Intelligence is as intelligence does

Abstract

Anglo-American scholars have sought to define ‘intelligence’ by positing that it helps leaders acquire and control information against competitors. Most or all agree that intelligence entails collection, analysis, and counterintelligence, and many add covert action as well. These core functions of intelligence, however, neglect the variety of activities that intelligence services have also engaged in, such as conducting diplomacy, guarding borders, running prisons, operating military units, designing atomic bombs, and managing professional soccer teams. Such peripheral functions can vary across time and place, while the core functions endure but can gradually grow in number over time. Simultaneously, non-intelligence agencies encroach on the turf of intelligence agencies. Thus, ‘intelligence’ is what intelligence agencies do. We close by wondering how these insights can generate testable hypotheses to illuminate patterns in intelligence functions and organizations over time and across a range of regimes.

Acknowledgment

The authors would like to thank Lesley Copeland, Rory Cormac, Peter Gill, James Lockhart, and Nikita Wolf for productive discussions and useful comments and suggestions.

Notes

1. See, for instance, the divergent but somewhat overlapping definitions offered by authors in Phythian, Gill, and Marrin, Intelligence Theory.

2. Davies, “Ideas of Intelligence,” 12.

3. Ibid., 13.

4. Davies and Gustafson, “An Agenda,” 7.

5. United States, DOD Dictionary.

6. [Redacted], “SIGINT,” 31.

7. Kennedy, Intelligence Warfare, 16.

8. Wheaton and Beerbower, “Towards a New Definition,” 327.

9. Cornwall, The Undermining of Austria-Hungary, 5.

10. Weber, The Final Memoranda, 54–7.

11. This is how the 2014 National Intelligence Strategy seems to regard covert action, which it never explicitly mentions but seems to allude to in stating the IC will assist the current operations of the US government by conducting ‘sensitive intelligence operations to support effective national security’. United States Director of National Intelligence, The National Intelligence Strategy, 8.

12. See for instance Shulsky and Schmitt, Silent Warfare, 159–67.

13. One of the current authors expanded on this in recent years; see Warner, “Fragile and Provocative.”

14. Gilbert, World War I, 146–8.

15. Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers, 241.

16. Interestingly, the teams in the USSR, East Germany, and Romania were all called ‘Dynamo’.

17. Raviv and Melman, Spies against Armageddon, 26.

18. The literature on ‘quiet diplomacy’ is voluminous, though it tends to run to newspaper stories and memoirs. The best scholarly examination may be Scott, “Secret Intelligence.” For a useful discussion of how ‘intelligence operated in the blurred space between traditional diplomacy and human espionage using agents’, see Wolf, “This Secret Town.” There are many specific examples of clandestine diplomacy using intelligence services. The United Kingdom’s MI6 tried to open a back channel to the Taliban in the 2000s, Julian Borger and Jon Boone. 2010. “US General McChrystal Approved Peace Talks with Fake Taliban Leader.” The Guardian, 26 November. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/nov/26/us-general-mcchrystal-taliban-impostor. British and American intelligence agencies worked together to negotiate a deal over weapons of mass destruction with Libya’s Muammar Qadaffi UK in the early 2000s, Metter, “A Case.” Libya used its intelligence service to try to open a backchannel to the United States through former Senator Gary Hart in 1992, Gary Hart. 2004. “My Secret Talks with Libya, and Why They Went Nowhere.” Washington Post, 18 January. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/2004/01/18/my-secret-talks-with-libya-and-why-they-went-nowhere/d144215b-f781-4c18-978e-33c483850a7b/?utm_term=.1993ce91f2d5.

The South African government used its National Intelligence Service to open up discussions with the then-imprisoned Nelson Mandela to lay the groundwork for his release, Barnard and Wiese, Secret Revolution. The most famous such case is the KGB opening of a back channel to the U.S. Government through journalist John Scali during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Fursenko and Naftali, “The Scali-Feklisov Channel,” 207–14.

19. Black and Morris, Israel’s Secret Wars, 182.

20. Choe Sang-Hun. 2012. “North Korea Stole Data of Millions of Online Consumers, South Says.” New York Times, July 28. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/29/world/asia/north-korea-hacking-interpark.html?_r=1.

21. Matei Rosca. 2014. “Ikea Funds Went to Romanian Secret Police in Communist Era.” The Guardian, July 4. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/04/ikea-funds-romania-secret-police-communist-era.

22. Watson, Molotov and Soviet Government, 163.

23. United States House of Representatives, “Authority to Order,” 20.

24. Cox, Close Protection, 65, 66.

25. Gulko, Felshtinsky, and Popov, The KGB Plays Chess.

26. Abbott, The System of Professions.

27. United States Department of Defense, “DoD Briefing on Policy.”

28. United States Department of Defense, Inspector General, Review of the Pre-Iraqi War Activities, 2, 3.

29. Ibid., 8.

30. Ibid., iii and 7–9.

31. Ibid., 3.

32. Erwin, “Covert Action.”

33. In philosophy, the Thomists helpfully define an essence as the set of properties constitutive of a thing; an essence is that which is necessary, immutable, indivisible, and eternal.

34. Cepik and Antunes, “Brazil’s New Intelligence System,” 355, 356.

35. Quoted in Deal and Kennedy, Corporate Cultures, 86.

36. van de Velde, “War in Peace.”

37. Arboit, “The Luxembourg State Intelligence Service.”

38. There has been a great deal of unreliable scholarship on Cold War ‘stay behind’ networks tainted by conspiracy theories and Soviet disinformation. However, four very useful articles on this subject appeared in the Journal of Strategic Studies 30:6 (2007). They are Cogan, “‘Stay-behind’ in France”; Nuti, “The Italian ‘Stay-behind’ Network”; Engelen, “Lessons Learned”; and Riste, “With an Eye.” See also, Riste, “Stay Behind.”

39. Sun Tzu, The Art of War, xiii, 14.