Theory in Practice

The tendency of countries to employ differing definitions of intelligence has both conceptual and substantive implications. Substantively, it provides a particularly telling insight into how and why intelligence institutions take shape in specific ways. It is not, of course, the whole story; governmental, institutional, and even constitutional factors come into play but are significant in terms of why intelligence is conceived one way or another as well as in terms of what architectures are created and in what form. The decentralization of power in the British cabinet system is undoubtedly a factor in the decentralization of all-source analysis, much as executive centralization under the US presidency influenced the centralization of analysis—except that the impetus toward central collation and analysis in the United States came from the US Congress while the decentralized power interests of the British system opted for centralized, covert collection. Key traumatic events that demonstrate the failures of intelligence in each country have driven national perceptions of what intelligence ought to be. And such normative concepts are crucial in how we think we ought to go about building an intelligence community, much as key normative concepts provide an intellectual framework for other activities.

Different US and British conceptions of intelligence also have been an underlying factor in the differences in the history of public debate and legislation on intelligence in the two countries. The CIA was established by legislative will in 1947 while the SIS and GCHQ had no equivalent legal standing until the Conservative administration of John Major passed enabling legislation in 1994. Similarly, there has been a vigorous and well informed public debate over the role and functions of intelligence in the United States since the late 1940s, but no equivalent open discussion in Britain happened until the late 1980s. These differences have generally been attributed to the greater openness of the US political system. However, it is also far easier to talk publicly about intelligence analysis, even all-source analysis, than it is to speak openly about the sensitive and competitive sphere of covert intelligence collection. Both the 1947 act and the concurrent public debate dealt primarily with analysis and policy and relatively little with the role and content of collection, especially covert collection. Likewise, although official acknowledgment of the existence of Britain’s foreign intelligence services had to wait until the 1980s, the first officially attributable references to the Joint Intelligence Subcommittee and the Joint Intelligence Bureau appear in a Royal Institute of Public Administration study of the machinery of British central government published in 1957. It appears that having a broad definition of intelligence makes it easier to be open about intelligence institutions, legislation, and policy.

And yet these profound divergences emerge within two closely related and closely integrated intelligence communities, which also share a common language and political culture. If Britain and the United States differ so widely and so fundamentally, what about systems that are less cognate? Where there is little or no common cultural and institutional heritage, the divergences run deeper, increasing the risk that decision makers and intelligence practitioners may misunderstand what foreign agencies are essentially about. Non-democratic states typically define their agencies as security services rather than intelligence services. This is often not least because agencies of revolutionary regimes like the old Soviet KGB and the Chinese Department of Public Security and Department of State Security have their roots in the pursuit of counter-revolutionary and dissident forces at home and abroad. John Dziak has categorized states like the Soviet Union as “counter-intelligence states” in which intelligence agencies evolve out of an almost paranoid concern about threats to regime survival rather than policy needs for information.

The way “intelligence” services of non-democratic societies view themselves differs fundamentally from the self-perception of intelligence services in open societies. Intelligence was eventually consolidated in Nazi Germany under RSHA (Reich’s Chief Security Department) and Communist East Germany relied on its MFS (Ministry of Security). But Federal Germany’s “Gehlen” organization was formally the BND (Federal Information Service). Of course, there are odd transitional cases like France, whose foreign intelligence service is categorized as DGSE (Directorate-General of External Security), but the French agency has often been criticized for an aggressive, even brutal paramilitary orientation. The French visualize their service less as a national information provider than as the first and last line of defense for France.

Thinking and Doing

The key conceptual implication of the divergence of British and US concepts is that there is an advantage to thinking seriously about formulating and articulating a theory of intelligence culture. In recent years, a great deal has been made of the theoretical value of the concept of “strategic culture” as a means of reconstructing national thinking on defense and strategic policy. That concept itself has owed much to the longer-standing and more extensive literature on “political culture” as a means for understanding governmental institutions and policies. It would seem natural, even inevitable, to conclude that how we define what it is we think we are doing when we think we are doing intelligence shapes how we do intelligence. And the cornerstone of any theory of intelligence culture has to be the idea of intelligence, or more accurately, the many different ideas of intelligence and their institutional and operational consequences.