Competitive Adaptation Counter-Terrorism Style 45
impede the production of relevant and timely intelligence analysis.
“Originator control
procedures are still a problem,” one high-level CIA official recently explained. “This has
not been solved. Information flows get blocked due to ORCON. It slows down the flow
of information and restricts the dissemination of knowledge. Sometimes analysts will
take the information out of circulation rather than have to deal with these cumbersome
procedures.”
When this happens, ORCON distorts sensemaking by forcing analysts to
construct social understandings, some of which may inform counter-terrorism operations
and policy, without the benefit of knowledge that could improve the reliability and
validity of their interpretations. In a fervent effort to prevent past and present adversaries
from learning about them, intelligence agencies have created an anachronic institutional
structure that makes it harder for their own analysts to learn about the terrorists.
Such ironies are not restricted to civilian agencies prosecuting the war on terror.
Special Operations task forces that have been pursuing Osama bin Laden and other high-
value targets in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere also suffer from information
sharing problems and slow decision cycles. Many of these difficulties are an inevitable
outgrowth of the way these military organizations are designed to function, with
compartmented planning procedures, tall management hierachies, and high-level
decision-makers that, to their credit, seek to minimize the loss of civilian casualties in
counter-terrorism attacks.
68
For one effort to reduce the use of ORCON on terrorism threat intelligence, see “Statement of Russell E.
Travers to the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon The United States,” Seventh public hearing
of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (
[Accessed April 5, 2005].
69
Author interview with former deputy director, Counterterrorist Center, Central Intelligence Agency,
Washington, D.C., September 27, 2004.
Convention