“The bureau’s stellar track record seems, on paper, inexplicable. INR is tiny, with fewer than 500 employees total. The DIA has over 16,500, and while the CIA’s headcount is classified, it was 21,575 in 2013, when Edward Snowden leaked it.
You could fit over 47 INRs in the CIA, and even if you exclude the non-analysts on the CIA’s payroll, Langley’s analytic headcount is far greater than INR’s. Tom Fingar, who led the bureau from 2000 to 2001 and 2004 to 2005, once told a reporter its budget was “decimal dust.” In 2023, it came to only $83.5 million, or 0.1 percent of overall US intelligence spending.
On top of that, INR has no spies abroad, no satellites in the sky, no bugs on any laptops. But it reads the same raw intel as everyone else, and in at least a few cases, was the only agency to get some key questions right.
Saying “INR does a better job than DIA or CIA,” as a general matter, would go too far, not least because making a judgment like that in a responsible way would require access to classified information that the press and public can’t read. But it clearly is doing something different, which in a few key cases has paid off. And at least some policymakers have noticed. Bill Clinton told the 9/11 Commission he found memos by INR more helpful than the President’s Daily Brief, then prepared by the CIA.
I spoke to 10 veterans of the bureau, including six former assistant secretaries who led it. While no single ingredient seems to explain its relative success, a few ingredients together might:
- INR analysts are true experts. They are heavily recruited from PhD programs and even professorships, and have been on their subject matter (a set of countries, or a thematic specialty like trade flows or terrorism) for an average of 14 years. CIA analysts typically switch assignments every two to three years.
- INR’s small size means that analyses are written by individuals, not by committee, and analysts have fewer editors and managers separating them from the policymakers they’re advising. That means less groupthink, and clearer individual perspectives.
- INR staff work alongside State Department policymakers, meaning they get regular feedback on what kind of information is most useful to them.”