Improving the democratic accountability of EU intelligence

The 9/11 attack and the ‘war on terrorism’ have been followed by a discussion on intelligence deficits. However, surprisingly little attention has been given to the issue of agencies' democratic accountability. This article argues the benefits of oversight for democracy and its significance for the improvement of services' performance. It puts EU intelligence agencies, which have hardly been the subject of any debate, at the centre. While acknowledging that the major threats to civil liberties of European citizens are posed by national intelligence agencies, it identifies the establishment of mechanisms for quality control of EU intelligence as the main challenge at the EU level.     

Balancing Democratic Civilian Control with Effectiveness of Intelligence in Romania: Lessons Learned and Best/Worst Practices Before and After NATO and EU Integration

This article reviews Romania's intelligence reform after 1989. Specifically, it looks at intelligence reform before and after Romania's accession to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 2004, and the European Union (EU) in 2007. It finds that Romania has made considerable progress in intelligence reform. That is because Romania, which expressed its desire and commitment to join NATO/EU after 1989, has worked hard to comply with these organizations’ membership demands (including intelligence reform). After NATO/EU integration (when demands on balancing control and effectiveness virtually vanished), despite continued openness efforts made by agencies, control/oversight diluted. Thus, post-NATO/EU, while effectiveness is being strengthened, democratic control lessens.     

Agency Autonomy Actually: Managerial Strategies,Legitimacy, and the Early Development of the European Union's Agencies for Drug and Food Safety Regulation

ABSTRACT

In recent decades, a series of regulatory agencies has been created at the European Union (EU) level. The existing literature on EU agencies focuses either on autonomy as a reason for the creation of such agencies or on the autonomy that they are granted by design. As a result, we do not know much about how EU agencies' actual autonomy comes about. This article therefore probes into the early development of two specific agencies. On the basis of document analysis and interviews with agency staff members, national experts, EU officials, external stakeholders, and clients, it explores why, in practice, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) seems to have developed a higher level of autonomy than the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), even though on paper EMA appears to be as autonomous as, or if anything, less autonomous than EFSA. The article demonstrates the importance of investigating the managerial strategies of EU regulatory agencies to understand the actual practice of their autonomy and points to legitimacy as a key condition affecting the early development of such agencies.     

The Munich Olympics Massacre and the Development of Counter-Terrorism in Australia

Counter-terrorism is a product of government, identifying as its target a kind of violence defined as terrorism. This article explores a particular moment in its development, as an intersection of international, national and bureaucratic responses to the Munich Olympics massacre of 1972. Australian understandings of the development of counter-terrorism have been dominated by a number of themes – principally by the Hilton Bombing of 1978 and the subsequent acceleration of security restructuring during the Fraser years, by the collapse of the Cold War focus of the security and intelligence agencies at the end of the 1980s and then by the ‘war on terror’ following 9/11 and the Bali bombing. Counter-terrorist planning was however an emerging business of government in the 1970s, in Australia as in its alliance partner the United States. While the Hope Royal Commission into intelligence agencies (1974–7) has dominated attention in later accounts of the development of counter-terrorism, a 1972 Interdepartmental Committee on Terrorism and Violence in Australia anticipated many of its concerns. In this developing concern with terrorism, the role and interest of the domestic intelligence agency (ASIO) at this time was limited. This paper contextualizes the Munich massacre as one of the factors shaping a rethinking of security and policing strategies in the early 1970s, a moment in the emergence of a modern government of terrorism.     

Securing the Globe: Intelligence and the Post-9/11 Shift from 'Liddism' to 'Drainism'

Significant shifts have been underway in security intelligence agencies and processes since the 11 September 2001 attacks in the United States. Whereas the previous quarter of a century had seen a considerable democratization of intelligence, the article examines whether UK and US government responses risk the re-creation of 'security states'. Changes since 9/11 in law, doctrine, the intelligence process - targeting, collection, analysis, dissemination and action - and oversight are considered and it is concluded that there is a danger of the rebirth of independent security states.     

James Bond,Ian Fleming and intelligence: breaking down the boundary between the ‘real’ and the ‘imagined’

This article looks to answer the question of why the James Bond novels and films should matter to scholars of intelligence and national security. We argue that Bond is important because, rightly or wrongly, and not without inaccuracy, it has filled a public knowledge vacuum about intelligence agencies and security threats. On another level, this article explores the unexpected yet important interactions between Bond and the actual world of intelligence. We contend that the orthodoxy dictating that Bond and spying are diametric opposites—one is the stuff of fantasy, the other is reality—is problematic, for the worlds of Bond and real intelligence collide, overlap and intermesh in fascinating and significant ways. In short, Bond is important for scholars because he is an international cultural icon that continues to operate at the borders of fiction and reality, framing and constructing not only public perceptions but also to some degree intelligence practices. Core narratives of intelligence among not only the public but also policymakers and intelligence officers are imagined, sustained, deepened, produced and reproduced through and by Bond. We conclude that Bond and intelligence should be thought of as co-constitutive; the series shapes representations and perceptions of intelligence, but it also performs a productive role, influencing the behaviours of intelligence agencies themselves.     

Spies and Scientologists: ASIO and a controversial minority religion in Cold War Australia, 1956–83

Among all the controversial New Religious Movements to emerge since the Second World War, the Church of Scientology has arguably been subject to more scrutiny by domestic and international intelligence agencies than any other non-Islamic alternative religious group. While owing to the nature of intelligence gathering scholarly accounts of this have often been one-dimensional and brief, the situation in Australia resulting from the Archives Act 1983 has meant that historians of both intelligence agencies and new religions now have access to a significant amount of documentation illustrating the interactions between the Church of Scientology and the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) for the period from 1956 to 1983. This period witnessed vacillating fortunes for the Church of Scientology which saw it become the subject of legislative bans in three Australian state jurisdictions during the late 1960s, as well as it launching a high profile, but ultimately unsuccessful, legal case against ASIO in 1979. While never considered a serious security risk by ASIO, the Church of Scientology played a minor role in a number of important events in the history of ASIO particularly during the 1970s, including participating in a wider activist campaign which sought to curtail ASIO’s operations during this period and making submissions to the first Royal Commission into the Australian Intelligence Services under Justice Robert Marsden Hope.     

Managing Dynamic Public Sector Networks: Effectiveness,Performance, and a Methodological Framework in the Field of National Security

ABSTRACT

Networks are increasing in number and in importance across the security field as a means of providing inter-agency coordination. Based on a large qualitative study of networks in the field of national security in Australia, this article aims to advance our knowledge of the internal properties of public sector networks in the field of national security and the conditions shaping their performance. It puts forward a multi-level theoretical framework involving five interdependent levels of analysis—structural, cultural, policy, technological, and relational—which aims to account for the internal properties of networks and examines each of these levels in relation to public sector networks in the field of national security. Using detailed interviews with senior members of security, law enforcement, and intelligence agencies, the article aims to highlight the potential lessons this framework has for strategically organizing and managing dynamic networks within and beyond the field of national security.     

Plots,murders, and money: oversight bodies evaluating the effectiveness of surveillance technology

Intelligence agencies routinely use surveillance technology to perform surveillance on digital data. This practice raises many questions that feed a societal debate, including whether the surveillance technology is effective in achieving the given security goal, whether it is cost-efficient, and whether it is proportionate. Oversight bodies are important actors in this debate, overseeing budgets, legal and privacy matters, and the performance of intelligence agencies. This paper examines how oversight bodies evaluate the questions above, using documents produced by American and British oversight mechanisms.     

Britain Betwixt and Between: Uk SIGINT Alliance Strategy's Transatlantic and European Connections

Intelligence alliances are among the most intimate and enduring international security relationships. International partnerships have proven to be especially relevant to signals intelligence (SIGINT), where collaboration among allies has been crucial for extending the range and scope of geographic coverage. One of the earliest and most enduring SIGINT alliances dates back to the Second World War, when Great Britain and the United States collaborated in intercepting German and Japanese electronic communications and shared the intelligence product. This Anglo-American wartime partnership subsequently evolved and expanded during the post-war and Cold War eras, and continues up to the present as the core of a wider plurilateral SIGINT alliance involving Australia, Canada and New Zealand as well. Britain's accession to the European Communities, now the European Union (EU), did not, at first, detract from its transatlantic intelligence connection. By the late 1990s, however, European partners had begun to challenge Britain's alliance strategy for SIGINT, in particular, out of heightened concern for their own communications security and in response to the increasing salience of economic intelligence in contemporary international affairs. British statecraft now found itself confronted by mounting pressure from EU partners to reorient the UK intelligence away from its long-standing transatlantic SIGINT connection, so as to undermine American reach and also promote a potentially competing European capability to achieve global coverage in signals intelligence collection. While the 2003 war against Iraq certainly consolidated the trans-Atlantic alliance between the UK and USA, while alienating the Americans from the so-called 'Old Europe' led by France and Germany, the longer term spin-offs from that conflict seem likely to exacerbate those pressures on British intelligence strategy.     

The intelligence of fear

Intelligence agencies long have brought unwelcome news to civilian political and military masters – and sometimes suffered severely for it. Even in Western democracies, insecurities and outright fear produce behavioral responses by individuals and defensive institutional reactions that distort normal intelligence activities and affect the overall performance of intelligence agencies. Causes of fear include: political leaders, overseers, agency managers, and the security elements of their organizations. This article highlights the importance of institutional factors, especially organizational cultures and incentives, on the activities and overall performance of intelligence agencies and suggests that motivated biases, caused by personal and organizational self-interest and fears, are more significant causes of intelligence failures than are commonly believed.     

Sudan's Security Agencies: Fragmentation,Visibility and Mimicry, 1908–89

This article contends that, in the period under study, government security agencies in both colonial and post-colonial Sudan have failed to dominate society. It attributes this failure to the limited resources and limited ambitions of the state, and the fact that its security organs were thus weakly institutionalized. The fact that these failures persisted after independence, in spite of the efforts of post-colonial governments to expand their intelligence agencies, demonstrated the divisions within the state and the extent to which it could be captured by competing political and social groups.     

The use of intelligence by insurgent groups: the North Vietnamese in the Second Indochina War as a case study

The need to define intelligence is understandable because the secrecy surrounding it can almost make it appear too amorphous to study. In most definitions, the authors not only attempt to define what intelligence is but also who does it. Until recently the focus has been on the state with occasional focus on sub-state actors such as law enforcement agencies. After 9/11 there was a shift from the study of inter-state intelligence to the use of intelligence against non-state actors such as Al Qaeda. The literature still treated these non-state actors as something to be acted upon rather than intelligence actors in their own right. By examining the North Vietnamese use of intelligence during the Second Indochina War this article takes a step to redress that oversight. This article will discuss the North Vietnamese use of intelligence in the context of definitions of intelligence and intelligence actors and will use John Gentry’s proposed model of violent non-state actor intelligence as its analytical framework.     

From laboratory to the WMD Commission: how academic research influences intelligence agencies

Academic research can improve national security, yet the process by which findings flow from the ivory tower to intelligence agencies is not well understood by scholars. This article addresses this gap through an exploratory case study of when research impacted intelligence: the incorporation of cognitive biases research in intelligence analysis. The results of this study illustrate the importance of idea entrepreneurs—individuals who promote academic research—as well as the need for making academic findings applicable to intelligence practitioners. These results, while based on a single case, suggest new avenues for scholarship exploring knowledge utilization in intelligence.     

Combatting terror in Europe: Euro-Israeli counterterrorism intelligence cooperation in the Club de Berne (1971–1972)

How do intelligence agencies cooperate to counter terrorism and to what extent can it be (ab)used for political purposes? This article focuses on the Club de Berne, an intelligence liaison forum that was founded in 1969 by nine Western European countries and which was also linked to the United States and Israel. This article explores the mechanisms of counterterrorism intelligence-sharing in the early 1970s and examines the motives for cooperation within this framework. On the basis of large-scale recently declassified intelligence records, the article uncovers new aspects in the history of European security cooperation with Israel and the United States, and hopes to lay the groundwork for broader theoretical reflections about counterterrorism intelligence cooperation.     

Covert Operations and Official Collaboration: British Intelligence's Dual Approach to Ireland during World War II

Neutral Ireland posed a unique challenge to the wartime British intelligence community and the latter responded by adopting a dual approach. On the one hand, it carried out covert intelligence operations in Irish territory, involving the Service intelligence branches, the Ministry of Information, and, most importantly, the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). On the other hand, unprecedented cooperation developed between military, police and intelligence agencies from Britain and Ireland, and in particular between MI5 and Irish military intelligence (G2). For most of the war British intelligence pursued this joint strategy of covert activity and official collaboration, and MI5 and SIS shared responsibility for Ireland. However, there was a gradual shift of emphasis towards cooperation and it was eventually concluded that the MI5-G2 link could serve all Britain's security needs. This article charts this evolution and places it within the context of Anglo-Irish wartime political relations.     

Policing Uncertainty: Intelligence,Security and Risk

Today, the idea of risk is ubiquitous, a presence in debates across a range of fields, from investment banking to politics, from anthropology and sociology to health, environmental and cultural studies. While this ubiquity attests to the importance of the concept it is at the same time a potential weakness in that it injects the term into a wide range of debates in each of which its meaning can be subject to different emphases and meanings. The notion of risk is of obvious importance to security intelligence, but here too its ubiquity has had an impact on specificity of meaning. While the term is widely used in both the profession and study of intelligence, its usage can carry different meanings and it can be used interchangeably with linked terms. Given the importance of the idea of risk to intelligence, clarity of meaning is essential. This article sets out to consider the meaning of, and relationship between, uncertainty and risk in a security intelligence context, propose a framework on which a common understanding can be built, and illustrate how this can help in thinking about the nature and role of security intelligence.     

Harry Howe Ransom and American intelligence studies

In this interview Harry Howe Ransom, a leading American scholar of intelligence studies over the past 50 years, discusses how he entered the field and his views regarding some key intelligence topics. Foremost on his research agenda has been the study of whether in democratic societies secret agencies can operate side-by-side with an otherwise open government without violating basic civil liberties – the difficult balancing act between the need for security, on the one hand, and the cherished value of liberty, on the other. He has also been a leading critic of intelligence politicization, noting in this interview that there is a tendency for intelligence systems to provide information they think their top bosses want to hear, and for the top bosses – more often than not – to do what they wish in spite of intelligence to the contrary. Professor Ransom began his research into intelligence as a young political scientist at Harvard University and continued this work throughout his subsequent distinguished career at Vanderbilt University and into his retirement years.     

Information sharing,secrecy and trust among law enforcement and secret service institutions in the European Union

Abstract

Transnational information sharing among security agencies in the European Union and beyond has grown considerably more important over the past decades. Centralised databases and numerous formal and informal networks now facilitate cooperation and information sharing. However, sharing intelligence may not only conflict with the protection of fundamental rights (data protection/privacy; presumption of innocence), but also with the organisational culture of institutions that are built upon secrecy. Police agencies often keep knowledge about individual cases and their strategies secret as long as possible. Intelligence services build their work and strategies upon secrecy even more. This paper analyses the variations of secrecy that can be observed for police agencies and secret services, and the relationship between information sharing among security agencies, secrecy, trust, transparency and accountability. In a normative perspective, the paper explores answers to the questions of how secret the work of security agencies should be in democratic rule of law systems and how accountability can be improved without making these institutions work less effectively.     

SOE's ‘Prosper’ Disaster of 1943

International economic issues have become a foremost government concern since the start of the global financial crisis, leaving economic security increasingly linked to more traditional concepts of national interest and politico-military security. This prioritization has been reflected in the recent requirements of the United Kingdom's intelligence and security actors. Yet, scholarly research has neglected the relationship between intelligence, international economics, and contemporary security policy. Taking current requirements as a catalyst, this article draws on contemporary British history to explore when intelligence can be used to protect economic security and when intelligence actors can best use economic measures to achieve broader politico-military goals. The use of secret intelligence in the economic sphere does, however, have certain limitations and it should therefore only be employed when necessary.