Handbook of Intelligence Studies

Loch K. Johnson, Loch K. Johnson

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781135986872
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Geschichte
• Categoría: Militär- & Seefahrtsgeschichte

This topical volume offers a comprehensive review of secret intelligence organizations and activities.

Intelligence has been in the news consistently since 9/11 and the Iraqi WMD errors. Leading experts in the field approach the three major missions of intelligence: collection-and-analysis; covert action; and counterintelligence. Within each of these missions, the dynamically written essays dissect the so-called intelligence cycle to reveal the challenges of gathering and assessing information from around the world. Covert action, the most controversial intelligence activity, is explored, with special attention on the issue of military organizations moving into what was once primarily a civilian responsibility. The authors furthermore examine the problems that are associated with counterintelligence, protecting secrets from foreign spies and terrorist organizations, as well as the question of intelligence accountability, and how a nation can protect its citizens against the possible abuse of power by its own secret agencies.

The Handbook of Intelligence Studies is a benchmark publication with major importance both for current research and for the future of the field. It is essential reading for advanced undergraduates, graduate students and scholars of intelligence studies, international security, strategic studies and political science in general.

Part 1
The study of intelligence

1
Sources and methods for the study of intelligence

Michael Warner

Intelligence can be thought of as that which states do in secret to support their efforts to mitigate, influence, or merely understand other nations (or various enemies) that could harm them. By its nature as an activity that could involve the loss of fragile sources or means of understanding and influence – not to mention the lives of troops, subjects, and even leaders – intelligence is treated by its practitioners as sensitive and confidential. Even the accidental disclosure of some analytical, informational, or operational advantage over a rival or an enemy is presumed to be tantamount to the loss of that advantage while it is still potentially useful. Thus the penalties for disclosure have always been severe – and those for espionage even harsher. Nations have sought thereby to terrify disloyalty and also to protect the advantages that secret means seem to bring to decisionmaking. Wherever such life-and-death stakes obtain, intelligence is conducted with some full or partial cloak of secrecy, and the evidence of it is typically unavailable to onlookers.

Intelligence thus by definition resists scholarship. As a result, the study of intelligence is not one field but two. Intelligence studies have been conducted one way on the “outside,” with no official access to original records, and another way on the “inside,” where a few scholars have intermittently enjoyed sanctioned (if not always complete) access to the extant documentation. The differing natures of the source materials available to scholars on the inside and the outside, naturally, have caused academic researchers and students of intelligence to work differently from official historians and investigators in the employ of the state.

The sources and methods of both the “outside” and the “inside” scholars, interestingly enough, can bring their practitioners quite close to genuine historical understanding. Over the last 60 years, a handful of governments have episodically sought to understand the experiences of their various intelligence services. The results have been uneven, across and within governments, but they have been real, and in places they have laid a solid foundation for historical and even theoretical work on intelligence on the outside. Intelligence studies in academia, on the other hand, have quickened over the last two decades in the fields of history and political science as more scholars of the diplomatic and military arts grasp the importance of intelligence for their own disciplines, and gain familiarity with the relevant documentation. In so doing, they have begun to create a community of intelligence scholars and have helped to reclaim the study of intelligence from those who would have us believe in the omniscience or the omnipotence of the discipline’s practitioners.

Both inside and outside scholars, however, labor under differing strains imposed by the nature of intelligence as a secret enterprise. These strains need not be debilitating, but they impose significant impacts on the quality of the final products. What follows is not a bibliographical or archival guide to records-holdings in any particular country. It is not possible in one article to survey the literature and collections around the world that hold documents of possible interest to researchers in the intelligence field. Even for researchers of intelligence in the United States, such a survey would have the ironic disadvantages of being both lengthy and vague. It would also be quickly out of date as new files are released. This chapter is rather a set of field notes for using the sources that are available and are likely to emerge over the foreseeable future. It is also a reflection on the burdens that must be shouldered by researchers on both sides of the wall of secrecy that surrounds intelligence.

What are the sources?

In describing the sources used in the historical study of intelligence, it is easier to start on the inside and work outward. That is, by examining first the way in which intelligence activities appear to those holding access to the official records, and then how they appear to the much larger set of scholars who do not enjoy such access. Historians in the employ of their governments work primarily from the office and operational files, from cable traffic and budget data, and from interviews, artifacts, and other sources, to identify and assemble the clues to what happened and what it meant.

The first place for the official historian to look is always “the file.” Like virtually all governmental organizations from the late nineteenth century onward, intelligence agencies are hierarchies, and their officers at multiple levels have created and preserved files on their activities. The growing professionalism and rationalism of the various agencies gradually supplanted the work of the amateurs, the friends of royalty, and the charlatans who had dominated espionage since ancient times. Efficient paperwork and good filing systems were keys to this evolutionary triumph. The sort of files that got saved – and eventually made their way to official historians – have tended to be archived by office first, by subject next, and then sometimes by operation or activity, according to the records protocols governing the larger department or organization in which they are embedded. Even the independent intelligence agencies of the United States adapted this classification scheme from the filing systems of the State and War Departments, without much change. Indeed, filing systems in their fundamental outlines seem so similar across organizations and eras that they would seem to be following almost a law of nature.

A mature organization will follow protocols governing how and when files are opened, maintained, archived, or purged. The extent to which such protocols are set and followed is an indicator of the quality of the organization’s leadership – or at least of its administrative acumen. The researcher typically checks all the extant and relevant files he or she can locate, which means reading those from all the organization’s levels of approval and review. Activities or subjects enduring over several years will have multiple files, some of them running for multiple volumes. Smaller and simpler activities or operations (which is not to say less successful or important ones) will obviously have thinner files. Files kept overseas are typically abbreviated; those at headquarters in the capital are longer, because there is more time to keep them, more clerical staff to do so, and usually more storage space.

One rule of thumb for the official researcher is that the more expensive the activity or topic, the more places one finds files on it. Costly activities and projects ordinarily require more personnel and logistical expenses, hence more accounting and security controls, and therefore more legal counsel, and thus more files. The agency’s legal, financial, logistical, and security offices can be expected to keep their own files on larger activities. The director of the agency may have a file on it, if it demands his attention or a briefing for higher authorities. Something really important will merit files in other agencies, and in the executive branch’s archives as well. These can be quite valuable for the researcher because they provide a different (if not always more objective) perspective on the activity.

Not all important incidents, projects, issues, or events are well documented. The converse is also true: events or topics with scanty documentation are not always insignificant. Here is a quandary in intelligence research: what to infer from a situation in which there are few or no files? That can happen in at least two circumstances. First is when events are happening too quickly for everything to be documented by the people on the spot. In such cases the documentation will typically come in the form of summary cables and after-action reports, which are good to have, but not always as accurate and complete as a researcher might wish. The second case is when the head of the agency or one of its units was specifically ordered to keep the “paper trail” as short as possible – possibly by destroying it. Such instances would seem to be rare, even in secret services, but there are exceptions that prove the rule (like the CIA’s “Track II” in Chile in 1970), for reasons that should be obvious.¹ It is difficult to do anything in a bureaucracy without authorizations and funds, and difficult to show such authorization if it is not written down somewhere. More typical is that some extraordinary aspect will be added to an operation already under way, as with the abortive assassination plotting in the CIA’s Guatemala coup operation in 1954.² Such operational annexes will most likely have been authorized orally.

Various officials for reasons of their own will sometimes keep “private” files. As these files are by definition maintained outside of the office’s records management protocols, they are naturally structured in whatever way that keeps them useful and convenient for the individuals who created them. The saintly and conscientious intelligence officer who deliberately seeks to keep future historians well informed, however, is another rarity. Indeed, a savvy official historian immediately (if silently) questions the motives of anyone who keeps such a file, and wonders what axe he or she is grinding. The first such collection this author ever encountered was surely started because the compiler of it thought he should have been kept on as head of an office that had been assigned to the care of a younger rival. Simply put, he saved the items that made him look prescient, and hoped someone would notice someday. The more common private files to be saved, however, are compiled willy-nilly over the course of a career, as the official runs across something he thinks is interesting or amusing or otherwise worth squirreling away. Eventually he leaves or retires, and either “wills” his collection of miscellany to some colleague, or leaves it behind in a desk or safe to be found months or even years later by successors who might or might not take the trouble to save its contents.

The next place to look for records, especially if the activity took place overseas, is in the cable traffic. Intelligence agencies (even domestic ones) live by their official communications channels, and the messages sent along them are meticulously preserved and organized. Cable files are rigidly chronological, and cables themselves are supposed to be drafted so as to be economical and clear in their prose. They have to be, for the safety and success of the operation and the people involved, not to mention the expense of sending them.

Cables can be a wonderful source for historians, even when misleading, trivial, or turgid – or sometimes all at once. Indeed, when compared with staff memoranda produced at a leisurely pace in the home offices, cables generally seem terse, articulate, and definitive. Cables are the residue of a dying technology, however, and thus in reading them it is vital for the contemporary researcher to understand how cable traffic differs from modern messaging over computerized, global networks. Cables could take many hours to reach their recipients, especially if there were significant time-zone differences between the end points of the messages. In the days of hand encoding and decoding, moreover, a long cable usually meant late hours in the coderoom for some poor junior officer. Not a few cabled instructions had been overtaken by events by the time their addressee finally read them.

It almost goes without saying that telephone conversations are usually lost. Senior officials have always had their aides or secretaries keep office diaries and phone logs, and perhaps to paraphrase important calls as well. Prime ministers or presidents may even have had their conversations taped. The era is long past, however, and it did not last long to begin with, when senior intelligence officials would tape phone calls. By the 1960s important intelligence telephone calls were supposed to be placed on secure phones, the use of which has increased steadily over time as the secure phone networks expanded. Sometimes phone calls have presumably been recorded by foreign adversaries, but such third parties are rarely so kind as to release the transcripts to scholars.

A third key source for insider researchers is budget data. Budgets are sure indicators of the priorities of an organization, and to that organization’s priority in the larger scheme of policy implementation. They are also an index for comparison in looking at operations themselves; they indicate the relative size of the operation, giving a rough indication of whether the project in question represents a barn, a table, or a thimble.

Agency-wide budgets serve another purpose – that of giving the researcher a benchmark for the quality of and challenges facing the organization’s leadership. Declining budgets are a severe test of a leader’s ability. Indeed, sometimes it can be high praise indeed to say that a agency head was only able to hold his ground; that he preserved the organization’s core mission and staff and even maintained its operational tempo while his budgetary base eroded. Tough decisions are forced on a leader in such times; he or she has to trim somewhere to preserve other priorities, and such choices generally result in disagreements and even bitterness among the managers whose projects and offices lose out. On the other hand, growing budgets force a different set of challenges on a leader. Budget hikes allow him to throw money at problems, and many directors are tempted to do just that, often with meager and short-lived results. In a situation of sharply increasing resources, merely maintaining previous levels of staff and activities is a sign of poor or challenged leadership.

Another help on the inside, sometimes, is the personnel file of someone involved in an activity. This is helpful especially when living memory is deficient. If it contains performance evaluations for the time in question, or names of other people involved, such a file gives a researcher important reference points. It also provides clues to the orientation of the officer in question – his professional training and background – that may have had a bearing on the decisions or operation in question. A roster of the personnel involved also helps in surmounting the difficulties posed for intelligence scholarship that are caused by secrecy and compartmentation. One cannot assume that an event that was prior in time helped to cause a later one, or a prior report caused a subsequent decision, since the personnel involved may have had no access to such information. Sometimes it is possible to show that someone involved in an earlier operation was – or could not have been – in a position of responsibility to have had a role in a later one. The converse is true as well – sometimes two things that looked similar were really independent, with no common personnel.

Lastly, for intelligence agencies after the mid-1980s, internal electronic mail records can be important, or even vital. American governmental agencies began putting crude computers on the desktops of their officials in the 1980s; the employees using these early hub-and-spoke systems could sometimes communicate with one another via simple messaging programs. It took another decade, and the decisive victory of the IBM-clone personal computer, for such technology to become ubiquitous in the government and its intelligence bureaus. After about 1995, the internal e-mail becomes an indispensable source.

These various forms of e-mail present several problems to the researcher. They might not exist for certain offices or periods, given the archiving requirements and habits of the agencies and the officials manning them. They may not reflect the views of all the important officers involved in a decision or an operation. The most important officials in any organization typically have the least time to write them, and thus an agency head will typically leave behind a thin collection of e-mails. E-mails collectively carry a huge amount of information – and more importantly, circumstance – but it is often highly fragmented and elliptical. They cannot substitute for traditional sources, both oral and documentary, because even in the age of e-mail, many decisions still get made face-to-face, or over the telephone.

Inside scholars use published secondary materials as much as they can get them, but generally for establishing context for narratives that are based primarily on still-classified files. It can be tough to square the outside histories with the inside information, and the insiders always worry that something produced on the outside is incomplete. Official researchers can rarely call a colleague on the outside to ask if she checked collections X and Y in preparing her latest book – in part because security considerations can preclude such contacts. This is the signature weakness of inside scholarship – it can never be placed fully in the context of the literature written on the outside and reviewed by all the people in the various scholarly disciplines who might be able to explain or expand upon its findings.

This lengthy discussion of sources for official research in intelligence must seem quite elementary to any historian working in the documentary record of twentieth-century military or diplomatic history. That is no coincidence, for military and diplomatic history is precisely what historical research in intelligence is. Intelligence is not some privileged realm where the usual dynamics of organizational and group behavior do not apply; intelligence agencies are bureaucracies, and thus no exception to th...

Índice

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Glossary
• Introduction
• Part 1 The study of intelligence
• Part 2 The evolution of modern intelligence
• Part 3 The intelligence cycle and the search for information
• Part 4 The intelligence cycle and the crafting of intelligence reports
• Part 5 Counterintelligence and covert action
• Part 6 Intelligence accountability
• Appendices
• Select Bibliography