That's one reason the FBI embarked on a change of mission after 9/11, from almost pure law enforcement to intelligence - from solving puzzles to framing mysteries. But framing mysteries is necessary for prevention. After the attacks, they became a puzzle: it was easy to pick up their trail. The hijackers were able to hide in plain sight. So warnings from FBI agents in Minneapolis and Phoenix went unexplored. Until the 9/11 hijackers actually boarded their airplanes, their plan was a mystery, the clues to which were buried in too much "noise" - too many threat scenarios. If a critical piece is missing one day, it usually remains valuable the next.īy contrast, mysteries often grow out of too much information. Given Washington's need to find out how many warheads Moscow's missiles carried, the United States spent billions of dollars on satellites and other data-collection systems. Puzzle-solving is frustrated by a lack of information. It might have raised the question: Could Saddam be more afraid of his local enemies than he is of the United States? Could that lead him to boast that he had weapons he really didn't have? That might have turned the exercise away from technical details and toward Saddam's thinking. But suppose the issue of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction had been treated not as a puzzle but as a mystery. Whether Saddam Hussein's Iraq had nuclear or chemical weapons seemed a quintessential puzzle, and U.S. They came to it because they had identified gaps in our aviation defenses. The 9/11 hijackers, for instance, did not come to their plan of attack because they were aviation buffs. Terrorists shape themselves to our vulnerabilities, to the seams in our defenses the threat they pose depends on us. But the nature of the threat is a mystery, not a puzzle. To analysts in the Pentagon, for instance, terrorists present the ultimate asymmetric threat. intelligence, to the point that its major challenge now is to frame mysteries, as I learned as vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, managing the process for producing National Intelligence Estimates. How many missiles did the Soviet Union have? Where were they located? How far could they travel? How accurate were they? It made sense to approach the military strength of the Soviet Union as a puzzle - the sum of its units and weapons, and their quality.īut the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of terrorism changed all that. intelligence was puzzle-solving - seeking answers to questions that had answers, even if we didn't know them. But approaching them as mysteries may make us more comfortable with the uncertainties of our age.ĭuring the cold war, much of the job of U.S. Treating them as puzzles is like trying to solve the unsolvable - an impossible challenge. Puzzles may be more satisfying, but the world increasingly offers us mysteries. A mystery is an attempt to define ambiguities. A mystery cannot be answered it can only be framed, by identifying the critical factors and applying some sense of how they have interacted in the past and might interact in the future. It poses a question that has no definitive answer because the answer is contingent it depends on a future interaction of many factors, known and unknown. Puzzles can be solved they have answers.īut a mystery offers no such comfort. Even when you can't find the right answer, you know it exists. Amid the well-ordered combat between a puzzler's mind and the blank boxes waiting to be filled, there is satisfaction along with frustration. There's a reason millions of people try to solve crossword puzzles each day. Follow a modern day detective as he travels to Edinburgh, Scotland, and attempts to end the curse once and for all in Dark Parables: Curse of Briar Rose.The Soviet Union was a puzzle. The rampant briars were held at bay, but the poor princess was left in her slumber. Dark Parables: Curse of the Briar Rose Gameġ000 years ago, Sleeping Beauty was kissed by a prince, which removed a terrible curse from the kingdom.
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