Intelligence studies: The emergence of the British school

Christopher Andrew and Jeremy Noakes (eds.), Intelligence and International Relations 1900–1945 (Exeter: University of Exeter Publications, 1987), pp.320; £10.00 (paperback).     

British Intelligence through the Eyes of the Stasi: What the Stasi's Records Show about the Operations of British Intelligence in Cold War Germany

Abstract

The German parliament's Law on the Stasi Records, passed in 1991, extended the principle of freedom of information to the records of a Communist security service. By so doing, it has given historians, former targets of Stasi intelligence collection and others an unprecedented insight into the operations of such a service. Enough records of the Stasi's trials department have been made available to reconstruct a picture of the work of British intelligence agencies in the years 1945–61, and above all the work of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). They show that SIS was a very skilful service which obtained the high-grade intelligence it sought. However, SIS's work in East Germany was undone in the late 1950s by the treason of the KGB's penetration agent in it, George Blake.     

9/11: The Failure of Strategic Intelligence

Professor Goodman analyses the failure of US intelligence prior to 9/11 setting the context in the 1980s and 1990s. He dissects the flaws of the CIA, FBI and the Pentagon. He argues that the State Department should be strengthened because its capabilities are the most important. He also recommends that the FBI be split in two and that the CIA's budget be disclosed.     

British Intelligence and the Mandate of Palestine: Threats to British National Security Immediately After the Second World War

Recently declassified Security Service (MI5) records reveal, for the first time, the full extent of the threat that Zionist terrorism posed to British national security immediately after the Second World War. It is well established within the historical literature that after 1945 Britain faced violent campaigns by Jewish terrorist groups in the Mandate of Palestine. Hitherto unacknowledged in the historiography, however, is the fact that the threat of Zionist terrorism extended from Palestine to Britain itself. This article studies the nature of the threat posed by Zionist terrorism within Britain after 1945, and explores the counter-terrorist measures that MI5 devised to meet it. Overall, as this article shows, MI5's concerns with Zionist terrorism after 1945 offer a striking new interpretation of the history of the early Cold War.     

Voluntary Organisations and Community Politics: Norwegian and British Comparisons

The study reported in this article compares local political activity of voluntary organizations in a Norwegian and an English city — Tromsø and Birmingham. The two cities display rather striking structural similarities with respect to the relative number of organizations as well as to organizational membership. The relative distribution of major types of organizations is also rather similar, although there is a greater degree of organizational specialization in the English city.
With respect to political activity of the organizations the two cities are, however, quite different. While two thirds of the organizations in Tromsø have been active in local political matters, this holds true for less than 30 per cent of the organizations in Birmingham.
This difference is attributed to the finding that in the Norwegian case local government assists organizations with goods and services, while in the English case organizations have to depend on their own internal resources. An additional factor is that Norwegian organizations, when compared to their English counterparts, have greater access to political decision-making bodies.     

What the Intelligence Community Got Right About Iraq

Although widely criticized for inaccurate estimates of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in 2002, the United States Intelligence Community was far more prescient about the likely consequences of a military campaign to remove Saddam Hussein. Intelligence assessments of the challenges likely to be faced by a post-war Iraq were widely disseminated within the Executive Branch and Congress and may have served to justify the Bush Administration's decision to undertake extensive reconstruction efforts rather than to turn power over at once to Iraqi leaders.     

British Intelligence and Propaganda during the 'Confrontation', 1963-1966

This study examines the importance of British intelligence and propaganda in the Confrontation with Indonesia. It shows that Britain had access to human and signals intelligence on Indonesia, which influenced British policy and strategy in several ways. In particular, signals intelligence gave London the confidence to launch 'Claret' cross border raids against Indonesia from 1965. The study also reveals that Britain mounted an aggressive propaganda campaign against Indonesia during the Confrontation and especially after an abortive coup attempt in 1965. British propaganda successfully encouraged the army to destroy the Indonesian communist party, remove President Sukarno from power and end the Confrontation.     

From polls to votes to seats: Forecasting the 2010 British general election

This paper outlines and discusses techniques for three stages in forecasting parliamentary seats from British opinion polls: adjusting and aggregating published vote-intention figures from across different polls; forecasting how public opinion might change before election day; and predicting the seat totals from the forecasted election-day vote shares. Specifically, we consider a state-space model for opinion polls which correct for house effects and other sources of survey error, the estimation of the historical relationship between polls and the election-day share of the vote, and a probabilistic approach to predicting the winner in each constituency.     

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.     

British Intelligence and the 1916 Mediation Mission of Colonel Edward M. House

Colonel Edward M. House, the close personal confidant of American President Woodrow Wilson, disembarked in Great Britain in January 1916 on a mission to bring the First World War to a close under the auspices of American mediation. Although his mission, which culminated in a secret pact between the United States and Great Britain known as the House-Grey Memorandum, has been studied by several scholars, the involvement of British intelligence with respect to that mission has never received more than cursory attention. Through a careful analysis of the surviving documents, this article reconstructs British intelligence's activities with respect to House's mission, examines the countermeasures that House employed as he attempted to protect the secrecy of his negotiations, delineates the role played by different British intelligence agencies and assesses their response to their findings.     

The 9/11 Terrorist Attacks: A Failure of Policy Not Strategic Intelligence Analysis

Abstract

The 9/11 terrorist attacks have been intensively examined as both tactical and strategic intelligence failures but less attention has been paid to the policy failures which preceded them. Perhaps this is due to the presumption that intelligence analysis influences decision-making as a precursor to and foundation for policy. This assumption about the influence of analysis on decision deserves a much closer examination. The 9/11 terrorist attacks provide a good case to study for greater understanding of the influence, or lack of influence, that intelligence analysis has on decision-making. Specifically, the 9/11 Commission Report identifies as a significant failure the lack of a National Intelligence Estimate on the terrorist threat between 1998 and 2001, and implies that if one had been produced it might have helped enable decision-makers to prevent the 9/11 attacks. In other words, a failure of strategic intelligence analysis lay at the foundation of the failure to prevent 9/11. But was this really the case? This article takes a closer look at the case of the missing National Intelligence Estimate by first evaluating what decision-makers knew about the threat prior to the 9/11 attacks, the policies they were implementing at the time, and the extent to which the hypothetical National Intelligence Estimate described by the 9/11 Commission would have mattered in terms of influencing their judgement and policy for the better. It concludes that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were more a failure of policy than strategic intelligence analysis.     

Policy Lessons from Iraq on Managing Uncertainty in Intelligence Assessment: Why the Strategic/Tactical Distinction Matters

This paper focuses on how pre-existing policy priorities and goals among policy elites in the US, UK, and Australia encouraged the blurring of strategic and tactical intelligence assessment as a mechanism for legitimising the Iraq invasion. Through the selective use and interpretation of sometimes vague or unsubstantiated tactical and technical intelligence and the many uncertainties it contained, proponents of the war were able to undermine existing strategic assessments on Iraq by introducing a range of possible, but largely unsubstantiated, threat scenarios as justification for military action. The paper argues that in so far as intelligence reforms are needed, they should be focused primarily on the interface between analysis and policy making, and the issue of how policy makers interpret and understand the uncertainties that intelligence assessments necessarily contain.     

Connecting Intelligence and Theory: Intelligence Liaison and International Relations

Intelligence liaison increased exponentially during the so-called ‘War on Terror’. Today it continues as the most significant dimension of intelligence, including impacting on accountability and oversight considerations. Nevertheless, the intelligence liaison phenomenon remains largely under-studied and substantially under-theorized. In this article, preliminary suggestions are offered concerning how this dearth of theory can be addressed. Firstly, the relevance of international relations theory and other bodies of theory, together with significant approaches concerning how international relations – extending to how intelligence and intelligence-related phenomena (such as, in this article, intelligence co-operation) – can be studied, are explored. These theories, and equally, approaches, are arguably most appropriate when deployed in an arrangement of ‘complex co-existence plurality’ across the different interrelated levels of experience and analysis, and they offer more effective explanations when intelligence liaison is disaggregated into at least eight systemic attributes or variables. More broadly, the suggestion that international relations theory, and indeed theory generally, is ‘irrelevant’ to intelligence studies is simultaneously challenged.     

The secret service department: a British Intelligence Bureau in mid-Victorian London,September 1867 to April 1868

In December 1867 the Earl of Derby's government established a ‘Secret Service Department’ in London to extend Dublin Castle's anti- Fenian intelligence network to England and to contend with the perceived threat posed by domestic and international secret societies. This secret detective force – an early English intelligence bureau – lasted only until April 1868, but its disbandment reflected practical and administrative difficulties rather than a pervading prejudice towards spying. Indeed, the motivations for founding the department and the actions of those involved suggest that long before the establishment of the Special Branch in the 1880s, need rather than principle determined official actions in regard to political espionage.