Analysis

All-source work is a continuation of single-source processing, as defined in the official British description of the DIS as being to ‘analyse information from a wide variety of sources, both overt and covert’. NATO doctrine divides it into a sequence as follows:

• collation, or the routine office work of recording incoming information

• evaluation, of the reliability of the source and credibility of the information

• analysis: identifying significant facts, comparing them with existing facts, and drawing conclusions

• integration, of all the analysed information into a pattern or picture

• interpretation, or ‘deciding what it means in terms of what is likely to happen in the future’.

But it is not really a neat progression of this kind. As in the rest of the intelligence process, each stage is recycled back into the others. Analysis is used here to cover it, though ‘evaluation’ and ‘interpretation’ catch some of the flavour rather better, and ‘assessment’ is also used in a sense to be discussed here. The tangible output is finished intelligence, but there are others: oral briefings; the body of stored knowledge for future intelligence use (as ‘data bases’ and analysts' memories); and feedback to steer collection.

Unlike collection, there is nothing esoteric about all-source analysis itself. Immediate reporting is rather like good-quality daily journalism or radio news services, and the other extreme – long-term intelligence production – resembles the general run of research.