Among all the functions which governmentsâboth authoritarian and democraticâengage in, intelligence activities are often the least discussed and least understood, both by the general public and by academics. Rather, the existence of covert and clandestine activities such as government programs to support candidates in foreign elections or training and equipping foreign fighters functions as something of a âdirty little secretâ both in Washington and surely in other national capitals as well. Politicians, news media, and the general publicâas well as academic analystsâare aware that such activities do occur, but prefer not to look too closely at them or to acknowledge what they are seeing.
And even though the United States spends nearly one trillion dollars annually on national security programs and agencies, and that intelligence functions are routinely carried out by seventeen federal agencies, along with state and local intelligence fusion centers,1 the study of these activities and functions is particularly poorly integrated within the discipline of international relations. Indeed, while almost five million Americans (nearly two percent of our population) now hold security clearances, as Christopher Andrew noted in 2004, âintelligence ⊠is all but absent in most contemporary IR theory,â including, tellingly, in theorizing about the Cold War.2
Here one might begin to address this conundrum by asking why the work produced by intelligence studies scholars is not better integrated into the study of international relations. Indeed, the intelligence studies communityâboth in the United States and in other English-speaking countriesâappears to function as its freestanding entity, with its own journals, its jargon, and its own set of accepted assumptions and theories, many of which are unique to itself. It is indeed striking to see the degree to which the intelligence studies community has developed largely in isolation, unaffected by and perhaps even hostile to trends within the larger international relations disciplineâsuch as an attempt to move beyond Western and American-centric analyses, to include voices of the subaltern, or to consider the contingent nature of knowledge itself.3
Even today, intelligence studies analyses focus almost exclusively on the Western intelligence tradition, with an emphasis on the rise and practice of intelligence in the United States and England, along with some comparative work on Western Europe. And literature produced by the academic intelligence studies community (which often includes retired intelligence practitioners among its ranks) tends to fit into one of four formats: Analysts have taken an institutional approach in considering the structures of the intelligence community, how they function and how they are policed or regulated by other actors. In addition, analysts have produced case studies that have been historical in nature, examining phenomena like how particular leaders have utilized intelligence or the circumstances which led to intelligence failures. Also, there is a growing literature that is methodological, asking questions about how one might articulate and test assumptions or identify bias in carrying out intelligence analysis, including some which is interdisciplinary.
Finally, if intelligence studies have been integrated into larger studies within international relations, it has often been through the utilization of a âcrime frame,â thus establishing intelligence as a sort of deviant international relations.4 Elizabeth Anderson, a former National Security Agency analyst who later became an academic, has faulted the scholarship produced by practitioners as âjournalistic in nature,â since what is produced is often simply a narrative of the events themselves from an operational perspective which focuses, in her words, on âaction, adventure, and scandal.â5 That is, intelligence scholars have sought to understand events like the 1985 Iran-Contra scandal, which occurred under then-president Ronald Reagan not as one of many ways in which states practice politicsâbut as a âscandalââbecause to acknowledge intelligence activity as international relations would upset many of our long-standing (and unquestioned) assumptions about what does and does not constitute normal international relations.
Why Donât IR Scholars Study Intelligence?
At the same time, academics within the larger discipline of political science have tended not to include intelligence studies as a variable within traditional international relations analyses, nor to include organizations like the Central Intelligence Agency within a study of public administration bureaucracies, and not to include studies of the intelligence community within larger studies of, for example, foreign policy elite decision-makers.
Here, one can certainly identify legitimate logistical or practical reasons why academics might avoid adding intelligence agencies to their data sets or cases for comparison. First, the closed nature of the intelligence community and its overwhelming emphasis on secrecy (often for real reasons of national security) make it particularly challenging to study. Analysts become used to working with sources where keywordsâincluding dates, names of places, and names of individualsâhave been redacted through a publication review process, even when a successful Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request has been filed. In cases where documents have been released, or an official has been compelled to speak with an academic interlocutor, problems may arise concerning the representativeness of the information being made available. Is it possible that the organization has safeguarded its image through redacting information of an embarrassing nature, rather than merely withholding that which is strategically necessary?
Historian Kaeten Mistry presents this perspective in describing the difficulties she encountered in researching the part which the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) played in attempting to influence Italyâs elections in the aftermath of World War Two. She writes:
None of this is to imply that the CIA did not channel covert funds ⊠Rather, it emphasizes the difficulties in authoritatively supporting claims dependent on evidence that is withheld, inaccurate, or perhaps non-existent. Agency records could settle such scores, particularly in curtailing the useful myths surrounding critical and triumphant interpretations. Yet with the declassification process in statis, it poses a dilemma for historians.6
As a result of these difficulties, she argues that much of what the academic intelligence community accepts as âknowledgeâ is deeply intertwined with mythologies about agencies like the CIA, along with wishful thinking, rumors, and even conspiracy theories. For this reason, she suggests that the study of intelligence is often rather divorced from other types of academic endeavors.
A second compelling reason for this academic divorce is that the intelligence agencies are often regarded as so unique in their culture, their leadership styles, and their missions that analysts may conclude that it makes little sense to include them in a more general database of agencies or agency activities and that it also may be pointless to generalize about the behavior of, for example, the Central Intelligence Agency in making a statement about how agencies behave. Here, intelligence scholars themselves point to the phenomenon of âintelligence exceptionalismâ in arguing that the intelligence community has unique or distinctive rules, values, and procedures. As Turner notes, intelligence activities may differ from other traditional activities of foreign policy since the guiding principle is secrecy, the activities may include illegal activity including violating other nationâs laws, and the use of techniques like deception and deniability by those producing information creates problems for analysts regarding the credibility of information obtained.7 Proponents of this âexceptionalismâ viewpoint argue that analysts, lawmakers, and the general public should not expect the intelligence organizations to behave like any other government agency since they have a unique mission. Furthermore, proponents argue that an intelligence agency does and must have special or unique powers and policies, including less oversight of its practices by the legislative branch, more secrecy in the conduct of its affairs, fewer budget constraints, and less transparency overall regarding its budget, as well as an acceptance of the understanding that such powers may and often do violate legal and/or ethical understandings in areas such as transparency and public oversight of the agencyâs practices and policies. In this way, the literature on âintelligence exceptionalismâ can be read as a sort of defense of the IC and its practices, created from within the IC itself, in order to establish conditions for what Nathan refers to as a âdispensationâ8âa justification for why the IC should not be held to the same standards with reference to adherence to regime sovereignty or understandings in the areas of transparency, constitutionality, or adherence to human rights regimes.
However, I contend that it is not logistical capabilities or even methodological concerns alone which cause traditional international relations to give short shrift academically to the phenomenon of intelligence. Rather, it is because there is something subversive about the practices and values of intelligence which both cause it to fit awkwardly, if at all, into traditional international relations theoretical paradigms, and furthermore, because a full-fledged analysis of the role of intelligence in international relations threatens to destabilize some of the understandings which form a sort of ground truth for a mainstream international relations scholar. In examining the discourse of intelligence studies, we encounter a reflection of this assumption about the subversiveness of intelligence. In scholarly histories of the organization, we encounter language describing the CIA as having âsiphoned off moneyâ from legitimate organizations and operations, or having performed an âend-run aroundâ legitimate politics and procedures.9
As Daugherty has noted in describing public attitudes towards the Central Intelligence Agency:
In the wake of Vietnam and Watergate ⊠the very idea of spying and acting covert became disreputable ⊠For most of my adult life, any mention of the spy Agency has prompted suspicion of unlawful meddling, dirty tricks, scandal, and a kind of bullet-headed redneck American approach to foreign policy.10
That is, there appears to be something unseemly or perverse about the activities of the intelligence community in particular. As an example, we may consider the claims that Russia, led by its intelligence community, succeeded in penetrating US domestic politics through interfering in our 2016 presidential elections. The crime which Americaâs president and his administration are accused of is collusion, which is defined by Dictionary.âcom as:
1. A secret agreement, especially for fraudulent or treacherous purposes; conspiracy and 2. Law: a secret understanding between two or more persons to gain something illegally, to defraud another of his or her rights, or to appear as adversaries though in agreement (i.e...