Dissent was encouraged. Attempts to goad students into policy debates were rebuffed. As one young analyst went through the mock exercise of briefing a general who was considering an invasion, she offered a pointed warning.
"Once you go into a country and take it over," she said, "it would be best to have a plan."
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Agency has limits
Senior intelligence officials praise Fingar's efforts, though some complain that there are some problems he lacks the authority to solve.
In 2006, the Defense Intelligence Agency went to Fingar for help in tracking the Iraqi insurgency but was turned away.
"They explained to me, 'We're about standards and oversight and tradecraft,' " said Robert Cardillo, head of analysis at DIA. "I was looking for command and control."
Fingar said the law didn't give him power to shift resources the way Cardillo wanted. And even if he could, Fingar said, "there was no bench full of analysts waiting to get in the game."
In speeches, Fingar compares the stigma of erroneous Iraq assessments to "having your yearbook picture taken on the worst bad hair day ever."
The controversy over the Iran report is likely to linger as well. Asked whether he anticipated the fallout from the Iran estimate, he said: "I don't think I thought about it very much. Maybe I should have."
The first line in the report said that analysts judged "with high confidence" that Tehran had halted nuclear weapons work in 2003. The finding was based in part on captured journals that recorded Iranian decisions to stop weapons work.
But a footnote at the bottom of the page explained that analysts meant only that Tehran had halted warhead design work, not its efforts to enrich uranium, which experts regard as the most difficult hurdle to making a bomb.
Weeks earlier, President Bush had warned that a nuclear-armed Iran could trigger "World War III" and speculation mounted about the possibility of a military strike.
Democratic lawmakers and liberal columnists cast the document as evidence that fed-up spies were finally striking back against their political masters, while Iran hawks accused Fingar of subverting the president's policy.
Even those who defended the report's findings faulted the way it was put together. Fingar's boss, Director of National Intelligence J. Michael McConnell, testified in February that the report had caused such confusion that if he could rewrite it, he would "do some things differently."
