Intelligence Elsewhere

Spies and Espionage Outside the Anglosphere

Philip H. J. Davies,Kristian C. Gustafson

• Editorial: Georgetown University Press
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781589019577
• Categoría: Politics & International Relations
• Categoría: National Security

Spying, the "world's second oldest profession, " is hardly limited to the traditional great power countries. Intelligence Elsewhere, nevertheless, is the first scholarly volume to deal exclusively with the comparative study of national intelligence outside of the anglosphere and European mainstream. Past studies of intelligence and counterintelligence have tended to focus on countries such as the United States, Great Britain, and Russia, as well as, to a lesser extent, Canada, Australia, France, and Germany. This volume examines the deep historical and cultural origins of intelligence in several countries of critical importance today: India, China, the Arab world, and indeed, Russia, the latter examined from a fresh perspective. The authors then delve into modern intelligence practice in countries with organizations significantly different from the mainstream: Iran, Pakistan, Japan, Finland, Sweden, Indonesia, Argentina, and Ghana.

With contributions by leading intelligence experts for each country, the chapters give the reader important insights into intelligence culture, current practice, and security sector reform. As the world morphs into an increasingly multi-polar system, it is more important than ever to understand the national intelligence systems of rising powers and regional powers that differ significantly from those of the US, its NATO allies, and its traditional opponents. This fascinating book shines new light into intelligence practices in regions that, until now, have eluded our understanding.

PART I
Introduction and Theory

CHAPTER 1
An Agenda for the Comparative Study of Intelligence

Yet Another Missing Dimension

Philip H. J. Davies and Kristian C. Gustafson

In the decades since Christopher Andrew and David Dilks resurrected Sir Alexander Cadogan’s description of intelligence as the “missing dimension of diplomatic history,” scholars of intelligence have themselves been uncovering assorted additional absent axes within the study of intelligence.¹ Indeed, there are moments when intelligence scholars begin to feel a little like quantum physicists who find themselves wrestling with the idea of large numbers of different dimensions curled up, or “compactified,” in normal, three-dimensional space.² Among the compactified dimensions that have begun to unravel under scrutiny are questions of organizational structure and behavior, cultural analysis,³ and even foreign language competency.⁴ All these approaches have been found wanting in a field dominated by historical study on one side of the Atlantic and normative political and policy analysis on the other. This should come as no surprise in a comparatively newborn field of study. Before the 1960s intelligence and related activities such as covert action and protective security policy were so shrouded by strong formal and informally constituted rules of secrecy that the necessary evidence base for intelligence studies simply did not exist.⁵ There was also a sense that the underhanded nature of espionage meant that intelligence was not quite a respectable sphere of study for academics. However, there has since been a sea change both in the availability of information and in perceptions of the need to have a scholarly understanding of intelligence—accelerated in recent years by events such as the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States and the furors over the role of intelligence in the US decision to invade Iraq in 2003.

One of the compactified dimensions of the study of intelligence that still needs to be properly examined (and that actually entails many different axes of inquiry in its own right) is the comparative analysis of intelligence institutions and processes in government. Comparative politics is, of course, a well-established field. And the tools and conventions of overall comparative analysis have been clearly articulated. But they have yet to be applied really vigorously and systematically to the cross-national study of intelligence. Comparative investigation has been widely advocated since the 1980s, but very little actual in-depth, systematic comparative work has been undertaken.⁶ And yet comparative analysis is one of the most powerful methodological tools available in the contemporary social science arsenal.

Comparison as Protection

There is, to be sure, a tendency to view comparative methods as being mainly a protection against the limitations of stand-alone cases. Scholars are fond of invoking comparative analysis as a protection against “ethnocentrism.”⁷ But the idea of ethnocentrism is not particularly transparent, and it can all too easily carry with it the pejorative suggestion of chauvinism rather than a merely limitedly parochial perspective. In practical terms the main problem with examining cases in isolation rather than comparatively is that it can induce two alternative but complementary optical illusions regarding the case at hand. It is, for example, all too easy to approach a case with the conviction that it is somehow unique and then develop a characterization of that case that supposedly identifies distinctive features that are actually not unique at all. By the same token, it is all too easy for one to assume that the way things are done in one’s own community or context represents inherent criteria for the task that must be echoed in every instance. This is perhaps the classic sense of ethnocentrism, but it might more usefully be thought of as the illusion of universality. Thus one finds accounts of the US machinery of government built on organizational politics, and neoinstitutional paradigms of internecine organizational relations,⁸ that take that internecine nature as not merely universal but also as intrinsic to institutional processes.⁹ The problem here is that these approaches work very well for poorly coordinated systems but fail entirely to account for more orderly and integrated governmental machineries such as the UK central government.¹⁰

At the same time, one can find attempts to articulate phenomena that are putatively particular or unique, such as Michael Turner’s 2002 effort to articulate a distinctive US intelligence identity or culture. Among the distinctive features of the American approach to intelligence are an emphasis on secrecy, “intelligence exceptionalism” (the idea that intelligence is a different order of information from other sources), the separation of intelligence and law enforcement, a multiagency “confederal structure,” the separation of intelligence from policy, its role in policy support, debates over the merits of in-depth analysis as against the demands of current intelligence, and the provision of “accurately, timely and relevant intelligence” as among the distinguishing features of US intelligence. Although other elements of Turner’s model—such as the “primacy” of analysis (i.e., the broad as opposed to narrow view of intelligence that will feature throughout this volume), competitive intelligence, and the so-called can-do attitude—might be more pronounced in America than elsewhere, the rest are pretty uniform to the intelligence communities of all the Anglo-American liberal democracies. Certainly they are just as true of the United Kingdom as they are of the United States. Though they may indeed be characteristics of the US system, they are hardly particular to it; they are not actually distinctive.¹¹ Consequently, some sort of comparative effort is required to test whether an issue is common or purely localized.

Comparison as Diagnostic

However, comparative analysis can do more. It can help articulate judgments of degree in qualitative matters where articulating quantitative metrics may be intractable for various reasons. In the absence of an absolute cardinal measure of, say, more or less effective interagency coordination, one can make an ordinal judgment that this case is more well ordered than that one and then set about identifying variations between them and the relevance and consequences of these variations. Indeed, this is the strength of the fundamental logic of the comparative method that was originally articulated by John Stuart Mill in the nineteenth century, in particular his notion of arguments from difference and from similarity—in other words, taking two outwardly similar cases with a different outcome and then asking what drives them apart, or taking two different cases with similar outcomes and seeking to understand what drives them together.

It can be very useful to visualize comparative analysis in this role as being loosely analogous to resolving multiple parallel equations in algebra. In algebra one arranges the assorted equations with their shared variables in a common order and then performs some elementary arithmetic manipulations to one by one eliminate variables from expressions on the left hand side of the system until one is left with one value for the remaining variable. In principle the methods of similarity and difference are likewise also about eliminating variables. Where one has similar cases with different outcomes, one is in the business of knocking out features that the cases have in common in order to be left with those points of difference, some or all of which may drive the cases to different outcomes. Conversely, one may eliminate differences between a number of cases to identify those properties that they share, some or all of which drive them to a common outcome. Unfortunately, like most social science, such logical strategies are not much more than heuristic in practice and are virtually impossible to apply with the same rigor as in mathematics. Part of the problem is that parallel equations are only resolvable when one has at least the same number of equations as variables; otherwise, one is left with an ineradicable residual uncertainty in the need to express at least some variables in terms of other variables. And the real-world, comparative study of humanity is actually always a situation where the number of potential variables in society and historical events exceeds the number of possible cases for which one could even realistically hope.

To make matters worse, the “variables” in social sciences—such as political, economic, physical, and personal impact—are not what mathematicians call countable. That is, they cannot be treated as wholly separate, individually discrete items. Instead they all have overlapping, fuzzy edges (and often fuzzy centers), where economic matters are also inherently political ones, the conduct of individual personalities is inextricable from their institutionalized background expectations and worldviews, and so on. As a result, even cataloguing the variables or factors one is trying to eliminate or include is a pretty rough-and-ready affair and could entirely be reasonably articulated very differently from an alternative analytical point of view. In principle, however, like alternative mathematical solutions to a common problem (e.g., using algebra, matrices, or integral calculus to solve a rectangular volume), those alternative articulations should be at least homomorphic; the terminology may differ, and the workings on paper vary, but the essential shape of the answer one reaches is logically equivalent even if rhetorically seemingly far removed. Like Marxist concepts of “ideology” and “material forces” or “superstructure” and “base” placed alongside functionalist notions like Talcott Parsons’s duality of “norms” and “conditions” (in his earlier formulations¹²) or “information” and “energy” in later expressions, there is actually a common underlying and basic idea of how the world works, despite variations in normative perspective (consequently, much theoretical debate involves thinkers actually and regrettably talking past one another).¹³ And so, at some level, articulating a consistent framework for analysis is almost more important than which framework one employs. And in a field like comparative analysis, where trying to step outside the bounds of parochial viewpoints is one of the principal goals, this is a natural point of departure.

Intelligence and Commensurability

In its way, intelligence is a subject especially well suited to comparative analysis. Unlike many areas of government, which may depend on profoundly different basic forms of social organization, the various functions and principal logical components or steps of the intelligence field tend to provide a relatively common set of activities that can be identified and differing implementations that can be examined methodically. In its way intelligence bears a closer resemblance to the study of very concrete public policy tasks like road building and national accounts than to conceptually subtler issues such as constitutions or judiciaries. As with transportation policy, there are common basic problems that different governments need to resolve. In building roads one must lay something down that gets from A to B and manages the flow of traffic as safely and efficiently as available resources permit. In intelligence one must acquire information, figure out what it means, and make sure that it gets to the places and people who need it because that is why the information is required in the first place. It makes relatively little difference if the information is about drug cartels for the police, foreign trade negotiations for a foreign or economic ministry, or uncovering putative counterrevolutionary conspiracies to reinforce the stability of some nouvelle regime. Like the iron ingot that can be forged as plough or sword, or even heated, beaten, and reshaped from one to the other, intelligence is not intrinsically good or bad; it may serve democracy or tyranny, and it may be conducted in many walks of life, both within and outside government.

The kind of built-in commensurability that makes intelligence a good medium for comparative analysis is illustrated by what might be most usefully termed the “core functions” of intelligence. In whatever form, or whatever social locus, certain basic tasks—requirements, collection, analysis, and dissemination—constitute common problems for doing intelligence. These are often arranged sequentially as an intelligence cycle, but their relationship is more fluid than the sort of procedural clockwork that the idea of a cycle suggests. To be sure, one might subdivide the steps in analysis between the interpretation of information and identifying its implications, as does the American approach, which distinguishes between “processing” and “analysis,” or one might distinguish between “analysis” and “assessment,” as is done in the United Kingdom; but one must interpret and understand that which has been collected.¹⁴ There might be differences over whether the collectors decide for themselves what to collect or should be given shopping lists by the people who use that information to make decisions. But no one has the resources to scrutinize everything, everywhere at once, so some decisions must be made about requirements and priorities. Dissemination might be an integral part of the analytical process or might be passed on to briefing officers elsewhere, but the information also must get to the user. If used in this fashion, the core functions paradigm should constitute a case of the optical illusion of universality discussed above, because it is not about uprooting one particular parochial institutional practice and finding parallels elsewhere; it is about basic functional tasks that can be chopped, changed, and redistributed, but without which intelligence, however organized and institutionalized, cannot happen.

There may be cross-connections and feedback loops between the functions of intelligence, with raw reports being presented hurriedly to national leaders or analysts telling the collectors what they need to know and what needs to be collected to make their appreciations sound. But the essential logical steps do not simply evaporate; like dividing oncoming traffic into separate lanes or even ensuring that the road surface is reasonably flat and smooth, they are basic requirements of the task at hand. And of course the core functions of intelligence may be performed more or less efficiently or competently, and sometimes (like maintaining proper road surfaces or actually obeying the highway code) may...

Índice

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Part I: Introduction and Theory
• Part II: Intelligence Culture outside the Anglosphere
• Part III: Current Practice and Theory
• Part IV: Conclusion
• Contributors
• Index