On Morning Edition there is a story of about some basic training to recruits in the "intelligence community". What the apprentice spooks are taught are basic historiography pracrtices. On Wiki there is this description of historiography before it getsmired in ideological and religious motivations.
Some of the common questions of historiography are:
- Reliability of the sources used, in terms of authorship, credibility of the author, and the authenticity or corruption of the text.
The weighing of sources and the provenance of sources and the intergration of all sources into coherent narrative is what history, reporting and intelligence analysis is. Provenance of sources is the sources of sources be it raw information, primary source in history, interpreted information, secondary source in history, or information interpreted from others' interpretations, tertiary sources. What it boils down to is the need to have many sources that are as primary and verifiable as possible for a history paper or intelligece briefing.
What surprises me is that they need to teach aspiring spooks such basic practices. The tyro spies and their instructors are not identified but probably have at least a liberal education. Just because a job is important dosen't mean it gets the best recruits. In the book Inside The Soviet Army thereis a description of the ease of doing secret research. For if did "secret research" in the old Soviet Union you may have less access to overseas trips but will be easier to get your thesis approved, easier to get hired and tenure and you have to produce less scientific papers than pursuing pure science. Additionally there are problems with intelligence agents or agencies in that rarely can loyalty and knowledge be combined. In the early Cold War the Brittish had very smart but treasous spies and the Americans had the opposite very loyal but stupid spies.
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