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C.I.A. Officers and F.B.I. Agents, Meet Your New Partner: The Analyst

By SCOTT SHANEMARCH 26, 2015

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Call it the revenge of the nerds, Washington-style. The gun-toting F.B.I. agent and the swashbuckling C.I.A. undercover officer are being increasingly called upon to share their clout, their budgets and even their Hollywood glamour with the humble, desk-bound intelligence analyst.

As the two agencies confront an evolving terrorist threat, cyberattacks and other challenges, both are reorganizing in ways intended to empower analysts. That involves the delicate job of meshing the very different cultures of the streetwise agent and the brainy analyst, who reads secret dispatches, pores over intercepted communications, absorbs news media accounts and digests it all.

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The biggest challenge remains at the F.B.I., a traditional law enforcement organization that has struggled since the 2001 terrorist attacks to remake itself as an intelligence agency that can prevent attacks and not just investigate crimes. A report on the F.B.I.’s progress, released on Wednesday, concluded that despite great strides, the bureau needs to step up the role of analysts and the respect and resources they get.

While bureau officials have long extolled the importance of intelligence analysts, the report, by the F.B.I. 9/11 Review Commission, found that the bureau “still does not sufficiently recognize them as a professionalized work force with distinct requirements for investment in training and education.” The F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, acknowledged the problem and said that empowering analysts was one of his main goals.

At the C.I.A., where analysts have had a central role since its founding, they long worked largely apart from the “operators,” who work in the field overseas recruiting agents. This month, John O. Brennan, the C.I.A. director, announced that analysts and operators would be combined in 10 new “mission centers,” following the model of the agency’s Counterterrorism Center. That may give the analysts greater day-to-day influence on operations.

The latest moves continue the steady enhancement of the role of intelligence analysts. Even popular culture has caught on, with analysts becoming the stars of recent movies and television shows.

In “Zero Dark Thirty,” the 2012 movie account of the hunt for Osama bin Laden, the central character is a C.I.A. analyst called Maya, played by Jessica Chastain. Addressing the beefy, heavily armed members of the Navy SEALs who are about to fly into Pakistan, the petite Maya is no wallflower.

“Bin Laden is there,” she confidently tells the SEALs. “And you’re going to kill him for me.”

The failure to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks and the subsequent focus on terrorist threats have helped drive the new stature of analysts. The National Counterterrorism Center — not to be confused with the C.I.A’s Counterterrorism Center — was created after Sept. 11 as an analytical hub to make sure that every scrap of threat information was combined with other data to detect plots.

Another factor is the explosion of data in an era of smartphones and the Internet, as the National Security Agency documents leaked by Edward J. Snowden have underscored. While the N.S.A. has always been a data-driven operation, other agencies now need their own skilled people to sort and make sense of the flood of information, or it will overwhelm them.

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“These days when you have an intelligence lapse, it’s usually because the crucial information is lost in an avalanche of data,” said John E. McLaughlin, a former deputy director and acting director of the C.I.A.

He said that while analysts had always been valued at the agency, they were long segregated in the Directorate of Intelligence, separate from the Directorate of Operations, which did the spying. For many years, a turnstile and a security checkpoint at the C.I.A.’s headquarters in Langley, Va., separated the analysts from the operations officers, he said.

A career analyst himself, Mr. McLaughlin said that some operations veterans “may feel angst” about the reorganization that will group them with analysts, but that it made sense. “The role of the analyst who puts all the pieces together has become more critical, because there are just more pieces,” he said.

After Sept. 11, the C.I.A. lent the F.B.I. some 40 analysts to try to jump-start the bureau’s reorientation, Mr. McLaughlin said. Before 2001, according to the national 9/11 commission, 66 percent of F.B.I. analysts were “not qualified to perform analytical duties.” Secretaries were sometimes rewarded with a promotion to analyst, with duties that included emptying the trash and answering the phone.

Proud special agents did not always see the value of analysts who did not necessarily