Michael Morell Quotes

In the intelligence business you are almost never completely wrong or completely right.

The great problem now is that we don’t know what to do.

One cannot guarantee that if we have good intelligence, good policy will necessarily follow. But we can guarantee that if we have poor intelligence, poor policy will necessarily follow.

I also believe that it is time to begin the fundamental analysis of how we got here, what led us here and what we need to do in order to ensure that we are equipped with the best possible intelligence as we face these issues in the future.

And I argued with that intelligence estimate and I think it is a responsibility of policymakers to use their best judgment on the basis of the intelligence they've received.

I was an intelligence officer, not a policy-maker.

Policymakers have to make judgments based on the best intelligence they get.

The Pentagon suffers from too much Intelligence. They can't use what they get because there is too much collected. It would almost be better if they didn't have it because it's difficult to find out what's important.

President’s usually do not want to hear an intelligence analyst’s doubts, preferring confidence (even when unwarranted) in one policy option.

I can't ever remember being struck by lightning when making a big decision. It's always about taking in more and more data points and making tack adjustments as you figure it out. I call customers, suppliers, industry analysts and try to get as much information as possible.

When developing intelligence assessments, initial tactical reports often require additional collection and validation.

You can use all the quantitative data you can get, but you still have to distrust it and use your own intelligence and judgment.

One is to ensure that the war fighters and the intelligence analysts get the information that they need when they need it, in a format that's useful to them.

Here's the teaching point, if you're teaching kids about intelligence and policy: Intelligence does not absolve policymakers of responsibility to ask tough questions, and it doesn't absolve them of having curiosity about the consequences of their actions.

Nothing is more important to national security and the making and conduct of good policy than timely, accurate, and relevant intelligence. Nothing is more critical to accurate and relevant intelligence than independent analysis.

Intelligence collection has its place—no question—… But no matter how important collection is, in the short and even the long run, it just doesn’t cost very much.

We need to be able to make decisions even though part of the information that we have is incorrect and wrong.

We… need to recalibrate our expectations for what we access as actionable intelligence. We need to lower that threshold to the appropriate level and we need to have a higher threshold tolerance for pain in the event that we miscalculate or things go wrong or people get caught or something happens.

Intelligence involves analysis of raw reports, not merely their enumeration or weighing them by the pound. Analysis, in turn, involves finding independent means of corroborating the reports.

You have to put together bits and pieces of information before you can draw overall conclusions.

The intelligence community is intended to base its intelligence estimates on facts and analysis—not philosophy and conviction.

But what if our intelligence is wrong?

Moving from general intelligence to specific targets is the most difficult part of the intelligence business.

If we want the best judgment of our intelligence personnel, we have to accept the fact that they will be wrong sometimes.

Good policy analysis recognizes that physical truth may be poorly or incompletely known. Its objective is to evaluate, order, and structure incomplete knowledge so as to allow decisions to be made with as complete an understanding as possible of the current state of knowledge, its limitations, and its implications.