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.     

Strategic Horizons: Futures Forecasting and the British Intelligence Community

The article deals with the role and benefit added by the use of horizon scanning in intelligence analysis in the UK. It asserts that horizon scanning as a technique, while not entirely akin to the tradecraft of intelligence analysis, has much to contribute to its success. Specifically, is asserts that a horizon scanning function in the JIO and the Cabinet Office should be made permanent, as bureaucratic tumult in the wake of the 2010 SDSR have left the capability un-staffed, though still established. Within the UK intelligence community, such an organization may have positive roles to play in the processes of challenge, the setting of collection priorities, and overall long-term UK intelligence assessment at the national level.     

Deep Probe: The Evolution of Network Intelligence

Over the last several decades, civil society activists and non-governmental organizations have been employing new information and communication technologies, such as the Internet, to facilitate their activities. At the same time, an increasing number of computer scientists, hackers, and engineers have become increasingly politicized, contributing their skills to security, privacy, and networking tools used by civil society organizations worldwide. The merging of these two social forces, and their sophisticated uses of technology for political action, is giving rise to a new form of distributed information and communication networking that I refer to as ‘network intelligence’.     

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.     

Intelligence Contracting: On the Motivations,Interests, and Capabilities of Core Personnel Contractors in the US Intelligence Community

In the debate on intelligence contracting, intelligence officers are grouped into two personnel categories characterized by opposing sets of motivations and interests. Government employees are assumed to be motivated by a higher goal related to national security, while intelligence contractors are said to be motivated primarily by pecuniary interests and loyal first and foremost to their shareholders. Contemporary research on human motivation, however, suggests that the two personnel categories are not all that different in that both appear to be intrinsically motivated and loyal primarily to the mission at hand, namely national security. Moreover, comparative research on public organizations and private corporations suggests that there are more similarities between the two than there are differences. This must lead us to re-examine the recent criticism fielded against the practice of intelligence contracting.     

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.     

The Church Committee Investigation of 1975 and the Evolution of Modern Intelligence Accountability

Since 1975, lawmakers have displayed four responses to the call for greater intelligence accountability on Capitol Hill. Some have taken the approach of ‘ostriches’, content to bury their heads in the sand and continue the earlier era of trust when members of Congress deferred to the decisions of the executive branch within the domains of intelligence. Others – indeed, a majority – have chosen to become unalloyed boosters for intelligence –‘ cheerleaders’ who view their job primarily as one of explaining the value of intelligence to the American people and supporting intelligence missions with robust funding and encouragement. Taking the opposite approach, another set of lawmakers – the ‘lemon-suckers’ – have consistently found fault with America's attempts to spy on adversaries or overthrow regimes that fail to accommodate US interests. Finally, some lawmakers have been ‘guardians’, striking a balance between serving as partners of the intelligence agencies on Capitol Hill and, through a persistent examination of budgets and operations, demanding competence and law-abiding behavior from these agencies. The guardian model fits best into the framework of democratic theory.     

Interdisciplinary,cross-sector collaboration in the US Intelligence Community: lessons learned from past and present efforts

ABSTRACT

How does one design and sustain interdisciplinary, cross-sector collaboration to improve intelligence results for twenty-first century security threats? This paper will analyse five past and present initiatives designed to create interdisciplinary, cross-sectoral collaboration within different agencies of the US Intelligence Community (IC). We will discuss key features of each effort, their successes and challenges, identify common themes and, propose which collaborative model might be most advantageous for a particular type of project based on project constraints. In so doing, we provide direction for IC leaders seeking to improve academia–industry–intelligence partnerships for future planning on intelligence-funded collaborations.     

Intelligence and the management of national security: the post 9/11 evolution of an Australian National Security Community

Since 2001 expenditure on the security services has increased exponentially in Western democracies and particularly amongst the Five Eyes community of the UK, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. This has occurred in conjunction with the expansion of counter-terror laws. Yet somewhat problematically the phenomenon of Islamist inspired violence became more threatening to the internal security of western democracies in the first decade of the twenty-first century. This study examines the Western managerial approach to security using Australia as a case study. It argues that the growth of Australian security agencies since 2001 and their evolution into a National Security Community after 2008 has neglected basic maxims of political and constitutional prudence and eschews the modern state’s own contractual self -understanding of sovereignty and political obligation.     

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.     

Intelligence Requirements at the Crossroads: The 1948 French Plan de Renseignement,Intelligence Requirements and the Role of Intelligence History

Very often intelligence history concentrates on the knowledge produced by a country's intelligence service and its impact on national decision-making, or – in the case of intelligence failures – the lack thereof. Using a previously unexplored document from the archives of the French Foreign Ministry, this research note proposes another contribution of intelligence history to diplomatic history: By analysing national intelligence requirements – the ‘top secret diaries’ of governments – intelligence history can provide a window into the minds of decision-makers. The 1948 French plan de renseignement illustrates this case. Written shortly after the Cold War started in earnest in 1947, the plan de renseignement shows a French government deeply worried about the danger of global conflict and of internal upheaval in its empire, but also a government not fully committed to the western cause and particularly sceptical about American intentions. French foreign policy was at a crossroads in 1947/48 and, quite sensibly, French policy-makers wanted to know exactly what lay on all the possible roads ahead. While these findings do not contradict existing scholarship, they may help to encourage a re-weighing of existing arguments.     

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.