can help trace a claim to its origin are too often deployed to certify it instead.

Information Is Not Intelligence

The deeper problem is what happens after the dashboard produces its output. Companies market it as intelligence, and buyers, including government agencies, intelligence firms, financial institutions, and corporate security teams, purchase it as intelligence, then act on it.

However, open-source material is raw information. It becomes intelligence only after a process that no interface can fully automate. Someone has to establish where the material came from, grade how reliable the source has been, assess how credible the specific claim is, and test it against other collection. Established standards exist for this. Grading systems that rate source reliability separately from information credibility have been used for decades, and analytic standards require analysts to describe the quality and credibility of their sources, to distinguish between underlying evidence and judgment, and to account for alternative explanations. These are not bureaucratic formalities. They are the mechanism by which an organization knows how much weight a conclusion can bear.

When that step is skipped, the result is aggregated internet content with a confident interface. The output reads like a finished product, but the epistemic work behind it is missing, and the person reading it often can't see that. A decisionmaker shown a green indicator does not know whether it reflects three independent confirmations or one rumor with good distribution.

The consequences are practical. A government that bases sanctions designations, force posture, or diplomatic messaging on an unverified claim risks embarrassment at best and escalation at worst. A company that reroutes shipments or exits a market because a risk platform flagged a rumor can lose real money; and an agency that comes to rely on commercial feeds may quietly stop investing in the capabilities that would let it check them.

What Should Change

I would offer the following two principles.

One, to treat provenance and independence as essential to intelligence. Open-source material should be treated as a cue and a corroborator, not a conclusion. Open sources are at their best when they point collection in a useful direction or when they test and strengthen what other sources have suggested. A satellite image that shows construction at a site tells analysts where to look and what to ask. A procurement database entry might confirm a pattern already suspected. Neither is a finding on its own. The workflow should run from open-source lead to targeted collection to assessment, not from dashboard alert to briefing slide. As AI makes it easier to summarize, reproduce and generate information, analysts need to know not only what a source says, but where the information originated and whether apparently separate sources are actually independent. A fluent paragraph that blends fifteen sources does not tell an analyst that twelve of them are derivative. Likewise, a cluster of articles, websites or database entries may create the appearance of broad corroboration while ultimately tracing back to a single underlying claim. Platforms should therefore preserve provenance wherever possible and make the distinction between original reporting, derivative content and AI-generated material visible to the user. The workflow should run from open-source lead to targeted collection to assessment, not from dashboard alert to briefing slide.

Two, protect human assessment and the collection that supports it. AI can make uncertainty harder to see. Language models are designed to produce coherent answers, not to preserve the ambiguity of the evidence on which those answers are based. Contradictory sources can be reconciled into a smooth narrative, gaps can disappear beneath plausible inference, and tentative conclusions can acquire the tone of established fact. Human analysts therefore need both the time and the authority to question what automated systems produce rather than simply validate it. That also means protecting the collection capabilities that AI cannot replace. As open-source material becomes more abundant, the value of what cannot be found online rises. Human sources, financial intelligence, law enforcement access and legal process take years to cultivate and moments to lose. A budget cycle that trims them in favor of subscriptions is trading durable capability for a license that expires. The objective should not be to remove automation from intelligence work, but to ensure that automation remains subordinate to collection, verification and human judgment.

What Open Sources Cannot Close

I learned the limits of open-source work firsthand while researching foreign components in Russian strike drones. Open sources got me a long way. Recovered wreckage data, teardown imagery, part markings, and manufacturer documentation could establish what was inside these systems and who made it. That is valuable, and it was achievable by skilled analysts working in public.

But the questions that mattered most were different. Who actually bought a given part? Through which intermediaries did it move? Who paid for it, and through which accounts? Those gaps could not be closed by any amount of scraping. They required the tools that sit behind a legal threshold or inside a trusted relationship: law enforcement access to shipping and customs records, financial intelligence on transactions, and human sources with knowledge of how the networks operate. A dashboard could tell us a component existed. Only that other collection could tell us how it got there and who was responsible, which is the information policymakers need if they want to disrupt the supply chain rather than simply describe it.

That experience shaped how I think about the current issue. Open sources and closed collection are not competitors. The first made the second more efficient, because it let investigators ask better questions. The second made the first more meaningful, because it turned an interesting observation into an attributable finding. Treating either as a substitute for the other would have left us with a weaker product.

Defending the Analytical Craft

None of this is an argument against open-source intelligence. It is an argument for it, properly understood.

The practitioners who built the field's reputation, whether in newsrooms, nonprofits, academia, or government, are rigorous precisely because they distrust easy answers. They document their methods, show their chains of evidence, and say so when something can't be confirmed. That culture is the real asset. It is also what the commercial market is most at risk of undermining, because rigor is slow and expensive to sell, while a dashboard can be demoed in ten minutes.

The test I would offer any buyer, policymaker, or analyst is simple. When you are shown a claim, ask where it began, who else has independent knowledge of it, and what other collection could confirm or contradict it. If the system in front of you cannot answer those questions, it hasn't given you intelligence. It has given you a well-organized rumor.

The volume of open information will keep growing, and the tools to process it will keep improving. The scarce resource will not be data. It will be judgment, along with the access and tradecraft that make judgment possible. Agencies and firms that remember that, and invest accordingly, will see more clearly than those who confuse a full screen with a full picture.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.

Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief

"I think CFIUS is probably one of the least-known acronyms in D.C. nomenclature. We're doing our best to try to get it out there more," Chris Pilkerton said.

© The Associated Press

Five people assigned to support U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency died by suicide over the course of five weeks in June and July.

© AP/Patrick Semansky

Twenty-five years after 9/11, the United States is confronting yet another era of profound uncertainty and potential dangers. The pace and scale of change are creating unforeseen disruptions that impact our security, stability, and prosperity. Advancing technologies are being adopted and applied in unexpected ways, sparking debates about the unintended consequences for human existence. No longer can we sit back and wait to be surprised.

In the wake of 911, the CIA stood up the Red Cell to address a systemic failure of imagination and later reaffirmed this mission after the intelligence failures of the Iraq War. As memories have faded, the appetite for bold, contrarian thinking has waned, but we remain one unforeseen act of violence, one slow-burning and overlooked development, one scientific breakthrough away from the next shock. In this essay, those who served in the Red Cell look back on its history to derive lessons for better navigating this uncertain future. Now is not a time for cautious assessments but fearless exploration. Leaders in the public and private sectors must be ready to navigate a broader range of possible futures. The safety, security, and livelihoods of future generations depend on such forward thinking.

The Origin of the Red Cell

It was September 12, 2001, just 24 hours after the tragic attacks of 9/11. The American people were in shock and struggling to make sense of what had happened. The United States had experienced a strategic surprise as unfathomable as the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941.

At CIA headquarters in Virginia that morning, Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet gathered Deputy Director for Intelligence Jami Miscik and two distinguished analytic managers, Robert Ovelmen and Paul Frandano, to find a way to compel the bureaucracy to go beyond what it knew and what it assessed and to consider what could be. With a simple but bold mandate, “tell me what others don’t” and “make seniors feel uncomfortable,” he commissioned them to create a new analytic unit, called the Red Cell, to challenge conventional wisdom on terrorism. (Foreign Policy) Neither Ovelmen nor Frandano were experts on terrorism or the Middle East, but they were known for their strong analytic skills, exceptional command of history, understanding of policymaker needs, and somewhat quirky personalities. This cell was not limited to traditional Cold War-style “red teaming” that focused on roleplaying the adversary, but instead it was a more expansive effort to explore possibilities.

Tenet gave them great latitude to gather talent from across the intelligence enterprise. While the mission initially was limited to terrorism and the Middle East, the analysts they recruited had worked everything but those issues. Having experienced the unthinkable, these analysts were tasked to stretch their imaginations to consider the full range of plausible next events. The first products were short and pithy, with catchy titles and provocative ideas about the nature of attack and what the coming days and weeks could portend. The first Red Cell analysis was published two days later on 14 September. Tenet took it directly into the Oval Office, and President George W. Bush asked for more.

Within the first year, the Red Cell was tasked to go beyond its original focus on terrorism and branch into other issues. In the run up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Red Cell produced a flurry of products on what Iraqi President Saddam Husayn might do to prevent an attack and how he might react. The presentations and argumentation were deliberately eye-catching and evocative to make readers engage with the ideas and to remember them the next day. Ovelmen and Frandano knew the avalanche of information and meetings senior policymakers faced each day and wanted the ideas to stand out and be considered, even if they were later dismissed.

This strategy was not without controversy. Some ideas were not only bold but contradicted by existing facts. Others unwittingly were uncomfortably close to highly sensitive policies and plans. Some military commanders in the field worried that the Red Cell might give their superiors dangerous ideas. Expert analysts across the IC were often furious, especially if a Red Cell idea created a tasking for them. Sometimes CIA seniors had to remind readers that the Red Cell was not the authoritative assessment. Even with these challenges, the Red Cell continued to have senior-level support. One senior policymaker once said, “tell those analysts I disagree with this but also tell them to keep writing it.” In his 2006 confirmation testimony to become CIA director, General Michael Hayden said, "Red cell alternative analysis and red cell alternative evaluations are a rich source of thought-provoking estimates, and they should be a part, an integral part, of our analysis.” (Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, May 18, 2006)

BOX: Original mission statement: “In response to the events of 11September, the Director of Central Intelligence commissioned CIA ‘s Deputy Director for Intelligence to create a "red cell " that would think unconventionally about the full range of relevant analytic issues. The DCI Red Cell is thus charged with taking a pronounced "out-of-the-box " approach and will periodically produce memoranda and reports intended to provoke thought rather than to provide authoritative assessments.”

The Next Generation – Red Cell 2.0

As the Red Cell approached the end of the decade, the remaining original members planned to retire. They assumed they would be told to turn off the lights and lock the vault. They had a good run! They had many fans and probably an equal number of skeptics. Contrary to their expectations, then–CIA Deputy Director for Analysis Michael Morell tasked them to find a new set of leaders to carry on the work and train the next generation.

However, with greater distance from the tragedy of 9/11, the interest in and tolerance for the most extreme ideas had waned among some audiences. Both policymakers and the intelligence leadership wanted Red Cell products to have more grounding in tradecraft and data while still considering alternative trajectories and expanding thinking on the various possibilities. The new Red Cell leadership recognized the challenge to preserve and maintain the “Redness” while grounding the assessments with rigorous research and data. To meet these competing demands, they launched Red Cell 2.0, refreshing the brand and expanding the style, argumentation, and presentation.

The Red Cell still had top-level support to delve into the thorniest issues. In September 2012, CIA Director David Petraeus reiterated and expanded the mission, telling the Red Cell to “take on our most difficult intelligence challenges” and “shock us.” During this time, both senior military officers and policymakers found value in Red Cell analysis. Lt. General H.R. McMaster recalled that “As National Security Advisor and as a military commander in combat, I found Red Cell papers useful, in part, because they challenged assumptions and were untainted by and often ran counter to policy preferences.”

Other leaders wanted to participate in the brainstormings because Red Cell analysts challenged them. Supreme Allied Commander NATO, Admiral James Stavridis described engaging with the Red Cell team as “an intellectual adventure that forced my senior staff to interrogate our assumptions, consider more extreme futures for the Alliance, and to understand the choices and risks involved in each scenario.” Red Cell engagements often kicked off with a provocative prompt to disarm the participants and to pave the way for a more open and productive conversation. In one such engagement, a Red Cell analyst launched with “sir, if you were indicted for war crimes.” Although taken aback by such an outlandish suggestion, the prompt changed the tenor of the conversation, and this senior leader became a regular consumer of Red Cell analysis.

To add rigor and maintain credibility, the cell directly addressed perceived analytic tradecraft weaknesses, built partnerships with similar units across the US government, systematically interrogated assumptions and biases, and experimented with new ways of conveying analysis. To show their homework, Red Cell analysts sharpened the logic and argumentation of its products and published more point/counterpoint assessments to illuminate both sides of a contentious issue. During this time, CIA leadership reaffirmed the importance of the cell’s mission but encouraged the team to consider scenarios that were smaller deviations from the expected future—rather than being so far out of the box. In response, the Red Cell turned to more multiple scenarios analysis to explore the spectrum of futures from slight variations to more extreme futures. (NPR, May 23, 2012) Some applauded this effort while others complained the Red Cell would lose its edge.

Being a small, experienced, and non-hierarchical unit enabled rapid prototyping. The team experimented with innovative analytic exercises and developed new approaches for delivering complex analytic stories in creative, memorable ways. For example, the team kicked off each year with a highly engaging, day-long exercise called “Ideapalooza” to push beyond the expected future and explore the intersection of trends and dynamics. (Foreign Policy) The Red Cell was the first unit to publish a fully interactive, choose-your-own-adventure, analytic product, enabling analysts and policymakers to test the impact of different variables. The Red Cell experimented with delivering analysis as a graphic novel. To present difficult messages, the Red Cell drew on historical analogies, turns of phrase, and even pop culture. From song references like “Back in the USSR” to puns about the cold when writing about the Arctic to provocative titles like “Anticipating Saddam’s Last Gasp Gambits,” “Saddam’s Eleventh Hour Options,” and “What If the US Is Seen as an Exporter of Terrorism,” the Red Cell pushed the limits to make scenarios vivid and spark the imagination.

While maintaining its creative environment, the Red Cell often tackled some of the most serious and challenging national security questions. The NSC called upon the Red Cell to produce highly speculative, strategic perspectives on global issues that did not lend themselves to more traditional, heavily sourced intelligence products, such as the future of geopolitics, the durability of alliances, and the international order. These products were less challenge analysis and more thought provoking, big picture assessments. The collocation of senior analysts from different disciplines and with experiences working different regions and issues was an advantage in tackling broad, strategic global issues.

Moving from a Cell to a Product Line

In the most significant evolution since the creation of the Red Cell, in 2023 the Red Cell ceased to be a standalone unit and became a product line under the direction of a Red Cell chief. No longer was there a dedicated staff or separate offices. Instead, Red Cells would now be written by the expert analysts, managed and edited by a senior-level analyst in negotiation with regional and issue managers. There are obvious pros and cons to this new approach.

• On the plus side, products could draw on the expertise of those who know the topic best and can see more nuanced variations. Moreover, when published, the assessments would have high-level support, increasing the possibility of policymakers reading them.

• However, it is difficult to question your own, well-researched and -reasoned analytic line, especially one that has held up to time and events. During crises, expert analysts rarely have the time to pull away from daily coverage of events to consider alternatives and question assumptions. Human nature is to expect the future to be like the present, and it often requires an outsider who is not burdened by expertise to ask the fundamental questions. For example, in 2011, regional analysts in the early days of the Arab Spring were covering the crisis 24/7 with situation reports and daily assessments. The Red Cell was able to explore provocative questions, such as “is this an end-of-history moment”, and could develop multiple scenarios for how the crisis might end.

Shades of Red

Looking back on this work, Red Cell products have always had many shades of red, ranging from far outside the box—almost crimson analysis—to products that were just a subtle but important deviation from the mainline–pink. Sometimes the situation called for a complete 180-degree contrarian take on how the world could go in the opposite direction, but in other situations the Red Cell looked to stress-test underlying assumptions or pursue multiple scenarios. From the beginning, the Red Cell focused on a few analytic techniques or prompts to help tease out subtleties and other perspectives.

• A popular and effective approach was What-If analysis. This approach recognized the most likely future trajectory but then asked, what if something changed? These pieces explored both why something different might happen and what the consequences might be.
• Devil’s Advocacy—a true contrarian alternative—was sometimes but not often the line of argumentation. More frequently, the piece offered a range of ways a situation could evolve or various perspectives a foreign actor might hold.
• Another favorite but more difficult approach which was used from the beginning was the first-person narrative in which the Red Cell tried to channel the strategies, calculations, and even fears of key leaders like Saddam Husayn and Usama Bin Laden. (CIA Reading Room)
• An important and analytically rigorous technique was the assumptions check in which the Red Cell would identify and interrogative important underlying assumptions about an issue.
• Multiple scenarios papers delivered variations of the future from very “red” storylines to trajectories that are largely continuations of the status quo. Some scenarios were mutually exclusive while others offered sequential developments.
• Team A/B or Point/Counterpoint papers explored opposing explanations or arguments about the future. Sometimes, these were delivered in a debate style.

Assessing the Value of the Red Cell

There are many misconceptions about the role of such a contrarian unit. Many tried to assess the value of Red Cell products based on accuracy, assuming that predicting the future better than the mainline analytic experts was the goal. However, the Red Cell was never designed to be right or to provide authoritative assessments. Judging the value of the Red Cell based on how often its alternative analysis was right misses the point. In fact, the Red Cell should be wrong most of the time, given the exceptional expertise and analysis conducted by the Intelligence Community every day. When the Red Cell was right, the mainline analysis by definition had missed something.

At its core, the mission of the Red Cell was to help US decision-makers prepare for a greater range of possible futures to make our nation safer, stronger, and more resilient in the face of growing uncertainty and to give them decision advantage. The Red Cell achieved this by widening the aperture on any situation and exploring plausible—not necessarily probable—futures. The real value was in making people think, making them curious, provoking debate, and helping them understand the underlying foundations of their assessments. Done right, the Red Cell identified analytic weaknesses and helped make mainline analysis stronger. Helping analytic colleagues strengthen their assessments was more important than delivering a finished product to a senior policymaker.

Here are few ways to consider the value and usefulness:

• Did decision-makers read it? Yes, some more than others. Many read the analysis even—and especially—if they disagreed with it as a check on their own thinking.

• Did analysts and warfighters read Red Cells? Absolutely. Red Cell products were among the most read analytic products in the Intelligence Community over multiple years.

• Did Red Cells spark debate? Almost always. It created discussions, which was the point.

• Did senior decision-makers ask for Red Cell papers? Quite often.

• Did Red Cell products influence policy discussions and even choices? Again, yes. In one instance, the NSC reworked a regional strategy in light of a Red Cell memo that foresaw the involvement of a major international player. (Forbes)

• Did the Red Cell shift and improve the culture of mainline analytic units? Yes. Over time many offices incorporated Red Cell techniques, and some created their own contrarian in-house units. Red Cell alumni often went back to “regular” units, in effect, becoming evangelists for out-of-the-box thinking and analysis.

• Have others incorporated these techniques and approaches? Yes, in foreign governments, international institutions, and private companies, entities like the Red Cell—some even called the Red Cell—now exist around the world. (Stimson Center) (Red Cell Partners)Georgetown University has created a Master’s Degree that includes Red Cell projects. (Georgetown University) In 2023, the Stimson Center—a Washington-based think tank—created its own unit called the Red Cell which takes “a devil’s advocate approach to US foreign policy” and “puts forward innovative solutions and unorthodox thinking about America’s role in the world.” (Stimson Center)

Secrets of Success

The success of the Red Cell stemmed from the combination of circumstances, design, and leadership. The shock and fear generated by the attacks on 9/11, followed by flawed intelligence assessments of Iraq’s WMD programs, created the environment for more speculative, creative, and provocative analytic assessments. To meet this demand, CIA leadership made several important choices to create a unique unit with the authority to explore, question, challenge, and go beyond the data. Moreover, they let the ideas be heard, even when they were on the edge and even when they disagreed with them. However, over time, as memories of 9/11 faded, the conditions that facilitated and protected bold analysis evaporated or were dismantled one after another.

Top Cover: With a mandate to make leaders uncomfortable, success required absolute assurance and top cover. That top cover came from both senior analytic managers and senior customers and was reiterated often in the early days.

The Process: The Red Cell also was given the freedom to write and publish without going through formal Intelligence Community coordination processes. The Red Cell was required to consult, but not to coordinate. It could—and often did—disagree with the mainline, coordinated point of view. It weighed the evidence differently. It took speculative leaps. In contrast, mainline analysis had to reflect the views and expertise of the entire organization; every analytic unit with a stake in the topic got to weigh in, and the originating office was obligated to take these views on board. Judgments had to be rigorously supported with multiple citations and sources. This process is what made the end result an CIA product, not an individual one. It ensured that all the evidence is considered and all defensible points of view are reflected. A great deal of time and effort went into coordination, and it was a point of pride for analysts to do it well and come up with an agreed analytic line.

Talent and Staffing: Being a member of and writing for the Red Cell required insatiable curiosity, a willingness to ask tough questions and go against the grain, and a propensity to see angles others didn’t. Red Cell analysts had to be fearless and willing to speak truth to power no matter the consequences. To find such talent, CIA leaders gave the Red Cell authority to recruit from across the organization and request officers from other agencies, including those senior analysts who had topped out and thus, had little fear of pushing analytic boundaries. The cell combined a few core, long-term members with frequent rotations, including from other agencies, to bring fresh ideas and new energy.

Location: Having a designated team outside of the organizational chart and physically separate from expert teams was a key component of the cell’s success. Experts can be too close to a topic or an analytic line to question it. The Red Cell could step back and see a broader landscape of possibilities.

Culture: The Red Cell was about ideas above all else and promoted a culture of exploration, play, and divergent thinking. Rank was left at the door–even for senior military officers. The work always started with conversation/brainstorming—not an unusual method—but in the cell brainstorming sessions preceded every analytic effort. The art of the conversation is teasing out ideas first. Collaboration was another critical component; Red Cell analysts often co-authored products or developed projects with other offices, agencies, governments, academia, and the private sector. No one has a monopoly on innovation or good ideas.

Conveying Analysis: Creativity in argumentation and presentation brought the unlikely future scenarios to life for skeptical consumers. The Red Cell experimented with new formats, visual aids, and graphics, and it worked closely with designers, cartographers and videographers.

Lessons for an Uncertain Future

Twenty-five years since the establishment of the Red Cell, the future environment appears even more uncertain, more prone to unprecedented disruptions, and potentially more dangerous. The combination of rapidly advancing technologies, hyper connectivity, changing international norms and institutions, discontented publics, and the return of great-power competition has created a world in flux. Change is happening at a breathtaking pace and scale with implications for our security, stability, and prosperity. Dynamics that were unimaginable even five years ago are now reality.

Experience continues to show the high probability of being surprised by low-probability events. Organizations of all types remain vulnerable to groupthink, confirmation bias, and assuming the future will be like the present. Such well-known organizational and human behaviors lie at the root of historical policy and intelligence failures. Red Cell-type organizations help guard against these tendencies and compel consideration of alternatives.

To anticipate, manage, and thrive in these divergent futures, now is the time for more Red Cell-like thinking in every sector—both public and private. Leaders and decision-makers must be ready to navigate a broader range of possible futures, including inevitable strategic surprises. Now is not a time for cautious assessments but fearless exploration. The safety, security, and livelihoods of future generations depend on such forward thinking.

Drawing on our years of analytic experience and thinking the unthinkable, this group of Red Cell alumni offers several suggestions to improve future readiness for our communities, our industries, and our country.

• Institutionalize a challenge function: Create a dedicated effort with a broad mandate and direct, unfettered access to the top leadership (CEOs, directors, commanders, etc.) Such a team should be charged with challenging assumptions, questioning longstanding practices, and exploring low probability-high impact scenarios.

• Explore a broader range of futures: Stress-test goals and policies across a range of plausible futures to improve resilience, increase flexibility, and take advantage of emerging opportunities.

• Think multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary: Dynamics and trends can no longer be analyzed in isolation. The world is too complex and connected.

• Go beyond the obvious: It is in the second- and third-order implications where surprises tend to occur, often from seemingly small development that cascade over time.

• Give permission to fail: Instill a ”start-up” mindset, where many investments are dead-ends but a few pay off in a big way.

• Be FEARLESS. The world is depending on you.

It was with alarm that I read the recent New York Times article reporting the regurgitation of a truly terrible idea that, like a bad meal, continues to come up every several years.

The Times reports that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence

is demanding that American intelligence officials turn over the names of all foreign espionage targets, including suspected spies and potential recruits, to create a master list, to avoid inadvertent conflicts between agencies and to better track foreign intelligence threats in real time.

A primary task of any corporate security department or Federal counterintelligence activity is to prevent, deter, and detect human and technical compromises of sensitive information. Even innocent errors can result in massive damage when they reveal sensitive information. Nor is it a secret that any large organization, no matter how carefully it screens its people, may have persons in its ranks who would betray their colleagues and their country. And of course, malign foreign actors routinely seek to access U.S. information systems and classified computing resources.

Just as a comprehensive list of CIA employees, including covert officers serving in dangerous locations, would be of great value to any number of foreign adversaries, so too would the proposed list of espionage targets, suspected spies, and potential recruits. And the drawbacks associated with creating such a list are significant - and potentially catastrophic.

The mere process of assembling the relevant data from within separate departments and agencies would require the assembling of multiple intermediate lists -for example, all subjects of interest from multiple operating components of the FBI, CIA, and additional agencies, each one of which would pose a separate significant and potentially catastrophic counterintelligence vulnerability. Compiled into a single comprehensive set, the theft or leak of the combined list would work incalculable damage to the United States.

Similar proposals have been made for decades. At the very best, they are a solution in search of a problem; for every time two or more agencies trip over one another in the pursuit of intelligence opportunities, there are literally hundreds more occasions in which the existing deconfliction arrangements work exactly as they should.

I spent several years in an ODNI policy position when the Office was first created. From time to time I encountered colleagues from one or another part of the Government, or from outside the Government completely, who sought to establish policies and procedures to address some obscure, long-since resolved, or simply imagined pet peeve. While some concerns truly reflect structural obstacles and warrant serious consideration, sometimes the most responsible thing to do is simply draw the line and withdraw a truly bad proposal. This is one of those times.

Jonathan M. Fredman is a Non-Resident Fellow at the Princeton University School of Public and International Affairs. He spent 36 years in legal and policy positions at the Central Intelligence Agency and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the U.S. Government. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying U.S. Government authentication of information or endorsement of the author's views.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.

Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief

Agent 711 was one of the most effective and least known spies in our nation's history. He used dead drops to communicate about enemy plans. He used secret chemical processes to create new forms of invisible ink. He spread disinformation to disguise his own troops' movements and confuse the enemy. The year was 1778. Agent 711 was George Washington. He was our nation's first spymaster, and his network of informants was the Culper spy ring. It was one of several that he ran through the war and also during his time as president. Washington's army was undermanned, underfunded, frequently on the run. He knew he needed an edge, and he found it with intelligence. A British intelligence officer later said Washington did not really outfight the British — he simply outspied us.

At the same time, as a young nation was leaning heavily into its very first intelligence community, Thomas Paine was inspiring a nation to democracy. He had ideas about equality, rights, and the limits of government — revolutionary ideas for the time. He had ideas about power: it was not a divine right handed down to a monarch, but power rested in the hands of the people. Government borrows that power for a time, within limits. The representatives of that government are meant to be of the people and return to lives among the people, not to be separate or above or disconnected from what's going on among them.

Thus, our nation was born, not out of a tension between intelligence and democracy, but as an alchemical mix of both. We carry these ideas forward into a modern context. Power rests with the people. They loan it to the government. We trade some of our liberty for things that no one person can provide — roads, the power grid, police, submarines, national security. In exchange, we demand things of our government: accountability, adjustments, change, transparency. But we also demand security, and we demand economic prosperity. That's the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness part.

It's easy to forget that there are still those in the world who wish to take these things away from us. It's also in part generational — today’s college graduates were not alive during 9/11 or had maybe just been born. There are still terrorists and cartels who wish to take life. China seeks to take liberty — they want to subjugate people to their will, as they've done in Tibet, in Hong Kong, as they're attempting to do in Taiwan. Russia wants to end the pursuit of happiness. Some men truly do just want to watch the whole world burn to make themselves feel better, and Putin is one of those. Rather, they want happiness on their terms. This looks like power for the elite few oligarchs around Vladimir Putin, while he sends the poor to fight his war in Ukraine. It looks like the ruling elite of the CCP and their little princelings. They want order. They want to take liberty to hold power. The state has shown, in their case, security, but only for the few.

Why? Because liberty is messy. It is a struggle. It's making our own way while everyone else does the same. It's making space for ourselves and for each other, and when those spaces conflict, we figure it out. Thomas Paine wrote that “when we speak of rights, we ought always to unite them with the idea of duties — rights become duties by reciprocity: the right which I enjoy becomes my duty to guarantee to others, and he to me.” So today we are the guarantors of each other's rights. In Paine's time that looked like representative democracy and a little bit of revolution. Today, specifically with regard to spy work, it is a hard concept to wrap your head around — it's actually protection of rights by proxy.

In my pocket I carry a coin — the first one made for the Senate Intelligence Committee, on which I served for six years. On one side is Washington's seal, to represent our very first spymaster and to honor the intelligence officers who were so instrumental to the birth of this nation. But there are also two sets of stars on this coin. There's a set of 15 around the outside that represents the 15 members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who represent the entirety of the Senate. And then on the other side there are a hundred stars representing the Senate as a whole.

Why are there two layers? The 100 senators represent the entire country. The 15 members of the committee represent the Senate. Just as Washington went to great pains to encode secret messages and hide what he knew from the British army, secrets today must stay secret — the more people who know a thing, the less likely something is to stay secret. The intel committees are there to be the eyes and ears of the entire Senate or the House, and by extension the nation. These committees were designed to bring things back into balance.

During the 1960s and 1970s, another time of intense national upheaval, the IC got way out of hand — spying on political figures like Martin Luther King, attempting assassinations of foreign leaders, and engaging in massive propaganda campaigns. The Church and Pike committees united to investigate and create both the Senate Intelligence Committee and the House Intelligence Committee, to provide permanent, comprehensive oversight to keep this balance.

People who don't know intelligence work think that it's all-powerful and full of abuse. They see the spy thrillers that are in the movies. They think the 1970s continue today. But people who do know it, know it's a microcosm of liberty. It's messy. It's flawed. But it's also full of checks, balances, and people doing the right thing. These are my friends and former colleagues. They look like me. They look like you. They miss dinners with families. They put themselves in harm's way. They don't get parades. They don't get early boarding on flights. They don't get military discounts. They just do the work.

For us as a country, I fear there are rough seas ahead. We face two revisionist powers that, like King George III, believed that one person should be in charge through might alone. These people want to set up a false choice: freedom or security, not both. But the truth is that freedom and security are deeply intertwined. It is fear that leads to that false choice. On the one hand, dictators fear chaos — they think that people will come to understand that their oppressive dear leader does not, in fact, have their interests at heart. The supposed strongman is actually terrified. He's desperate to hold on to power. On the other hand, amongst some, there is fear the security mission will take over and become too big, too powerful, lodged in the hands of someone who is too power-hungry. But the goal is balance. We need Washington's spy ring. We also need Paine's ideals. And we need them working together.

One further reflection on that Paine quote: the rights I enjoy, I also guarantee to others. This is perhaps most true for those who operate in the shadows. They guarantee the rights of fellow citizens day in and day out, with a million small decisions, even when no one is watching. Democracy enables good spy work — only in a democracy can you walk into the Oval Office and deliver truly terrible news to power, tell the president things have gone sideways, and work together to fix it.

Spy work also makes democracy possible. I look forward to a day where there are no enemies; no one who seeks to assert ultimate power over others. That day I will have happily worked myself out of a job. But it is not today. Today I am fully employed attempting to create deterrence, know our adversaries, create a future of peace through strength. I have sworn an oath to support and defend the Constitution four times in my life, and hopefully one day I'll do it a fifth, but inside government or out, trying to work for democracy, for freedom, for a secure America and a secure world is the mission.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.

Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief