Intelligence in An Insecure World

Peter Gill, Mark Phythian

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781509525232
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Peace & Global Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Security intelligence continues to be of central importance to the contemporary world: individuals, organizations and states all seek timely and actionable intelligence in order to increase their sense of security. But what exactly is intelligence? Who seeks to develop it and to what ends? How can we ensure that intelligence is not abused? In this third edition of their classic text, Peter Gill and Mark Phythian set out a comprehensive framework for the study of intelligence, discussing how states organize the collection and analysis of information in order to produce intelligence, how it is acted upon, why it may fail and how the process should be governed in order to uphold democratic rights. Fully revised and updated throughout, the book covers recent developments, including the impact of the Snowden leaks on the role of intelligence agencies in Internet and social media surveillance and in defensive and offensive cyber operations, and the legal and political arrangements for democratic control. The role of intelligence as part of 'hybrid' warfare in the case of Russia and Ukraine is also explored, and the problems facing intelligence in the realm of counterterrorism is considered in the context of the recent wave of attacks in Western Europe. Intelligence in an Insecure World is an authoritative and accessible guide to a rapidly expanding area of inquiry – one that everyone has an interest in understanding.

CHAPTER ONE
What Is Intelligence?

Towards a Definition of Intelligence

This opening chapter poses a seemingly straightforward question – what is intelligence? Once we attempt to define intelligence, it soon becomes apparent that, as a concept, it is as elusive as the daring fictional agents who have cemented it in the popular imagination. One of the more concise ways of thinking about intelligence is to view its business as being concerned with stealing secrets. As James Pavitt, former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Deputy Director for Operations, once put it: ‘At the end of the day, the human spy business is the way the human spy business was at the battle of Jericho many hundreds of years ago – human beings stealing secrets and giving those secrets to someone for gain, for advantage.’¹ This contains an important truth about intelligence, but can be only a partial definition as it does not capture the full range of activities in which intelligence agencies engage, focusing only on one part – collection.

Our starting point should be to recognize that intelligence is a means to an end. This end is the security, including the prosperity, of the entity that provides for the collection and subsequent analysis of intelligence. In the contemporary international system, states are the principal customers of intelligence and the key investors in and organizers of collection and analysis agencies. However, a wide range of sub-state actors – political, commercial and criminal – also perceive a need to collect and analyse intelligence and guard against the theft of their own secrets. In today’s world, this need even extends to sports teams.

In this context, on qualifying for the 2018 World Cup finals in Russia, the England football team reportedly invested in improved information security as a result of fears that their tactics could be leaked before games. Previously, a hacking group called Fancy Bears, believed to be a front for Russian military intelligence, had hacked databases and leaked medical files on a number of sportsmen in relation to drug use. This activity was believed to be in retaliation for the banning of Russian athletes from the 2016 Rio Olympics after the exposure of systematic use of banned drugs.² Such concerns about protecting secrets that others could seek to acquire were neither new to sport nor limited to Russia. Ahead of the November 2003 Rugby Union World Cup final against hosts Australia, for example, the England team swept its changing room and training base for electronic surveillance equipment, concerned that in 2001 espionage had allowed an Australian team to crack the codes employed by the British Lions, helping secure their dominance in line-outs and go on to win the series.³ Allegations of spying or espionage have also been a feature of Formula 1 motor racing and, via allegations of attempts to steal hull designs, of yacht racing. In high-value team sports, there is a clear incentive to uncover and understand the secrets that produce a competitive edge.

Once we define intelligence in terms of security, it becomes clear that intelligence is an inherently competitive pursuit. A key consequence of this is that security is relative, and therefore the purpose of intelligence is to bestow a relative security advantage. Moreover, as discussion of sports espionage suggests, security is a broad concept that goes well beyond preventing surprise military or terrorist attack. Nevertheless, in the contemporary world, the prime concern of national intelligence agencies has shifted from counterespionage to countering terrorism. In Britain, for example, the Security Service (MI5) estimated that in 2015–16 some 63 per cent of its resources were allocated to international counterterrorism, 18 per cent to countering terrorism in Northern Ireland, and 19 per cent to counterespionage, counterproliferation and protective security.⁴ The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) lists the key threats it faces as including ‘terrorism, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, espionage, foreign interference and cyber-tampering affecting critical infrastructure’. Its website explains that:

countering terrorist violence is the top priority for CSIS. Terrorism, which has become a global phenomenon, is a very real threat to our national security. Terrorists and their supporters come from a variety of countries, cultures, political systems and socio-economic backgrounds. They include both highly educated elites and more humble ‘foot soldiers’. Followers are recruited from around the world, including our own country. CSIS strives to prevent terrorist acts from being planned in Canada, from occurring on Canadian territory and from affecting Canadian citizens and assets abroad.⁵

The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) lists counterterrorism ahead of its other activities (counterespionage, countering serious threats to Australia’s border integrity, collecting foreign intelligence in Australia, and protective security).⁶ Reflecting the much broader US conception of national security, the CIA talks more generally about its mission, yet the space on its website devoted to the counterterrorism theme is indicative of the way in which it became the primary focus after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 (9/11).⁷ One thing that this demonstrates is the increasing convergence amongst leading Western intelligence agencies about the most serious potential threats they guard against. High levels of international intelligence cooperation flow from this sense of shared mission.

Ideally, intelligence will enhance security by bestowing on the wise collector, perceptive analyst and skilled customer a predictive power on the basis of which policy can be formulated. However, intelligence is often fragmentary. As a process, it has been compared to the construction of a jigsaw puzzle. The process begins with few pieces in place and, although more may be collected over time, allowing for a progressively fuller picture to be constructed, the analyst can never be sure that all the necessary pieces have been collected or whether some of them come from an entirely different puzzle. Unlike a conventional jigsaw, there is no box to provide a picture of what the complete puzzle should look like. This is a matter for analysts’ (and customers’) judgement. As a consequence, customers need to be aware of the limits of intelligence if it is to be effective as a basis of policy. This was the clear message contained in gently admonitory passages in the 2004 Butler review that arose out of the UK intelligence failure over Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). Butler warned:

These limitations are best offset by ensuring that the ultimate users of intelligence, the decision-makers at all levels, properly understand its strengths and limitations and have the opportunity to acquire experience in handling it. It is not easy to do this while preserving the security of sensitive sources and methods. But unless intelligence is properly handled at this final stage, all preceding effort and expenditure is wasted.⁸

Similarly, the 2004 Flood Report into Australia’s intelligence agencies highlighted how, even though its customers would like it to possess the characteristics of a science, and despite the benefit of decades of technological innovation, intelligence stubbornly remains more of an art:

In so far as it seeks to forecast the future, assessment based on intelligence will seldom be precise or definitive. This is particularly so when it seeks to understand complex developments and trends in future years. Greater precision is sometimes possible in relation to intelligence’s warning function – highlighting the possibility of a specific event in the near term future … But even in this field, precision will be hard to achieve. Intelligence will rarely provide comprehensive coverage of a topic. More often it is fragmentary and incomplete.⁹

Existing definitions of intelligence can generate as many questions as they do answers. In the CIA’s in-house intelligence journal, Studies in Intelligence, historian Michael Warner has pointed out that, despite a long history, even in the early years of the twenty-first century, ‘we have no accepted definition of intelligence’. This has led to problems, because intelligence ‘is defined anew by each author who addresses it, and these definitions rarely refer to one another or build off what has been written before. Without a clear idea of what intelligence is, how can we develop a theory to explain how it work...