Intelligence Governance and Democratisation

A Comparative Analysis of the Limits of Reform

Peter Gill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317541790
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Freedom
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book analyses changes in intelligence governance and offers a comparative analysis of intelligence democratisation.

Within the field of Security Sector Reform (SSR), academics have paid significant attention to both the police and military. The democratisation of intelligence structures that are at the very heart of authoritarian regimes, however, have been relatively ignored. The central aim of this book is to develop a conceptual framework for the specific analytical challenges posed by intelligence as a field of governance. Using examples from Latin America and Europe, it examines the impact of democracy promotion and how the economy, civil society, rule of law, crime, corruption and mass media affect the success or otherwise of achieving democratic control and oversight of intelligence. The volume draws on two main intellectual and political themes: intelligence studies, which is now developing rapidly from its original base in North America and UK; and democratisation studies of the changes taking place in former authoritarian regimes since the mid-1980s including security sector reform. The author concludes that, despite the limited success of democratisation, the dangers inherent in unchecked networks of state, corporate and para-state intelligence organisations demand that academic and policy research continue to meet the challenge.

This book will be of much interest to students of intelligence studies, democracy studies, war and conflict studies, comparative politics and IR in general.

1 Intelligence and democracy

Introduction: a challenging project or just an oxymoron?

There is, to put it mildly, much tension between these concepts; indeed, for some readers their incompatibility is so complete that any notion of ‘democratic intelligence’ is oxymoronic. Throughout history, security and intelligence agencies have been created by executives – democratically elected or not – usually by decree, involving neither public discussion nor statutory enactment. The only democratic ‘control’ might come from elected ministers but they were often ignorant of intelligence policies and operations. Almost total secrecy ensured little or no informed public discussion of intelligence matters. Yet, since the mid-1970s there have been increasing, if uneven, efforts throughout Europe, the Americas and more sporadically in Africa and Asia to, at least, reduce this tension, and this study considers the extent to which these efforts have been successful and, if not, why not. This chapter prepares the ground by discussing what intelligence governance looks like in an otherwise established ‘liberal democracy’ and then provides examples from intelligence under authoritarian regimes. The growing empirical richness of materials available for ‘Intelligence Studies’ is contrasted with its relatively undeveloped conceptual frameworks and a suggestion made as to how this ‘interdiscipline’¹ might progress.

Change has been triggered by two main factors: in the ‘older’ democracies (North America, Western Europe, Australia and New Zealand), the impetus was often scandals involving abuses of power and rights by the agencies. Typically, these gave rise to legislative or judicial enquiries that resulted in new legal and oversight structures for the agencies, some achieved by statute, others by executive order. Elsewhere, this shift has been a central, and sometimes painful, aspect of the democratisation of formerly authoritarian regimes, both civilian and military, a process also marked by recurrent scandals. For example, the death of Franco in 1976 precipitated democratisation in Spain that included the demilitarisation of intelligence. Military rule ended in Brazil in 1985, though the military-dominated Serviço Nacional de Informações (SNI) was not replaced until 1990 as part of a continuing process of demilitarisation. In the countries of the former Soviet bloc no agency has been immune to change although the amount of real, as opposed to nominal, reform varies widely. In Russia itself some initial moves in the 1990s have been effectively reversed since 1999 so that the Federal Security Service (FSB) is as central to Russia’s autocracy as was its Soviet predecessor.

Debates relating to the definition of democracy and democratisation are considered in detail in the next chapter but a definition of intelligence is required that could apply to any political regime – authoritarian, democratic, theocratic – so intelligence is:

mainly secret activities – targeting, collection, analysis, dissemination and action – intended to enhance security and/or maintain power relative to competitors by forewarning of threats and opportunities.²

This needs to be distinguishable from other ‘knowledge management’ and surveillance practices ubiquitous throughout organisational life in both state and corporate sectors. All are engaged in trying to keep up with the ever-increasing rate of change in information and communication technologies even if it constitutes a particular challenge for intelligence agencies. Even the most secretive of agencies will deploy some resources to gathering ‘open source’ information especially from the Internet (they are surely missing many tricks if they do not); yet key elements of intelligence work remain secret, especially their sources, methods and international collaboration. Second, the intelligence ‘cycle’ that begins with targeting is often used as a shorthand way of describing what is actually a much more complex process including interrelated actions aimed at turning raw information into intelligence sufficiently validated that it convinces a decision-maker to exercise some power in pursuit of a course of action or, if no action is taken, at least provides a useful increase in knowledge.³ It is this link between knowledge and power – ‘surveillance’ – that is at the core of all intelligence work.⁴

Third, while security may be defined as ‘the absence of threats’, how this is actually operationalised is highly contested.⁵ All governments claim to be acting in the interests of their nation and people even if the primary, if not sole, mission of their intelligence agencies is the protection of the governing group. Protection of those in power or, more broadly, existing state institutions is always the objective of security and intelligence agencies, though the significance of this compared with other priorities will vary widely among regimes. Fourth, intelligence is always competitive; it is directed at some ‘other’ state, group or company either as a defensive mechanism at the threat they pose to one’s institutions, people or market share, or as an offensive tool in seeking to advance one’s own interests in terms of territory, influence or profit. Fifth, because its object is security and some element of it will be conducted in secrecy, it will always provoke resistance from those it targets. It is this resistance – again, both defensive and offensive – which gives rise to the whole field of counterintelligence: seeking to protect the integrity of one’s own agencies, people and information from the penetration of others.⁶ These factors all contribute to the argument that it is far from idle to consider whether there are near-universal commonalities in intelligence processes and structures.

Any study with these aims must be comparative albeit essentially ‘qualitative’. The field of democratisation studies includes much work based on the manipulation of large datasets⁷ but these are simply unavailable to intelligence researchers for the fairly obvious reason that the basic information on which such sets might be constructed barely exists within government and is certainly not published if it does. So we have no equivalent of the data on elections, education, crime, unemployment, etc. on which comparative analysis is often based in other government fields. It must also be acknowledged that there is a necessary trade-off between the modernist aim of generalisation and the postmodernist preference for ‘thick description’ that accounts more fully for complex national cultural specificities. Clearly, there is a space in the literature for both; indeed, the former can only build on the latter produced by country experts. Equally, however, any survey of national studies reveals aspects of intelligence that recur everywhere and provide fertile ground for comparison.⁸ Specifically, ‘surveillance’ is ubiquitous even if its philosophical roots may be different in Western compared with non-Western societies.⁹

Before moving on we should clarify our use of the terms ‘information’ and ‘intelligence’. There is a technical reason for distinguishing the terms in relation to the intelligence process rather than its organisations and that is to retain information as a general term relating to what agencies collect and intelligence as a term applied to what they produce after a process of validation and analysis. More generally, the distinction may be just a matter of language; for example, the Portuguese word informações can be translated as either.¹⁰ Some languages deploy different terminologies for ‘intelligence’ depending on the positive or negative connotations to be conveyed. In Arabic both mukhabarat and istikhbarat may be used to denote intelligence, though the latter normally refers to military intelligence while the former is used for all types. But different words are used to distinguish spying for benign or malign ends: the verb tajassasa is normally associated with spying on behalf of someone else, especially for an enemy, while tahassasa is used specifically to describe the act of acquiring information for oneself or for a good cause.¹¹ In many Arab states al-mukhabarat denotes fear and in Latin America ‘intelligence’ is associated with ‘dirty wars’.¹² The United Nations, for many years, avoided using the term because of its derogatory implications.

Establishing benchmarks: intelligence in an ‘old’ democracy

Much of this study is concerned with the process by which intelligence in former authoritarian regimes in Europe and Latin America has become more democratic, or not. However, in doing so, we must also consider the experience of more established democracies in recent decades as they have also passed intelligence legislation and established more transparent oversight arrangements (these issues are discussed in more detail in Chapter 7). In other words, the idea of ‘democratic intelligence’ is very young and even the older democracies are still experimenting in order to move towards it. So it is worth asking why it took so long for the older democracies to reform their own systems and what lessons, if any, this holds for new democracies and, indeed, the very possibility of establishing democratic intelligence governance. Space does not permit a full survey of the older democracies here but take the UK as a not necessarily typical example.

Parliament had effectively triumphed over the monarchy in the battle for supremacy by the end of the seventeenth century and Cabinet government developed thereafter. After 1832 parliamentary democracy became established with the broadening of the franchise through to 1928 when everyone over the age of 21 received the vote. Yet Parliament had no role in the development of the UK intelligence agencies. While a sophisticated surveillance system intended to protect the Protestant succession was developed in the late sixteenth century,¹³ the modern intelligence system started developing 300 years later when the Irish Special Branch was created in 1883 in the London Metropolitan Police to deal with violent Irish nationalism.¹⁴ In 1909 what would become MI5¹⁵ (or the Security Service) and MI1c (later, the Secret Intelligence Service, SIS or MI6¹⁶) were created respectively for domestic security and foreign intelligence amid fears of the growing German threat to British interests. During the First World War the forerunner of what would become Government Communications Headquarters¹⁷ (GCHQ) was established for code-making, code-breaking and signals intelligence (SIGINT). As well as their core defensive role of covertly collecting information with respect to threats to national security including terrorism, espionage, economic well-being and serious crime, the agencies also have an offensive role. Thus MI5 will seek to disrupt attacks through its surveillance operations, often working with police who will carry out arrests where ‘evidence’ rather than simply ‘intelligence’ has been gathered, and MI6 conducts covert operations in support of government objectives abroad. GCHQ has the defensive function of protecting the UK’s own communications from interception and disruption by others while it will disrupt and interfere with others’ computer networks, functions of which we know a great deal more thanks to the steady publication of National Security Agency (NSA) and GCHQ documents since June 2013 in The Guardian and elsewhere.¹⁸

Democratic governance of intelligence is manifested in two complementary ways: control, whereby agencies are established and funded solely by parliaments and, for example, ministers authorise intrusive activities such as communications interception. The second requirement is for oversight – both internal and external – to review the legality, propriety, efficiency and effectiveness of intelligence agencies. Up until 1985 the UK only had the first of these so that state opening of mail and telephone tapping was subject to no statutory regime and rested on the traditional royal prerogative power.¹⁹ The legality of this was challenged when the police inadv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• 1 Intelligence and democracy
• 2 Analysing intelligence: capacity and democracy
• 3 Intelligence in and beyond the state: a conceptual framework
• 4 Kosovo and Amexica: a tale of two countries
• 5 Explaining democratisation 1: transnational factors
• 6 Explaining democratisation 2: the national dimension
• 7 Explaining democratisation 3: politics and organisation
• 8 Conclusion: is democratic governance a chimera?
• Index