Writing and Briefing for the Intelligence Community 239
In addition to condence levels, analysts also use estimative language
to convey the likelihood that something will happen. is is dierent from
condence levels because here the analyst is not saying how condent they
are in their sources or their information; rather, they are saying how likely
something is to happen or not. To illustrate this, consider an analyst who is
investigating whether a country’s leader is in good health and whether the
leader is likely to die within the next year. e analyst may have a human
intelligence (HUMINT) report from a source whose reliability is either not
good or has yet to be established; the HUMINT source may report that the
leader is in the nal sta ...