One year later, while a graduate student at the University of California in Berkeley, future CIA Director Richard Helms recruited Heuer to work at the Central Intelligence Agency.
His interest in intelligence analysis and "how we know" was rekindled by the case of Yuri Nosenko and his studies in social science methodology while a master's student at the University of Southern California.
[4] Heuer discovered his interest in cognitive psychology through reading the work of Kahneman and Tversky subsequent to an International Studies Association (ISA) convention in 1977.
His continuing interest in the field and its application to intelligence analysis led to several published works including papers, CIA training lectures and conference panels.
[6] Heuer's book Structured Analytic Techniques for Intelligence Analysis, published in 2010 (second edition 2015) and co-authored with Randy H. Pherson, provides a comprehensive taxonomy of structured analytic techniques (SATs) pertaining to eight categories: decomposition and visualization, idea generation, scenarios and indicators, hypothesis generation and testing, cause and effect, challenge analysis, conflict management and decision support.
[6] In light of the increasing need for interagency analyst collaboration,[7] Heuer and Pherson advocate SATs as "enablers" of collective and interdisciplinary intelligence products.
And lastly, tools and techniques that apply higher levels of critical thinking can substantially improve analysis on complex problems.
[8] Even though every analyst sees the same piece of information, it is interpreted differently due to a variety of factors (past experience, education, and cultural values to name merely a few).
[8] Therefore, since all people observe the same information with inherent and different biases, Heuer believes an effective analysis system needs a few safeguards.
It should: encourage products that clearly show their assumptions and chains of inferences; and it should emphasize procedures that expose alternative points of view.
[3] With so much hanging on the failure of success of analytical judgments, he reasons, intelligence agencies need to stay abreast of new discoveries in this field.
This large database supplements the Intelligence Community Adjudicative Guidelines which specify 13 categories of behavior that must be considered before granting a security clearance.
The software covers a variety of topics including (but not limited to): protecting classified information, foreign espionage threats and methods, and computer vulnerabilities.