Intelligence Services in the Information Age

Michael Herman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136615351
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Intelligence was a central element of the Cold War and the need for it was expected to diminish after the USSR's collapse, yet in recent years it has been in greater demand than ever. The atrocities of 11 September and the subsequent "war on terrorism" now call for an even more intensive effort. Important questions arise on how intelligence fits into the world of increased threats, globalization and expanded international action. This volume contains the recent work on this subject by Michael Herman, British intelligence professional for 35 years and Oxford University academic. It compares intelligence with other government information services, and discusses the British intelligence system and the case for its reform. It also addresses the ethical issues raised by intelligence's methods and results: "do they on balance make for a better world or a worse one?". Other chapters explore a wide range of intelligence topics past and present, including the transatlantic relationship, the alliance strategies of Norway and New Zealand, Mrs Thatcher's "de-unionization" of British Sigint, and personal memories of the British Cabinet Office in the 1970s. Michael Herman argues for intelligence professionalism as a contribution to international security and for its encouragement as a world standard. The modern challenge is for intelligence to support international cooperation in ways originally developed to advance national interests, while at the same time developing some restraint and international "rules of the game", in the use of intrusive and covert methods on its traditional targets. The effects of 11 September on this challenge are discussed in a thoughtful afterword.

Part I

Intelligence and Information

1

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Intelligence’s Essence

The official intelligence discussed in this book has no distinguishing adjective; it tends to be just called ‘intelligence’, both in general usage and in formal descriptions.¹ Other kinds of intelligence are usually expanded, for example into ‘business intelligence’ in the private sector and ‘criminal intelligence’ in law enforcement.² Occasionally the intelligence discussed here becomes ‘national intelligence’, as in the recent official British booklet on ‘National Intelligence Machinery’,³ but for most purposes it stands alone. Yet as Sherman Kent explained in his classical description of it, it denotes a particular kind of knowledge, the type of organization producing this knowledge, and the activity pursued by the organization.⁴ This chapter considers the particularity that distinguishes it from other information activities, and speculates on its future in the Information Age.

Some things about it are obvious enough. As an institution it serves central and not local government. It deals with information, but in ways that differ from the information-gathering and information-handling that take place as integral parts of government and military command-and control. It is a specialist activity; in military terms it is ‘staff,’ not ‘line’. As such it developed over the same period as the state’s other information specialists. Thus Britain’s naval and military Intelligence Departments developed in almost exactly the same period in the nineteenth century as official statistics, and its ]oint Intelligence Committee OIC) was established in the twentieth century in parallel with its Central Statistical Office, and for much the same reasons.⁵ Intelligence and statistics resemble each other as specialized information collectors and interpreters, each providing its own distinctive window on to reality.

But intelligence does not have the professional status of other specialists.⁶ Institutionally its boundaries are sometimes arbitrary or fuzzy; thus although the JIC has nominal oversight of ‘British intelligence activity as a whole’, by no means all of it comes in practice within its purview.⁷ The use of the intelligence label also varies from country to country; the US State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research is a member of the American intelligence community, while the comparable British Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s Research and Analysis Department is emphatically not classified as ‘intelligence’.⁸

Just as confusing is the variety within intelligence itself. More than other information services, it is torn between its twin skills of collecting information and evaluating it. It is partly government’s specialist on certain collection and exploitation methods, but partly also the expert on certain subjects, using both intelligence and non-intelligence material for its all source analysis. The Humint, Sigint and imagery agencies are specialists in their own single-source collection/exploitation techniques; by contrast the expertise of CIA’S Directorate of Intelligence and the British Defence Intelligence Staff and Assessments Staff is on a range of subjects, not on the means of gathering information about them. Another internal dichotomy is between ‘foreign intelligence’ with overseas targets, and its rather different, more inward-looking ‘security intelligence’, with its domestic components or implications. There are other notable differences in intelligence cultures, particularly between the military and civilians.

Yet despite these diversities intelligence has a distinctive status, and all states of any substance recognize it as a permanent part of their apparatus. This chapter therefore examines its common factors from four viewpoints, as activity, subjects, product and functions. None of these presents a uniform aspect, and indeed as much time has to be spent in qualifying conclusions as making them. Nevertheless a picture emerges of intelligence’s character.

This picture is not a universal one. What is examined here is mainly the current system in the UK, US and Old Commonwealth, with a bias towards the British example. I therefore go on to consider whether this English-speaking intelligence can be regarded as part of a wider ‘Western’ model, and to what extent it is -or should be -a worldwide standard.

ACTIVITY

Intelligence’s main activity is information-gathering and exploitation; allsource analysis is a smaller component, and covert action (to be touched on later) is smaller still. The main common feature is the sensitivity of its collection/exploitation (and covert action), for reasons that include questions of propriety and legality but are mainly based on the vulnerability of its sources and methods to countermeasures.⁹ From this comes intelligence’s special secrecy, extending from collection/ exploitation to cover most aspects of analysis. Secrecy is intelligence’s trademark: the basis of its relationship with government and its own self-image.

Yet, here as elsewhere, not all intelligence corresponds completely with the generalization. There are in fact wide variations in the source protection needed. Not all its collection/ exploitation is in the mainstream activities ofHumint, Sigint and imagery, and the other intelligence sources -special surveillance of various kinds, Masint (the American acronym for Measurement and Signature Intelligence, such as underwater and atmospheric Acoustint), POW interrogation, and the procurement and study of foreign military equipment -are generically less sensitive than the main ones. Even the mainstream sources have varied sensitivity within them. Humint sources range from secret agents in place to the routine interviewing of refugees and travellers; British interviews of Kosovo refugees by its Defence Debriefing Teams on behalf of the Hague Tribunal were a form of Humint, but hardly a deep secret. Sigint has codebreaking at one extreme of its sensitivity, but also includes far less sensitive activities such as the monitoring of foreign radars for order-of-battle purposes. Satellite imagery was once regarded as a deep secret but its existence is now commonly acknowledged, and in the handling of its product the Director of America’s National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) claimed in 1999 that ‘classification and compartmentation barriers continue to fall’ and that ‘a large percentage of NRO products is now being released at the collateral SECRET classification level’.¹⁰ Additionally, whatever the sensitivity of particular operations and output, these main sources are themselves not unique to intelligence. Some satellite photography is now available commercially. Law enforcement has always used human sources as informers and has long experience of telephone-tapping; now it even has some codebreaking under its control.¹¹

The actual picture is therefore of gradations of fragility. Specially sensitive and important sources are surrounded by a wider glacis of secrecy that provides protection in depth. Within this glacis there are gradations of sensitivity, rather than black-and-white distinctions between sensitive sources and robust ones. Intelligence’s special protection in each case should be a balance of the risks and penalties of disclosure against the need for it to be usable. Secrecy is relative, not absolute.

This receives some recognition. Intelligence organizations are no longer covert, and over recent years there has been greater flexibility over the release of historical material, as in the American declassification of satellite imagery up to the middle of the Cold War. But intelligence as a whole is still held to be uniquely secret, rivalled in government only by details of nuclear deployments and procedures.¹² In Britain this secrecy has long antecedents; the Secret Service Fund goes back to the Restoration and its Vote to 1797, and intelligence inherits a traditional respect for Secret Service. Intelligence’s culture is based on secrecy and a sense of embattlement, not without reason; its penetration was the other side’s highest priority target in the Cold War, and the media’s urge to tease out its secrets perpetuates its sense of being under siege. ¹³ Its position with government rests on its special sources; the authority of ‘if you knew what 1 know’. The thrill of secret knowledge makes Ministers read intelligence in their evening boxes, even if they leave more mundane items to the next morning. If intelligence has any single, defining characteristic in the eyes of governments and publics it is this secrecy and the mystique it attracts.

SUBJECTS

The subject -matter reinforces this idea of ‘specialness’. It excludes the normal run of home affairs; Britain had its ‘Home Intelligence’ in the Second World War, but this investigation of public attitudes and morale subsequently evolved into opmlon polling.¹⁴ Intelligence is targeted on ‘them’ not ‘us’, with espionage, subversion, sabotage, terrorism and covert foreign inf1 uence as part of ‘them\In formal terms the scope of foreign coverage appears unlimited. The JIC’S terms of reference charge it not only with warning on ‘direct or indirect foreign threats to British political, military or economic interests’, but also with assessing ‘events and situations relating to external affairs, defence, terrorism, major international criminal activity, scientific, technical and international economic matters’.¹⁵ The US effort exists similarly to provide information for national decisions on ‘foreign, defense and economic policy, and the protection of United States national interests from foreign security threats’.¹⁶ The CIA has a wealth of expertise that ref1ects this broad remit. ‘The greatest concentration of analytical experts on international economic issues resides not in any of the executive departments but in the Central Intelligence Agency … [where] about one-third of its analytic talent concerns itself with economic issues of one kind or another. ‘¹⁷ There is also an official market for its studies on new subjects. A CIA study of the international incidence of Aids was reported in early 2000 to have led to the designation ofAids as a threat to American security.¹⁸ There are no official guides to the foreign subjects intelligence should not tackle.

Yet in its role of government’s all-source cxpert there are reallimitations to thc subjects on which it carries authority. In writing about the American system, Jack Oavis has pointed to the areas whcrc intelligence has ‘comparative advantage’ over other sources of knowledge,¹⁹ and these tend to be those of the fungible but recognizable idea of ‘national security’. Actual or potential violence everywhere -along with weapons and explosives, their use or intended use, the capabilities they provide, their scope for development and the threats they constitute - is intelligence’s biggest subject. Linked with it are warning of attack and the study of foreign military forces, international arms supplies, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and terrorism. Intelligence is the expert on violent change, threats of it, and instability and situations in which these figure. Such subjects tend to produce difficult and opaque targets. Hence intelligence is also the expert on secretive regimes and indeed clandestinity of all kinds, one of the factors linking foreign intelligence with security intelligence.

In practice its all-source product extends to much wider areas, including foreign affairs generally; the JIC’S prime fields are officially stated to be ‘security, defence and foreign affairs’.²⁰ Agreed intelligcnce estimates can be useful in reducing policy disagreement on almost any subject; intelligence’s relatively broad role in Washington perhaps springs partly from the special problems of policy coordination there. Nevertheless there are stilllimits on its authority. Oespite the importance of the warnings it gives of foreign political developments with economic consequences, and economic changes with political effects, it is rarely government’s pundit on economics qua economics. The same applies to the international financial market. The British experiment in the late 1960s and 1970s of a separate economic JIC, of equal standing to the older non-economic body, did not survive. Similarly intelligence is not normally regarded as the authority on close allies, even though governments’ constant problem is forecasting their behaviour. British intelligence is not tasked with providing warnings of US military action; being surprised by the American invasion of Grenada in 1983 was not counted as a failure on its part. Neither was it expected to monitor the international spread of the virus that produced Britain’s crippling foot-and-mouth epidemic in early 2001.

National security has thus provided a focus for intelligence’s expert position. Sir Percy Cradock described the JIC under his chairmanship in the 1980s and early 1990s as working in

the hard world of shocks and accidents, t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Also in the Intelligence Series
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• PART I - Intelligence and Information
• PART II - Living with the US: British and Other Systems
• PART III - Historical Lessons
• PART IV - Intelligence and a Better World
• Index