In intelligence studies, the question of security communication has mainly been treated as a matter of providing information and estimates to governments on current and evolving threat levels. Especially, the Second Gulf War generated an increased political and academic focus on the nature of intelligence communication and the so-called potential ‘political role’ of intelligence advisors. Security communication became the subject to public scrutiny, as the idea of the intelligence agency as a politically independent institution was questioned.1 In effect, security communication came to frame new debates on parliamentary control, oversight and the executive’s ability to make informed decisions on national security.2
In the aftermath of the war, the legitimacy of the system was linked to the need for redefining the relation of communication between the services and the political system, both by installing more oversight, implementing new institutional reform and by sharpening the methods and ‘language policies’ of the agencies. Although it is recognized that there are huge uncertainties involved in providing probabilities on security threats, numeric value scales (such as Bayesian statistics) were and are most frequently seen as the solution to prevent political bias. Using these numeric values, probabilities and impact levels to convey analytical results are often argued to be preferable due to the fact that it makes advice seem ‘value-free’ and ‘non-politicized’.3 This debate is interesting for many reasons, not least because it reflects how the line between intelligence expertise and that of political practice is negotiated: on what it means to give non-biased and non-politized advice, and what this does to the managerial behaviour of the agencies.4
In this article, I will shed light on a slightly different, yet somehow similar, kind of intelligence communication – namely the communication directed towards the public. Communication aimed at the public is a rather recent topic in intelligence studies – though increasingly important to practice. It engages the public through websites, apps, community programmes and partnerships; it asks for awareness, for advice and even sometimes for action. Like traditional intelligence communication, the aim is to the find a format for communication that on the one hand upholds the authority of the organization as experts in the field, while also making it possible to navigate in a context where solutions are increasingly complicated and expectations are high. In describing such a bureaucratic challenge, scholars talk about a late modern ‘performativity gap’: a gap between the outside’s expectations of control and effective solutions and the capacity of institutions and administrations to actually satisfy those expectations. This gap, scholars argue, may create a legitimatization crisis, and, following on from that, an increased need for documentation, evaluation and inspection of management procedures.5
Communication can, in this way, be seen as a tool that helps to manage this ‘performance gap’ between the organization and its outside. It helps to establish the authority of the services and define the meaning of security expertise – in a world where the relation between the desired ends of control and the means of mitigation is considered limited. Communication has, in other words, become an organizational label for a number of the current institutional pressures on intelligence services, encompassing ‘a space’ for dealing with societal expectations.
Communication towards the public is, however, much more than just a matter of managing this gap between expectations and possible performance. While public communication at one level works to justify and make visible what is being done to control and protect against current and unknown threats, it also functions as a means to mobilize this same public to act on its behalf. Communication practices are, I will argue in this article, organizational practices that work as instruments for steering as well as working to define legitimate authority, action and responsibility.
In this article, I study how communication embodies ‘a particular intention’, and how it consequently addresses ‘the solution of a particular problem’.6 Following the conceptual historians Quentin Skinner and Reinhart Koselleck, it becomes possible to observe many different ways in which the concepts of communication are used in today’s debate on the role of intelligence in society; concepts that each define and confine what can possibly be considered meaningful organizational action. In other words, by studying the use of the term ‘communication’, we get to understand how some managerial practices and solutions become possible and others impossible, as well as get to understand how intelligence services perceive their authority in relation to the public.
The article will thus present a study of how the concept(s) of communication, when employed by intelligence experts, constructs the meaning of expertise and legitimate action. The countries in focus are mainly the A and the UK, while examples from Denmark are also brought in. The results are based on a thorough analysis of the intelligence studies literature, speeches, reports and website presentations on intelligence communication.
The argument will proceed as follows. The first part will examine how the intelligence community communicates about ‘communication’. The first section of the article identifies three different concepts of communication in the current debates on intelligence. I argue that each of these concepts (communication as awareness, advice or co-production) constructs the role of the public differently and evokes different organizational forms. The analysis draws on risk communication studies to understand and discuss how control and authority have been written and rewritten in these approaches to communication: how new forms of security organizations are consolidated, how new understandings of secrecy are generated and how the traditional authority of the services in society are challenged. The second part of the article discusses how these three concepts of communication mirror different organizational risk cultures, which each define different needs for institutional reform.
Communicating ‘communication’ to the public
There are commonly two ways in which the intelligence literature has understood ‘communication’ in relation to the public. One is ‘communication as awareness’ and refers to speaking, publishing and making actions visible (e.g., at the homepage) in the name of democratic accountability. Communication thus serves the democratic civil society’s possibility of scrutinizing the actions of the state.7 The second way is communication as advice through warnings and threat assessments, meant for the public to undertake collective or individual action.8 While these two concepts are the ones we usually think of when talking about communication between a ‘sender’ (the institution) and a ‘receiver’ (the public), we have recently witnessed a third concept of communication that challenges these previous rather conventional understandings of communication. In this article, I have termed the third concept ‘communication as co-production’, denoting an expressed need for the public to engage in the definition of new threats. Openness is, in this instance, not simply about transparency, oversight, or about directing behaviour. Rather, it is a matter of how to mobilize and engage a wide range of societal groups, organizations and businesses to share information, be prepared and better recover.
While these three concepts coexist they do, however, appear with some degree of historical succession, going from what the intelligence analyst Bowman Miller (2011) calls a ‘need to know’ to a ‘need to share’ culture.
Also, while this article shows that all three concepts are present in Danish, American and British intelligence practices, one must recognize a cultural diversity in the use of these concepts of communication: diversity with respect to the different organizational cultures of the intelligence services – foreign or domestic – and with respect to differences in national cultures.
In what follows I will not go into detail about the cultural differences, but rather focus on how each of the three concepts has a distinctive character: how they politically function to write, rewrite and challenge conventional understandings of the authority relation between the services and civil society.
First concept: communication as awareness
The first concept of communication as awareness is, contrary to the other concepts treated below, not aimed at spurring civil action or mobilizing the public to the management of new threats. Rather, this conceptual discourse describes communication as a means to create accountability in the institutions by creating a general democratic public awareness. Openness and secrecy are the defining counter-concepts, as the concept of communication relies on the classical dilemma between the need for securing the national interest against the need for democratic debate. The concept of communication comes, in this way, to describe a solution to a classical dilemma between that of upholding the ability of the state – in the face of threats to the nation – to act authoritatively versus a general democratic need for civil society to hold the state accountable for its actions. This discourse on communication you can find almost everywhere in the Western world. Typically, we see it in executive speeches published by the services, where information sharing typically is explained as a matter of ‘understanding’ or ‘trusting’ the actions of the authorities.
A review of the Danish and British security intelligence practice on information-sharing demonstrates an approach to counter-terrorism and other security threats that rely strongly on such notions of openness, secrecy and trust. The former director of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6), Sir John Sawers, argues,
‘Secret organisations need to stay secret, even if we present an occasional public face, as I am doing today… Without the trust of agents, the anonymity of our staff, the confidence of partners, we would not get the intelligence. The lives of everyone living here would be less safe. The United Kingdom would be more vulnerable to the unexpected, the vicious and the extreme’.9 Similar examples can be found in the Danish and American debates. As a former naval intelligence officer and historian, Warren F. Kimball, writes in a note about the ‘CIA and openness’: ‘But why worry about openness and declassification at all? Why take even the slightest risk in order to satisfy the curiosity of historians or journalists supposedly looking for something bizarre and sensational? Simply put, the United States of America is a democracy, and democracies cannot survive in secret…How can the American government be accountable to its public without jeopardizing the security of the nation? The answer is simple and profound – common sense’.’10 Again, the value of democracy becomes the underlying argument for communication vis-à-vis the public.
In the case of Denmark, the security intelligence agency compares itself to a ‘normal’ bureaucratic institution, stating that: ‘Like other public authorities, the Danish Security Intelligence Agency, must be prepared to be accountable to the public with regard to the way in which the business is exercised and, not least, the use of public funds.’ This quote, like in the one on the CIA (from Kimball, above), witnesses an institution that sees openne...
