ARCHIVED: Commentary No. 83: Intelligence After 9/11: A British View of the Effects

Michael Herman

July  2003
Unclassified

Commentary No. 83 has been archived.

Editors Note: Michael Herman (MHe24@aol.com) was in British government service from 1952 to 1987. He is now associated with St Antony's College Oxford and Aberystwyth University. He has published Intelligence Power in Peace and War (1996) and Intelligence Services in the Information Age (2001).

Disclaimer: Publication of an article in the Commentary series does not imply CSIS authentication of the information nor CSIS endorsement of the author's views.

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Introduction

Not everyone was happy with President Bush's proclamation of the 'war on terrorism' after 11 September 2001 ('9/11'), but there is now not much doubt that Al Qaida has been at war against the United States since the attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, and that the rest of the 'capitalist West' (however defined) is now threatened as America's ally. At the time of writing (winter 2002-3) the British government is giving wide publicity to the threat of terrorist attack with chemical, biological or radiological weapons, and has warned the public that complete defence cannot be guaranteed. Assuming that this is well-founded, we live in a climate of serious threat, and one that will not be short-lived.

So intelligence's importance in combating terrorism can be taken as read. Its current place in American thinking was emphasized in President Bush's National Security Strategy of 20 September 2002: his eighteen references to intelligence as a prime national instrument were rivalled only by twenty-four to military means, and contrasted with seven to diplomacy. Most Western countries have followed the American example, and have increased intelligence's budgets and relaxed legal limitations on its activities. Everywhere it is riding high.

This has not been a complete reversal of a previous position. Intelligence had indeed been reduced as part of the peace dividend at the end of the Cold War, but budgets were already being increased before 9/11 to cope not only with terrorism but with the requirements of the 1990s to support international peace-enforcement and humanitarian operations, and for intelligence on WMD proliferation, sanctions evasion, drug trafficking and the other emerging targets of the decade. Governments were already adapting themselves to what seemed an increasingly unstable world, and to the revolution within it in the information available and governments' ability to collect and process it. Intelligence satellites had ceased to be a superpower preserve and were being operated or planned by a range of second-rank powers. Intelligence as a whole was becoming a rather more legitimate organ of state, no longer quite such a deniable activity.

But 9/11 dramatically reinforced the trend. It confirmed intelligence's position as a major attribute of national soft (or semi-soft) power; all nations except the smallest will soon develop it, if they do not have it already. It also highlighted the role of counter-terrorism within it. This can now be accepted as a distinct and important intelligence category, akin to the older political, military and economic subsets, and subsuming much of what has previously been labelled as 'security intelligence'. No doubt it will have competition from other requirements-the related search for 'smoking gun' evidence on Saddam Hussein's WMD developments is currently of equal priority in US eyes-but it seems set nevertheless to be a major, lasting influence on the intelligence community.

Intelligence is due to change radically in any case, as part of the information revolution of which it is an element. As two American writers put it before 9/11, 'if it is to remain effective, the intelligence community will have to change-so much, that when these changes are completed, it will likely bear little resemblance to the organization created fifty years ago'. ¹ But counter-terrorism's central position within it in a lengthy quasi-war will give the process a particular spin.

This paper speculates on what this will be, and what issues it poses. It gives a personal British view, drawing largely on British experience plus recent American announcements; but with some application to 'Western' intelligence as a whole, and perhaps more widely.

Counter-terrorism and Intelligence's Character

Intelligence on terrorism (shortened here for convenience to 'counter-terrorism') is characteristically based on the identification and tracking of people and their plans and activities. Its targeting is on individuals rather than 'things', and contrasts with military intelligence's concentration on the matériel of military power and the order of battle of formed units. Its aim is detection, rather than the analysis of complete situations that marks much other intelligence, for example the battlefield 'situational awareness' made possible by the power of modern technical collection. For such reasons, much discussion of counter-terrorism before and after 9/11 has focused on the need for better Humint as the prime requirement.

This may have shown elements of naivety and the search for panaceas. Good human sources on terrorism are worth their weight in gold; British success in the battle against the IRA depended in large measure upon them. American commentators may indeed be correct in arguing that the CIA's Directorate of Operations became demoralized in the 1990s by persistent media and Congressional criticism and lack of managerial support. But it is unrealistic to pin too many hopes on even an enhanced Humint effort against such security-conscious targets.

Instead, counter-terrorism's most important and distinctive challenge may lie not in any particular kind of collection, but in searching for connections among many diverse kinds of evidence. A member of the British Security Service's International Counter Terrorist Branch has written recently about what is involved. ² He argues that counter-terrorism is neither playing chess against a single enemy nor completing a jigsaw puzzle, unless it is accepted that the picture is fragmentary and fleeting with many pieces in the box that fit nowhere. In the search for clues, he prefers a metaphor of tracing threads and weaving patterns. The raw material is itself variegated and extensive, including:

• secret intelligence such as the intercepted communications of known terrorists; 
• secret intelligence on those, perhaps overseas, known to have been involved in terrorist support activity in the past;
• reports from overseas security organizations (again of highly variable quality and sometimes politically coloured) on actual or possible terrorist planning;
• police reports, for instance of suspicious movements through ports;
• allegations from 'walk-ins' who claim to have inside knowledge of terrorist plans;
• calls from members of the public reporting their suspicions;
• media statements by spokesmen for terrorist groups or their sympathizers.

The quantity of material coming in is immense-and to some extent driven by market forces. If someone is willing to pay for counter-terrorist intelligence then you can be sure that someone else is willing to supply it-manufacturing it first if necessary.

On this Material

The job of the intelligence officer is to identify those strands that are worth pursuing and then to pursue them until either they are resolved, or they start to look flaky and not worth pursuing, or there is nothing more that can usefully be done. It is a risk-management process. The number of potential leads that can be followed is virtually infinite. On the other hand covert investigation is extremely resource-intensive and impinges on the human rights of the subject. The threshold for such investigations is therefore high and the number of investigations necessarily limited. Consequently many potential leads have to be discounted. Decisions on which leads to pursue are vital, but are also complex and rich in judgement.

The British Foreign Secretary made a similar point in defending the Security Service's handling of the Bali bombing, by claiming that the Service receives 150 potential warning items each day. Globalized terrorism poses many challenges, but an ability to deal with extensive data of many different kinds seems a central criterion for an effective response.

So too is the need for secrecy. Much of the material is of covert intelligence provenance, foreign as well as national, and requires source protection; little of it is in the public domain. Follow-up investigations based on it need similar protection; good security is as necessary for counter-terrorist activity as for terrorism itself. Hence secrecy's pervasive effects.

These influence the character of intelligence as a whole. As an activity it has always been seen partly as covert collection-secretly acquiring other peoples' secrets-and partly as analyzing subjects and situations in wider 'all-source' contexts. Greg Treverton has characterized the two different aspects as 'intelligence-as-secrets' and 'intelligence-as-information', the latter making more use of open source material and including the more speculative, 'iffier' estimates and forecasts often most relevant to central decision-taking. ³ Views of intelligence have tended to emphasize either one feature or the other. In the Cold War most investment was in covert collection, and the collection of secrets predominated, but commentators for much of the 1990s argued that the future lay in analysis. More information was becoming openly available; covert collection would fill gaps, but the most important contribution would be wise analysis for top government. After the end of the Cold War, the present author argued that intelligence would become increasingly variegated, flexible and opportunistic. In terms of Britain's survival it is now less vital than during the Cold War, but probably more useful.... British intelligence's national importance therefore needs to be judged mainly in rather general contexts: public assumptions about foreign policy and defence; long-standing expectations of intelligence as a strong card in government's hand; the links between intelligence and the transatlantic political relationship. ⁴

On this view it was possible for a liberal to expect that intelligence would become rather less mysterious and 'special', and more like a normal information service such as government statistics; more open and unspectacular, and attracting less media curiosity and hype.

How overtaken by events this now seems! Already by the end of the 1990s the pendulum was swinging back some way towards the older view. Operations in the former Yugoslavia had demonstrated the continued need for secret collection, and for support for the use of armed force. Yet there still seemed to be no overarching threat; Western military interventions were still interventions by choice. 9/11 and subsequent terrorism have now radically altered the situation. As in the Cold War, intelligence is again targeted on a major threat from an intensely difficult target; but arguably the threat is now actual, not latent, and even more impenetrable than then. In the Cold War, intelligence was helping its governments to avoid war; now it is actively involved in one, saving lives and defending national security in the most literal sense. Whatever reservations there may be about describing Western reactions to 9/11 as 'war', the wartime metaphor fits intelligence's changed status rather well.

Of course it will continue to have its many other, different tasks. Much of it will still be on political or military subjects, or combinations of the two in the mixed 'pol-mil' assessments needed on so many modern situations; and sometimes on the world of trade, finance and economics. And the counter-terrorist role is itself nothing new; Irish terrorism was a top priority for Britain for thirty years. But the threat then was limited in scale and geography, and seems relatively small compared with the globalization and destructiveness of contemporary terrorism. Counter-terrorism's importance will now cause intelligence to be slewed overall some way towards its requirements and skills.

The result may be to influence policy and perceptions about intelligence more than has yet been appreciated. Governments' legislation after 9/11 may presage a permanent shift in the balances between security surveillance and individual rights. The long-running dilemma of democratic openness versus official reticence will be heavily influenced by counter-terrorism's need for secrecy. Intelligence's value for money may come to be judged less by its top-level policy inputs than by its 'sharp-end' counter-terrorist effectiveness: Dame Stella Rimington's claim in 1994 that the security forces in Northern Ireland were by then frustrating four out of every five planned terrorist attacks illustrates the cumulative but unspectacular significance of successful tactical pre-emptive warnings. ⁵ None of this reduces the need for understanding the adversary's mind and tackling other broad questions; yet the reality of counter-terrorism puts a special premium upon nitty-gritty analysis and smart operational use.

The effects of a re-evaluation of this kind may spread more widely in unexpected ways. Thus at an academic level the received doctrine about 'warning failures' probably needs rewriting to take account of the asymmetric warfare in which counter-terrorism is engaged. All this could be part of a general twenty-first century sea-change in thinking about intelligence as a whole.

This paper does not speculate further on the form this may take, but concentrates instead on one particular aspect. If the core of counter-terrorism is indeed tracing threads and weaving patterns out of many different kinds of evidence, then it is a 'natural' for the application of the latest in ICT (information and communications technology) to work horizontally across all the separate institutions holding relevant data. It therefore poses questions about the vertical institutional boundaries that give individual agencies proprietary control of their own information. How far then does counter-terrorism link with the information revolution in calling established intelligence structures into question?

Community Structure

The structures of the English-speaking intelligence communities have in fact been surprisingly static since they took their main forms just after the Second World War. Apart from the integration of the separate armed services' central intelligence staffs, Britain's current structure is much as it emerged in 1945. Since the creation of the CIA and NSA in 1947 and 1952, the US community has also been relatively conservative in its make-up, except for the new organizations needed for intelligence satellites and the imagery they produce. Perhaps Canada's creation of CSIS out of the RCMP was one of the more radical English-speaking reforms. All this relative stability has been in a period in which reorganization has been endemic in other public administration, and 'agile organization' has become a modern managerial watchword elsewhere.

Before 9/11 there was no shortage of American writing about the need for change. Much of it was about specific American weaknesses. The National Security Agency was said to be fossilized; the new National Imagery and Mapping Agency should never have been created in the first place; the Defense Intelligence Agency had never found its real métier; the CIA for some writers was too civilian, and thought it had been too oriented to military support since the Gulf War. At the apex of the structure the DCI was held to be ineffectual, without direct control of money and jobs.

To some extent, this reflected the American propensity to seek improvement in everything, but it also reflected a wider, radical strain in organizational thinking. Intelligence's structure of separate and powerful agencies was seen to encourage 'stovepiping', in which single-source intelligence is passed up to the top without sufficient all-source integration. Writers criticized the resulting marketing of single-source rather than all-source material, the inter-agency rivalry, and the pursuit of agency rather than community interests. The tone was strongly anti-bureaucratic. 'Bureaucracies are bad. Secret bureaucracies are worse.' ⁶ Intelligence's future was held to lay in the modern organizational doctrine of de-layering, market-based models, virtual communities and team approaches.

One suspects that stovepiping had become here a convenient whipping boy for every kind of shortcoming. Intelligence requires high reliability, and organizational divisions are needed to maintain varied kinds of special expertise and accountability. Intelligence cannot be just a free-for-all. There has to be a leading agency that takes main responsibility for analysis and inputs to policy in quickly-moving emergencies, as the Security Service does in the UK. (Part of the American problem is that over foreign preparations for attacks on the homeland, it is not clear whether the CIA or the FBI leads). The issue is not the existence of the stovepipes but their number, length and arrangements for junctions with others. ⁷

Nonetheless the criticism cannot be dismissed. In the present writer's (admittedly distant) experience, American satellite imagery in the Cold War was a technical and professional miracle, but its handling in separate organizations with separate security regulations meant that it was difficult for anyone to integrate it properly with other technical collection. Intelligence developed an ever-increasing labyrinth of special classifications and compartments, designed explicitly to control information flows; justifiably so, in Cold War conditions, but with damage nevertheless to effectiveness. ⁸ After his experience in the senior American community, Treverton memorably commented that community describes precisely what it is not: it is somewhere between a fiction and an aspiration. ⁹

This seems particularly relevant to counter-terrorism's need to cope with diverse information. American post-mortems after 9/11 have been surprisingly unfocused up to now, but stovepiping-particularly its effects on information exchanges between the CIA and the FBI-will remain a central theme for full-scale investigation. The writer's impression is that, in English-speaking intelligence communities, modern ICT is being harnessed quite effectively to create classified intelligence Web sites for agencies' 'published' reports (those issued as end-product to intelligence consumers and other agencies), but that it is still not envisaged that analysts following up terrorist traces will be able to trawl automatically through the unpublished material in each others' databases.

One simplistic answer would be to reorganize, starting by eliminating the traditional distinction between 'domestic' and 'foreign' intelligence. This might not have spectacular effects in Canada, but in Britain would mean amalgamating the Security Service and the Secret Intelligence Service (the SIS). In principle this amalgamation would fit the globalization that now makes distinctions between foreign and domestic targets increasingly artificial. Terrorists are located partly abroad and partly at home and move easily in the world of extensive foreign travel, worldwide communications and international finance. So some reorganization around global terrorism is not altogether out of the question. It is interesting to speculate whether Britain would have been wise to create a more interdisciplinary, target-driven counter-terrorist organization of some kind in 1969, presumably under Security Service direction, if it had known that Irish terrorism would be a principal national preoccupation for the next thirty years.

Yet reorganization as a solution is in some ways facile, in others too difficult. It ignores individual organizations' particular skills and institutional links, particularly with opposite numbers overseas. Treverton put it neatly: 'the capacities embedded in existing intelligence organizations are both powerful and hard to create, so caution is called for in demolishing them in favor of something new while we are yet so uncertain of the world we will confront'. ¹⁰ 9/11 has not outdated his caution. The private sector, with different traditions of organizational fluidity, might well reorganize, but can run greater risks than governments.

So it will be surprising if Britain ever goes for amalgamation. There is American talk of creating an analogue of the Security Service out of the FBI, but over the integration of home and overseas efforts it seems inconceivable that the CIA would ever again get a mandate for the domestic coverage it was accused of mounting before the mid-1970s. However much they are interleaved, domestic and foreign intelligence agencies in democracies are subject to very different legal and political restraints, and develop distinctive casts of mind as a result. Merging them hardly seems practicable or desirable.

If reorganization is not an answer, correctives to stovepiping lie in ways of softening inter-agency boundaries and enabling ICT to develop 'virtual communities' across different organizations. Cross-postings between agencies, inter-agency training and similar initiatives have an important part to play in building up a greater 'community consciousness'. Intelligence may have something to learn here from the armed services' successes in developing operational 'jointery' while keeping their separate identities. A writer on public administration has opined that getting agencies to work together is a matter of behaviour and process, not structure; collaboration is a long-term process that turns on 'creating a climate of trust and joint problem-solving' that produces what he labels an 'Interagency Collaborative Capacity'. ¹¹ If true of all government, this applies particularly to intelligence, where secrecy breeds an intense sense of belonging, but to a single agency and not a community. Intelligence literature emphasizes the need to be close to policy-makers; yet single-source agencies' highest priority in counter-terrorism is actually to be close to their all-source intelligence colleagues who work the problem as a whole.

This points to the importance of fruitful single-source/all-source relationships. The different responsibilities of the two have to be recognized: one as the expert on particular kinds of collection and exploitation, the other as government's all-round authority on a subject. Military intelligence doctrine is emphatic in differentiating between the two, and the present writer has written similarly that, through it, 'a valuable Western principle has evolved-by accident, not conscious design-that those collecting and processing information should not normally have final responsibility for evaluating it'. ¹² Yet the institutional boundary impedes what intellectually is really an all-embracing search for truth, ideally a jeu sans frontières (a title given to the Eurovision Song Contest). 'Despite the value of the single-source/all-source distinction, it is still intellectually artificial to chop into two parts what in reality is a continuous search from truth. There are no pure, objective 'facts' delivered to the all-source analyst's front door. All-source analysis needs some ability to reach back into Sigint, and vice versa.' ¹³

ICT now has the potential to make this approach to truth-seeking more of a reality, with data as a common asset which virtual communities can access freely. In one sense it is a rather obvious desideratum; some may claim that it is not far from what happens now, particularly when people are on good terms and have the stimulus of the terrorist threat. In another sense it is a revolutionary doctrine, wreaking havoc with well-established ideas of security protection and specialized agency skills and responsibilities. Despite its particular relevance to counter-terrorism, applying ICT in this way will be much harder in practice than it sounds. Determined leadership from the centre will be needed to reduce inter-institutional boundaries without throwing source protection overboard. But, if so, the question then arises: in intelligence, who leads?

Who Leads?

The British Joint Intelligence Committee (the JIC) evolved in the Second World War with two principal roles joined together by historical accident: directing wartime intelligence, mainly by agreement between the three armed services, and producing agreed intelligence assessments for those running the war. It has been quite widely imitated. Most English-speaking countries recognize that committees have a place in producing top-level estimates, though they vary in the precise roles attached to them. Committees are also needed to manage intelligence, though almost everywhere they are complemented by central authority somewhere in the system. There has been a general tendency-less in Britain than elsewhere-for the machineries of community assessment and management to separate. Both are bound to evolve further. How will counter-terrorism affect their evolution?

One effect may apply to both. The importance of counter-terrorism has joined with the sheer pace of modern government-the constant need for immediate action and reaction-to focus attention on the question 'Who's in charge?', put by Churchill in 1940 about the British system. In Britain as elsewhere there is no clearer answer now than then. As intelligence becomes more important and decisions more pressing, governments and media will become increasingly dissatisfied with answers in terms of committees and communities, and will call for an identifiable national Chief Intelligence Officer. In the American system the post already exists in the person of the DCI, but it has long been argued that he lacks managerial teeth; the problem is devising practical ways of providing them. In Britain the JIC Chairman is a titular head of the community, yet there has always been a deep reluctance to accord the occupant a proconsular role in an innately collegial system.

So in both systems top posts exist, but their impact is unusually dependent on personal qualities plus backing from above. Enhanced power for the DCI post figured among the recently stated presidential objectives, though there is no indication how this is to be provided. In Britain the position is clearer. As part of reorganization at the centre, Sir David Omand has recently joined what is almost a dyarchy at the top of the Cabinet Office, in which he has responsibility for coordinating all intelligence and security matters including counter-terrorism. This does not solve the problem of ministerial support and responsibility in a Westminster-style system, but certainly strengthens the centre's clout at official level. Committees have their place, but terrorism's threats are likely to reinforce the trend in government towards identifying personal accountability.

So in both systems, and perhaps in other English-speaking ones as well, the effects of counter-terrorism may turn out to lie not in changing formal intelligence structures, but in the de facto authority of the top posts at the centre. In America, the position of the present DCI, as a Clinton appointee continuing under the Bush Administration, may be a precedent for greater continuity and authority. In the UK, all JIC Chairmen before 2001 came from the Foreign Office, usually in combination with other duties; and although intelligence was well-served by the high calibre of the post's occupants, the fact of being high fliers tended to make them also birds of passage. Since just before 9/11 the post has been occupied for the first time by a full-time intelligence professional likely to stay there for some time, and events since then have underlined the requirements originally stated in 1947 that the Chairman should have 'an assured position, adequate time and sufficient supporting staff' to provide 'the added authority that is needed to give more forcefulness and influence to our intelligence organization as a whole'. ¹⁴

So perhaps counter-terrorism everywhere will re-emphasize intelligence leadership, and with it the need for continuity in post and adequate preparation in previous careers. Possibly a national Head of Intelligence role may eventually become recognized and professionalized in the same way as governments' heads of other specialized disciplines, with consequent reduction in agencies' autonomy. This may pose its own problems, but the post-9/11 climate at least gives governments scope for giving the community this option. But in a century of rapid change, what community will this actually be?

What Community?

Intelligence is a broad church; there is no formal definition of the subjects it should not tackle. The British JIC has a mandate to assess almost anything, and expands ad hoc to include representatives of other departments when dealing with matters outside its normal sphere. But in practice its main impact is usually when it deals with the world of threats, warning, violence, international disorder and war. Washington has tended to take a rather broader view, for example in the production of CIA's futurologies of world trends. Yet at least until the end of the Cold War there was a general assumption in English-speaking countries that intelligence was most needed on 'national security' matters of one kind or another, more carefully defined in domestic contexts than foreign ones.

This underwent some change in the decade after 1990. There was discussion of economic intelligence as a growth area, though in the end it remained much as before. More innovative were the developing intelligence connections with law enforcement authorities, mainly police, immigration and customs. These were not new, but were expanded in both the UK and US to develop intelligence agencies' collection on drug trafficking, money laundering and other organized crime, especially when international. Drugs became a major CIA commitment and a JIC First Priority collection requirement, and the JIC produced papers on the subject. There were media reports that Britain's Security Service had been tasked with arcane aspects of police corruption, and the SIS with tracking the organizers of illegal immigration, which also became a matter for JIC assessment. Even military intelligence was sometimes targeted on crime, as when military forces for peace support in Bosnia and Kosovo needed intelligence on the local and international mafia.

At the same time 'intelligence' itself developed as a new specialization within law enforcement institutions themselves, and in Britain showed signs of developing as a nascent intelligence community on its own account, led and coordinated by the new National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS). At least in the UK, the favoured sound-bite for greater police effectiveness has become 'intelligence-led policing'. Joint interests with the 'old' intelligence community are recognized by the attendance of the NCIS at JIC meetings. Both the UK and US established intelligence exchanges on international crime with the KGB's successors in modern Russia. So even before 9/11 there was scope for speculation about the future boundaries between the 'new' and 'old' intelligence, and the possibility that the two might in the long term merge, particularly as sophisticated crime became more transnational, especially in Europe and presumably also in the Americas.

Counter-terrorism now gives additional force to the speculation. It makes close cooperation between the two sets of institutions particularly important; law enforcement is both a major contributor of intelligence on terrorism and a prime customer for it. In Britain the study of terrorist funding is performed principally by the NCIS; the National Counter Terrorism and Security Office is manned jointly by police and the Security Service; and the Police International Counter Terrorist Unit includes Security Service representatives. In the US the need for better cooperation of this kind was another theme of the Presidential address already quoted. Terrorists are usually not criminals in a conventional sense, but their infrastructure is very likely to involve them in forms of criminality and law evasion.

Large issues of principle arise, of course, over any governmental integration of personal information about its citizens, and its use for multiple purposes. There is libertarian anxiety about the official American research program of Total Information Awareness, which envisages tracing terrorists by matching inter alia passport and visa applications, criminal, education and housing records, travel and transportation information, as well as personal identity data like fingerprints and iris scans. Even the present British government's non-security objective of using ICT to link government's separate services to the citizen in 'joined up government' has aroused similar fears of Orwell's 1984. In institutional terms, however, the needs of counter-terrorism might nevertheless seem to point towards expanding the traditional intelligence communities with increased law enforcement responsibilities and representation.

Yet even in an information revolution there are substantial objections to radical changes of that kind. The basic difference remains between law enforcement's main concern with 'normal' crime for financial gain, and terrorism's use of violence for political ends. In Britain it would be surprising if the JIC were expanded to include the NCIS and other law enforcement organs as full members, and took on substantial segments of crime among its permanent responsibilities; and it would on the whole be undesirable as well as unlikely. On the other hand the American lesson about the need to pool foreign intelligence with domestic data seems so compelling that it will be surprising if some US changes do not follow the creation of the new Department of Homeland Security. Perhaps all that can be said is that counter-terrorism accentuates the increased interdependence of the (old) intelligence community and its (new) law enforcement analogue. Intelligence as traditionally understood has always had some fuzzy boundaries, and law enforcement intelligence and its involvement in counter-terrorism is adding another.

How International?

Quite apart from its involvement in the overseas as well as domestic dimensions of law enforcement, foreign collaboration had become increasingly prominent in intelligence's normal activities before 9/11. Foreign liaisons are of course nothing new. They were an important feature of the West's Cold War alliances, but further extended in the 1990s. International terrorism was already a major target. Governments' actions involving military power were also becoming increasingly multilateral, as in the former Yugoslavia, and these were themselves becoming increasingly intelligence-led. The same applied to the growing international attempts to monitor and restrain WMD development and other threats. A considerable growth of intelligence-sharing followed. Before 9/11, CIA already had relationships with 400 foreign intelligence and security organizations, and at that time the Russian FSB (the ex-KGB equivalent of CSIS) was similarly claiming to have 'around 80 missions representing the special services of 56 countries' working permanently in Moscow, and formal agreements with '40 foreign partners in 33 countries'. ¹⁵ Up to UNSCOM's withdrawal in 1998, up to twenty nations are said to have passed information to it on Iraqi sanctions-busting and weapons development.

But 9/11 has given a great boost to this 'internationalization'. It brought home to the US that, despite being an intelligence superpower, it cannot meet all its counter-terrorist requirements itself. Almost every nation is able to supply some unique intelligence on global terrorism, from its local records and local human and technical sources; from local telephone tapping, for example. Security Council Resolution 1373 immediately after 9/11 explicitly mandated such exchanges, though in UN style these were still described as 'information'. America developed a set of new counter-terrorist relationships, and Britain followed suit, notably in the Blair-Putin announcement in December 2001 of new Anglo-Russian machinery for the purpose. A year later the presidential message of September 2002 formally confirmed the American objective of coordinating closely with allies for common assessment of the most dangerous threats. The Security Service, necessarily the most domestically oriented British agency, by then was claiming to have over a hundred overseas links. ¹⁶

The move to more cooperation has not always been consistent. US policies vary between cultivating international support and going it alone, and no doubt influence the climate in intelligence as in everything else. Nevertheless the increase in inter-governmental intelligence collaboration since 9/11, sometimes between unlikely allies, has been striking in what, despite foreign liaisons, had formerly been instinctively regarded as an essentially separate, reclusive national activity, deeply rooted in secrecy and national interests: waging a special zero-sum information contest between states, some way removed from the main fabric of international relationships, a matter for special people in special compartments. By contrast, intelligence collaboration is now regularly in the news, almost as often as the older elements of international relationships.

Cooperation may therefore provide another element in a sea-change in thinking about intelligence as a whole. 9/11 re-emphasized the covert aspects and need for secrecy. But it must also have intensified the shift already apparent in the 1990s away from governments' targeting of what the Victorians called 'civilized' states, and towards a concentration on non-states (including terrorist organizations), problem states and situations, and rogue states outside the international pale, particularly those supporting and harbouring terrorism. Al Qaida, Iraq and North Korea typify the new category, and their importance must mean less coverage of 'normal' states as an adjunct to regular diplomacy and negotiation; the ten per cent which a distinguished British diplomat once estimated as the addition that covert intelligence added to regular diplomatic reporting.

From this comes the possibility of a new paradigm for intelligence. In the international system of (normal) states, it is moving to becoming, not a zero-sum contest, but a cooperative activity between them, directed against common threats and common concerns. Even major policy disagreements-as at the time of writing over the action to be taken over Saddam Hussein's evasion of UN inspection-are based on shared (or partially shared) evidence; intelligence has become the material of worldwide inter-governmental and public discourse. The paradigm of cooperative intelligence activity and interpretation was implicit in the developments of the 1990s, but with 9/11 and subsequent events it can now be articulated.

Possible results of the new paradigm have been discussed elsewhere ¹⁷ in terms of international intelligence collection and the development of multilateral and international analysis. There are already some precedents for UN-controlled collection-blue-helmeted tactical units in the Congo and operations in the former Yugoslavia; the American U-2 sorties over Iraq controlled by UNSCOM; the similar collection for UNMOVIC. But this is unlikely to be a main line of development. Most collection will remain a national activity, but with more formal international pooling and discussion of results. The UK-US-Commonwealth community has its long-standing arrangements for joint participation in the production of intelligence estimates such as those of the JIC, and there is no intrinsic reason why the NATO Council should not have similar machinery for intelligence drafted by an international intelligence staff. There is equally no reason why the Security Council should not have something similar at its disposal, though there it would need to be labelled 'assessment' and not 'intelligence'. UNMOVIC is reported today as having convened a meeting of 'missile experts' from six countries to assess the evidence on Iraqi missiles along with its own analysis staff. What is this but a de facto international assessment staff?

Developing cooperative intelligence and formal intelligence machinery of this kind may seem pie-in-the-sky for what is still closely guarded national activity. It assumes that states will actually practice greater restraint in intrusive collection against each other, recognizing that a kind of 'intelligence arms control' would assist cooperation and free resources for use against the new targets; that intelligence is not automatically associated with covert action; that governments worldwide will come to expect some professional truthfulness from it, rather than view it as inseparable from policy. The KGB's official definition of intelligence-gathering was as 'a specific form of political struggle used by the intelligence agencies of a state to help it to fulfil its internal and external functions'. ¹⁸ Stripped of its ideology this is still the widely held international view. Few governments or publics believe that intelligence is not just a currency for exploitation for policy or power.

Yet nations and their leaders can change their working assumptions quite radically over time. In intelligence itself, National Technical Means of information collection (the euphemism for Sigint and imagery) received a totally unforeseeable legitimacy through US-Soviet strategic arms control in the Cold War and subsequent international agreements. ¹⁹ More broadly, war between states before the eighteenth century Enlightenment 'remained an almost automatic activity, part of the natural order of things.... If anyone could be said to have invented peace as more than a mere pious aspiration, it was Kant.' ²⁰ In the nineteenth century the Red Cross owed its development to a private initiative which caught on and moved governments; ²¹ and the Hague Conference of 1899 and its contributions to the laws of war originated in an unexpected initiative from the Tsar, possibly from reading a book on future war. ²² Views of military power itself are now undergoing a similar transformation, as in the British writer's view of democracy's professional soldiers as international society's check upon violence; 'those honourable warriors who administer force in the cause of peace.' ²³ Mutatis mutandis, the terrorist threat opens up a similar view of intelligence. So just as 9/11 leads governments to lower information boundaries within their own national systems to improve inter-agency cooperation, so also it points to a more cooperative view of intelligence internationally.

Conclusion

11 September 2001 has made counter-terrorism intelligence's overarching priority. It requires a near-wartime intensity to meet it, will not be transitory, and will be a major influence on intelligence's overall character. Intelligence is simultaneously part of the revolution in information and communications technology (ICT), a revolution that is peculiarly suited to meet counter-terrorism's distinctive need for detecting connections in large swathes of many different kinds of data, but one that also changes organizations, relationships and communities in quite radical ways. Hence applying it to full effect in counter-terrorism calls into question intelligence's long-standing structures and boundaries, and the single-agency 'stovepiping' that these encourage.

Thus reorganization for international terrorism by merging all related 'foreign' and 'security' intelligence into one ICT-driven agency might appear logical; but it would in fact be facile. The antidote to stovepiping will instead be in cultural adaptations of varying kinds to promote the greater 'community consciousness' needed to develop ICT systems spanning across inter-agency boundaries. Promoting this consciousness requires central intelligence leadership. So too does the need to cope with the sheer pace of modern government and its demands on intelligence. Committees still have their place, but governments will increasingly expect to have their Chief Intelligence Officers, with full responsibility for their national intelligence communities.

These communities will themselves change in other ways. Counter-terrorism will emphasize the need for increased connections with law enforcement and its new law enforcement intelligence 'communities'. In another dimension they will become increasingly international in the services they provide. They will remain national institutions, but will be seen increasingly as supporting inter-state cooperation for shared objectives, primarily but not exclusively counter-terrorism: in a sense, states' defence against their non-state enemies. They will remain deeply influenced by counter-terrorism's need for secrecy, yet will at the same time adapt to the need for more cross-boundary working-within their own communities; with law enforcement organs and others involved in counter-terrorism; with foreign opposite numbers; and with specialist assessment machinery at NATO, the UN and other regional and international levels.

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Endnotes

1. Bruce D.Berkowitz and Allen E.Goodman, Best Truth: Intelligence in the Information Age (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), p.98.

2. Published in Security Monitor (RUSI London) first issue, 2002. Quotations from this article.

3. Gregory F.Treverton, Reshaping National Intelligence for an Age of Information (Cambridge University Press, 2001), passim.

4. Author, British Intelligence towards the Millennium (London: Centre for Defence Studies, pp.64-65.

5. S. Rimington, Richard Dimbleby Lecture Security and Democracy (London: BBC Educational Developments, 1994), p.9

6. Address by Robert Steele, St Antony's College Oxford, 12 June 2002.

7. I am indebted for these balancing comments to the late Colonel Kevin Cunningham, US Army War College.

8. The present American Defense Secretary is said to have complained that a recent briefing on national missile defence had been chaotic since, because of compartmentation, no analyst could present the total picture.

9. Treverton, p.xiii.

10. Treverton, p.249.

11. E.Bardach, Getting Agencies to Work Together: the Practice and Theory of Managerial Craftsmanship (Washington DC: Brookings Institute), quoted by Wayne Parsons, 'Modernising Policy-Making for the Twenty-First Century: the Professional Model', Public Policy and Administration vol.16 no.10 (autumn 2001).

12. Author, Intelligence Power in Peace and War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p.112.

13. Author, Intelligence Services in the Information Age (London: Cass, 2001), p.193.

14. Evill report in 1947 on the JIC, quoted in Intelligence Services in the Information Age, p.114.

15. Article by FSB Director N.Patrushev, Russian National Information Service 20 December 2001.

16. MI5: The Security Service (offical publication, fourth edition, available 2002), p.26.

17. Author's '11 September: Legitimizing Intelligence?', International Relations vol.16 no.2 (August 2002).

18. Vasiliy Mitrokhin, KGB Lexicon: The Soviet Intelligence Officer's Handbook (London: Cass, 2002), p.200.

19. History outlined in Intelligence Power in Peace and War, pp.159-62.

20. Quotations from M.Howard, The Invention of Peace: Reflections on War and International Order (London: Profile Books, 2000), pp.13 and 31.

21. Pam Brown, Henry Dunant: The Founder of the Red Cross (Watford: Exley, 1988).

22. G.Best, 'Peace Conferences and the Century of Total War: The 1899 Hague Conference and What Came After', International Affairs, vol.75 no.3 (July 1999), p.622.

23. Concluding words in J.Keegan, War and Our World (London: Hutchinson, 1998) (Reith Lectures 1998), p.74.

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