Between the Lines

"Johnson, you get a chance to read that North Korea assessment that came down yesterday?" Miller asked, dropping a folder on the desk as he settled into the worn chair across from his colleague of twenty years.

"Unfortunately," Johnson sighed, pushing his reading glasses up onto his forehead. The fluorescent lights of their basement office made the dark circles under his eyes more pronounced. Thirty years in intelligence work had left him with a permanent squint and a well-honed bullshit detector. "Tell me what you thought. And don't hold back—the walls down here have heard worse."

"It's literally just The Economist article from last week repackaged with 'high confidence' slapped on it," Miller said, tapping the folder. "Twenty-plus years in this business, and the bar keeps dropping. These analysts don't even have fancy degrees anymore to excuse their laziness."

"Tell me about it. Remember when you actually had to develop sources? Run assets? Now they think scrolling Twitter and rewriting news headlines counts as tradecraft."

Miller nodded, the lines around his mouth deepening. His time running operations in Eastern Europe during the late 90s felt like ancient history now. "You know what I caught last week? One of the new kids included analysis of a statement that was actually from a parody account. Didn't even bother to verify it. When I called him on it, he said he was 'under deadline pressure.'"

"Deadline pressure," Johnson echoed, shaking his head. "Like the world operates on their publication schedule. Remember Kuznetsov in '03? That guy waited three days in a basement in Grozny to make contact with his source. Three days! These kids can't wait three minutes for their coffee."

"The worst is the smug certainty. Never been in-country, couldn't order a beer in the local language, but they'll tell you exactly what some foreign leader is thinking. And when they're catastrophically wrong? No accountability. Just memory-hole the old assessment and write a new one explaining why no one could've seen it coming."

"Meanwhile, decision-makers are nodding along like they're getting the inside scoop."

"That's what kills me. It's just intellectual laundering – taking open-source information, running it through the classified system, and pretending it gained value. Meanwhile, the real signals, the stuff that matters, gets buried under all this mediocrity."

"You know what I miss? Analysts who'd actually say 'I don't know' when they didn't know. Now that's a rare skill worth classified clearance."

Johnson took a long sip from his coffee mug—cold, but he hardly noticed. "You see their new methodology? They've got a confidence matrix now. Six different levels of certainty, all based on how many news sources they can cite."

"Christ," Miller muttered. "What happened to human judgment? To weighing competing explanations? To actually talking to people who understand the culture and context?"

"Died with the budget cuts," Johnson replied. "Easier to hire someone to monitor social media than maintain networks of human sources. Cheaper too, until you factor in the cost of getting blindsided."

"Remember Patel? That analyst who actually learned Farsi and spent her weekends reading Iranian poetry to understand the cultural references in speeches?"

"Retired three years ago. Her replacement has an app that translates for him. Thinks that's the same thing."

Miller leaned forward, lowering his voice. "We had a meeting last week about the situation in the Caucasus. This kid—couldn't have been more than thirty—starts lecturing me about regional dynamics. I asked where he served there. Know what he said? 'I've got a comprehensive database of articles going back fifteen years.' Like reading about a place is the same as breathing its air."

"It's the arrogance that gets me," Johnson said, tossing his pen onto his cluttered desk. "The absolute certainty. When we came up, you earned the right to an opinion through fieldwork, through failures, through learning the hard way when you got something wrong."

"Now opinions are cheap. Everybody's got one, all equally valid apparently. Doesn't matter if you've spent thirty years in the region or thirty minutes on Wikipedia."

"You know what I miss? The old hands who could read between the lines. Who knew that what wasn't being said was often more important than what was."

"Intuition," Miller nodded. "Can't quantify it, can't teach it in their two-week training courses, so it doesn't exist."

Johnson picked up the report again, flipping through it with visible disdain. "The real tragedy is that sometimes—not often, but sometimes—there's something important buried in all this regurgitated news. But who's going to find it when every report reads like it was written by the same AI program?"

"Shit. Who are you kidding?" Miller scoffed. "It WILL all be written by the same AI program."

"You want to be an intelligence professional?" Miller said, as if addressing an invisible junior analyst. "Stop reading the news and rewriting it with 'likely' and 'possibly' sprinkled in. Get out in the field. Talk to people. Develop sources. Challenge your assumptions. And for God's sake, have the humility to admit what you don't know. That's more valuable than any assessment you'll ever write."

"Amen," Johnson said, closing the folder. "Want to grab lunch? I need something stronger than this coffee before I tackle the China brief that just came in. I hear it's a real groundbreaking piece—apparently tensions in the South China Sea are 'concerning.'"

Miller laughed as they both stood up. "Stop the presses. What would we do without such insights?"

This collection of short stories uses AI to explore technology and security in a more engaging and accessible way. Each narrative transforms complex ideas into relatable human experiences. By harnessing artificial intelligence as a collaborative storytelling tool, the collection re-imagines how we explore and illustrate potential outcomes of technology, security, and social issues.