Fragile and Provocative: Notes on Secrecy and Intelligence

Abstract

Students of international relations should seek to understand the ways in which power in international relations can be amplified by secrecy. Discussions of ‘decision advantage’ over rival states have explained information asymmetries and means for competitors to gain advantages by keeping secret their sources of information or the special insights they gain even from information that is widely available. The histories of war, diplomacy and intelligence illuminate such advantages, and also show various ways in which secrecy amplifies ‘action’ advantages as well as ‘information’ advantages. That amplification often seems to be accomplished by the same people and organizations, and this essay suggests the prime reason for this common institutional co-location of secret functions can be termed the ‘economy of secrecy’. The key to grasping this point is to set aside traditional and academic distinctions between knowledge and action, and information and implementation, when viewing the moves of sovereignties. Sovereign leaders opt to co-locate their secret activities when they judge it too risky (e.g. potentially expensive and dangerous) to distribute secret-information and secret-action functions around too many different offices. The handful of subordinates that receive these functions are what we now call ‘intelligence agencies.’ Finally, a firmer grasp of the economics of secrecy can improve oversight of secrets and the offices that deal with them.

Acknowledgments

This draft is a reflection on the nexus of secret information and secret action that we ordinarily call ‘intelligence’, and on the logic of its support for decision advantage. It was prepared to spark discussion at a panel on Intelligence and Risk at the 2011 conference of the International Studies Association in Montreal. The views contained herein are solely the views of the author and do not reflect official confirmation or policies of the Department of Defense, or any other US Government entity.

Notes

Email: [email protected]¹Sissela Bok, Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation (New York: Vintage 1989 [1983]) p.281.

²Ibid., pp.25–6, 105–6, 174, 282.

³Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Secrets: The American Experience (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 1998) pp.226–7.

⁴Boyd's ideas gave impetus to the Revolution in Military Affairs. See, for instance, his explanation of why it is that ‘In a competitive sense, where individuals and groups compete for scarce resources and skills, an improved capacity for independent action achieved by some individuals or groups constrains that capacity for other individuals or groups', quoted in Frans P. B. Osinga, Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd (New York: Routledge, 2007), p.132.

⁵Jennifer E. Sims, ‘Understanding Friends and Enemies: The Context for American Intelligence Reform’ in Jennifer E. Sims and Burton Gerber (eds.) Transforming US Intelligence (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press 2005) pp.15–17. Decision advantage also appeared in a planning document publicly released by then-Director of National Intelligence J. Michael McConnell, Vision 2015, in July 2008; this can be read on-line at <http://www.dni.gov/Vision_2015.pdf> (accessed 1 March 2012).

⁶I narrate these and other discussions of this issue in my recent article ‘Intelligence as Risk Shifting’ in Peter Gill, Mark Phythian and Stephen Marrin (eds.) Intelligence Theory: Key Questions and Debates (London: Routledge 2008).

⁷Abram N. Shulsky and Gary J. Schmitt, Silent Warfare: Understanding the World of Intelligence (Washington, DC: Potomac Books 2002 [1991]) pp.159–68.

⁸I have tried to avoid the words ‘nation’ and ‘state’ in this essay, preferring instead the looser but more precise term ‘sovereignty’. Sovereignty denotes an armed entity intent on gaining or maintaining effective control over people, resources, and territory. Sovereignties include classic Westphalian states, of course, but also ancient city-states and empires as well as modern, large and sophisticated terrorist or revolutionary entities – all of which are seekers of decision advantage vis-à-vis their competitive rivals, and both targets and practitioners of intelligence. One can read the reasons for this in detail in my essay ‘Intelligence as Risk Shifting’.

⁹Bok, Secrets, p.125.

¹⁰F.J. Roethlisberger and William J. Dickson, Management and the Worker (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1956 [1939]) pp.14–18.

¹¹John Ranelagh, The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA (New York: Simon & Schuster 1987 [1986]) p.85.

¹²Stating such is not to applaud such practices or to wish their spread; it is merely to observe their ubiquity.

¹³In the United States such information is deemed ‘Classified Military Information’, the sharing of which is governed by a succession of National Disclosure Policy documents.

¹⁴Len Scott, ‘Secret Intelligence, Covert Action and Clandestine Diplomacy’ in L.V. Scott and P.D. Jackson (eds.) Understanding Intelligence in the Twenty-First Century: Journeys in Shadows (London: Routledge 2004) pp.162–3; Jennifer E. Sims, ‘Foreign Intelligence Liaison: Devils, Deals, and Details’, International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 19/2 (2005) pp.196–201.

¹⁵A good summary of this episode is in R. Harris Smith, OSS: The Secret History of America's First Central Intelligence Agency (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press 1972) pp.230–3. See also Ranelagh, The Agency, pp.78–82.

¹⁶Thailand was an ally of Imperial Japan that had actually declared war on the United States and Britain in 1941. Washington had ignored the declaration at the request of the Thai ambassador; the British had not.

¹⁷US House of Representatives, Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence [Staff Study], ‘IC21: The Intelligence Community in the 21st Century’, 104^th Congress, 1996.

¹⁸Donald Welzenbach and Gregory Pedlow, The CIA and the U-2 Program (Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency 1998) pp.73, 96–7.

¹⁹Sun Tzu expands on this in Chapter III of The Art of War; noting ‘what is supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy's strategy; next best is to disrupt his alliances; the next best is to attack his army. The worst policy is to attack cities. Attack cities only when there is no alternative’. Sun Tzu, The Art of War, trans. Samuel B. Griffiths (London: Oxford, 1971 [1963]) pp.77–78.

²⁰Michael Warner, The Office of Strategic Services: America's First Intelligence Agency (Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency 2000).

²¹Michael Warner (ed.), The CIA Under Harry Truman (Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency 1994) p.xviii.

²²Michael Warner, ‘The Divine Skein: Sun Tzu on Intelligence’, Intelligence and National Security 21/4 (2006).

²³See, for instance, Larry L. Watts, the discussion in ‘Intelligence Reform in Europe's Emerging Democracies’, Studies in Intelligence 48/1 (2004), <https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol48no1/article02.html> (accessed 18 April 2011).

²⁴David Kahn, ‘An Historical Theory of Intelligence’, Intelligence and National Security 16/3 (2001) pp.84–5.

²⁵Sun Tzu, The Art of War, 13:2.

²⁶Information Security Oversight Office, 2009 Cost Report, 25 June 2010, p.2, <www.archives.gov/isoo/reports/2009-cost-report.pdf> (accessed 26 December 2010).

²⁷The line appears in Forster's A Room with a View (1908). E.M. Forster, A Room With a View (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1925), p.186.