What about your own dark side?

11 september 2026

What intelligence professionals may actually need to recognize bias and strengthen critical thinking

Twenty-five years ago today, I was two weeks into an internship with the Dutch Probation Service in The Hague. I had a fierce hunger to understand deviant behavior, and almost no understanding yet of what it actually takes to prevent harmful behavior.

Then came September 11.

Some dates do more than mark time. They divide it. September 11, 2001, became one of those dates, etched into our collective memory and into the professional worlds of intelligence, security, law enforcement, and counterterrorism. Today, I remember the people who lost their lives and all those whose lives were changed forever. But I also find myself reflecting on the responsibility of the professionals whose work is meant to help anticipate and prevent harm.

That reflection follows three unforgettable days this week at the 2026 European Chapter Annual Conference of the International Association for Intelligence Education (IAFIE) at Brunel University London.

Twenty-five years after starting that internship, and still driven by the same questions about how and why people behave as they do, it felt like an honor to join this community as a new member.

Finding a professional community
The conference felt right from the beginning. I met like-minded professionals, learned from some of the best in their fields, and found reassurance that several of the principles I teach are still taking me in the right direction. Working independently within the intelligence and security community can sometimes feel lonely. Reflection is essential, but you can’t discuss every professional experience with just anyone. Much of the work is sensitive, confidential, or simply difficult to explain outside the field. With the Chatham House Rule protecting many of our conversations, there was room for genuine professional exchange. People looked out for one another, challenged ideas, shared experiences, and paid attention to the person behind the professional role.

The conference focused on practical intelligence education. Sessions ranged from the history and professionalization of intelligence to analytical methods, scenario development, structured techniques, and the education of intelligence analysts. The subjects that stayed with me most were cognitive bias and critical decision-making.

But something also began to bother me.

Can we really think our way out of bias?
Even something as deeply behavioral as cognitive bias is often discussed inside a vacuum of rational thought. We identify the bias. We classify it. We introduce an analytical technique, checklist, or decision-making model to counter it. We then expect the professional to return to some objective state of mind. Those tools matter. But are they enough?

Cognitive biases and heuristics are not simply defects in human reasoning. They are also functional and can help us make fast decisions with limited information, particularly under uncertainty. A mental shortcut that creates an error in one context may be highly effective in another.

Bias can also serve a psychological function. Our reasoning may help us preserve our sense of identity, competence, status, belonging, or control. Research on motivated reasoning shows that people do not always process information with accuracy as their only goal. Sometimes, without realizing it, we search for and evaluate information in ways that make a preferred conclusion easier to reach. That does not mean every cognitive bias originates in trauma or ego protection. This cannot be claimed. But our upbringing, culture, professional role, personal experiences, coping patterns, and previous exposure to threat can influence what we notice, what we experience as threatening, and which explanation feels safest to accept.

So perhaps, before asking which rational tool will remove our bias, we should ask a more uncomfortable question:

What is this way of thinking doing for me?
What am I trying to protect?
And from what?
Irrational to whom?

When I teach forensic interviewing (and, more specifically, counterterrorism interviewing) I deliberately use the word counterpart rather than enemy. That choice matters. The word enemy already frames the person before the conversation has begun. It tells us something about who they are, how we should relate to them, and what kind of behavior we should expect. It can narrow our hypothesis space before we have asked a single question. The behavior of a criminal, spy, or terrorist may appear irrational when viewed through our own values, interests, and perception of reality. But irrational to us does not necessarily mean random to them.

Their behavior may be internally coherent within their experience of the world.

Espionage literature has long used MICE (Money, Ideology, Compromise or Coercion, and Ego) to organize possible motives for spying. RASCLS (Reciprocation, Authority, Scarcity, Commitment and Consistency, Liking, and Social Proof) describes principles of influence that may play a role in recruiting and handling agents. One framework categorizes possible motives. The other describes possible routes of influence. Both can be useful.

Neither captures a human being in full.

People may act to protect money, status, power, identity, dignity, family, or belonging. They may respond to coercion, remain loyal to an ideology, or interpret events through beliefs that were formed at a very young age. In some individual cases, a psychiatric condition may also affect someone’s perception of reality. These are fundamentally different pathways. We should not collapse them into one category called irrational behavior. But they do share something: we will not understand them by looking only through our own rational framework.

That is why I often ask:

Why do we keep reaching for purely rational solutions when the problem itself is not purely rational?

And yes, that question also applies to the tools we use to protect ourselves against bias.

The professional dark side
This brings me to the dark side. By dark side, I don’t necessarily mean hidden evil, although it could be. I mean the parts of ourselves that don’t fit comfortably inside our professional identity. The need to be right. The desire to be seen as competent. The fear of appearing naïve. The need to remain in control. Loyalty to our team. Our attraction to certainty. Our anger, disgust, fear, ambition, or personal history. The experiences that determine which behavior triggers us, and which behavior we are inclined to excuse.

As analysts, investigators, interviewers, managers, and leaders, we may be reluctant to look at those parts of ourselves. If I admit that I want a particular hypothesis to be true, can I still trust my analysis? If I recognize something of myself in the person I am assessing, can I still remain objective? If I understand the person I have been taught to regard as the enemy, does that weaken my professional position?

I believe the opposite is true.

What remains unexamined is more likely to steer us. Professionalism is not the absence of subjectivity. It is the willingness and ability to examine how our subjectivity affects what we observe, which hypotheses we develop, and how we interact with the person in front of us. Objectivity is not a personality trait. It is a disciplined practice.

Empathy is not sympathy
What happens if I stop seeing my counterpart as an enemy and begin seeing them as a human being? That question can feel dangerously close. But empathy is not sympathy. Understanding someone’s internal logic does not mean agreeing with them. It does not mean sharing their emotions, excusing their conduct, abandoning moral judgment, or lowering professional standards. It means better understanding how the world might make sense from their position.

A counterpart may notice when you are merely studying them as an object rather than genuinely trying to understand their reality. Without that understanding, you may miss the interests, loyalties, fears, relationships, and perceived threats that shape their behavior.

Ask yourself:

What might I do if I had this person’s experiences, interests, motives, intentions, loyalties, and perception of reality?

That question does not make you less professional. It expands your analytical bandwidth. You begin to develop scenarios that are far removed from your own worldview but may be entirely plausible from your counterpart’s perspective. You recognize explanations you would otherwise have rejected too early. You become less dependent on mirror imaging and more capable of testing genuinely different hypotheses.

The mirror belongs next to the model

None of this means that structured analytical techniques are unnecessary. They are essential. Competing hypotheses, red teaming, scenario analysis, probabilistic reasoning, peer challenge, and explicit quality criteria help us externalize our reasoning. They make assumptions visible and conclusions contestable. I am not arguing for fewer analytical tools. I am arguing that tools alone cannot examine why we need a certain answer to be true. A checklist cannot feel threatened. A model cannot lose face. A framework does not need to prove that it belongs in the room. The professional using it can.

Self-reflection should therefore not replace analytical structure. It should make our use of that structure more honest. The mirror belongs next to the model.

A responsibility to imagine

The 9/11 Commission later identified four kinds of failure surrounding the attacks: failures of imagination, policy, capabilities, and management. The failure of imagination remains particularly confronting. Imagination in intelligence is not creativity for its own sake. It is the disciplined ability to consider a scenario outside our existing assumptions, values, and expectations, even when that scenario feels unlikely, disturbing, or psychologically difficult to accept. That ability requires more than knowledge of cognitive bias. It requires the courage to ask what is happening inside us while we analyze what may be happening outside us.

So my question is:

Which professional do you choose to be in the middle of uncertainty and chaos?

The professional who knows how to use the tools? Or the professional who can use those tools while also daring to ask:

What am I not seeing, and what in me does not want to see it?

No individual analyst, interviewer, or leader can promise to prevent the next 9/11. We should never pretend otherwise. But we can become harder to surprise. We can widen the range of scenarios we are willing to consider. We can challenge the language that narrows our thinking. We can examine not only the threat in front of us, but also the internal filters through which we interpret it.

On this day, that responsibility feels anything but abstract.

To IAFIE Europe, the conference organizers, the speakers, and my fellow members: thank you for three unforgettable days in London.

You gave me new tools. But, even more importantly, you gave me new questions. And perhaps that is exactly what the best intelligence education should do.