ints intelligence collection methods (as in “sigint”)
IOB Intelligence Oversight Board
IRBM intermediate-range ballistic missile
IRTPA Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act (2004)
ISA Inter-Services Intelligence (the Pakistani intelligence service); also, International Studies Association
ITT International Telephone and Telegraph (an American corporation)
I & W indicators and warning
JENNIFER Codename for CIA Soviet submarine retrieval operation in the 1970s (also known as Project AZORIAN)
KGB Soviet Secret Police and Foreign Intelligence: Committee for State Security
KJ Key Judgment (NIE executive summary)
KSM Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the Al Qaeda terrorist said to have mastermined the 9/11 attacks
MAGIC Allied codebreaking operations against the Japanese in World War II
masint measurement and signatures intelligence
MI5 British Security Service
MINARET cryptonym for NSA warrantless telephone taps against Americans (pre-1975)
MIP Military Intelligence Program
MI6 Secret Intelligence Service (SIS – United Kingdom)
MRBM medium-range ballistic missile
NCA National Command Authority
NCS National Clandestine Service
NCTC National Counterterrorism Center
NGA National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
NIC National Intelligence Council
NIE National Intelligence Estimate
NIM National Intelligence Manager (ODNI)
NIO National Intelligence Officer
NIPF National Intelligence Priorities Framework
NIP National Intelligence Program
NOC non-official cover
NPIC National Photographic Interpretation Center
NRO National Reconnaissance Office
NSA National Security Agency
NSC National Security Council
NSI National Security Intelligence
NSL national security letter
OBE overtaken by events
OC official cover
ODNI Office of the Director of National Intelligence
OLC Office of Legal Counsel (Justice Department)
OPEC Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries
osint open-source intelligence
OSS Office of Strategic Services
PDB President's Daily Brief
PDD Presidential Decision Directive
PFIAB President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (as of 2008, PIAB)
phoint photographic intelligence
PIAB President's Intelligence Advisory Board
PM ops paramilitary operations
PRC People's Republic of China
PRISM Codename for controversial NSA sigint program targeting, without a court warrant, suspected terrorists – including some Americans (post-9/11)
RFE Radio Free Europe
R Republican
RL Radio Liberty
SA special activities
SAM surface-to-air missile
SCIF sensitive compartmented information facility
SDO support to diplomatic operations
SecDef Secretary of Defense
SHAMROCK cryptonym for NSA program to read international cables from and to American citizens (pre-1975)
sigint signals intelligence
SLBM submarine-launched ballistic missile
SMO support to military operations
SNIE Special National Intelligence Estimate
SOG Special Operations Group (CIA)
SOVA Office of Soviet Analysis (CIA)
SR-21 U.S. spy plane (see U-2)
SSCI Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
STELLARWIND generic cryptonym for controversial NSA warrantless wiretaps and metadata collection programs (post-9/11)
SVR Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation (KGB successor)
techint technical intelligence
telint telemetry intelligence
TIARA tactical intelligence and related activities
TIMBER SYCAMORE CIA PM operation against Syria
TOR Terms of Reference (for NIE drafting)
215 Code number for NSA communications metadata program targeting U.S. citizens (post-9/11)
UAE United Arab Emirates
UAV unmanned aerial vehicle (drone)
USIA United States Information Agency (Department of State)
U-2 CIA spy plane (with later Air Force Variations known as the A-12 and the SR-71)
VC Viet Cong
WMD weapons of mass destruction
YAF Young Americans for Freedom (student group)
Roadmap to a Hidden World
National security intelligence is a vast, complicated, and important topic, with both technical and humanistic dimensions – all made doubly hard to study and understand because of the thick veils of secrecy that surround every nation's spy apparatus. Fortunately, from the point of view of democratic openness as well as the canons of scholarly inquiry, several of these veils have lifted in the past four decades. The disclosures have been a result of public government inquiries into intelligence failures and wrongdoing (especially those in 1975 that looked into charges of illegal domestic spying in the United States), accompanied by a more determined effort by academic researchers to probe the dark side of government. The endnotes in the chapters of this volume are a testament to the burgeoning and valuable research on national security intelligence that has accrued from steady scholarly inquiry into intelligence organizations and their activities.
Much remains to be accomplished, and – quite properly – national security imperatives will never permit full transparency in this sensitive domain. In a democracy, though, the people must have at least a basic comprehension of all their government agencies, even the shadowy world of intelligence. Within the boundaries of maintaining the sanctity of properly classified information, it is incumbent on scholars, journalists, and public officials to help citizens understand the hidden dimensions of their governing institutions.
The Cold War was, in large part, a struggle between espionage organizations in the democracies and in the communist bloc, illustrating the centrality of a nation's secret agencies.1 Sometimes spy services have been the source of great embarrassment to the democracies, as with America's Bay of Pigs disaster (1961), along with the questionable assassination attempts against foreign leaders carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA, known as “the Agency” by insiders), acting under ambiguous authority from the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations. Harmful to the reputation of America's democracy, too, were the domestic espionage scandals of the mid-1970s, the Iran–contra scandal a decade later, and, most recently, revelations about torture and other forms of prisoner abuse, as well as dragnet “metadata” collection of information about American citizens by the National Security Agency (NSA), employed by the CIA and military intelligence agencies in the struggle against global terrorism. Intelligence mistakes of analysis can have enormous consequences as well, as when the United Kingdom and the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, based in part on a faulty assessment that Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator, was developing weapons of mass destruction (WMD) that could soon strike London and Washington. Further, intelligence organizations and operations are a costly burden on taxpayers – some $80 billion a year in the United States, according to statements by America's Director of National Intelligence (DNI) in 2010. For all of these reasons, national security intelligence deserves the attention of the public, closer study by the scholarly community, and improved accountability inside democratic regimes.
The challenge is daunting. To some extent, a society's intelligence agencies and its community of scholars are at loggerheads: the government prefers secrecy, while scholars hope for access to information – openness. Still, recent experience underscores that a nation can encourage intelligence schola
rship and still have an effective secret service. Indeed, the more a public knows about intelligence, the more likely it is that citizens will support the legitimate – indeed, vital – protective services of these agencies, as long as they operate within the boundaries of the law and accepted ethical probity.
In 2009, a survey of scholarship on intelligence in the United States concluded:
The interdisciplinary field of intelligence studies is mushrooming, as scholars trained in history, international studies, and political science examine such subjects as the influence of U.S. and foreign intelligence on national decisions during the cold war, the Vietnam War, and Watergate; how spycraft shaped reform efforts in the Communist bloc; the relationship of intelligence gathering to the events of September 11, 2001; and abuses and bungles in the “campaign against terrorism.” As the field grows, it is attracting students in droves.2
More recently, a study of the intelligence studies literature finds “path-breaking” new research that has brought in scholars from multiple disciplines and has attracted the attention of more women researchers.3
Hundreds of British, Canadian, and American universities and colleges now offer formal courses on national security intelligence, and these classes are always in high demand. The interest stems in large part from the widely reported intelligence failures related to the 9/11 attacks and the flawed predictions about WMD in Iraq that preceded the Second Persian Gulf war in 2003. Students want to know why these failures occurred and what can be done to prevent intelligence errors in the future. Many of them hope to join their governments in some capacity, whether as diplomats, lawmakers, staff aides, intelligence officers, or soldiers, to engage in activities that will help protect the democracies against attacks and assist the cause of international peace. Others realize that governmental decision-making is based on information and, whether in the groves of academe or within a think-tank, they want to pursue a life of learning about the relationship between information and decisions. Some, raised on James Bond movies, are drawn to the study of national security intelligence because it is a fascinating topic – although they soon discover that the writings of the sociologist Max Weber, an expert on bureaucracy, provide greater insight into the real world of spy organizations than the dramatic license exercised by novelist Ian Fleming.
In recent years, the most important development in the study of national security intelligence has been the effort by scholars to move beyond spy memoirs toward a rigorous application of research standards that address such questions as how nations gather and analyze information on threats and opportunities at home and abroad, and how and why they engage in covert action and counterintelligence operations. Important, as well, as least for democratic nations, has been the question of how to erect safeguards against the abuse of power by secret agencies, at home and abroad. Moreover, studies on intelligence are increasingly offering empirical data, testable hypotheses, and theoretical frameworks – the underpinnings of rigorous scholarly inquiry.4
Further, scholars in the field have been conducting in-depth interviews with intelligence practitioners, and have benefited in addition from the extensive number of intelligence documents released by governments in recent decades. Among these documents are, for example, in the United States: the Church Committee Report in 1975–6 (on domestic spying, covert action, and secret assassination plots); the Aspin–Brown Commission Report in 1996 (on counterintelligence and, more broadly, the state of U.S. intelligence after the Cold War); the Kean Commission Report in 2004 (on the 9/11 intelligence failures); and the Silberman–Robb Commission in 2005 (on WMD in Iraq). In the United Kingdom, the list of valuable new government reports includes the House of Commons Select Committee on Foreign Affairs Report and the Intelligence and Security Committee Report (both in 2003), as well as the Butler Report and the Hutton Report (both in 2004) and the Chilcot Committee (2010), with its report published in 2016 – all of which examined the flawed aspects of British intelligence reporting on WMD in Iraq prior to the outbreak of war in 2003. In Canada, the McDonald Commission Report on domestic intelligence abuse is another valuable source for intelligence researchers (1981).
When the leaders of a nation make a decision, the quality of information before them can be a significant determinant of success or failure. Researchers engaged in intelligence studies seek to know more about this information: where it comes from, its accuracy, how it is used (or misused), and what might be done to improve its reliability and timeliness. The discipline of intelligence studies attempts, as well, to learn more about covert action, which has led to much controversy in world affairs, as with the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961. More recently, America's use of Predator and Reaper unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs or drones), armed with Hellfire and other types of missiles, is a new and highly lethal form of covert action, unleashed against Taliban and Al Qaeda jihadists in mountainous regions of northwest Pakistan and Afghanistan, and sometimes inflicting deaths accidentally among noncombatants. As well, drone attacks have been carried out by the Pentagon and the CIA against terrorist targets on the Horn of Africa and across the Maghreb in Northwest Africa, as well as in Syria and Iraq – wherever radical terrorist factions opposed to the democracies are encamped or engaged in their dark arts. Intelligence researchers also study the question of treason: why it occurs and what counterintelligence methods can be employed to reduce its incidence. Further, they explore the question of how democracies can best maintain a balance between the secret operations of intelligence agencies, on the one hand, and the privileges of a free and open society, on the other hand – the ongoing search by the democracies for a workable equilibrium between security and liberty.
National security intelligence is a rich and exciting field of study, for researchers, policymakers, government reformers, intelligence professionals, students, and attentive citizens in every democratic regime. This volume offers an introductory look at this subject, with hopes of encouraging further study by scholars of all ages, along with a renewed dedication to intelligence reform by government officials and citizen activists.
The second edition of this book, like the first, begins in Chapter 1 with an overview of the three major intelligence missions: collection-and-analysis, covert action, and counterintelligence – each of which is replete with its own challenges and controversies. This opening chapter also looks at the multiple dimensions of intelligence, including as a cluster of organizations, as a product, and as a set of activities. Further, Chapter 1 introduces the seventeen agencies that make up America's “Intelligence Community” (IC); suggests why accountability is vital to ensure that these secret organizations adhere to the basic principles of democracy (which has not always been the case); and explores why the American intelligence services have been plagued by a lack of both structural integration and a culture of working together seamlessly toward providing the President and other policy officials with accurate and timely information.
The next three chapters examine more closely each of the core missions, beginning in Chapter 2 with collection-and-analysis. The concept of an “intelligence cycle” is introduced as a useful way to envision how the United States gathers information from around the world and moves it toward helpful analytic reports for the White House and other high councils of government. The steps that intelligence takes while moving from the field to the Oval Office (“the Oval” in Washington lingo) are susceptible to many potential mistakes and distortions, as this chapter reveals.
Chapter 3 takes up the most controversial of the mission triad in the world of intelligence: the use of covert action, such as secret drone attacks in Pakistan. Can, and should, the United States seek to channel the flow of history in a favorable direction by way of hidden interventions abroad – which is the essence of the covert action mission?
Then Chapter 4 peers into the heavily veiled topics of counterintelligence and counterterrorism. These intelligence disciplines are designed to protect the United States from hostile spies and terrorists. The
failure of America to thwart the terrorist attacks aimed at New York City and Washington, DC in September 2001, as well as the many other terrorist assaults this nation and its allies have suffered since 9/11, are painful reminders of how significant – and difficult – this responsibility for shielding the democracies can be.
Finally, Chapter 6 reviews why national security intelligence will continue to be a subject of central concern in international affairs, for as long as this world remains a fragmented, uncertain, and dangerous place. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how intelligence activities in the United States and in other open societies might be reformed, both to enhance their effectiveness in providing security for the democratic nations and to ensure the allegiance of the secret services to the core principles of liberty and privacy in these nations.
Much has happened in the world since Polity published the first edition of this book in 2012. This second edition addresses in greater depth the subject of cybersecurity, a growing threat driven home to Americans and their allies by the ceaseless activities of computer hackers against the democracies by autocratic foreign governments, terrorist organizations, and old-fashioned criminals using this new “safe-cracking” tool. Russia has even been accused by U.S. authorities of trying to tamper with the American presidential election of 2016 by hacking into the computers of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), as well as the election boards of various U.S. states (such as Arizona).
Of interest, too, in this new edition are the controversies that have arisen over warrantless wiretaps conducted by the NSA, as well as its massive collection of “metadata” consisting of telephone and social media communication logs of citizens in the democracies – however innocent these individuals might be. The secret agencies in the United States, the United Kingdom, and other democracies adopted this dragnet approach to intelligence collection after the 9/11 attacks – a fact revealed in a leak of classified internal documents in 2013 by a U.S. government contractor, Edward J. Snowden.
Coming to light as well since the first edition has been the extent to which the CIA adopted torture as a counterterrorism interrogation technique in the aftermath of 9/11, along with the rendition of suspected terrorists who have been swept off the streets of their hometowns overseas and kidnapped to foreign prisons for harsh questioning. Critics of these operations wonder if, in combating terrorism, the United States has lost its way, becoming more like the very terrorist factions opposed by democracies and staining the good reputation for ethical behavior that the open societies have enjoyed in many parts of the world. Deep questions of morality have accompanied these startling disclosures, including concerns about the emergence of “surveillance states” even within the free nations. As this book emphasizes, intelligence is not only about security; it is also about safeguarding the traditional democratic values of fair play and the honoring of ethical considerations.
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