Politics is not everything: New perspectives on the public disclosure of intelligence by states

ABSTRACT

Why do states deliberately disclose hard-earned intelligence? For political and operational reasons, Official Public Intelligence Disclosure (OPID) is often considered counterintuitive and ill-advised. However, as this practice proliferates in international affairs in recent years, extant scholarship emphasizes domestic political incentives for its employment. Drawing on interviews with policy, defense, and media figures in Israel, this article generates alternative perspectives. First, in keeping with the dictates of contemporary information and media environment, states engage in OPID as a performative act designed to enhance diplomacy and shape international agenda. Second, in the age of limited wars, instead of being amassed purely for large-scale escalation, selective disclosure of intelligence can be weaponized against adversaries whose operations and very survival depend on secrecy, so as to shape their behavior below the threshold of war. The article advances our understanding of the innovative ways in which intelligence can be strategically employed in the information age.

KEYWORDS:

• Foreign policy
• intelligence
• secrecy
• performativity
• Israel

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Dr. Devorah Manekin, Dr. Daniel Sobelman, and Prof. Oren Barak for their guidance and advice, Ms. Shani Shabanov for her assistance, and the two anonymous reviewers as well as the journal's editor, Hylke Dijkstra, for their useful comments and suggestions that helped improve this article. I would also like to thank all the interviewees for dedicating time to share from their experience.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Public intelligence disclosure by states is not to be confused with unauthorized forms of intelligence disclosure, such as leaks and whistleblowing; with private intrastate and interstate disclosures, also known as intelligence sharing; nor with the declassification of archival material.

2 Noted American examples are “the Zimmermann Telegram” of 1917, U.S. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson's appearance before the UN Security Council during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and U.S. Ambassador Madeleine Albright's appearance before the UN Security Council following the Srebrenica massacre in 1995. For few examples of British OPIDs mainly on Soviet subversion in the United Kingdom, see Andrew (2018, Ch. 26). For Soviet examples, see the above and Easter (2021).

3 Amid the Six-Day-War, in June 1967, Israel’s Army Radio broadcast a full telephone conversation between Egyptian President Abdel Nasser and Jordan’s King Hussein, in which the two leaders conspired to fabricate reports that the West took part in Israel's military assault on the Arab states. In October 1985, Ehud Barak, then the head of the military intelligence directorate Aman, played a recording on Israeli television of a telephone conversation between the hijackers of the Achille Lauro cruise ship and their commander, who was a member of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), which Israel sought to delegitimize at the time.

4 Nearly 60% of Israelis supported hawkish military solutions in case Iran renews its nuclear activity. 20% supported greater pressure on the US to achieve a better deal with Iran. See Israeli (2019).

5 The main reason for the difference between the agreement over the increase in OPIDs and the lesser agreement over the high public exposure to intelligence is the interviewees' assertion that the intelligence disclosed reflects a negligible portion of the total amount of the state's secrets.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ofek Riemer

Ofek Riemer is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of International Relations of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He holds a B.A. in Middle Eastern Studies and an M.A. in Diplomacy and Security, both from Tel Aviv University. His research interests include intelligence, coercion, communication, and ontological security.