Anonymous asked about verification of intelligence reports.

Q. During a NOC's field assignment, after he/she has extracted information from an agent and passed it back to the Company's internal case officers for verification, how can the internal case officers verify/analyze whether the information is truthful (as they may not have third party verification) before they write up the report back to Langley ?

A. After any Case Officer (CO), whether a NOC or inside officer, obtains information through debriefing an agent that responds to collection requirements, the CO prepares a Field Information Report (FIR), which is a raw (unverified) information report. The Station Reports Officer, an officer specifically trained to handle the process of preparation and dissemination of intelligence reports, then reviews the draft FIR to determine whether it is worthy of dissemination. It is the Reports Officer who makes this determination based on his/her knowledge of previous reporting on the subject of the FIR and on how this raw information may fit into the knowledge pool of information used by CIA analysts at headquarters who prepare final products for policy makers. Basically, once the CO prepares the draft FIR and turns it over to the Station Reports Officer, it is out of his/her hands. The CO has no further input unless asked for clarification or further input by the Reports Officer. Once the report is disseminated to analysts at CIA headquarters, it is given a “score” by analysts relating to how they viewed the information. This score lets the Station and, thereby the CO, know if the information was useful or not. This gets back to the agent through the CO to let the agent know if he/she is on the right track in responding to collection requirements. It comes full cycle, so to speak.

That said, however, the CO in the field still has a duty to make sure that the source of the information, the agent, is an authenticated asset. This is covered in the portion of the blog under Facts on Agent Authentication. Information obtained from an “authenticated agent” is given more credence than information from an untested, non-authenticated agent. The authentication process seeks to determine that the agent is who he claims to be, that he has access to the information claimed, that he accurately reports the information and that he is not under hostile control of another intelligence service. This is an on-going process throughout the lifetime of the operation.