CIA Analysts Meet with Pardee Students
Central Intelligence Agency officers visited with students at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies on April 11 and 12, 2017 to provide an overview of the CIA’s mission and to conduct an intelligence simulation.
Students from Pardee School Professor of the Practice of International Relations John Woodward‘s IR 518 “Evolution of Strategic Intelligence” played the role of CIA analysts and assessed a hypothetical event involving a terrorist group conducting an insurgency in a fictitious foreign country.
Students were given information collected from different sources and methods, such as signals intelligence, human intelligence, and open source. Working as a team under tight time pressure, the students had to analyze, synthesize, and assess this information and provide an oral briefing to a senior intelligence official.
The CIA officers also met with students in Professor Joseph Wippl‘s IR 556 “Current and Future Intelligence Issues” course and provided excellent examples of the type of work intelligence analysts do, such as preparing inputs for the President’s Daily Brief and working together in interdisciplinary teams to assess foreign nuclear facilities.
Woo Jae Kim, a Pardee School undergraduate taking IR 581, said meeting with CIA analysts was a rare opportunity for a closer look at what a job in the intelligence community entails.
“The student exercise was a great opportunity to personally experience what analysts do, something I had only vaguely known about,” Kim said. “It helped me understand how analysts identify critical information from their sources and make assessments despite the existing uncertainty. The analytical framework the CIA analysts showed was especially useful when crafting an analysis of the hypothetical situation. The part I found most interesting was when my team had to brief one of the CIA analysts on our assessment. We were constantly asked questions that challenged our analysis and that encouraged me to rethink the assumptions I made and consider different possibilities of the situation. Overall, this was an invaluable experience where I could learn about the inner workings and the nature of analysts’ job.”