GAINESVILLE, FLORIDA — The Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.) recently hosted a crisis simulation at the University of Florida that highlighted some of today's greatest problems facing the U.S. Intelligence Community. Ten C.I.A. agents, including the C.I.A. briefer to President George W. Bush from December 2001-January 2004, and former U.S. Senator Bob Graham, joined together with 24 University of Florida students to avert a national emergency. The simulated crisis: North Korea potentially igniting a war in East Asia.

Follow up:

The 24 students were split into four teams, and each team was given 90 minutes to analyze different streams of intelligence updates. My team's focus was to determine what military threat North Korea posed, while other teams considered political, economic, and international relations issues as they emerged. We were fed a "fire hose" of alarming public media releases, with military and internal intelligence reports, to analyze and eventually brief policy makers (including Senator Graham) on the bottom line. At least some of the public briefings were true. For example, our first briefing began with notice that North Korea has withdrawn from the Six-Party Talks, which actually occurred in April 2009. In this way, some significant metaphors and insights into the frustrated nature of the U.S. Intelligence Community became apparent.

The rules of the simulation implicitly mandated an inefficient system of information-sharing between the 4 student analyst groups: we could only have one analyst outside of our closed room at any given time. Each of the groups knew different pieces of data, which was cohesively meaningful, but separately confusing. The communication challenges this simulation was embedded with spoke volumes about the disintegration of the real U.S. Intelligence Community today: 16 agencies with 16 unique databases.

Under the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, the Director of National Intelligence was created to bridge these shortcomings. But last Christmas Day exposed what could be a deeper, systemic disability of the Intelligence Community to "connect the dots". A Nigerian agent of al Quaeda very nearly killed hundreds of Americans.

As one C.I.A. recruitment brochure puts it: "An analyst's job is not unlike putting together a difficult puzzle with no picture of the finished product and with some pieces misplaced, missing, or belonging to different puzzles altogether." My experience with the simulation confirms this.

Perhaps the most critical skill needed to succeed as an analyst is identifying what precisely you don't know. Only then can the right people be asked the right questions. As was evident during the simulation, no individual has enough time or intellectual capacity to parse every significant detail. This is why coordinated, cohesive teamwork is so critical to the U.S. Intelligence Community today, and in the years to come.