National Intelligence University: a half century educating the next generation of U.S. Intelligence Community Leaders

Founded in 1962, the National Intelligence University has evolved over more than five decades into living up to its current vision as ‘The Center of Academic Life for the Intelligence Community.’ With the intelligence reforms post-9/11 and the development of the NIU concept, the mission has changed from a military-centric focus of instruction to educating a more diverse audience from throughout the IC, both military and civilian, full-time and part-time, active and Reserves, with an emphasis on taking higher education to an interagency clientele spread globally and desiring different learning outcomes. The result is a rapid growth in offsite academic centers and a resurgence of certificate programs geared to professionals who already have a degree but wish to enhance their credentials in intelligence specialty fields. There is also an effort to revive concentrations and programs of study. This article outlines the steps NIU is taking to make itself more flexible and marketable to a growing and demanding academic audience that is much more than the uniformed DoD students who matriculated in the past with full-time resident study as their only option.     

A retrospective on retrospective voting

This paper critically reviews the extensive literature on retrospective voting in response to economic conditions. Each of the major types of analyses which have been performed — time-series analyses of national vote totals, presidential popularity, and cross-sectional analyses of individual survey responses — has raised several interesting and important questions. The answers that have been obtained, however, are only partial and limited, as each of these approaches entails serious problems of estimation and interpretation. Further progress in this area, we argue, requires explicit treatment of conceptual and statistical issues that have hindered previous research: the dynamic formulation of expectations and preferences, the incidence of policy (and nonpolicy) effects across the population, and notions of incumbency and political responsibility.     

Horst Hesse: A cold war military intelligence mole

Drawing upon East German Stasi archives, this article presents the story of Horst Hesse's penetration as a double agent into a US Military Intelligence office in Würzburg, Germany during 1955 and 1956. While military personnel were celebrating a German holiday, Hesse broke into the office with two accomplices and absconded with two safes containing the names of MI agents in East Germany. Many were arrested and some were sentenced. The account provides important positive and negative lessons for intelligence tradecraft.     

Framing the Oxymoron: A New Paradigm for Intelligence Ethics

Despite some arguments to the contrary, I argue that because ethics benefit, rather than harm, the intelligence profession they should be considered an inherent part of intelligence studies. The literature largely presents intelligence ethics as a two-sided debate between teleologists and deontologists. I propose that ethical justifications should instead be considered along a progressive spectrum drawn from the work of moral psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg. Such a spectrum has numerous applications for gauging the moral arguments of individual practitioners of intelligence. I illustrate this using the dilemma of targeted political assassination – first in a hypothetical context, and finally using examples from the investigations of the 1975 Church Committee.     

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.     

Libya's civil war: the essential briefing

Libya has been in a state of civil war since July 2014. Here, IISS Strategic Comments attempts to make sense of the politics, the conflict and the economics – and potential future scenarios.     

Colombia's FARC: A Portrait of Insurgent Intelligence

Abstract

The literature on intelligence little describes or comparatively analyzes the intelligence services of insurgent groups. This article partially fills the gap by assessing the intelligence activities of FARC – the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. FARC intelligence displays similarities to, as well as sharp differences from, the intelligence activities of other insurgent groups and established states. Like FARC as a whole, FARC intelligence is decentralized. Its strength is its focus on tactical military intelligence. Collection on strategic political issues, analysis, and counterintelligence are relatively weak. FARC's intelligence weaknesses limit its prospects for strategic success and its intelligence-related vulnerabilities offer the Colombian government opportunities to exploit.