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(U//FOUO) Interview with... Fran Fleisch, China & Korea (S2B)
Production Manager
FROM: SIGINT Communications
Unknown
Run Date: 05/20/2004
FROM: SIGINT Communications
Unknown
(U//FOUO) What follows is the first installment of a new SIDtoday feature, the "Interview
With..." series. These articles are in a question-and-answer format, with managers describing
how the world looks from their vantage point. We'll ask them to both look back on their careers
and to tell us what lies in store for the organizations they lead. Our first interviewee is Fran
Fleisch, Production Manager for China and Korea :
(U) What was your first job at the Agency?
(S//SI) I hired on at the Agency in February 1980 as a Russian graphic linguist as part of a huge
hiring surge against the Soviet target. Assigned to A4, the office which worked the Soviet civil
targets, I spent my first year in training - classroom and OJT - before finally getting to contribute
to production.
(S//SI) My first substantive analytic and reporting assignment was to follow the special Soviet
troops which built sensitive military facilities - such as IRBM and ICBM* bases and radar
facilities. SIGINT was typically the first evidence of these planned deployments and was
routinely used to cross-cue imagery. Pretty extraordinary stuff for an Economics and Finance
major, with some Russian language capability, who applied to the Agency on a lark.
(U) What is the biggest change you've seen at the Agency in your career?
(U//FOUO) The single most pervasive change I've seen over the course of my 24 year career at
the Agency is the application of technology to enable our analytic work. At the risk of dating
myself, I'll call out that in my first years at the Agency, I wrote out my reports in longhand. We
typed our reports on the single typewriter in the branch and did not have computers in our area.
While we continue to strive to equip our analysts with state-of-the-art tools, the power of the
computers and analytic tools that analysts have today is awesome by comparison to the early
1980s when I came on board.
(U) What was the most memorable experience you've had during your career?
(TS//SI) On a personal note, clearly my most memorable experience was meeting - and
subsequently marrying - my husband. We EODed* within a month of each other and were
assigned to the same office initially. From an operational perspective, my most memorable
experience was one I really can't talk about in detail - multiple deployments for a sister agency
to visit the target country I was following at the time. More recently, I had the opportunity to
accompany the ADCI*/Community Management Joan Dempsey on a tour of the Far East in 2002
visiting Hong Kong, Taiwan, the PRC and Thailand. That trip, my first ever to the region and as
part of a high-level US delegation, was a fabulous learning experience and introduction to
enterprise and foreign partners.
(U) What is the biggest challenge facing your organization right now?
(S//SI) The China/Korea Product Line leads activities enterprise-wide against two of the DCI's
top priorities: China and Korea, which are both designated Hard Targets. My challenge every
day is to optimize our activities to meet customer information needs in the face of access,
processing and analytic shortfalls. We are very fortunate that Congress has recently authorized
extra funding for our analytic efforts on the China target, with an emphasis on leadership,
submarines, C4ISR* and mobile missiles.
(U) What is the most exciting project for the future that your organization is currently
undertaking?
(U//FOUO) I'd like to rephrase your question if you don't mind and substitute "initiative" for
"project". Our most exciting initiative - undertaken with the assistance of multiple enabling
organizations including HR, Security, and the skill communities - is our hiring program. Over the
last several years, the Agency has authorized an increase in hiring - linguists, intelligence
analysts, global network analysts - to prosecute the China and Korea missions. Today nearly one
third of our product line civilian workforce is comprised of new hires in development programs and the contributions that they are making are extraordinary. Being taught by our seasoned
professionals and complementing our very talented military workforce, these new hires are the
future of the Agency. And the future is bright.
*(U) Notes:
IRBM = Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile
ICBM = Intercontinental Ballistic Missile
EOD = Entered on Duty
ADCI = Assistant Director of Central Intelligence
C4ISR = Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and
Reconnaissance
"(U//FOUO) SIDtoday articles may not be republished or reposted outside NSANet
without the consent of S0121 (DL sid_comms)."
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DERIVED FROM: NSA/CSSM 1-52, DATED 08 JAN 2007 DECLASSIFY ON: 20320108