Who He Was
Sherman Kent was a history professor who helped turn intelligence analysis into a true profession. Born in 1903, he earned his PhD in history at Yale in 1933 and taught there until World War II, when he joined the Research and Analysis Branch of the Office of Strategic Services, America's wartime intelligence agency, in 1941. By 1943, he was leading its Europe-Africa Division. In 1949, he published Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy, one of the first books to explain how intelligence analysis should work. He joined the CIA in 1950, and from 1952 to 1967 he led its Office of National Estimates, the team that wrote the government's most important judgments about world events for the President. He also founded the CIA's professional journal, Studies in Intelligence, in 1955.
Why He Matters
Kent believed analysts should think like careful scholars, not fortune tellers. In a famous 1964 essay, he pointed out that a word like "probable" meant different things to different readers, and he proposed giving each word a number, so that "almost certain" meant about a 93 percent chance. That idea lives on today in official rules that require analysts to use precise wording. In 2000, the CIA named its school for training new analysts the Sherman Kent School for Intelligence Analysis. For young people, his story shows that an intelligence career can be built on reading, writing, and clear thinking rather than secret missions.
