Thinking about defence intelligence: Victor Cavendish-Bentinck,Denis Capel-Dunn,Kenneth Strong and the Joint Intelligence Bureau as foundation for the Defence Intelligence Staff

Abstract

The Defence Intelligence Staff’s closest relative was the Joint intelligence Bureau. The Bureau was created in 1946 as part of the post war reorganization of the intelligence machinery, consolidating a number of wartime organizations. It was a centralized organization, providing defence intelligence to customers in the armed forces and government. The Bureau was founded with the objective of implementing several lessons that had been identified in the Second World War concerning the organization and management of intelligence. This paper examines the particular lessons the Bureau’s founders and its leader had learned, and the ideas they sought to ingrain in the organization. It asks what kind of foundation the Bureau provided for the DIS, when it merged with the service intelligence directorates in 1964.     

The problem of Defence Intelligence

Abstract

The following article argues that defence intelligence in general, and Britain’s Defence Intelligence (DI) organization in particular, represents an area in intelligence studies that is significantly under-investigated. It makes the case that the significance of understanding defence intelligence and DI lies not only in a general lack of illumination but also because DI is subject to and prompts a range of difficulties and challenges that are either especially acute in the defence context or have ramifications for the wider intelligence community that remain to be fully appreciated. Particular attention is given to DI’s remit being divided between Ministry of Defence and national requirements, problems of fixed-sum resourcing an intelligence function with national responsibilities that is subordinate to Departmental spending structures and priorities, fraught positioning of defence intelligence in Departmental line management and, finally, a chronic lack of public or official interest or scrutiny. The article concludes that the UK’s experience has echoes elsewhere, notably in the US, and that wider international study of defence intelligence is both long overdue and may have implications for understanding of national and wider intelligence institutions and processes.     

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.     

A New Definition of Intelligence

Intelligence is widely misunderstood. Too much is made of secrecy, and of covert operations and counter-intelligence (action domains informed by intelligence rather than integral to it). Intelligence is often focused on threats, missing opportunities for advantage. A standard definition is proposed for better understanding of intelligence by the academy, media and public. Intelligence is a corporate capability to forecast change in time to do something about it. The capability involves foresight and insight, and is intended to identify impending change which may be positive, representing opportunity, or negative, representing threat. Definitions which converge with this proposal are found in several intelligence settings.     

The Spanish Intelligence Community: A Diffuse Reality

The functioning and composition of the Spanish Intelligence Community is not regulated in detail by any legal regulations, and neither the intelligence service nor the government have specified these despite the repeated references they make to them. This article sets out to establish what actually constitutes the Intelligence Community in Spain; thus, after a brief theoretical discussion in which the two major categories of members – consumers and producers – are identified, a model of the intelligence community in Spain is set forth on the basis of the interrelations between its members and their roles in the decision-making process. In its preparation, besides analyzing the existing legislation, 52 interviews were carried out with individual participants in all the structures, so as to reach an understanding of the role played by each one, to evaluate its performance and to propose some guidelines for improvement.     

Military Intelligence and Controversial Political Issues: The Unique Case of the Israeli Military Intelligence

Contrary to intelligence services in other democracies worldwide, the activity of the Israeli Directorate of Military Intelligence, AMAN, is not merely centered around collection and research regarding military intelligence matters. Instead, AMAN covers the majority of intelligence activity arenas, including intelligence regarding state-related issues. This field of activity presents a situation where AMAN's officers, and predominantly, its research division, are compelled to deal with sensitive issues embedded well within Israeli political and public controversy. This is commonly illustrated in the field of ‘Intelligence for Peace’ in general and more specifically in the Palestinian arena. Intelligence research surrounding the question of Palestinian commitment to peace throughout the Oslo Process and following the onset of the al Aqsa Intifada – activity classified as ‘Intelligence on Intentions’ – placed AMAM at the heart of political debate in Israel and resulted in bitter internal disagreements in AMAN as well as tensions between the intelligence service and the political leadership. Throughout the years, numerous recommendations have been repeatedly voiced to end AMAN's monopoly over Israel's national intelligence assessment (including aspects of intelligence regarding state-related issues). These recommendations were based predominantly on hindsight evaluations, such as AMAN's repeated failures in intelligence assessments. This paper calls for gradual termination of AMAN's activity of intelligence regarding state-related issues, in light of its contradiction with the appropriate military–political separation in a democratic society. Moreover, it places AMAN at the heart of the political debate dividing Israeli society.     

Geoffrey Vickers and lessons from the Ministry of Economic Warfare for cold war defence intelligence

Abstract

Geoffrey Vickers is the forgotten man of British intelligence. As the UK’s economic intelligence supremo at the Ministry of Economic Warfare and the Foreign Office between 1941 and 1945, Vickers transformed the craft of economic intelligence in both strategic and operational spheres. In the policy arena he was the driving force behind the economic and industrial planning of civil administration of liberated Europe. Vickers was also an intelligence theorist of the first rank whose legacy survived in his holistic conception of economic intelligence, its centrality to decision-making in peace and war, and the scope and evolution of the Joint Intelligence Bureau and defence intelligence.     

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.     

Reflections on Technology and Intelligence Systems

Abstract

The impact of individual technological innovations on intelligence operations is often discussed, but the influence of technological change per se on intelligence systems remains less well understood. The historical literature on this topic is uneven – filled with detailed narratives on certain aspects, but also with surprisingly little attention to larger trends and their meaning. This is significant for two reasons. First, it means we have an incomplete understanding of what happened in the past, particularly for the ‘analog revolution’ in intelligence in the twentieth century. Second, it leaves us with few clues for understanding another wave of technological change washing over the intelligence profession at this time (a ‘digital revolution’). Looking at the second revolution in the light of the first can give us important clues to what to watch for in coming years.     

The Singapore Mutiny (1915) and the Genesis of Political Intelligence in Singapore

This paper describes how political intelligence evolved in Singapore and the establishment for the first time of a political intelligence bureau, the forerunner of the Singapore Police Special Branch and the present-day Internal Security Department (ISD). It is an example of British imperial practice as the early roots of intelligence in Singapore owed much to the experience gained earlier in British India in dealing with intelligence matters. The establishment of an intelligence bureau in Singapore came about as a direct result of the Singapore Mutiny (15 February 1915), and in the following year the newly-established bureau was renamed the Criminal Intelligence Department and absorbed into the Straits Settlements Police. In September 1933, it became the Singapore Special Branch, the forerunner of present-day Singapore's Internal Security Department.     

Security Intelligence in the Middle East (SIME): Joint Security Intelligence Operations in the Middle East,c. 1939–58

Security Intelligence Middle East (SIME) remains an understudied aspect of British intelligence. In many respects it was a remarkable organization. Its wartime iteration was created in haste, ostensibly as a military body but based upon the Security Service's office in Cairo. It evolved into a truly ‘joint’ unit but culturally was closer to the Security Service (MI5) than either the military or the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). SIME changed dramatically as a result of the end of the Second World War: it became the sole responsibility of MI5; local cooperation between MI5 and MI6 was scaled-down and became the focal point of a broader inter-intelligence service dispute in London; and new nationalist threats caught SIME off-balance and eventually undermined its raison d'être. SIME's contrasting wartime and peacetime iterations provide a useful example of how intelligence agencies respond to external pressures. It also provides a window into wider jurisdictional and constitutional conflicts at the heart of the relationship between MI5 and MI6, both during and after the war. Finally SIME shows practitioners what can be achieved under the right stimulus and what can be lost when that stimulus fades.     

The Next 100 Years? Reflections on the Future of Intelligence

Abstract

A growing interest in the history of intelligence might be a way to learn more about not only the past, but also the dynamics shaping the future of intelligence. Intelligence is an evolving activity and the twentieth-century experience must be regarded as a phase in an ongoing transformation of its institutions, methods and roles. At least six fundamental processes can be identified as relevant to this re-shaping of intelligence in long perspective; the decreasing hegemony of national intelligence, the rise of new fields of knowledge with intelligence relevance, the diminishing relative importance of exclusive sources and methods, the rise of new actors producing and providing intelligence, the loss of an intellectual monopoly in a competitive knowledge environment and finally an increasing demand for reliable assessments and verification in a fragmented world of information.     

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.     

What's wrong with the Intelligence Cycle

In the modern era, almost all intelligence professionals will study the Intelligence Cycle as a kind of gospel of how intelligence functions. Yet it is not a particularly good model, since the cyclical pattern does not describe what really happens. Policy officials rarely give collection guidance. Collection and analysis, which are supposed to work in tandem, in fact work more properly in parallel. Finally, the idea that decision makers wait for the delivery of intelligence before making policy decisions is equally incorrect. In the modern era, policy officials seem to want intelligence to support policy rather than to inform it. The Intelligence Cycle also fails to consider either counter-intelligence or covert action. Taken as a whole, the cycle concept is a flawed model, but nevertheless continues to be taught in the US and around the world.     

The Value of Non-Governmental Intelligence: Widening the Field

In the UK, the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) has a poor track record of predicting attack. In the US, official inquiries into 9/11 identified ‘a failure of imagination’ to conceive of a large scale threat to the American homeland. There is a long-standing literature on surprise attack which emphasizes that clues to predict attack often exist but are not pieced together by an intelligence sector which is not structured to look in the right direction. In a world of increasingly fragmented threats and weak signals, it is apparent that much of the challenge in intelligence work now lies not in collection but in managing requirements, setting priorities, and conducting incisive analysis based on the ability to imagine new threats. One solution to a failure of imagination is to widen the range of people who can contribute to the task. Non-Governmental analysis of security issues, whether by academia, civil society or the private sector, can help to identify emerging issues and set priorities. Whilst collection of secret intelligence may always remain the preserve of specialist Government agencies, the rest of the intelligence cycle can benefit from external contributions and open source intelligence. We argue that the process of setting intelligence requirements could be opened to a wider range of actors. In conflict environments, there may be particular value in an open process to identify what each side would need to know about the other to confidently seek peace.     

The Latest Intelligence Crisis

In the autumn of last year the National Intelligence Council issued a National Intelligence Estimate that states (in a portion of the NIE that has been published) with ‘high confidence’ that Iran years ago suspended its development of nuclear weapons. This paper questions the wisdom of a consensus intelligence document bound to be published in one form or another, and the soundness of the analysis in it, which pivots on speculation about Iranian decision making and on an ambiguity in the very meaning of ‘suspending’ a nuclear-weapons program while continuing to produce highly enriched uranium. These questions lead in turn to questions concerning the ambitious reorganization three years ago of the US intelligence system.     

For Queen and Company: The Role of Intelligence in the UK's Arms Trade

This article analyses the role that the UK intelligence services (particularly Secret Intelligence Service [SIS or MI6], the Defence Intelligence Staff [DIS], Government Communication Headquarters [GCHQ] and associated agencies) play in the legal UK arms trade. The article shows that intelligence has been used in support of British-based private commercial businesses, and occasionally in providing intelligence on the negotiating positions of rival manufacturers. This raises important questions about the role of the state in the private sphere, particularly the use of a large number of government assets in support of private interests and the elision of British government interests with those of a section of the manufacturing industry. This article also challenges existing conceptions of how the UK's intelligence agencies operate and relate to their customers. Conventional typologies of UK intelligence have emphasised the importance of the 'central machinery', highlighting the Joint Intelligence Committee as the focal point of intelligence tasking and analysis in the UK. However, in this case the intelligence support provided to the sale of military equipment suggests a range of parallel practices that are much more decentralised and often informal. This research therefore suggests that our conception of the UK intelligence architecture requires some reassessment.     

Introducing Social Media Intelligence (SOCMINT)

Abstract

We introduce the latest member of the intelligence family. Joining IMINT, HUMINT, SIGINT and others is ‘SOCMINT’ – social media intelligence. In an age of ubiquitous social media it is the responsibility of the security community to admit SOCMINT into the national intelligence framework, but only when two important tests are passed. First, that it rests on solid methodological bedrock of collection, evidence, verification, understanding and application. Second, that the moral hazard it entails can be legitimately managed. This article offers a framework for how this can be done.     

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.     

Intelligence and National Security Strategy: Reexamining Project Solarium

This article reexamines President Dwight D. Eisenhower's 1953 competitive review of Cold War strategy known as Project Solarium. It argues intelligence played a key role in this exercise and in the design of NSC 162/2, Eisenhower's ‘New Look’. Intelligence professionals were involved in all aspects of Project Solarium. Intelligence products provided a common baseline of analysis while stimulating debate. The process – a transparent system of structured deliberation among experts – encouraged a thorough consideration of intelligence and productive dissent. These findings underscore the need for a broader reexamination of the role of intelligence in the design of national security strategy.