Ideas of Intelligence

Ideas of Intelligence

Divergent National Concepts and Institutions

by Philip H. J. Davies

Since World War II, much effort has gone into defining “intelligence.” This effort has even given rise to what is sometimes called intelligence theory, which can be traced to Sherman Kent’s desire to see intelligence programmatically examined, addressed, and subsumed by the mainstream social science tradition. During World War II Kent served in the Bureau of Analysis and Estimates of the US Office of Strategic Services, and later headed the Office of National Estimates of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Virtually all intelligence theory could be considered a footnote to Kent. His conviction that intelligence should be a broad-based analytical discipline is embodied in his maxim “intelligence is knowledge,” which has set the precedent for most subsequent debate.

Since Kent’s day, many alternative approaches to intelligence have been suggested by a succession of authors. In his 1996 Intelligence Power in Peace and War, British scholar and former intelligence officer Michael Herman tried to present the range of conceptualizations of intelligence as a spectrum, ranging from the broad definitions that approach intelligence primarily as “all-source analysis” (typified by Kent’s view) to narrow interpretations that focus on intelligence collection, particularly covert collection. Herman notes in passing that the broader interpretations tend to be favored by US writers and narrow approaches by the British. What Herman does not pursue, however, is the fundamental difference this matter of definition effects in the British and US approaches to intelligence and how those conceptual differences have been reflected in their respective intelligence institutions and in legislation. It is entirely possible that by asking “what is intelligence?” we may be barking up the wrong intellectual tree. The real questions should perhaps be “How do different countries and institutions define intelligence?” and “What are the consequences of those different definitions?”

A Study in Contrast

Conceptual divergences in the concept of intelligence are particularly worth keeping in mind when comparing Britain and the United States. The 1995 US Congressional Aspin/Brown Commission examined the British national intelligence machinery. Likewise, one of the first actions of the British Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee after its creation under the 1994 Intelligence Services Act was a similar evaluation of US methodologies. Neither side found anything to incorporate from the other’s methods, and yet neither seemed to detect that they were talking—and hence thinking—about entirely different things when they were talking about intelligence. To a large degree, transatlantic dialogue on the subject of intelligence has tended to be conducted at cross-purposes.

In current usage, “intelligence” in US parlance tends to refer to “finished” intelligence that has been put through the all-source analysis process and turned into a product that can provide advice and options for decision makers. Perhaps the classic US definition comes from a past edition of the Dictionary of United States Military Terms for Joint Usage, which states that intelligence is “the product resulting from the collection, evaluation, analysis, integration, and interpretation of all available information which concerns one or more aspects of foreign nations or areas of operation which is immediately or potentially significant for planning.” This definition includes the collection of raw information, but the end result does not become “intelligence” as such until it has been thoroughly analyzed. Hence, in the US context, intelligence production means analytical production.

This very broad sense of the term intelligence was used as far back as 1949 when Kent argued that intelligence consists of three “substantive” elements: first, descriptive background; second, reportorial current information and threats, the “most important complicated element of strategic intelligence”; and third, the “substantive-evaluative” analytical process of evaluation and “extrapolation.” In 1967, Harold Wilensky approached intelligence as “the problem of gathering, processing, interpreting, and communicating the technical and political information needed in the decision process.” At the start of the 1980s Roy Godson provided the “elements of intelligence” scheme, describing intelligence as the sum total of collection, analysis, counter-intelligence, and covert action, a set of criteria whose breadth leaves behind even the official government rhetoric. The United States is therefore evidently oriented toward a broad notion of intelligence that is shared by both government practitioners and scholars.

It is more difficult to locate a formally constituted idea of “intelligence” in British thinking. In part this is because British official practice has more of what might be termed a civil law orientation toward procedures and terminology, driven by precedent and convention rather than by formalized exactitude. The behavoralist undercurrent in political and policy thinking has also always been stronger in the United States than in Britain, where the traditions of political thought owe more to political history and political philosophy than to political science. It is, however, possible to identify indicative or typical expressions of the British approach to intelligence.

While US intelligence analysis is professionalized, in British practice it is really no more than the ordinary work of government departments and ministries. Former Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) official Reginald Hibbert has argued that the FCO “is itself a huge assessment machine.” He breaks down the total spectrum of available raw information sources fed into the FCO into being “50 percent ... drawn from published sources,” another 10 percent to 20 percent from “privileged material which is not strictly speaking classified,” and 20 percent to 25 percent from classified material available from the “normal product of diplomatic activity,” leaving 10 to 15 percent from secret sources. The FCO then “chews the cud of this material day by day, reacts to it as it becomes available, and applies it in the decision-taking and policy-forming process which is the end product.”

Hence, in British practice, raw intelligence moves straight into policymaking circles without passing through a separate, intervening analytical stage. This is not because there is no assessment process but because all-source analysis is subsumed by the civil service employees who, in their role as advisors to ministers of the crown, take ultimate responsibility for the policies and actions of their departments before Parliament. As a result, intelligence as such tends to refer more narrowly to those kinds of information not available from the “normal product” of departmental activity. British intelligence officials are fond of intoning the mantra that “intelligence is about secrets, not mysteries.” British intelligence scholar Ken Robertson has captured this sentiment succinctly by defining intelligence as “the secret collection of other people’s secrets,” a phrase that closely parallels former Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) officer Nicholas Elliott’s description of the SIS role as being “to find out by clandestine means what the overt organs of government cannot find out by overt means.” In British usage, then, “intelligence production” means raw intelligence collection

Institutionalizing Intelligence

In more concise terms, the difference between British and US concepts of intelligence is that the United States approaches information as a specific component of intelligence, while Britain approaches intelligence as a specific type of information. Of the two, the British conception is unsurprisingly of greater antiquity, and it can probably be argued that the US usage of the term was closer to the British one prior to World War II. Despite institutional and constitutional differences between the two governments, US intelligence institutions such as the US Navy’s Signals Intelligence Service were geared mainly toward producing raw intelligence for departmental exploitation. The contemporary US approach to intelligence can, however, be traced fairly directly to the nation’s experience of the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. By comparison, if the British had any comparable formative trauma it was probably the disastrous South African campaign of 1899-1903, commonly known as the Boer War. These two experiences were catastrophic for different reasons, and the diagnoses of these failures provided the intellectual foundations for the two countries’ respective institutions as well as their conceptions of intelligence.

At the turn of the century, the British went into South Africa ignorant not merely about the geography but also about the demographics, economy, and social organization of the region. They knew little about the transportation and raw materials in South Africa, had little or no insight into the Afrikaans settlers, and were surprised by the Afrikaaners’ guerrilla tactics and ability to live off the land. The surviving papers of the post-Boer War Special Section of the War Office reveal how deeply the failings in South Africa affected British military intelligence officers. The lessons of the campaign were crucial contributing factors in establishing and maintaining an extensive and effective theater-level human intelligence system.

By 1910, years of saber-rattling arms races both on and around the European continent combined with a widespread, xenophobic “spy scare” (partly fomented by popular novelists like William Le Queux) to force the Committee of Imperial Defence to convene a subcommittee of inquiry into the threat of foreign espionage known as the Haldane Committee. During deliberations, the Admiralty and the War Office complained that “our organization for acquiring information of what is taking place in foreign ports and dockyards is defective” and furthermore that they were “in a difficult position when dealing with foreign spies who may have information to sell, since their dealings have to be direct and not through intermediaries.” The resulting report had a series of recommendations, including the creation of a new Secret Service Bureau (SSB) to take over the tasks of the Special Section at a national rather than just War Office level. Although the SSB arose out of an inquiry into foreign espionage against Britain, two of its three proposed functions were directed toward British espionage against foreign states, i.e. to “act as a screen” between the War Office and Admiralty and foreign agents with information they wished to sell and as an intermediary between those same two departments of state and “agents we employ in foreign countries.”

In due course, the SSB fragmented along domestic and foreign lines into what became the Security Service (formerly MI5) and the SIS (formerly MI6). After World War I, the central role of demand for raw intelligence was reinforced by what has been called the “1921 Arrangement,” in which departments attached sections of their own intelligence branches to SIS headquarters to articulate their departmental requirements directly to the service’s operational personnel. The same 1921 Arrangement set the requirements for the predecessor of Government Communications Headquarters until that agency gained independence after World War II. At that point, an analogous body called Z Division was set up within the Directorate of Signal Intelligence Plans and Production. In all of this, the role of the “intelligence community,” such as it may have been, was to provide raw intelligence to be factored into the ruminations of the overt machinery of the British central government.

The foundations of the contemporary US intelligence community similarly arose out of a public inquiry, the joint congressional committee that investigated the causes of the Pearl Harbor attack. Unlike the British experience in South Africa, the post-Peal Harbor diagnosis was not that the United States lacked raw intelligence. The appraisal adopted by the joint committee stated that “the coordination and proper evaluation of intelligence in times of stress must be insured by continuity of service and centralization of responsibility in competent officials,” although it added darkly that “only partial credence, however, can be extended this conclusion inasmuch as no amount of coordination and no system could be effected to compensate for lack of alertness and imagination” on the part of commanders and decision makers. In part as a consequence of the joint committee, the administration of US President Harry Truman passed the 1947 National Security Act, which created the National Security Council (NSC) to coordinate national security policy and the CIA to centralize intelligence assessment.

The original mandate of the CIA, though in part managerial, was most significantly analytical, framed in words strikingly close to the joint committee’s final report: “to correlate and evaluate the intelligence relating to the national security and to provide for the appropriate dissemination of such intelligence.” The CIA was originally intended to collate and assess information provided by other departments of government, chiefly the State and Defense departments. Its operational assets were acquired as something of a retrofit or afterthought, justified by an umbrella clause in the 1947 National Security Act allowing the CIA to perform “other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security” under the direction of the NSC. To a degree well beyond the British case, there was a public debate about the US need for intelligence in peace time, culminating in Kent’s 1949 Strategic Intelligence for US World Policy, in which Kent took up the notion of intelligence as collection plus all-source assessment.

Because of the post-Pearl Harbor reflections on intelligence in the United States, intelligence came to be considered and defined in terms of the analytical process. To be sure, purely collection-oriented agencies such as the National Reconnaissance Office and the National Security Agency exist, but agencies like the CIA, the Defense Department’s Defense Intelligence Agency, and the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research define their roles and responsibilities primarily in analytical terms.

Theory in Practice

The tendency of countries to employ differing definitions of intelligence has both conceptual and substantive implications. Substantively, it provides a particularly telling insight into how and why intelligence institutions take shape in specific ways. It is not, of course, the whole story; governmental, institutional, and even constitutional factors come into play but are significant in terms of why intelligence is conceived one way or another as well as in terms of what architectures are created and in what form. The decentralization of power in the British cabinet system is undoubtedly a factor in the decentralization of all-source analysis, much as executive centralization under the US presidency influenced the centralization of analysis—except that the impetus toward central collation and analysis in the United States came from the US Congress while the decentralized power interests of the British system opted for centralized, covert collection. Key traumatic events that demonstrate the failures of intelligence in each country have driven national perceptions of what intelligence ought to be. And such normative concepts are crucial in how we think we ought to go about building an intelligence community, much as key normative concepts provide an intellectual framework for other activities.

Different US and British conceptions of intelligence also have been an underlying factor in the differences in the history of public debate and legislation on intelligence in the two countries. The CIA was established by legislative will in 1947 while the SIS and GCHQ had no equivalent legal standing until the Conservative administration of John Major passed enabling legislation in 1994. Similarly, there has been a vigorous and well informed public debate over the role and functions of intelligence in the United States since the late 1940s, but no equivalent open discussion in Britain happened until the late 1980s. These differences have generally been attributed to the greater openness of the US political system. However, it is also far easier to talk publicly about intelligence analysis, even all-source analysis, than it is to speak openly about the sensitive and competitive sphere of covert intelligence collection. Both the 1947 act and the concurrent public debate dealt primarily with analysis and policy and relatively little with the role and content of collection, especially covert collection. Likewise, although official acknowledgment of the existence of Britain’s foreign intelligence services had to wait until the 1980s, the first officially attributable references to the Joint Intelligence Subcommittee and the Joint Intelligence Bureau appear in a Royal Institute of Public Administration study of the machinery of British central government published in 1957. It appears that having a broad definition of intelligence makes it easier to be open about intelligence institutions, legislation, and policy.

And yet these profound divergences emerge within two closely related and closely integrated intelligence communities, which also share a common language and political culture. If Britain and the United States differ so widely and so fundamentally, what about systems that are less cognate? Where there is little or no common cultural and institutional heritage, the divergences run deeper, increasing the risk that decision makers and intelligence practitioners may misunderstand what foreign agencies are essentially about. Non-democratic states typically define their agencies as security services rather than intelligence services. This is often not least because agencies of revolutionary regimes like the old Soviet KGB and the Chinese Department of Public Security and Department of State Security have their roots in the pursuit of counter-revolutionary and dissident forces at home and abroad. John Dziak has categorized states like the Soviet Union as “counter-intelligence states” in which intelligence agencies evolve out of an almost paranoid concern about threats to regime survival rather than policy needs for information.