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The Complete Guide to Becoming An Intelligence Analyst
A no-nonsense look at the real work, realistic pay, and honest odds of becoming an Intelligence Analyst — so you can decide before you invest the time, money, and clearances
by Alumigogo Books
Chapter 1: What Does a Intelligence Analyst Actually Do?
Let's start with what might be the most surprising fact about the job: most of an Intelligence Analyst's day is not spent doing anything that looks like the movies. You will not be staring at a wall of glowing screens while a map of the city pulses in front of you. You will not be chasing a suspect down a hallway. Instead, you will be reading. You will be writing. You will be sitting at a desk, often in a room with no windows, looking at sources that are largely the same kinds of documents and websites you already use every day. The product you make at the end of the day is not a chase scene. It is a report. Sometimes it's a short one. Sometimes it's a brief. Sometimes it's a database entry. But the core of the job is taking raw information from various sources, figuring out what's reliable and what's not, putting it together to make some kind of judgment, and then communicating that judgment to someone else who needs to make a decision. That's the whole job in one sentence. Everything else is a variation on that theme.
Core Responsibilities
An Intelligence Analyst's work can be broken down into a handful of responsibilities that show up in almost every job posting, from the CIA and NSA to defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and private companies like banks in New York. The first and most common is