Institutionalizing Intelligence

In more concise terms, the difference between British and US concepts of intelligence is that the United States approaches information as a specific component of intelligence, while Britain approaches intelligence as a specific type of information. Of the two, the British conception is unsurprisingly of greater antiquity, and it can probably be argued that the US usage of the term was closer to the British one prior to World War II. Despite institutional and constitutional differences between the two governments, US intelligence institutions such as the US Navy’s Signals Intelligence Service were geared mainly toward producing raw intelligence for departmental exploitation. The contemporary US approach to intelligence can, however, be traced fairly directly to the nation’s experience of the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. By comparison, if the British had any comparable formative trauma it was probably the disastrous South African campaign of 1899-1903, commonly known as the Boer War. These two experiences were catastrophic for different reasons, and the diagnoses of these failures provided the intellectual foundations for the two countries’ respective institutions as well as their conceptions of intelligence.

At the turn of the century, the British went into South Africa ignorant not merely about the geography but also about the demographics, economy, and social organization of the region. They knew little about the transportation and raw materials in South Africa, had little or no insight into the Afrikaans settlers, and were surprised by the Afrikaaners’ guerrilla tactics and ability to live off the land. The surviving papers of the post-Boer War Special Section of the War Office reveal how deeply the failings in South Africa affected British military intelligence officers. The lessons of the campaign were crucial contributing factors in establishing and maintaining an extensive and effective theater-level human intelligence system.

By 1910, years of saber-rattling arms races both on and around the European continent combined with a widespread, xenophobic “spy scare” (partly fomented by popular novelists like William Le Queux) to force the Committee of Imperial Defence to convene a subcommittee of inquiry into the threat of foreign espionage known as the Haldane Committee. During deliberations, the Admiralty and the War Office complained that “our organization for acquiring information of what is taking place in foreign ports and dockyards is defective” and furthermore that they were “in a difficult position when dealing with foreign spies who may have information to sell, since their dealings have to be direct and not through intermediaries.” The resulting report had a series of recommendations, including the creation of a new Secret Service Bureau (SSB) to take over the tasks of the Special Section at a national rather than just War Office level. Although the SSB arose out of an inquiry into foreign espionage against Britain, two of its three proposed functions were directed toward British espionage against foreign states, i.e. to “act as a screen” between the War Office and Admiralty and foreign agents with information they wished to sell and as an intermediary between those same two departments of state and “agents we employ in foreign countries.”

In due course, the SSB fragmented along domestic and foreign lines into what became the Security Service (formerly MI5) and the SIS (formerly MI6). After World War I, the central role of demand for raw intelligence was reinforced by what has been called the “1921 Arrangement,” in which departments attached sections of their own intelligence branches to SIS headquarters to articulate their departmental requirements directly to the service’s operational personnel. The same 1921 Arrangement set the requirements for the predecessor of Government Communications Headquarters until that agency gained independence after World War II. At that point, an analogous body called Z Division was set up within the Directorate of Signal Intelligence Plans and Production. In all of this, the role of the “intelligence community,” such as it may have been, was to provide raw intelligence to be factored into the ruminations of the overt machinery of the British central government.

The foundations of the contemporary US intelligence community similarly arose out of a public inquiry, the joint congressional committee that investigated the causes of the Pearl Harbor attack. Unlike the British experience in South Africa, the post-Peal Harbor diagnosis was not that the United States lacked raw intelligence. The appraisal adopted by the joint committee stated that “the coordination and proper evaluation of intelligence in times of stress must be insured by continuity of service and centralization of responsibility in competent officials,” although it added darkly that “only partial credence, however, can be extended this conclusion inasmuch as no amount of coordination and no system could be effected to compensate for lack of alertness and imagination” on the part of commanders and decision makers. In part as a consequence of the joint committee, the administration of US President Harry Truman passed the 1947 National Security Act, which created the National Security Council (NSC) to coordinate national security policy and the CIA to centralize intelligence assessment.

The original mandate of the CIA, though in part managerial, was most significantly analytical, framed in words strikingly close to the joint committee’s final report: “to correlate and evaluate the intelligence relating to the national security and to provide for the appropriate dissemination of such intelligence.” The CIA was originally intended to collate and assess information provided by other departments of government, chiefly the State and Defense departments. Its operational assets were acquired as something of a retrofit or afterthought, justified by an umbrella clause in the 1947 National Security Act allowing the CIA to perform “other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security” under the direction of the NSC. To a degree well beyond the British case, there was a public debate about the US need for intelligence in peace time, culminating in Kent’s 1949 Strategic Intelligence for US World Policy, in which Kent took up the notion of intelligence as collection plus all-source assessment.

Because of the post-Pearl Harbor reflections on intelligence in the United States, intelligence came to be considered and defined in terms of the analytical process. To be sure, purely collection-oriented agencies such as the National Reconnaissance Office and the National Security Agency exist, but agencies like the CIA, the Defense Department’s Defense Intelligence Agency, and the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research define their roles and responsibilities primarily in analytical terms.