.
T

here is no shortage of intelligence-themed or spy-related books on the market. From titles claiming something akin to “spy skills that will save your life” to “how do detect deception in your spouse”, there is a public appetite for a peek behind the curtain at the clandestine world. These typically trend more James Bond than George Smiley; more action than introspection, often resembling potboiler thrillers found in pharmacies and airport terminals alike.

How Spies Think: Ten Lessons in Intelligence | Sir David Omand | Penguin Books | October 2020.

They offer the reader a glimpse into the clandestine lives of spies, allowing them to insert themselves into the darkened alleys of European capitals or the slums of a conflict hot spot. How would I react in this situation? How would I handle being tailed? Where is the best place for a dead drop? The likelihood that suburban moms and dads will ever find themselves needing the skills outlined by the authors is decidedly slim. Perhaps some international travelers will find the advice on how to operate in a “denied” or “hostile” area helpful, but beyond that these books are more escapist than anything else.

On the other side of the equation, there are academic and weighty tomes about the craft of intelligence analysis. Most people are unlikely to encounter them unless they are actively looking. Typically published by university presses, these paperbacks are heavy and costly, but deeply fascinating and invaluable to analysts of all fields. They are, however, largely impenetrable for the lay audience. Unless one is a student of intelligence analysis or a keen amateur, it is unlikely that a reader will attempt to break through the heavy prose and analytical rigor.

Timely Lessons in Intelligence

Few books manage to find a happy middle ground of providing interesting insights into the craft of espionage and intelligence, while being both high-brow and supremely accessible. How Spies Think: Ten Lessons in Intelligence by Sir David Omand, the former director of GCHQ, is probably the finest, and indeed most successful, attempt to fill that niche gap. It is very readable, thought-provoking, and rewards engagement with its complex arguments. It is also likely the best book on the art and science of intelligence analysis, and its applicability to the 21st century, and it could not be more relevant or timely to today’s world.

Sir David is well placed to explain the craft and practice of intelligence analysis as both a producer and consumer. In his distinguished career he was the first UK Security and Intelligence Coordinator, was Permanent Secretary of the Home Office from 1997 to 2000, and before that was the Director of GCHQ (the UK signals intelligence agency). Early on he also worked in the Ministry of Defence as Deputy Under Secretary of State for Policy and served as Principal Private Secretary to the Defence Secretary during the Falklands War.

Divided into three parts, How Spies Think explores a model for intelligence analysis—he calls it SEES—followed by an exploration of how to check one’s reasoning and biases, and concludes with a fascinating section on the “intelligent use of intelligence.” Each chapter closes with a list of bullet points summarizing the entry’s commentary and key takeaways, making for easy digestion and reflection. While this may seem to be a bit pedantic or academic, it is wholly suited for this book and the readers will be better off having it included.

Understanding Intelligence Analysis, its Art & its Science

The opening third of the book focuses on his SEES model of the way intelligence analysts see the world—situational awareness, explanation, estimation, and strategic notice. It is an interesting approach to interrogating what one knows, what one thinks one knows, and what one doesn’t know (and even what one doesn’t know they don’t know—the Rumsfeldian unknown, unknowns).

More than just presenting the approach, Sir David explains the shortcomings and foibles of each. It is insufficient to understand the model if one doesn’t understand its weaknesses and biases. This is a key theme that is repeated throughout the book and is perhaps more critical now than ever. Questioning and interrogating information, understanding our own biases and flawed thinking, and the consequences of failing to do so, are likely the only way out of this information morass.

His approach and division of mal-information, misinformation, and disinformation is a welcome approach to a persnickety lexical challenge. Especially after the 2016 election, it seemed that everything was disinformation, in which case nothing is disinformation. By dividing into the three—mal-information being information that is true, but which was never meant to be released; misinformation, or information that is incorrect, but which is circulated without its inaccuracies being known; and disinformation or information that is known to be incorrect or false and circulated anyway—Sir David creates a useful framework for understanding the increasingly noisy information ecosystem. A greater challenge, however, is acting upon these categories.  

It is equally interesting to see, as he notes, some of the differences in how the United States and the United Kingdom assess information. Under the British model, there are gaps in between the confidence intervals, say “likely/probable” at 55% to 75% and the next category of “highly likely” between 80% to 90%. Why? This is to avoid disputes of what “around 20%” means to two analysts, which under a similar American table has no attendant gaps— “highly improbable” of 5% to 20% is immediately adjacent to “improbable” of 20% to 45% confidence.

Throughout the book, he provides real-world and historical anecdotes to illustrate the lessons he offers. From the Zimmerman Telegram in World War One to the Falklands War, and from the All-Russia Cooperative Society (ARCOS) debacle in London in 1927 (the raid which exposed secret intelligence capabilities, leading to the Russians adopting a one-time-pad system) to the intelligence leading up to the Iraq War in 2003—Sir David offers clear evidence of successes and failures in practice, helping frame and contextualize the lessons he presents.

The final third explores the use of intelligence and focuses on understanding your opponent from their world view, establishing trustworthiness in relationships, and the fact that sedition and subversion have gone digital. While all three are interesting and exceptionally valuable, the strongest is his application of the SEES model to the current systemic dangers present in our current information environment, and his use of a fictionalized narrative—à la P.W. Singer and August Cole—to illustrate the potential vulnerabilities that result from deep-fakes, active measures, and disinformation.

The book’s few stumbles (and they are very few indeed), I suspect, are not the fault of the author, but rather the publisher. When Sir David suggests the applicability of these lessons, particularly his SEES model of analysis, to one’s daily life, it comes across as forced and unnatural. It would have been better had he either used different examples or continued to use examples from the world of intelligence and foreign policy. Thankfully those examples are few, but they do stick out given the supreme strength of the book as a whole.

Putting Sir David’s Lessons into Practice

Reflecting on How Spies Think I’m not filled with hope that this book will receive the wide readership it deserves on this side of the pond. Perhaps I’m being too cynical of my fellow Americans—it is 2020 after all—but this book is almost too smart, too well-written for the general public. It is, absolutely, accessible, but it requires engagement and reflection, not merely a passive read through. It is about intelligence, but it is neither a tell-all or score-settling book nor is it a self-congratulatory autobiography as many published about intelligence in the United States seem to be. How Spies Think expects more from the audience than similar books in this genre and, as a result, it may limit its readership. How many books dive into Bayesian mathematics when explaining intelligence analysis, let alone do so in a fashion that is accessible?

This is disappointing as this is the exact kind of book needed in America during these challenging times—smart, considered, reflective, informative, and riveting all at once.

Reading Sir David’s book, one gets a better sense of how the craft of intelligence analysis actually happens and what it means when an assessment is presented to policymakers. This alone is invaluable in this day and age when intelligence analysis is misused and abused by politicos. What is an assessment? What does “likelihood” mean? How does an analyst take disparate pieces of data, incomplete data at that, and produce a finished product? Understanding the craft of intelligence is critical to understanding how policy is informed and, consequently, how policy is made. Intelligence analysis is as much an art as it is a science and Sir David provides a clear demonstration of both.

Beyond that utility, the book offers readers insight into how to divine fact from speculation, to break through conspiracies and conspiratorial thinking, and to grasp the nettle of fake news. Its epistemological approach is critical in this day and age. Just this week, a fantastical story emerged about several thousand Chinese Communist Party troops deployed in Canada to protect Chinese interests there, an F-16 purposefully shot down, and the U.S.-Canada border being mined. This conspiracy also had it that the 82nd Airborne would be shortly deployed, martial law implemented, and more.

How do I know this? The article and supporting “evidence”—which consisted of random Tweets, message board threads, and a potpourri of other data that only a haruspex could divine—had been shared with me by a family member convinced that this was the truth hidden by the “mainstream media”. No amount of dissuasion, evidence to the contrary, or application of logic could shake the sharer’s belief that this was what was happening. We have gone through the looking glass into a post-truth world.

Sir David’s book is an antidote to the toxic information environment in which we currently find ourselves. By applying critical thinking, questioning assumptions and understanding biases, and interrogating information, we could well sort the wheat from the chaff. The challenge is in getting citizens to be savvy consumers of information. Expecting the populace to be as skilled in analysis as professional intelligence analysts is, of course, a bridge too far. Expecting more from citizens, empowering them with the right tools, and engendering the skills necessary (at an early age) will help, but as others have noted, this is a generational challenge. In the nearer term, Sir David’s book will help work towards the end of a smarter citizenry.

How Spies Think is one of the finest (and most accessible) books on the craft, art, and science of intelligence analysis—and one of the best books on how we can confront the information challenges we face in the 21st century. One should gift this book to their relatives (especially the conspiratorial-minded) and dive into it over the holidays; they will be much smarter citizens for having done so.

Portrait of John le Carré. Photo by Anton Corbijn.

Reflections on John le Carré

It was not until I moved to London that I was exposed to John le Carré (pen name of David Cornwell), a notable omission in hindsight of my literary catalog. Of course, I read what could be seen as an American analog, but a poor comparison at that of Robert Ludlum, Tom Clancy, Clive Cussler, and others, which were more thriller than thoughtful exploration of espionage and the world. Perhaps the closest one could come is David Ignatius’ early works, books like Agents of Influence.

Be that as it may, my colleagues in London sought to ensure I was well-rounded and strongly encouraged me to look at Mr. le Carré. As I often did, I found myself one weekend in a local Waterstones bookstore. The chain had one of its periodic “three for two” sales and it had A Call for the Dead, A Murder of Quality, and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy on display. I grabbed all three and plunged into Mr. le Carré’s writing with a cup of tea in hand—quintessentially English and clichéd at that—rapidly devouring them and quickly returning to purchase the remainder of his catalog.

Mr. le Carré’s writing is masterful. His pacing exquisite. His plots, at least his early ones, divine. He brought his own experiences in MI5 and MI6 to his writing, and the craft on display was not golden guns and gadgets, but tradecraft and analysis. His spy novels were literary novels about the espionage game; not spy novels masquerading as literary works.

There are few books that I return to with any frequency, but the Karla trilogy is one set to which I turn when I find myself without things to read, or at least when a periodic literary ennui descends. I have several copies of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy—all of them well-thumbed. Mr. le Carré was the antithesis of pretty much everything I had read until that point. His writing was one where the action took place mostly in the minds of his characters. It was never a flurry of action, it was a slow-burn, methodical investigation, the peeling of an onion, layer after layer as the plot unfolded.

His writing expected more of the reader and I loved that. George Smiley was so atypical, so forgettable in his description, that he became iconic: “short, fat and of a quiet disposition”. Much as I loved Gary Oldman’s interpretation of him, Smiley will always be Alec Guinness in my mind. Yet, all of his characters were complex and complicated. None of these one-dimensional action heroes whose only inner conflict is whether to go semi- or fully-automatic when engaging with the nameless disposable goons of *insert generic adversary*.

As Mr. le Carré aged, he became increasingly tired of the world, the American century, and what he perceived as abuses the world over. There is an underlying anger in his prose, especially his later books—A Delicate Truth, A Most Wanted Man, among others. Equally, as one of my former colleagues noted, as his popularity rose he became “too famous to edit” and it shows. Certainly, his disillusionment with the profession from which he hailed was evident over the Karla Trilogy itself—the passion and enthusiasm of the art of espionage in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, replaced with a tired frustration by 1979’s Smiley’s People.

His most recent and, at least for now, final book (unless he was working on another when he passed), Agent Running in the Field, was almost more of a commentary on the state of Britain and Brexit than it was a traditional espionage novel. His nuance I so loved was ebbing and his anger was certainly rising. Perhaps that is the benefit of age and experience, indignation is more acceptable on public display. Yet, even though I knew his novels would be angrier, more clichéd, I still became elated any time I heard a new one was in the offing. I couldn’t wait to get my hands on his latest novel.

His passing is a literary loss. Few writers captured my imagination as he did and I imagine few will be able to do so in the future. He defined the spy genre, making it true literature, not just pulp fiction. While the settings and conflicts of the Cold War and the Global War on Terrorism will pass into history, his stories, characters, and plots will live on well beyond him and he will still be the benchmark against which other writers will be measured.

About
Joshua Huminski
:
Joshua C. Huminski is the Senior Vice President for National Security & Intelligence Programs and the Director of the Mike Rogers Center at the Center for the Study of the Presidency & Congress.
The views presented in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent the views of any other organization.

a global affairs media network

www.diplomaticourier.com

Ten Lessons in Intelligence

Photo by Samuel Zeller via Unsplash.

December 19, 2020

How Spies Think: Ten Lessons in Intelligence | Sir David Omand | Penguin Books | October 2020.

T

here is no shortage of intelligence-themed or spy-related books on the market. From titles claiming something akin to “spy skills that will save your life” to “how do detect deception in your spouse”, there is a public appetite for a peek behind the curtain at the clandestine world. These typically trend more James Bond than George Smiley; more action than introspection, often resembling potboiler thrillers found in pharmacies and airport terminals alike.

How Spies Think: Ten Lessons in Intelligence | Sir David Omand | Penguin Books | October 2020.

They offer the reader a glimpse into the clandestine lives of spies, allowing them to insert themselves into the darkened alleys of European capitals or the slums of a conflict hot spot. How would I react in this situation? How would I handle being tailed? Where is the best place for a dead drop? The likelihood that suburban moms and dads will ever find themselves needing the skills outlined by the authors is decidedly slim. Perhaps some international travelers will find the advice on how to operate in a “denied” or “hostile” area helpful, but beyond that these books are more escapist than anything else.

On the other side of the equation, there are academic and weighty tomes about the craft of intelligence analysis. Most people are unlikely to encounter them unless they are actively looking. Typically published by university presses, these paperbacks are heavy and costly, but deeply fascinating and invaluable to analysts of all fields. They are, however, largely impenetrable for the lay audience. Unless one is a student of intelligence analysis or a keen amateur, it is unlikely that a reader will attempt to break through the heavy prose and analytical rigor.

Timely Lessons in Intelligence

Few books manage to find a happy middle ground of providing interesting insights into the craft of espionage and intelligence, while being both high-brow and supremely accessible. How Spies Think: Ten Lessons in Intelligence by Sir David Omand, the former director of GCHQ, is probably the finest, and indeed most successful, attempt to fill that niche gap. It is very readable, thought-provoking, and rewards engagement with its complex arguments. It is also likely the best book on the art and science of intelligence analysis, and its applicability to the 21st century, and it could not be more relevant or timely to today’s world.

Sir David is well placed to explain the craft and practice of intelligence analysis as both a producer and consumer. In his distinguished career he was the first UK Security and Intelligence Coordinator, was Permanent Secretary of the Home Office from 1997 to 2000, and before that was the Director of GCHQ (the UK signals intelligence agency). Early on he also worked in the Ministry of Defence as Deputy Under Secretary of State for Policy and served as Principal Private Secretary to the Defence Secretary during the Falklands War.

Divided into three parts, How Spies Think explores a model for intelligence analysis—he calls it SEES—followed by an exploration of how to check one’s reasoning and biases, and concludes with a fascinating section on the “intelligent use of intelligence.” Each chapter closes with a list of bullet points summarizing the entry’s commentary and key takeaways, making for easy digestion and reflection. While this may seem to be a bit pedantic or academic, it is wholly suited for this book and the readers will be better off having it included.

Understanding Intelligence Analysis, its Art & its Science

The opening third of the book focuses on his SEES model of the way intelligence analysts see the world—situational awareness, explanation, estimation, and strategic notice. It is an interesting approach to interrogating what one knows, what one thinks one knows, and what one doesn’t know (and even what one doesn’t know they don’t know—the Rumsfeldian unknown, unknowns).

More than just presenting the approach, Sir David explains the shortcomings and foibles of each. It is insufficient to understand the model if one doesn’t understand its weaknesses and biases. This is a key theme that is repeated throughout the book and is perhaps more critical now than ever. Questioning and interrogating information, understanding our own biases and flawed thinking, and the consequences of failing to do so, are likely the only way out of this information morass.

His approach and division of mal-information, misinformation, and disinformation is a welcome approach to a persnickety lexical challenge. Especially after the 2016 election, it seemed that everything was disinformation, in which case nothing is disinformation. By dividing into the three—mal-information being information that is true, but which was never meant to be released; misinformation, or information that is incorrect, but which is circulated without its inaccuracies being known; and disinformation or information that is known to be incorrect or false and circulated anyway—Sir David creates a useful framework for understanding the increasingly noisy information ecosystem. A greater challenge, however, is acting upon these categories.  

It is equally interesting to see, as he notes, some of the differences in how the United States and the United Kingdom assess information. Under the British model, there are gaps in between the confidence intervals, say “likely/probable” at 55% to 75% and the next category of “highly likely” between 80% to 90%. Why? This is to avoid disputes of what “around 20%” means to two analysts, which under a similar American table has no attendant gaps— “highly improbable” of 5% to 20% is immediately adjacent to “improbable” of 20% to 45% confidence.

Throughout the book, he provides real-world and historical anecdotes to illustrate the lessons he offers. From the Zimmerman Telegram in World War One to the Falklands War, and from the All-Russia Cooperative Society (ARCOS) debacle in London in 1927 (the raid which exposed secret intelligence capabilities, leading to the Russians adopting a one-time-pad system) to the intelligence leading up to the Iraq War in 2003—Sir David offers clear evidence of successes and failures in practice, helping frame and contextualize the lessons he presents.

The final third explores the use of intelligence and focuses on understanding your opponent from their world view, establishing trustworthiness in relationships, and the fact that sedition and subversion have gone digital. While all three are interesting and exceptionally valuable, the strongest is his application of the SEES model to the current systemic dangers present in our current information environment, and his use of a fictionalized narrative—à la P.W. Singer and August Cole—to illustrate the potential vulnerabilities that result from deep-fakes, active measures, and disinformation.

The book’s few stumbles (and they are very few indeed), I suspect, are not the fault of the author, but rather the publisher. When Sir David suggests the applicability of these lessons, particularly his SEES model of analysis, to one’s daily life, it comes across as forced and unnatural. It would have been better had he either used different examples or continued to use examples from the world of intelligence and foreign policy. Thankfully those examples are few, but they do stick out given the supreme strength of the book as a whole.

Putting Sir David’s Lessons into Practice

Reflecting on How Spies Think I’m not filled with hope that this book will receive the wide readership it deserves on this side of the pond. Perhaps I’m being too cynical of my fellow Americans—it is 2020 after all—but this book is almost too smart, too well-written for the general public. It is, absolutely, accessible, but it requires engagement and reflection, not merely a passive read through. It is about intelligence, but it is neither a tell-all or score-settling book nor is it a self-congratulatory autobiography as many published about intelligence in the United States seem to be. How Spies Think expects more from the audience than similar books in this genre and, as a result, it may limit its readership. How many books dive into Bayesian mathematics when explaining intelligence analysis, let alone do so in a fashion that is accessible?

This is disappointing as this is the exact kind of book needed in America during these challenging times—smart, considered, reflective, informative, and riveting all at once.

Reading Sir David’s book, one gets a better sense of how the craft of intelligence analysis actually happens and what it means when an assessment is presented to policymakers. This alone is invaluable in this day and age when intelligence analysis is misused and abused by politicos. What is an assessment? What does “likelihood” mean? How does an analyst take disparate pieces of data, incomplete data at that, and produce a finished product? Understanding the craft of intelligence is critical to understanding how policy is informed and, consequently, how policy is made. Intelligence analysis is as much an art as it is a science and Sir David provides a clear demonstration of both.

Beyond that utility, the book offers readers insight into how to divine fact from speculation, to break through conspiracies and conspiratorial thinking, and to grasp the nettle of fake news. Its epistemological approach is critical in this day and age. Just this week, a fantastical story emerged about several thousand Chinese Communist Party troops deployed in Canada to protect Chinese interests there, an F-16 purposefully shot down, and the U.S.-Canada border being mined. This conspiracy also had it that the 82nd Airborne would be shortly deployed, martial law implemented, and more.

How do I know this? The article and supporting “evidence”—which consisted of random Tweets, message board threads, and a potpourri of other data that only a haruspex could divine—had been shared with me by a family member convinced that this was the truth hidden by the “mainstream media”. No amount of dissuasion, evidence to the contrary, or application of logic could shake the sharer’s belief that this was what was happening. We have gone through the looking glass into a post-truth world.

Sir David’s book is an antidote to the toxic information environment in which we currently find ourselves. By applying critical thinking, questioning assumptions and understanding biases, and interrogating information, we could well sort the wheat from the chaff. The challenge is in getting citizens to be savvy consumers of information. Expecting the populace to be as skilled in analysis as professional intelligence analysts is, of course, a bridge too far. Expecting more from citizens, empowering them with the right tools, and engendering the skills necessary (at an early age) will help, but as others have noted, this is a generational challenge. In the nearer term, Sir David’s book will help work towards the end of a smarter citizenry.

How Spies Think is one of the finest (and most accessible) books on the craft, art, and science of intelligence analysis—and one of the best books on how we can confront the information challenges we face in the 21st century. One should gift this book to their relatives (especially the conspiratorial-minded) and dive into it over the holidays; they will be much smarter citizens for having done so.

Portrait of John le Carré. Photo by Anton Corbijn.

Reflections on John le Carré

It was not until I moved to London that I was exposed to John le Carré (pen name of David Cornwell), a notable omission in hindsight of my literary catalog. Of course, I read what could be seen as an American analog, but a poor comparison at that of Robert Ludlum, Tom Clancy, Clive Cussler, and others, which were more thriller than thoughtful exploration of espionage and the world. Perhaps the closest one could come is David Ignatius’ early works, books like Agents of Influence.

Be that as it may, my colleagues in London sought to ensure I was well-rounded and strongly encouraged me to look at Mr. le Carré. As I often did, I found myself one weekend in a local Waterstones bookstore. The chain had one of its periodic “three for two” sales and it had A Call for the Dead, A Murder of Quality, and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy on display. I grabbed all three and plunged into Mr. le Carré’s writing with a cup of tea in hand—quintessentially English and clichéd at that—rapidly devouring them and quickly returning to purchase the remainder of his catalog.

Mr. le Carré’s writing is masterful. His pacing exquisite. His plots, at least his early ones, divine. He brought his own experiences in MI5 and MI6 to his writing, and the craft on display was not golden guns and gadgets, but tradecraft and analysis. His spy novels were literary novels about the espionage game; not spy novels masquerading as literary works.

There are few books that I return to with any frequency, but the Karla trilogy is one set to which I turn when I find myself without things to read, or at least when a periodic literary ennui descends. I have several copies of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy—all of them well-thumbed. Mr. le Carré was the antithesis of pretty much everything I had read until that point. His writing was one where the action took place mostly in the minds of his characters. It was never a flurry of action, it was a slow-burn, methodical investigation, the peeling of an onion, layer after layer as the plot unfolded.

His writing expected more of the reader and I loved that. George Smiley was so atypical, so forgettable in his description, that he became iconic: “short, fat and of a quiet disposition”. Much as I loved Gary Oldman’s interpretation of him, Smiley will always be Alec Guinness in my mind. Yet, all of his characters were complex and complicated. None of these one-dimensional action heroes whose only inner conflict is whether to go semi- or fully-automatic when engaging with the nameless disposable goons of *insert generic adversary*.

As Mr. le Carré aged, he became increasingly tired of the world, the American century, and what he perceived as abuses the world over. There is an underlying anger in his prose, especially his later books—A Delicate Truth, A Most Wanted Man, among others. Equally, as one of my former colleagues noted, as his popularity rose he became “too famous to edit” and it shows. Certainly, his disillusionment with the profession from which he hailed was evident over the Karla Trilogy itself—the passion and enthusiasm of the art of espionage in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, replaced with a tired frustration by 1979’s Smiley’s People.

His most recent and, at least for now, final book (unless he was working on another when he passed), Agent Running in the Field, was almost more of a commentary on the state of Britain and Brexit than it was a traditional espionage novel. His nuance I so loved was ebbing and his anger was certainly rising. Perhaps that is the benefit of age and experience, indignation is more acceptable on public display. Yet, even though I knew his novels would be angrier, more clichéd, I still became elated any time I heard a new one was in the offing. I couldn’t wait to get my hands on his latest novel.

His passing is a literary loss. Few writers captured my imagination as he did and I imagine few will be able to do so in the future. He defined the spy genre, making it true literature, not just pulp fiction. While the settings and conflicts of the Cold War and the Global War on Terrorism will pass into history, his stories, characters, and plots will live on well beyond him and he will still be the benchmark against which other writers will be measured.

About
Joshua Huminski
:
Joshua C. Huminski is the Senior Vice President for National Security & Intelligence Programs and the Director of the Mike Rogers Center at the Center for the Study of the Presidency & Congress.
The views presented in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent the views of any other organization.