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.

Notes

*Email: [email protected]¹To mention a few recent works: Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (London: Allen Lane 2009); Keith Jeffery, MI6. The History of the Secret Intelligence Service, 1909–1949 (London: Bloomsbury 2010); Matthew Aid, The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency (New York: Bloomsbury Press 2009); and Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (New York: Doubleday 2007), ranging from Andrew's and Jeffery's official histories with full access to files, to Weiner's journalistic account based mainly on secondary sources and interviews. The recent interest in the history of intelligence and security organizations is not limited to the Anglo-Saxon world, see for instance Kimmo Rentolas account of the Finnish Security Police in Matti Simola (ed.), Ratakatu 12, Suojelupoliisi 1949–2009 (Helsinki: WSOY 2009) and Hans Davidsen-Nielsen, Spionernes krig: Historien om Forsvarets Efterretningstjenste [The War of the Spy's: The History of the Defence Intelligence Service] (Copenhagen: Politikens Forlag 2008).

²Andrew, The Defence of the Realm, p.849.

³On the rapidly over-played, but in the longer perspective quite relevant debate on the future of intelligence after the Cold War period, see Allen E. Goodman, ‘The Future of US Intelligence’, Intelligence and National Security 11/4 (1996) and the Special Issue on Intelligence Analysis and Assessment, Intelligence and National Security 10/4 (1995).

⁴John Keegan, The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme (London: Pimlico 1998).

⁵One prominent example of the over-simplification of cases is the Israeli intelligence failure prior to the Yom Kippur or October War 1973, often referred to as the paramount example of cognitive traps and groupthink in intelligence analysis. This interpretation rested on the account of the Agranat-commission published in 1974, which for security reasons withheld the role of the most important Israeli intelligence asset at the time, the Egyptian Ambassador Ashraf Marwan. Yom Kippur remains an important historical case, but perhaps of something else than originally perceived. See Uri Bar-Joseph, The Watchman Fell Asleep: The Surprise of Yom Kippur and Its Sources (New York: State University of New York Press 2005).

⁶For the classical work on deception schemes, see Barton Whaley, Codeword Barbarossa (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press 1973).

⁷For the widely discussed phenomenon of pre-conditions for revolutionary change in societies, see Chalmers Johnson, Revolutionary Change (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company 1966).

⁸Jeffrey T. Richelson, A Century of Spies: Intelligence in the Twenties Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1995).

⁹Stevan Dedijer, ‘The Rainbow Scheme: British Secret Service and Pax Britannica’ in Wilhelm Agrell and Bo Huldt (eds.) Clio goes Spying: Eight Essays on the History of Intelligence (Lund: Lund Studies in International History 1983) and Robert Hutchinson, Elisabeth's Spy Master, Francis Walsingham and the Secret War that Saved England (London: Phoenix 2007) p. 216.

¹⁰Lennart W. Frick and Lars Rossander, Bakom hemligstämpeln [Behind Classified Secret] (Lund: Historiska Media 2004).

¹¹John Keegan, Intelligence in War. Knowledge of the Enemy from Napoleon to Al-Qaeda (London: Hutchinson 2003). Keegan quotes David Kahn's assessment that all the code-breaking efforts of Poland prior to the outbreak of the war in 1939 came to nothing as intelligence can only work through strength; David Kahn, Seizing the Enigma (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin 1991) p.91.

¹²For this extensive debate, see among others Michael Herman, J. Kenneth McDonald and Vojtech Mastny, Did Intelligence Matter in the Cold War? (Oslo: Instutt for Forsvarsstudier 2006).

¹³For a discussion of the twentieth-century concepts of intelligence, see Gregory F. Treverton, Intelligence for an Age of Terror (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2009).

¹⁴For an account of the linkage and conflicts between scientific intelligence and military R&D, see R.V. Jones, Most Secret War. British Scientific Intelligence 1939–1945 (London: Coronet Books 1979).

¹⁵See Hans Born, Loch K. Johnson and David Leigh (eds.), Who's Watching the Spies? Establishing Intelligence Accountability (Washington, DC: Potomac Books 2005).

¹⁶A recent example of this is the efforts of the Swedish government to give the signals intelligence service access to communications to and from the country through the fibre-optic cables (they had tapped a considerable amount of cables and satellite links before with secret approval or silent consent from the government). First presented in 2005, the proposed bill stated that the existing intelligence oversight body could handle the approval. When the bill was finally put before the parliament in 2008, a new independent approval-body was suggested, but a few months later the government surrendered in face of fierce public and parliamentary opposition as well as opposition within the ruling alliance and proposed a new independent intelligence court to decide if permission was to be granted for specific Comint operations.

¹⁷For the exploitation of the German intelligence heritage by the Western Allies and the Soviet Block, see Richard J Aldrich, The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and the Cold War Secret Intelligence (London: John Murray 2001); Norman M. Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,1995); and Tore Pryser, ‘From Petsamo to Venona’, Scandinavian Journal of History 24/1 (1999) pp.75–89.

¹⁸Some aspects of this shift in intelligence demands is discussed in James Sheptycki, ‘Policing, Intelligence Theory and the New Human Security Paradigm: Some Lessons from the Field’ in Peter Gill, Stephen Marrin and Mark Phythian (eds.) Intelligence Theory: Key Questions and Debates (London: Routledge 2009).

¹⁹Ignorance as a factor in understanding intelligence has been surprisingly overlooked, outside the specific field of intentional disinformation of other actors or the public. Besides a few works in economy, dealing with the phenomenon of random choices, ignorance as a social phenomenon has been sparsely studied with the important exception of Robert Proctor and Londa Schiebinger (eds.), Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 2008).

²⁰The ‘light of the state’ analogy originally appeared in a script by Bacon for a festival at Gray's Inn in 1594. Essex used it in a letter to a Doctor Hawkins two years later. See Dedijer, ‘The Rainbow Scheme’.

²¹The industrialized form of knowledge production in the intelligence systems from Bletchley Park and onwards is summed up by Michael Herman in Intelligence Power in Peace and War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996) chapters 17 and 18.

²²On the problems of analysis in intelligence, see Roger Z. George and James B Bruce (eds.), Analyzing Intelligence: Origins, Obstacles, and Innovations (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press 2008); Stephen Marrin, ‘Intelligence Analysis and Decision-making: Methodological Challenges’ in Gill, Marrin and Phythian, Intelligence Theory; Wilhelm Agrell, ‘Intelligence Analysis after the Cold War – New Paradigms or Old Anomalies?’ in Gregory Treverton and Wilhelm Agrell (eds.) National Intelligence Systems: Current Research and Future Prospects (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2009); and David A. Charters, A. Stuart Farson and Glenn P. Hastedt (eds.), Intelligence Analysis and Assessment (London: Frank Cass 1996).

²³Sherman Kent, Strategic intelligence for American World Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1949).

²⁴Christopher Andrew, ‘Intelligence, International Relations and “Under-theorisation”’ in L.V. Scott and Peter Jackson, Understanding Intelligence in the Twenty-First Century (London: Routledge 2004).

²⁵One of the best current description of this is found in Rob Johnston, The Analytic Culture of the U.S. Intelligence Community (Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency 2005).

²⁶For the impact of the open source revolution, see Gregory F. Treverton, Reshaping National Intelligence for an Age of Information (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2001) and Robert D. Steele, On Intelligence: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World (Fairfax, VA: AFCEA International Press 2000).