The Thing About the Source and Reliability

One of the ten-thousand little things that I gained out of my two decades in the intelligence field....was this reliability scoring of intelligence. 

Years ago, some smart guys sat down and surveyed the human intelligence collection business, and they came up with two categories that you had to view....when you wrote a report.

The first category was source.  The levels went from A (highly reliable), to E (highly unreliable) and F for source unknown.  This meant that you had to have some kind of record with the guy telling you the story.  Maybe he was a guy that you'd known for five years.....maybe he was the coffee shop clerk that had told you five stories over the last year, with only one single story being reliable. 

The second category was information reliability.  The levels here went from 1 (confirmed by other sources), to 5 (improbable, meaning you had other sources who told you something different), and 6 being no valid trust (you could prove anything). 

Here's the thing.....you always hoped on having a 'A' or 'B' rating on the source, and a minimum of '3' (possible true) on the information.  Things that were 'D4'....were in simple terms....crap. It was worth keeping in a folder because one day....it might lead to a better source and maybe improving this intelligence to B2.

So I look back at this dossier by the CIA guy on Trump.  He's basically telling you something that comes from a dozen-odd sources.  He fails to validate or assign a score to any of them.  Curiously, they all work in the same work environment as him....so you'd think that he'd say they were all 'A' or 'B' on trust. He didn't do that.

So I look at the second part of this....information reliability.  He should be able to note this as a minimum of '2' or '3'.  But he skips that and hints that it's all a '1'. 

Why not score this in some fashion?  My gut feeling is that this is some rookie CIA guy....maybe less than seven years in the service, and probably has never scored HUMINT in any way or shape.

Value of the dossier?  Well, you'd have to out and assign a number of FBI and CIA folks to score the stories, and how reliable they were.  The fact that you were willing to accept second-hand information?  Man, that opens up a whole can of worms, and promises to tie down people for a year or two.  In the end, most of these dossier items are probably going to be a D3 or D4....meaning they might be useless in a court or impeachment process.