The man behind the Iran arms report reveals the backstory

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A serious manner

Fingar, 62, has blue eyes, a deep voice and a serious mien. He grew up on Long Island, where his family operated a market and gas station. He said he is the only surviving member of his youth baseball team -- the others were killed by cars, drugs or Vietnam.

Fingar served as a German linguist in the Army, and was a professor of political science at Stanford University before being lured away in the mid-1980s to serve as a China expert at the State Department.

"What I liked in him was his analytical style," said Richard Clarke, who was one of Fingar's first bosses before becoming a counter-terrorism advisor to Presidents Clinton and Bush. "He was more open, honest and user-friendly than the intentionally obtuse analysts we sometimes get."

Fingar rose to become head of analysis at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Known as INR, the bureau is tiny compared to the CIA, and has a reputation for analytic independence if not obstinacy.

INR was almost alone in voicing any skepticism of the prewar claims that Iraq had stockpiles of banned weapons. As a result, the bureau had new clout when the intelligence community came in for sweeping reform.

Fingar was picked to fix the system's shattered credibility. He went from overseeing a few hundred analysts at the State Department to head of nearly 20,000 analysts across more than a dozen spy agencies.

Some of Fingar's first moves were scripted in the legislation that created his job. The law called for basic standards, so analysts now wear cards around their necks reminding them to remain "independent of political considerations."

But others were improvised. Fingar hired a former cryptographer at the National Security Agency, Michael Wertheimer, to help brainstorm ideas; and a former academic, Richard Immerman, as an ombudsman and to enforce quality control.

Fingar's team assembled a directory of analysts, the first time that had ever been done. They launched classified versions of the Wikipedia and MySpace websites, so analysts from different agencies could collaborate online.

Nearly half the nation's analysts have joined the government since 2001. To speed their development, Fingar required new hires to take a six-week course called Analysis 101.

During a recent class in northern Virginia, students from a dozen agencies formed teams to work on a war scenario. It was their first day of class, but many seemed to have arrived having absorbed the lessons of Iraq.