Intelligence and Intelligence Analysis

Patrick F. Walsh, Patrick Walsh

• Publisher: Willan
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781843927389
• eBook ISBN: 9781136718557
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book tracks post 9/11 developments in national security and policing intelligence and their relevance to new emerging areas of intelligence practice such as: corrections, biosecurity, private industry and regulatory environments. Developments are explored thematically across three broad sections:

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• applying intelligence
• understanding structures
• developing a discipline.

Issues explored include: understanding intelligence models; the strategic management challenges of intelligence; intelligence capacity building; and the ethical dimensions of intelligence practice. Using case studies collected from wide-ranging interviews with leaders, managers and intelligence practitioners from a range of practice areas in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and US, the book indentifies examples of good practice across countries and agencies that may be relevant to other settings.

Uniquely bringing together significant theoretical and practical developments in a sample of traditional and emerging areas of intelligence, this book provides readers with a more holistic and inter-disciplinary perspective on the evolving intelligence field across several different practice contexts.

Intelligence and Intelligence Analysis will be relevant to a broad audience including intelligence practitioners and managers working across all fields of intelligence (national security, policing, private industry and emerging areas) as well as students taking courses in policing and intelligence analysis.

Part I Applying intelligence

DOI: 10.4324/9780203815939-2

1 Traditional intelligence practice

DOI: 10.4324/9780203815939-3

Introduction

This chapter traces the origins and functions of intelligence practice in the ‘traditional’ environments of national security and policing. It has two aims: first, it will provide a brief overview of how intelligence historically has been applied in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the USA. This overview provides a broad thematic discussion of major historical milestones, which have been important in shaping the development of traditional intelligence practice. This discussion sets the scene for further in-depth development of themes, concepts and issues raised in the three Parts of the book (Applying intelligence, Understanding structures and Developing a discipline). Second, the chapter will argue, based on the origins of traditional intelligence practice, that a set of common characteristics has developed, which help to delineate the uniqueness of ‘intelligence’ from related activities such as research, analysis and information management. I have called these three characteristics an evolving intelligence tradition.

While others may argue for a different set of characteristics – even a long list – it is clear from the historical review in this chapter that these characteristics represent at the very least how intelligence has been viewed in the past. This intelligence tradition will continue to shape how traditional approaches to intelligence are applied, but is also relevant to defining understanding how new intelligence structures, processes and methods are being used in emerging areas of intelligence practice discussed in Chapter 2.

The origins and functions of traditional intelligence practice

National security intelligence practice

Defining ‘intelligence’ in a generic sense, let alone national security intelligence, is contentious, different perspectives are included or excluded depending on the view of the scholar or practitioner. I will not engage in these debates here, and national security intelligence is defined as intelligence collected, analysed and disseminated for decision-makers in the support of the security of the state. By ‘security of the state’, I mean not just the prevention or prosecution of wars between states, but also security of individuals within and between states. The definition draws on the human security agenda, which gained momentum in the mid-1990s (Hampson et al. 2002). The Human Security Report (HSC 2005) includes the security of people within states from political violence (terrorism, civil war, state collapse), economic vulnerabilities and even disease and natural disasters. This inclusive definition of security is more accurate in tracing how national security intelligence has evolved and responded since the end of the Second World War from a preoccupation with fighting or preventing wars between states to currently supporting a broader human security agenda.

In addition to defining national security intelligence, it is also equally difficult to plot its origins. Intelligence historian David Kahn suggests that the Ancient Egyptians used ‘codes’ on the walls of their monuments (1996: 71–73), and most students of intelligence will be familiar with the work of fourth-century BC Chinese general Sun Tzu, The Art of War. Sun Tzu used a network of spies to gain information about the military capabilities and intentions of enemies (Sun Tzu 2002). The focus here is the broad developments within national security intelligence from the end of the Second World War up to the present, as it was not until this period that we saw the emergence of national civilian intelligence operations with global reach.

Table 1.1 provides a summary of the origins and functions of the major national security intelligence communities of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the USA. Broadly, the functions of many agencies across each country are similar. For example, in Table 1.1 it is clear that the UK MI6 and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) are involved in the collection of foreign intelligence, and each country has a dedicated sigint collection agency (sigint is a general term for the process of collecting intelligence from intercepted electromagnetic waves, usually referred to as signals). There are of course, several differences between and even within the national security intelligence communities of the countries listed in Table 1.1. Historically, variations have emerged as a result of different organizational structures, political cultures, legal systems and bureaucratic styles, existing in each of these countries.

Table 1.1 Origins and functions of select national security agencies

Types of intelligence	The UK	The USA	Australia	Canada	New Zealand
Signals Intelligence	Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) Est.: 1919	National Agency (NSA) Est.: 1952	Defence Signals Directorate (DSD) Est.: 1947	Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSE) Est.: 1946	Government Communications Security Bureau(GCSB) Est.: 1977
Foreign Intelligence (humint*)	Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) Est.: 1909	Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Est.: 1947	Australian Secret Intelligence Service(ASIS) Est.: 1952	No specific foreign intelligence agency, but CSE provides some foreign intelligence collection via its sigint capabilities	New Zealand Security Intelligence Service (NZSIS) Est.: 1956.
Domestic Intelligence	Security Service (MI5)Est.: 1909	Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Est.: 1908 Department of Homeland Security (DHS)–Office of Intelligence and Analysis Est.: 2003	Australian SecurityIntelligence Organisation (ASIO) Est.: 1949	Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) Est.: 1984	NZSIS
Intelligence Assessment	Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) Joint TerrorismAnalysis Centre (JTAC) Est.: 2003	Office of the Directorof National Intelligence (ODNI) Est.: 2005 CIA Est.: 1947 Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) Est.: 1946 National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) Est.: 2004	Office of National Assessments (ONA) Est.: 1977 National Threat Assessment Centre (ITAC) Est.: 2004	Intelligence Assessment Secretariat (IAS) Integrated Threat Assessment Centre (ITAC) Est.: 2004	National Assessments Bureau (NAB) Renamed March 2010 (formerly the External Assessments Bureau) Combined Threat Assessment Group (CTAG) Est.: 2004
Military Intelligence	1. Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS) Est.: 1964	Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) Est.: 1961	Defence Intelligence Organisation (DIO) Est.: 1990	Department of National Defence/Canadian Forces – Director of General Intelligence Production	Directorate of Defence Intelligence and Security Est.: 1998
Imagery Intelligence	Defence Geographic and Imagery Intelligence (DGIA) Est.: 2000	National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) Est.: 1960 National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA) Est.: 2003 (prior to 2003 formerly the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA))	Defence Imagery and Geospatial Organisation (DIGO) Est.: 2000	Directorate of Geospatial Intelligence (D Geo Int)	NZDF Geospatial Intelligence Organisation Est.: 2008 (prior to 2008 formerly the Joint GeospatialSupport Facility)
Agencies with national policing/law enforcement functions	Metropolitan Police Est.: 1829	FBI DHS	Australian Federal Police (AFP) Est.: 1979	Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) Est.: 1920 (formerly the North-West Mounted Police (Est.: 1873))	NZ Police Est.: 1886
Organized Crime	Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) Est.: 2006	FBI	Australian Crime Commission (ACC) Est.: 2003	Criminal Intelligence Service Canada (CISC) Est.: 1970	Organised Financial Crime Agency of New Zealand (OFCANZ) Est.: 2008
* Intelligence collected by humans either through covert means (e.g. espionage) or through official channels (e.g. diplomatic liaison).

The historical significance of many of these factors has been well documented, particularly relating to the US and UK communities, in a growing number of volumes on the history of various intelligence agencies. Christopher Andrew’s book, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorised History of MI5 (2009) is a good recent example. However, despite each intelligence agency in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the USA following its own historical path, their origins and functions were also shaped by some similar events from the end of the Second World War, through the Cold War and up to the present. The events from 1945 to the present day did help define mutual interests and common values between the intelligence communities of these countries. Mutual interests and broadly similar liberal democratic outlooks also resulted in commonalities developing both within and between intelligence agencies in structure, priority setting and accountability processes.

A detailed discussion of all historical events that have impacted the origins and functions of all national security agencies in each country is beyond the scope of this book. In the USA alone, there are 17 agencies officially designated as part of its national security intelligence community and an entire book could easily be devoted to them alone. Instead, subsequent chapters will examine a selection of thematic changes (e.g. organizational restructure, analytical innovations and legislative reform) in the national security intelligence agencies of the five democratic countries chosen as the subject of this study and how these help us understand the evolution of national security and other practice contexts for intelligence. However, in order to provide some context for this discussion, it is important first to understand the broad historical catalysts for change in national security intelligence agencies from the end of the Second World War to the present.

From post Second World War to post Cold War

Wartime intelligence cooperation between the five allies (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the USA), particularly between America and the UK, set the stage for common approaches and cooperation during the Cold War period. Wartime technological advancements such as signals intelligence (sigint), overhead imagery and counter-intelligence also produced greater modernization, specialization and cooperation between the national security intelligence communities in the five countries. These intelligence arrangements became even more formalized in the Cold War period, starting with the 1946 UK/USA Communications Intelligence Agreement, where the five countries agreed to share their sigint collection efforts with each other. This agreement stipulated that the following sigint agencies would share their intelligence: the National Security Agency (the USA), Government Communications Headquarters (the UK), Communications Security Establishment (Canada), the Government Communications Security Bureau (New Zealand) and the Defence Signals Directorate (Australia).

The UK/USA Communications Intelligence Agreement led to some geographical specialization between each country’s sigint collection agency. The agreement has been tested through the years, most notably in 1985, when the USA restricted its sigint supply to New Zealand after that country banned nuclear-powered vessels from its ports. The agreement also provided the basis for closer cooperation in other areas of intelligence practice, including humint (human intelligence) and sharing intelligence products. The desire by the USA in particular, but also the other four UK/USA Agreement countries, to contain Soviet interests globally became the central focus for all of their national security intelligence agencies. At the conclusion of the Second World War and the early stages of the Cold War, other non-state actor security interests were largely subservient to or viewed through the prism of the broader Soviet threat. The dominant application of national security intelligence efforts in the latter half of the twentieth century up to the end of the Cold War in 1991, focused on expensive technical intelligence gained from satellite reconnaissance and sigint. The height of the Cold War was more than anything a ‘sigint war’ between the USA and the Soviet Union. The successful prosecution of this war relied on sigint collection agencies having strict control over the knowledge relating to their collection capabilities and which aspects of Soviet capabilities they were targeting. The absolute secrecy adopted by sigint collection agencies contributed significantly to a developing culture of secrecy within national security intelligence agencies during the Cold War and up to the present.

While significant sums were invested in UK/USA Agreement countries’ intelligence agencies, these agencies were not able to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union, the country which had been their key threat from 1945 to 1991. The mixed track record of many agencies during the Cold War, and the emergence of a fluid security environment – no longer defined by US–Soviet rivalry – raised questions from some academics, commentators and politicians about the future relevance of such agencies (e.g. Gill 1996 a; Draper 1997). Additionally, the incoming first Bush Administration – using the rhetoric of a ‘peace dividend’ derived from defeating the Soviet Union – was focused on maximizing any savings that could be made from defence and intelligence budgetary allocations. In the 1990s, the Bush and Clinton Administrations, along with Congress, decreased intelligence budgets. For example, during the 1990s, the CIA’s budget declined by 18 per cent, which resulted in a 16 per cent reduction in its workforce during this decade (Tenet 2002). Similarly, in 1996, the UK Treasury initiated cuts, which led to a reduction in MI6 staffing levels to about 2150 (Dorril 2001: 780). The collapse of the bipolar security structure of the USA and the Soviet Union revealed a greater diversity of threats, such as international terrorism and drug trafficking, which national security intelligence agencies had always monitored, however, during the height of the Cold War they were not seen as existential threats to the state.

Hence, the first half of the 1990s could be typified as a time of adaptation by national security intelligence agencies to an evolving and less certain security environment. Agency heads were starting to show an increased awareness of, if not complete understanding of, myriad transnational security threats, which progressively began to define the new security environment. On 2 February 1993,R. James Woolsey commented to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), just before he was confirmed as Director, Central Intelligence, that the security environment was changing. Woolsey, who served as Director of the CIA from 1993 to 1995, described both the complexity of the new security environment and the need for intelligence in the following colorful way: ‘We have slain a large dragon by defeating the Soviet Union, but we live now in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes, and in many ways the dragon was easier to keep track of ’ (Woolsey, quoted on Center for Intelligence Studies website). The statement reflected the difficulty that agencies such as the CIA were having in adjusting their collected and analytical assets from a single large and enduring target (the Soviet Union) to a multitudinous number of smaller and more fluid targets. For national security intelligence agencies, efforts to recalibrate intelligence collection assets were made more difficult as policy-makers failed to provide them consistently with a clearly articulated list of their priorities. For example, under the first Clinton Administration, despite some efforts to remedy the collection and analytical priorities framework, terrorism remained a ‘Tier 3’ (lowest priority issue) (FAS 1995). Despite several Islamist terrorist plots and attacks against US interests from 1993 up to 9/11, including Al Qaeda’s October 2000 assault on the US warship USS Cole in Yemen, the Bush Administration still had rogue states and their weapons of mass destruction (WMD) as its highest priority (Taylor and Goldman 2004: 425). However, there is no doubt by the end of the 1990s, Australian, Canadian, New Zealand, UK and US intelligence agencies had all developed a sophisticated understanding of the transnational national terrorist threats, particularly of the Al Qaeda ‘brand’.

9/11, accountability and the commodification of intelligence

However, the events of 9/11, the first mass casualty terrorist attack on US soil, represented a ‘wake-up call’ for the US intelligence community. They also had strategic significance for the intelligence communities of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK. Additional events after 9/11 including the nature of intelligence supplied to political leaders about the presence of WMD in Iraq in 2003, the Bali bombings (in October 2002) and the London bombings (in July 2005), also resulted in significant internal reflection for the US, UK and Australian intelligence agencies on their collection and analytical capabilities against such threats. For Canada, the ‘wake-up’ call for their national security intelligence agencies was not 9/11, but an event nearly two years earlier on the US-Canadian border. When interviewed on 26 August 2009, two senior Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) officers suggested that the foiled December 1999 attempt by Canadian-Algerian Ahmed Ressam to blow up Los Angeles International Airport became the major catalyst for a greater shift in focus by their agency from counter-intelligence to counter-terrorism. The underlying concern for CSIS officers was that Canada could be a base for attacks against its major trading partner, the USA.

The two significant inquiries after 9/11 – the House and Senate Intelligence Committee’s Joint Inquiry (2002) and the 9/11 Commission Report (2004) – produced a series of fin...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Illustrations
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Part I Applying intelligence
• Part II Understanding structures
• Part III Developing a discipline
• Bibliography
• Index