The Joint Intelligence Bureau: (Not So) Secret Intelligence for the Post-War World

Abstract

In 1946 veteran British intelligence officer Kenneth Strong undertook the Directorship of a new intelligence organization, the Joint Intelligence Bureau (JIB). The JIB absorbed the responsibilities of several wartime intelligence organs, and was responsible for economic, topographic, and aspects of scientific intelligence on an inter-service basis. Its responsibilities grew over the following 18 years; most notably, it absorbed atomic intelligence in 1957. When the Defence Intelligence Staff was created in 1964, absorbing the JIB and the individual Service agencies, JIB was at its heart and Kenneth Strong its first Director. The organization conducted key work in the early Cold War, was at the centre of an international network of Joint Intelligence Bureaux, and was an important stepping stone in the movement to centralize military and military-relevant intelligence in Britain – but the historiography pays it surprisingly little attention. This paper introduces the JIB and various aspects of its work, and demonstrates that its low profile in the historiography is unjustified.     

A Higher Form of Intelligence: Hugh Trevor-Roper and Wartime British Secret Service

Throughout his distinguished career, the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper was known in many incarnations and guises: the ‘sleuth of Oxford’; Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford; the Spectator's Mercurius Oxoniensis; Baron Dacre of Glanton; and Master of Peterhouse College. In addition, he was to gain wider notoriety in the early 1980s as the man who helped authenticate the forged Hitler Diaries. Nevertheless, his wartime embodiment as a British intelligence officer is one facet of his personal history that has never before been addressed by scholars in any great depth. Using previously unpublished material from Trevor-Roper's memoirs and personal papers, as well as excerpts from the Guy Liddell Diaries, this article aims to highlight the fact that, contrary to the impression engendered by F.H. Hinsley's dry and depersonalized multi-volume official history, British Intelligence in the Second World War, Major H.R. Trevor-Roper, and many other intelligence officers like him, not only had a ‘good war’, but a rich and colourful one. If historians are to escape the late Sir Maurice Oldfield's indictment of that official history, namely, that it was written ‘by a committee, about committees, for a committee’, they might do worse than begin to reappraise the role of the individual in the context of Britain's intelligence effort during 1939–45. The late Lord Dacre, so this article argues, is one such individual requiring further study.     

Intelligence Studies Centers: Making Scholarship on Intelligence Analysis Useful

Abstract

Improving intelligence analysis requires bridging the gap between scholarship and practice. Intelligence studies as an academic discipline is not very theoretical compared to the more established disciplines of political science and international relations. In terms of conceptual depth, levels of abstraction and theoretical development, even the theoretical portions of the academic intelligence studies literature could be described as policy relevant and potentially useful for practitioners, including intelligence analysts. Yet despite this orientation to the practitioner, there is still a substantial gap between scholars and practitioners, thus replicating within a more applied context the conventional theory/practice divide that exists in other fields. Those fields do, however, possess a variety of ideas and recommendations that could be used to bring scholarship on intelligence analysis closer to practice. If implemented, these ideas might help actualize the benefits of scholarship that are as yet still unrealized potential.     

Managers of Analysts: The Other Half of Intelligence Analysis

The literature on intelligence analysis has a glaring hole: assessment of the management of analysts and their work. This gap is striking because managers influence all aspects of analysis and share responsibility with analysts for analytic successes and failures. While many managers ably recruit, train, mentor, and manage their analysts, they also are responsible for pathologies that negatively affect analysis and are often incorrectly attributed to analysts. Accurate understanding of the roles and influence of managers should change scholars’ views of the processes of analysis and better balance attention on analysts and managers.     

Intelligence Analysis

American intelligence analysts have been severely criticized for failing to anticipate the 9/11 Al Qaeda attacks and for the ill-advised invasion of Iraq. The resulting Intelligence Community reorganization, intended to repair these presumed deficiencies, reflects a misunderstanding of what intelligence analysts can do and where responsibility for political and military decisions lie. In fact, the Intelligence Community is far more diversified in its tasks than is generally realized. Where analysis is done and for whom makes a large difference in its effectiveness. Moreover, changing technology is altering how it is done, where, and by whom. The border between what is ‘strategic’ or ‘national’ intelligence and ‘tactical’ intelligence is much diminished. At the same time, intelligence analysts all too often fail to incorporate the growing amounts of open source information, as well as analytic concepts and theories available from academic and scholarly literature.     

Mussolini's Secret War in the Mediterranean and the Middle East: Italian Intelligence and the British Response

Little is known of the history, structure and operations of the Italian intelligence services in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. The challenge brought by Fascist Italy to the security of the British and French imperial systems is at the heart of this article, which sets out to assess not only the imperial dimension of Fascist intelligence but also the response provided by Britain's and France's colonial authorities to Mussolini's ambitions in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. An examination of British and French intelligence archival material sheds new light upon perceptions of power and threat afforded by British and French policy-makers keen to maintain political control over their colonial and client states. The paper suggests that despite comprising a multitude of competing agencies, the Fascist services could rely on the work of motivated individuals and on the support of Italian diplomatic representatives overseas. Their ability to establish relations – although short-lived – with Arab nationalist leaders and their intense activities in British colonies, protectorates and mandates generated concern within the British Foreign and Colonial Offices. Meanwhile, poor intelligence coordination and assessment coupled with misguided assumptions about the nature of Arab nationalism hindered Britain's response to the challenge mounted by Mussolini's regime.     

TICOM: The Last Great Secret of World War II

Recent releases from the National Security Agency reveal details of TICOM, the mysterious 1945 operation targeting Germany's cryptologic secrets. Often mentioned by such authors as Kahn, Bamford, Parrish and Aldrich, for the first time the public has access to this information. This article provides a review in greater depth than has been previously covered in the open literature of the history of the TICOM operation, and its resulting intelligence, including the Germans' efforts against Soviet communications. In addition, some comments are provided on why TICOM has remained classified long after other similar information from World War II was declassified, and why locating TICOM documents is still difficult.     

The Secret of West Indian Success

For nearly a century, black immigrants from the West Indies have enjoyed greater economic success than African Americans. Several explanations have been proposed for this trend, but until now, none of these explanations have been subjected to systematic scrutiny. Recent efforts to adjudicate among them indicate that West Indian success can be attributed entirely to the “selectivity of migration”. This phrase refers to the tendency of people who migrate to be more talented and determined than the compatriots they leave behind. One implication of this discovery is that sympathetic observers should stop exhorting African Americans to behave more like West Indians. Such pleas are inappropriate because West Indian success is a consequence of choosing to move, not a consequence of Caribbean birth. A second implication is that persons of West Indian background remain vulnerable to racism. The new findings provide no evidence that positive selection protects West Indians from the negative stereotypes that Americans associate with black skin.

Congressional Intelligence Oversight: The Electoral Disconnection

This article seeks to reconcile congressional oversight models in theory with oversight realities in intelligence. For nearly three decades, political scientists have argued that Congress controls the bureaucracy – and in surprisingly efficient ways. Yet the history of intelligence oversight suggests the opposite. We take a fresh look at the logic and empirics of police patrol and fire alarm models and find that neither explains intelligence oversight well. Both rely on assumptions, such as the presence of strong and plentiful interest groups, which characterize domestic policy but not US intelligence policy. Our data – comparing committee hearing activities, legislative productivity, and interest groups across different policy domains between 1985 and 2005 – reveal that oversight varies dramatically by policy issue, and that intelligence almost always ranks at the bottom. Ironically, the same electoral incentives that generate robust oversight in some policy areas turn out to be far weaker in intelligence.     

Making Intelligence Analysis More Intelligent: Using Numeric Probabilities

A number of researchers have advocated the use of explicit numeric probabilities in the drafting and presentation of intelligence assessments. A trial of this methodology by a Canadian assessment unit has demonstrated that numeric probabilities can be used effectively in the preparation of intelligence reports. The practice leads analysts to pay greater attention to the estimative judgments they make and allows for greater transparency in understanding the degree of certainty that they attach to their conclusions. The use of numeric probabilities highlights the need for a consistent mapping standard for verbal probability terms. However, implementing the methodology requires overcoming a widely shared aversion among analysts and intelligence managers to thinking in numeric terms.     

Intelligence Analysis Theory: Explaining and Predicting Analytic Responsibilities

Theoretical work involves explanation and prediction, but thus far there has been little scholarly work explaining and predicting the role of intelligence analysts in support of foreign and national security policies. Without a theory of intelligence, it becomes difficult to decide what the appropriate substantive analytical responsibilities of the intelligence community should be. Accordingly, a theory of foreign intelligence analysis is necessary. This paper presents a theoretical framework developed during the immediate post-Cold War timeframe to explain why there was such a wide variety of perspectives regarding the future need for intelligence, embeds these ideas within the existing intelligence theory literature, applies this framework more generally in a way that can be used to explain variations in the substantive coverage of intelligence analysis in the past and predict possible variations in the future, and then tests the theory's ability to explain the analytical focus of domestic intelligence organizations.     

The Intelligence Paradigm

Ephraim Kam, Surprise Attack: The Victim's Perspective (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988). Pp.266. $25.00.