John Schindler’s 20 Spy Rules

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1. Intelligence analysts without deep knowledge of the target (language, culture, history) are usually worse than useless.

2. If you don’t understand collection, you don’t understand intelligence. Period. No exceptions.

3. If you don’t understand the other side’s collection, and what he’s doing to mess up your collection, you’re clueless too.

4. You can never have “too many” dots (preferably multi-INT). But make sure they’re real dots, not dots the other side wants you to see.

5. If you don’t own the street, the other side will. And soon they will steal your lunch money.

6. The best way to protect your secrets is to steal the other side’s.

7. The bigger your bureaucracy, the less effective your intelligence system is. No exceptions.

8. You can learn tradecraft. You can’t learn common sense. Nor can you “get up to speed” on a problem in a couple weeks.

9. ISGINT is the golden source but if the enemy doesn’t understand his own system, neither will you.

10. There are no “new” intel ideas. The Russians (or Brits or French or Israelis) have done it already. But you can make ideas better.

11. It’s not what you know. It’s not who you know. It’s what you know about who you know.

12. Generals like pictures. They will go with IMINT over any other INT even when it’s clearly BS to the trained eye.

13. Intelligence services are accurate reflections of their societies. Its not always a pretty picture.

14. US intelligence is the world’s BIGDAWG, especially in SIGINT and IMINT, but the bureaucracy is so vast as to undercut too much of that.

15. There are two kinds of intelligence service: those with global look/reach and those without. Very few in group 1. Huge difference.

16. Good analysts are golden, but there are few of them. And, like academics, they are tough to manage and entitled in outlook.

17. One analyst who really knows the target in and out is worth his/her weight in gold. But they’re very rare, and their co-workers hate them.

18. If you’re not at least somewhat competent in counterintelligence, why bother having an intel services at all? You’re giving it away.

19. If you think counterintelligence is fundamentally about catching traitors/moles, you don’t really understand CI.

20. All important intelligence methods have already been perfected by the Russians. We need to figure out how to do them nicely.

Obtained from Business Insider.

Schiller has a blog and is a regular Twitter poster. His handle “XX Committee” comes from the counterintelligence operation run by the British in the UK during WWII. A good book on this operation is available from Amazon.