Shifting Currents: Changes in National Intelligence Estimates on the Iran Nuclear Threat

Lost in the political fallout of the Iran National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of 2007 was any discussion about historical parallels and what those might say about intersection between intelligence, policy, and politics. This article argues that the NIEs on the ballistic missile threat of the 1990s offer a useful analogy. In a short period of time, the NIE's assessment of the threat from so-called ‘rogue states’ went from modest to non-existent, provoking charges of politicization, eliciting investigations, and pausing the US missile defense program. A similar sequence of events followed the NIEs on Iran, whose tenor appeared to shift from alarmist in 2005 to dismissive in 2007. If the experience of the ballistic missile NIEs is any guide, then it is not clear that the `cure’– investigations and commissions – are better than the disease. Both cases illustrate the need for the intelligence community to remain detached but not unaware of the policy environment into which these estimates are introduced. They also reaffirm that estimates are just estimates, probabilistic rather than deterministic judgments about future events.     

Glimpses into the Gems of American Intelligence: The President's Daily Brief and the National Intelligence Estimate

The two most prestigious products prepared by the US intelligence agencies for use by decision-makers in Washington, DC, are the President's Daily Brief and the National Intelligence Estimate. The Brief, an example of ‘current intelligence,’ adds value to what policy officials in Washington can learn about world affairs from the best newspapers, especially in the domains of foreign weaponry, activities within closed societies, and the machinations of terrorist organizations. The National Intelligence Estimate, an example of ‘research intelligence,’ has added value, too, on occasion, but has often been wrong. Each of these forms of intelligence has their critics, and the NIE in particular is frequently considered too long a document and too diluted in content. The production of NIEs has varied over the years since 1950, averaging twenty-three a year with a low of five (in 1976) and a high of fifty-six (in 1992).     

US Intelligence Performance and US Policy during the Polish Crisis of 1980–81: Revelations from the Kukliński Files

Drawing on intelligence documents that were recently declassified, this article assesses the quality of US intelligence analysis during the 1980–81 Polish crisis and the impact of the intelligence analysis on US policy toward Poland and the Soviet Union. After discussing the value and limitations of the declassified materials, the article raises questions about US policy during the crisis and discusses how intelligence inputs helped to shape policy. The newly available documents confirm that the US intelligence community's analytical products were often deficient and that these shortcomings put a crimp on US policymakers' choices.     

Halfway down the road to supervision of the Spanish intelligence services

For most of its history the United Nations was reluctant to deal with intelligence and major powers were reluctant to share intelligence with it. But as the UN's peacekeeping operations intensified in some of the world's hot spots in the early 1990s, the UN found it both necessary and wise to create an information analysis capability at UN headquarters in New York. To funnel selected intelligence to the headquarters, several countries (including the US, UK, France and Russia) loaned intelligence officers to the UN's Situation Centre on a secondment basis. This paper describes the activities of the SitCen's Information and Research (I&R) Unit that existed from 1993 to 1999 under the informal motto ‘Keeping an Eye on the World’. Using a case study of I&R reporting on the situation in Eastern Zaire (1996), where UN-run refugee camps were under attack, it is possible to examine the nature and utility of the intelligence provided by the intelligence officers to UN decision-makers and the planners of the Canadian-led multinational force in the region. It reveals that the Unit provided significant and useful intelligence about arms shipments, belligerent activities, and the status of refugees and made several prescient predictions and warnings. The Unit sought to minimize national bias and incomplete information, though both problems were still in evidence. Still, in many ways, the I&R Unit remains a useful model for the development of a future intelligence capability.     

Iraq: The Mother of all intelligence failures

The most important American intelligence failure in Iraq was the widespread belief among top administration officials that Saddam could be overthrown at little cost and successfully replaced by a pro-American regime. We trace the causes of these and related intelligence failures to the administration's hubris. It led the Secretary of Defense and Vice President – the men most responsible for the Iraq decisions – to formulate unrealistic expectations about America's ability to impose its will in the Middle East and to rig the feedback networks in the military and intelligence communities to provide them with confirming estimates while downplaying discrepant information.     

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.     

Trump and the US intelligence community

President Trump has publicly denigrated the value of the United States' intelligence community (IC), imperilling the morale and retention of intelligence officers. Unless he establishes a better working relationship with the IC, the White House not only risks hollowing out the IC but could also wind up politicising the intelligence process and misusing intelligence products.     

Good literature and bad history: The 9/11 commission's tale of strategic intelligence

Uncritical acceptance of the findings of the 9/11 Commission has obscured how the commission intentionally misrepresented pre-attack strategic intelligence on the threat from Al Qaeda. The commission staff used such techniques as highly selective use of material, partial truths, irrelevant references, plays on words, quotations out of context, and suggestive language leading to false inferences to portray as weak what had been a strong strategic analytical performance. The commission's misrepresentation corrupted history, damaged public understanding of the role of intelligence in counterterrorism, and helped to build support for a reorganization scheme that has made US counterterrorist intelligence worse rather than better.     

Burma's intelligence apparatus

Since it regained its independence in 1948, Burma has developed a complex structure of intelligence and specialized security agencies. After General Ne Win's coup d'etat in 1962, and led by the Military Intelligence Service (MIS), this apparatus was completely dominated by the armed forces, which used it not only to gather combat‐related intelligence but also to stamp out any challenges to continuing military rule. So powerful did the MIS become that, at times, it was seen as a threat to the Ne Win regime, and purged of key personnel. After the creation of the State Law and Order Restoration Council in 1988, the resources devoted to Burma's intelligence agencies greatly increased. Under the Directorate of Defence Services Intelligence, more attention was given to purely military intelligence, but there was also closer surveillance of both the armed forces and the civilian population. Since late 1997, this policy has continued under the State Peace and Development Council. Several intelligence failures in recent years, however, have raised serious questions about the ability of even this expanded apparatus to meet all the demands being placed upon it.     

Missing revolution: the American intelligence failure in Iraq, 1958

Why were American officials caught by surprise with the military coup and later revolution in Iraq on 14 July 1958? Drawing on American intelligence and diplomatic records as well as multilingual sources, this article argues that the US intelligence failure is the product of two factors: the collection of information from too few and too similar human sources of intelligence in Iraq’s ruling regime, and the unreceptivity of US officials to assessing new information and their unwillingness to update assessments of local Iraqi developments. It revisits America’s intelligence failure in Iraq and suggests important lessons for the study of intelligence.     

The Future of Civil–Military Intelligence Cooperation Based on Lessons Learned in Iraq

As part of the infrastructure for monitoring the movements of Private Security Companies (PSCs) in Iraq, a unique intelligence interface has been constructed to enhance cooperation between the military and PSCs. Using a wide range of existing intelligence-sharing agreements and guidelines for handling classified information, PSC contractors working with the US military have been able to provide unclassified intelligence products to the wider PSC community. Using lessons learned in Iraq as a contractor building this interface, the author explains how institutional difficulties were overcome and argues that the US military should be better prepared to share intelligence with the wide range of organizations it can expect to work with in future unconventional warfare or nation-building operations. Some of the lessons learned in Iraq can also be applied to the US Department of Homeland Security's Regional Fusion Centers, where many of the same difficulties with intelligence-sharing and integration with commercial organizations are being encountered.     

Counterterror intelligence operations and terror attacks

We present a formal model of an intelligence agency that must divide its resources between the collection and analysis of information pertaining to terror plots. The model highlights the negative consequences of queues which form when collection exceeds analytic capacity. We incorporate the response of a terrorist organization to the operating characteristics of the intelligence system it faces, and solve for equilibrium strategies for the intelligence system and terrorist organization. Our results demonstrate the importance of properly balancing resources between collection and analysis, and stand in contrast to the observed state of overcollection in US intelligence agencies.     

The devil’s advocate in intelligence: the Israeli experience

Many intelligence services around the world maintain mechanisms intended to help minimize the risk of erroneous intelligence assessments. One of the best-known mechanisms is the ‘devil’s advocate’ whose goal is to present – sometimes artificially – an intelligence assessment that contradicts the prevailing view. The goal of this practice is to try to encourage doubts, both among intelligence assessors and among decision-makers. This paper will describe the importance and function of the 'devil’s advocate' mechanism in intelligence. Using Israel as a test case, the paper will seek to draw conclusions regarding the desirable format of operations of this mechanism.     

An historical theory of intelligence

This article consists of three parts. First, ‘The past’ defines physical and verbal intelligence and maintains that intelligence, after centuries of insignificance, rose to prominence in modern times as a consequence of the increase in intelligence targets and the growth of verbal intelligence. Second, ‘The present’ explains that the function of intelligence is to optimize resources, that it is but an auxiliary element in war, and that it is necessary to the defense but is only contingent to the offense. Third, ‘The future’ articulates intelligence's two perpetual insoluble problems: foretelling everything and getting leaders to accept information that they do not like.     

Leader's spiritual intelligence and religiousness: Skills,factors affecting,and their effects on performance (a qualitative study by grounded theory)

Spiritual intelligence has received increasing quantitative research interest, while there is still no attention regarding to investigate spiritual intelligence with applying qualitative methods, especially grounded theory design. This study aimed to detect the skills, affecting factors, and the effects of spiritual intelligence and religiousness on performance. The qualitative analysis of the data collected through the in‐depth interview of the participants after encoding and classification, and the continuous comparison of the data by encoding and data by axes, resulted in these data can be coded in three axes: leader's spiritual intelligence skills, factors that affect leader's spiritual intelligence, and the effects of leader's spiritual intelligence on performance. The results revealed that there are five skills of leader's spiritual intelligence: work‐life balance skill, consists of (5) sub‐skills, leadership transcendence skill includes (6) sub‐skills, leadership meaning and purpose production skill includes (4) sub‐skills, leadership mindfulness skill consists of (9) sub‐skills, and the fifth skill is leadership virtue behavior includes (8) sub‐skills. And also, the results indicated that there are many factors that impact the leader's spiritual intelligence, were classified into three objects: personal (three factors), social and family (two factors), and work factors (4 factors). All participants were agreed unanimously that the leader's spiritual intelligence and religiousness are determined and affect the performance of the leader and his subordinates, these were classified into two objects: The first object is a leader's work‐performance, consisting of (16) indicators, and the second object is a workers performance includes (12) indicators. In light of these results, the study recommended the necessity of developing leaders' awareness of the importance of passion of spiritual intelligence skill and their impacts on performance. Thus, these findings shed new light on the importance of developing leaders' spiritual intelligence skills to resolve leadership problems, and increasing productivity, creativity, and well‐being among leaders and workers in Arab World.     

The Church Committee and a new era of intelligence oversight

Thirty years ago, the Church Committee completed what was and still is the most exhaustive look at any government's secret intelligence agencies. The Committee showed that in times of crisis, even constitutional democracies are likely to violate their laws and forget their values. In this reflection, the Committee's Chief Counsel states that by examining the full record over time, the Committee found that it was insufficient to blame abuses solely on intelligence agencies. Ultimate responsibility was properly fixed with the presidents, attorneys general, and other high executive branch officials. Seven general lessons, including the danger of excess secrecy, are drawn from his experience. These lessons are valuable for the present struggle with terrorism.     

Making future leaders in the US intelligence community: challenges and opportunities

This article explores what factors are important in developing the future leaders of the US intelligence community in the post-9/11 security environment. It surveys traditional leadership theory to assess whether any of its perspectives are applicable to understanding leadership in the intelligence context. It argues, that although some leadership theory may be applicable, the intelligence studies field may be better served by developing its own body of leadership theory. Second, any leadership theory needs to consider together the two synergistic components of intelligence leadership: personal leadership development and the ability to lead organization reform. Furthermore, the role of intelligence governance may be the most critical factor in promoting better leaders of US intelligence agencies and the broader community.     

Integration of strategic and operational intelligence during the Peninsular war

Wellington is well known for his understanding of the importance of intelligence, but so far history has recorded that he presided over a one-man intelligence department, himself being the only analyst of what proved to be a massive quantity of raw information. New research highlighted in this article reveals that this has been an inaccurate interpretation. The British government also acted to establish a civilian network of correspondents and agents communicating with the British ambassadors to Spain and Portugal. Wellington's main priority was to integrate the ‘strategic intelligence’ collected by government agents with his own ‘operational intelligence’. Instead, analysis was conducted more by Wellington's subordinates in the field, applying their personal localized expertise to the information they received. In this way, an early and primitive form of the staff system later developed by the Prussians was created in the Peninsular War.     

The British experience with intelligence accountability

This article assesses the British experience with intelligence accountability through an analysis of the principal mechanism that exists to provide for it – the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee. It discusses the context within which oversight proposals emerged, the debate surrounding the nature of the new oversight body, and assesses the performance of the Committee over the first decade of its existence. It concludes that while the Committee has secured some important advances with regard to the accountability of the intelligence and security services, there are nevertheless significant limitations and weaknesses, many of which were evident in the Committee's 2003 investigation and report into pre-war intelligence on Iraqi WMD. In this context, the debate as to whether the oversight body should have select committee status, discussed at length in the article, remains highly relevant.     

Eberstadt,Dulles and NSC 50: The Impetus for CIA Evolution through 1953

Despite outward appearances, the CIA's evolution between 1945 and 1953 was influenced by two objective investigations – the Eberstadt Task Force and Dulles Commission – and was accelerated, but not instigated, by the shock of the Korean War. The role of these two investigations, which ultimately resulted in NSC 50 and the establishment of the CIA as a viable member of the US intelligence community, has been overlooked in recent literature. While these panels played a critical role in shaping the CIA's organization during this period, the Truman administration never achieved its goal of establishing a truly ‘central’ intelligence organization. This article examines the formation of the CIA, discusses both reports, national policy changes enacted in response, and relevance to the US intelligence community's current operations.