If you want the real story on current CIA tradecraft (at least on the digital side):<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vault_7" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vault_7</a><p>For the rest of it, see books like "Legacy of Ashes" by Tim Weiner, or "Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA and the Sixties". A lot of that is about CIA recruitment and influence operations, which is perhaps not the kind of 'tradecraft' the CIA likes to popularize, e.g.:<p><a href="https://coffeeordie.com/charles-manson-cia" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://coffeeordie.com/charles-manson-cia</a>
I understand this document is from 2009, not secret, and probably contains information known elsewhere.<p>Still, what is the intent of the CIA in publishing this on the open web? I assume they would be able to distribute this to US nationals even in other orgs through internal networks.
Personally I prefer the bureaucratic sabotage manual the OSS (the predecessor of the CIA) published during WWII, to advise Nazi-occupied workers on how to slow business to a crawl. Which, funny enough, sometimes reads like a description of bad management practices in general!<p><a href="https://www.hsdl.org/c/abstract/?docid=750070" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.hsdl.org/c/abstract/?docid=750070</a>
> 2003 Iraq’s WMD Programs<p>> Saddam failed to cooperate with UN inspectors because he was continuing to develop weapons of mass destruction.<p>Apparently this "analysis" was written in 2009, a good 6 years after the start of the Second Iraq War, and still the CIA followed the political manoeuvre of not challenging their leaders' lies about Iraq's WMD.<p>This is one of the most vulnerable points of any "intelligence" agency, i.e. they're at the whims of those holding actual power in any given State.
I think fundamentally, if you have incomplete information and have to make some actions or judgements, either you are:<p>1. doing things to reason about or uncover more useful datapoints to increase certainty<p>2. you are accepting the probability that you are right/wrong at face value<p>The direction in which you decide to uncover datapoints is the "bias" that they are talking about. This process if further influenced by institutionalized assumptions or priors you are working with.<p>I really don't like lists like "Strategic Assumptions That Were Not Challenged" because they are factually true but also reek of survivorship bias.
I would think that when people in the CIA manage to understand international developments well enough, they typically become highly critical of US policies and then leave...