11 September: Legitimizing Intelligence?

Michael Herman, Cheltenham

Abstract

Intelligence has evolved principally as the targeting of other states, and has thus posed
its own security dilemma: the knowledge it produces encourages more responsible
governmental behaviour, while its methods of secret collection reinforce inter-
governmental antagonism or distrust. 11 September and the counter-terrorism following
it have, however, accentuated the post-cold war trend to a new intelligence paradigm:
targeting ‘non-state’, ‘partial state’ or ‘rogue state’ entities rather than ‘decent’ states;
serving ‘good causes’ rather than competitive national advantage; supporting multi-
national action in actions with international endorsement. As such it has gained
increased legitimacy. More positive action is now needed to develop formal inter-
national intelligence machinery, not in collection but in analysis and assessment, as part
of an extended security system; and to encourage objective intelligence as an input to
national policy-making as a world standard of good governance. A necessary counter-
point is more restraint on intrusive intelligence collection against ‘decent’, cooperating
states.

Keywords: counter-terrorism – intelligence services – general, intelligence services –

United States – ethics – international politics – objective assessment – terrorism

Intelligence has been riding high since 11 September. It identified Osama bin
Laden as the perpetrator of the atrocities, and the subsequent ‘war against
terrorism’ kept it publicly centre-stage in an unprecedented way. Security Council
Resolution 1373 broke new ground in mandating intelligence assistance. The
coalition of 50 nations was formed in the first instance through US–UK
intelligence briefings, and intelligence has subsequently been the glue holding it
together. It has been the key to the campaign in Afghanistan. Russia, Pakistan, and
others, even China, have contributed significantly. Terrorism has brought about a
greatly changed level of cooperation between unlikely collaborators.
Intelligence was already accepted as an important and permanent part of
government. Budgets were reduced after the end of the cold war but before 11
September were already rising again. US intelligence was then receiving about 30
billion dollars annually and the British equivalent (though not on the same
budgetary base) was rather more than a billion pounds, more than spent on the
diplomatic service and about a twentieth of the cost of defence. As early as 1997,
a well-informed Australian academic quoted an estimate that intelligence
expenditure in the Far East had doubled from the end of the cold war.1 Intelligence
was growing everywhere, a reflection of the world’s instability and the increasing
intelligence opportunities and capabilities in the electronic age.

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11 September gave it a further hike. The CIA immediately afterwards was said
to be getting as many job applications in a day as it previously got in a week. The
American intelligence budget was soon increased by 7 percent, and British
intelligence quickly received an extra 20 million pounds on account. Official and
unofficial Russian comment pointed in the same direction. 11 September was
initially characterized as a US intelligence failure, but post-mortems have been
slow to develop and are unlikely to question intelligence’s importance.
The effect has therefore been to confirm its position as a worldwide growth
industry. The US will continue to have unique superpower status, but Russia will
remain a considerable intelligence power with an almost equal concern with
terrorism. The UK will maintain its transatlantic alliance and the unique ‘upper
second class’ status linked with it. NATO’s Secretary-General reminded its
Defence Ministers on 18 December 2001 that more intelligence was needed
throughout the Alliance, and middle intelligence powers both inside and outside
NATO will continue to expand, particularly in their move into the expensive field
of intelligence satellites. Smaller countries will be equally stimulated towards
bigger organizations, modern technology and better standards. Almost all states of
any substance already have intelligence services, and most of the others probably
aspire to have them sooner or later.
Yet this effort inherits ambivalent attitudes towards it. Western publics were
permanently influenced by John le Carré’s picture of cold war intelligence in East
and West as two halves of the same rotten apple.2 Governments everywhere have
regarded intelligence as something best not officially mentioned, on the lines of
Clinton’s formula over homosexuality in the armed forces – ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’.
The UN still refuses to acknowledge it by name; Resolution 1373 stuck to the
euphemism of ‘information exchanges’ to refer to it. Governments have a deeply
entrenched reticence about it; witness Dame Stella Rimington’s rough treatment in
the UK for writing her autobiography as the retired head of the Security Service.
This coyness reflects concern for protecting sources and methods, but also
reflects an underlying ethical disquiet. This runs from Immanuel Kant’s con-
demnation of espionage over 200 years ago as ‘intrinsically despicable’ and
exploited only the dishonesty of others,3 and continues up to the present; CIA’s
discouragement in the last decade from recruiting foreign agents with lax morals
was symptomatic of a modern view. Realists follow a Times editorial which said
in 1999 that ‘Cold War or no Cold War, nations routinely spy on each other’.4
Idealists on the other hand want as little of it as possible. Democracies’ attitudes
veer between the two.
September 11 and the anti-terrorist campaign have now given intelligence
additional legitimacy on this highest priority subject, but the uncertainty about its
wider application stays. Doubts remain whether its enhanced status should be
applauded or regarded as a regrettable necessity. Taking its effects as a whole,
does it make for a better world or a worse one? Looking forward, does its current
high profile on terrorism suggest ways of improving its other contributions to
international society? This article considers answers.
 LEGITIMIZING INTELLIGENCE? 229

Better world or worse one? Intelligence on states

Intelligence has two main functions; collecting information by special, covert

means, and acting as government’s expert on targets and subjects mainly of a
national security kind. In both roles as they developed in the second half of the
last century it was targeted principally against other states and the activities they
inspired. Western priorities were habitually expressed in terms of such targets. The
USSR, the other Warsaw Pact countries, China and other state targets pre-
dominated, and the same was true vice versa, with the US as the KGB’s great
enemy. Other targets outside the cold war included states at all points on the
spectrum from enemies to friends.
This was never the complete picture, and some non-state entities were always
on the priority lists. Terrorism is a long-standing example; Britain dealt exten-
sively with it from its Palestine Mandate onwards, and there were many others.
But targets were predominantly of ‘normal’ states, not necessarily friendly or
commendable, but with an accepted international status.5
In its effects this produced a dichotomy of ends and means, between
intelligence knowledge and the activities that produced it. Thus the knowledge
produced by the American U2 flights over the USSR in the 1950s was inter-
nationally beneficial, cutting down inflated assessments of the Soviet threat; yet
the flights themselves were highly provocative, and led to the breakdown of the
Paris Summit in May 1960. The two effects on interstate relationships can be
considered separately.

Intelligence knowledge
To take knowledge first: intelligence can distort. Despite its collection successes,
Soviet intelligence selected and interpreted its material to suit the preconceptions
of the regime of which it was an integral part, and encouraged misleading
estimates of western intentions. The same probably happens today in most author-
itarian regimes. Western intelligence is more deeply grounded in objectivity,
telling truth to power, and in some separation from power itself, but clearly it is
fallible. Its objectivity is itself an elusive ideal; its evaluations may be likened to
historians’ rewriting of the past in the light of the present. It sometimes tends
towards demonization and worst cases; as Sir Percy Cradock put it as a former
Chairman of the British Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), its concern is with the
dark face of the moon.6 It is under special pressure from defence lobbies.
But it cannot be disinvented as one of government’s regular inputs, and its
western record is not actually of systemic distortion. It has underestimated threats
as often as exaggerating them; has failed to warn as often as cry wolf. In fact the
British JIC and American CIA estimates in the cold war are now getting better
historical marks than they were once thought to deserve. The key point is some
cultural and organizational separation from policy-making and decision-taking,
wafer-thin though it has to be. Intelligence’s justification is summed up in an
230 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 16(2)

American comment, that ‘Men who have participated in a decision develop a

stake in that decision. As they participate in further, related decisions, their stake
increases’.7 Intelligence has some insulation from this effect. If it cannot achieve
absolute policy-free objectivity, it at least strives for it, with a distinctive expertise
and viewpoint.
As such it has some moral impact. Occasionally this is through direct
contributions to international security. Thus under the euphemism ‘National
Technical Means’ it provided the verification that made the US–Soviet strategic
arms control agreements of the 1970s possible, and has subsequently been recog-
nized by the UN and incorporated in the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty of 1996.8
Similarly the US has used intelligence to provide reassurance in other contexts,
beginning with Kissinger’s supply of it to both Egypt and Israel as part of the Yom
Kippur war’s ceasefire agreement.9
Far more important, however, is its general effect on national behaviour. If it
does not make leaders wise in their international dealings, it at least reduces their
ignorance, and where they are receptive it inclines them to display rather less
insensitivity and recklessness than if they went without it. This conclusion
found unexpected support in the British Secretary of State for International
Development’s announcement in 1999 of assistance to the Third World for
‘training to improve the objectivity of threat analysis, especially on the civilian
side of government’ and ‘strengthening the capacity of [local] intelligence
services to assess genuine outside threats’.10 Use of intelligence knowledge
figures among the attributes of good governance and responsible international
citizenship.

Covert collection
But what about its covert collection? The methods cover a wide ethical spectrum.
Collection in international waters and airspace is not illegal. Neither are the
modern intelligence satellites. Wartime intelligence-gathering is free from legal or
moral restraints, except on the torture of prisoners of war. Many casual human
sources pose no ethical problems. As for long-range electronic collection, this
caused little comment before the furore in the French and European Parliaments
about the US–UK–Commonwealth Echelon system of electronic collection.
On the other hand, collection can entail violations of territorial integrity, as in
the western overflights of the USSR. American submarine operations in Soviet
waters were another cold war example. There is also the dubious status of
embassies, when these are the targets of electronic or other attacks or when they
act as bases for covert collection by human and technical means; all activities that
sit awkwardly with the stipulations of the 1961 Vienna Convention that dip-
lomacy’s purpose is collecting information by lawful means.11
Most questioned of all is the peacetime use of spies and informers. Sometimes
this is defensive, penetrating a foreign intelligence agency to frustrate its attacks
on oneself. Yet there are scruples over encouraging treachery, or betrayal for
 LEGITIMIZING INTELLIGENCE? 231

greed. It is sometimes claimed that the use of agents corrupts those running them.
And even when agents have the highest motives, is it right to expose them to the
awful fates that may await them?
International law is silent. Spies can be executed in war, but espionage itself is
not illegal. The few treaty references to intelligence specify that the ‘recognized
principles of international law’ apply, but give no indication what these are.
Intelligence activity may in any case have cumulative effects irrespective of strict
legal status. The sheer weight of western airborne and shipborne collection around
the Soviet periphery probably reinforced threat perceptions, even though most of
it was outside territorial limits.
The end of the cold war might have been expected to see the more intrusive
methods decline, yet up to 11 September espionage cases between officially
friendly powers seemed to hit the media more frequently than before. Counter-
espionage was officially said to make up just over 20 percent of the British
Security Service’s work in 1999–2000, with targets including ‘significant Russian
activity in the UK’.12 The FBI Director had testified in 1996 that 23 foreign
powers were implicated in 800 industrial espionage cases within the US, and an
FBI study in the same period claimed that 57 states had used covert methods
against American corporations.13 The Russian FSB (the successor of the internal
security part of the KGB) has made great play annually with the scale of foreign
espionage, mainly western; figures quoted for 2001 were ‘almost 50’ foreign
agents detected and ‘130 career personnel of foreign special services’ exposed.14
Russia sought intelligence détente in the early 1990s, and handed over its bugging
plans for the new American embassy in Moscow, but the mood passed. The tit-for-
tat expulsions of diplomats from Washington and Moscow in March 2001 were
followed shortly afterwards by the collision between the Chinese fighter and the
American intelligence aircraft which then landed in Hainan. Recently, there was
the remarkable story that 20 eavesdropping devices had been found in the
Presidential aircraft supplied to China by Boeing.15 There have been recurrent
rumours of French efforts against the US and UK, and Anglo-American coverage
of France. Most of the Permanent Members of the Security Council and main
countries in the European Union have been accused at some time of spying on
each other.
It would be strange if all this does not have some international effects; at the
very least it cannot make international cooperation easier. So intelligence
knowledge and activities combine to produce their own version of the security
dilemma. The knowledge helps governments to behave wisely, but in an interstate
environment which some of the activities make worse. A long view of the
dilemma is also appropriate. By 2025 or 2050, US intelligence hegemony will be
a thing of the past and, if an intelligence cold war continues, China may be on
equal terms with the US, perhaps even ‘winning’ it. And large states are role
models for smaller ones; will all the present 193 states and statelets now invest in
covert collection to keep up with the international Joneses?
This collection on other states remains a significant part of intelligence’s effort,
232 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 16(2)

and will remain so; some suggestions can be made about it later. But it is now only
part of the picture. The anti-terrorist campaign encapsulates a shifting of priorities
to different target sets, with different international effects.

New targets and trends

Importance and acceptability

The shift is towards a different class of target: non-state entities, semi-states and
the so-called rogue states. The range is familiar. International terrorism is one
well-established category, and others have included individuals and firms
involved in activities such as dealing in nuclear material, the development of
weapons of mass destruction and delivery systems, arms trading, sanctions-
busting, drugs and other criminality; ‘pre-state’ groups seeking statehood through
insurrection and civil war; collapsing and fragmenting ‘post-states’; and some
transnational corporations. They merge in turn into the rogue state pariahs, some-
times terrorist supporters.
11 September has accentuated this shift but did not begin it; it has been taking
place ever since the end of the cold war, with the growth of global disorder and
governments’ responses to it. Though terrorism is now the overriding priority it is
by no means the only target in this growing category.
This has two results for intelligence. One is to highlight the value of the
knowledge coming from it, by both collection and analysis. Many of these targets
are intrinsically secretive, and make intelligence indispensable. Even in situations
with extensive media coverage, intelligence is needed to calibrate open source
material, fill gaps and draw conclusions. Not only for terrorism but also for many
others among these targets – covert weapons programmes, for example –
governments’ dependence on intelligence is unquestioned.
The other is to make intrusive collection methods far more acceptable. On
terrorism of the al-Qaeda variety this can be taken as read, but most of the other
new targets have been connected either with international ‘baddies’ or with
situations of mass suffering that justify extreme measures to gather information on
them. Public opinion has few inhibitions about how this intelligence is collected.
Interstate relationships are not corroded by this collection, since the targets are not
‘proper’ states; the rogue states among them have forfeited their rights by bad
behaviour.
The effect is to move the ethical goalposts towards virtually a wartime position,
not only for the ‘war on terrorism’ but also for most of these new targets. In
sufficiently good causes, against these targets, almost anything is acceptable to
gather information, short of torture or other gross violations of human rights.
(Ethical issues were in fact raised over the American treatment of the prisoners
brought from Afghanistan to Guantanamo for interrogation; but this was an
unusual and perhaps misreported case.) Only the tenderest consciences would
 LEGITIMIZING INTELLIGENCE? 233

question the use of informers or technical surveillance to get warnings of terrorist

action on the al-Qaeda scale, and the same would also apply to prevent repetitions
of Srebrenica.16 On grounds therefore of both importance and acceptability, the
anti-terrorist campaign is linked with a wider trend in targeting. This has not
eliminated the coverage of normal, non-rogue states and the consequent interstate
effects. Nevertheless, intelligence’s role on the new tasks is modifying its image
and increasing its respectability.

Multilateralism
It is also reinforcing the trend for national intelligence to develop a multinational
overlay; terrorism as a global threat is giving rise to intelligence’s own global-
ization. Of course its formal and informal bilateral and multilateral exchanges are
nothing new in themselves, and are well established legacies of the cold war.
These were expanded into the more widespread liaisons needed in the 1990s, not
only on terrorism but also to support the UN, NATO and other collective action
taken in that decade. Combating organized crime also encouraged international
cooperation by intelligence services as well as by law enforcement authorities.
Hence, before 11 September, the CIA already had relationships with some 400
foreign intelligence, security and police organizations, and Britain had been said
by an official source in the mid-1990s to have some 120 such liaisons.17 The FSB
claimed in its recent annual survey that a Russian-led Council of Leaders of
Security Organs and Special Services of the Commonwealth of Independent States
had been active since 1997, and that in 2001 Russia had ‘around 80 missions
representing the special services of 56 countries’ working permanently in Moscow,
and had formal agreements with ‘40 foreign partners in 33 countries’.18
But this growth of liaisons was predominantly in supporting governments’
elective, discretionary action overseas, and not national domestic security and
integrity; and exchanges had limitations of all kinds. It seems doubtful, for
example, whether the publicized US and UK cooperation with Russia had got very
far, except perhaps on some criminal cases. 11 September then produced a new
US recognition of a threat to its homeland from virtually worldwide bases,
coupled with the conclusion that the threat extended to the international system as
a whole. Hence America’s rapprochement with Pakistan’s ISI, the new exchanges
with Russia (which the FSB claimed included ‘a real-time exchange of infor-
mation with the CIA and FBI’),19 and other increased US liaison elsewhere, even
extending to cooperation with China.20 Similarly, the Blair–Putin statement after
their meeting of 20–21 December confirmed that ‘cooperation on intelligence
matters has been unprecedently close’ and announced an Anglo-Russian
agreement to set up a new ‘joint group to share intelligence’. The EU for its part
developed an ‘anti-terrorist roadmap’ of 25 items for European action plus a
further eight for cooperation with the US; relevant intelligence items included
improving databases on individuals, making more information available from
public electronic communications, and the establishment of a new group of heads
234 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 16(2)

of security and intelligence agencies to meet regularly.21 In the UN, the new
Counter-terrorism Committee declared one of its aims to be ‘to establish a
network of information-sharing and cooperative action’.22 It developed procedures
for handling sensitive information, and received reports from UN members on
information exchanges. All these reflected a surge in international cooperation.

Globalized intelligence?
From them comes the material for a new vision. Intelligence has always been
regarded as essentially a national activity, geared to national requirements and
national interests, yet some time ago two retired US Directors of Central
Intelligence envisaged, independently, that it could also develop as an inter-
national good.23 International action on counter-terrorism now gives a new focus
to the idea. A 20th-century challenge was to organize intelligence to make it a
regular part of national decision-taking; the challenge in this century may be to
give it the same role internationally. The vision is of national intelligence services
collectively developing groups of states as their corporate clients, alongside their
well-established, individual, national governments; and perhaps even developing a
corporate intelligence identity themselves. A hostile writer about New Zealand
SIGINT wrote some years ago of American influence as ‘not too far from that of a
giant United States parent company visiting its New Zealand office’.24 He
intended to frighten his readers with American influence, but he may have
unintentionally conveyed a whiff of intelligence’s possible globalization.
There are indeed some precedents pointing in this extra-national direction.
Over forty years ago, the UN forces in the Congo created their tactical Sigint and
photographic interpretation units.25 An American U2 was put under UNSCOM’s
control for collecting imagery over Iraq after 1991, and UNSCOM developed
quite a powerful analysis unit of its own to analyse this and other data.26 The
European Union already has its imagery analysis centre in Spain, and German
participation is now agreed in the intelligence satellite programme originally
launched by France with Italian and Spanish support, though the UK is still
reluctant to jump aboard. A military intelligence structure has been created as part
of the European Union’s Common Foreign and Security Policy. No doubt some
national intelligence is also being supplied discreetly to meet the growing needs of
explicitly non-national customers: the UN Secretary-General and other UN
officials; the successor organization to UNSCOM; the UN Situation Centre itself;
the Hague Tribunals on information crimes against humanity; high international
officials in NATO, the EU and other regional organizations.
Yet these are all small-scale exceptions to the norm. Intelligence was seen in
NATO from its early days as a national activity, feeding its results into the
Alliance at national discretion without much machinery for international
assessment, and this approach still colours thinking everywhere. The arrange-
ments in the anti-terrorist campaign still appear to be mainly bilateral and ad hoc.
 LEGITIMIZING INTELLIGENCE? 235

Intelligence is exchanged, but there is as yet no machinery for collective

agreement on what it means. Britain has been an intelligence partner, but its
position remains exceptional. In intelligence, as in other things, the main pattern is
of the US as the hub and others as the spokes.
This accords with many US instincts, as well as its intelligence status, and has
fitted the military aspects of the anti-terrorist campaign. Moving to greater
multilateralism poses innumerable problems of source protection and political
sensitivity. Yet the nature of terrorism gives America a special need for access to
foreign intelligence services’ unique assets – human sources, local bugging and
eavesdropping, access to local police, immigration and other records, bases for US
collection – to supplement what it can do itself, and cooperative action needs more
than services of raw data. The interdiction of terrorist financing, for example,
requires agreed analysis and common databases. Coalitions of the willing require
some intelligence institutionalization to sustain them; participants need some
guarantee that the intelligence they supply is not being cherry-picked by the US to
suit its own policy preferences. And the structures needed for the anti-terrorist
campaign would also have wider applications in a global security system. On all
these grounds the vision of corporate intelligence and corporate clients deserves
attention.

A way ahead

Natural evolution or a new attitude?

Some things will happen in any case. Intelligence will grow everywhere. 11
September and the anti-terrorist campaign reaffirm the importance of covert
collection and democracies will relax some of the domestic constraints upon it.
The requirements of the campaign will combine with information technology to
hasten organizational change in intelligence itself and to redraw its institutional
boundaries with law enforcement. Its circle of non-national customers such as
international officials and Hague Courts will increase. It will also develop some
multinational and international intelligence machinery, but very slowly, without
much enthusiasm from the major powers. The campaign will underline intelli-
gence’s legitimacy in counter-terrorism, but not more widely. It will remain in an
ethical limbo: accepted as a necessary adjunct to action on good causes, yet still
suspected as a grubby activity, not fitting easily into ethical foreign policies.
Governments’ ambiguities about it will reinforce intelligence services’ caution
about formalizing international cooperation. Political leaders will talk about it
more than before, but with a lot of rhetoric.
This assumes that events take their natural course, but the anti-terrorist
campaign and the new search for global security offer a chance of taking them
further in a positive programme, with constituents of supranational intelligence
machinery, world standards of performance and reductions in intrusive coverage
236 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 16(2)

of normal states. These are needed anyway to make counter-terrorism more

effective, but would have wider effects. They could lead to more emphasis on
intelligence’s potential for reducing interstate misperception and facilitating
cooperation, for making states more ‘intelligent’ in the original Latin sense of
intelligere. Some of the difficulties over intelligence’s legitimacy – though by no
means all of them – would be reduced in the process.

Multinational and international machinery

Some precedents in this direction for more institutionalization and less ad hoccery
have been indicated. On collection, there may be some circumstances in which
this could again be by blue-helmeted units, as in the Congo case, or by white-
painted aircraft on loan to the UN as for UNSCOM. But these will be a minority.
Protecting collection sources is difficult to reconcile with international trans-
parency and some methods may seem incompatible with the UN’s clean hands.
Coalitions and international and regional institutions should concentrate on
establishing supranational frameworks further downstream in the intelligence
process; in producing ‘finished intelligence’, particularly at the final stage of
(policy-free) assessment. Source protection here is less difficult, and the impact on
policy-making and decision-taking greatest.
This would still be based on nations’ own collection and processing. Their
intelligence services would not be sidelined, but doctrine and procedures would be
developed for feeding their product into some form of supranational assessment.
A rough analogy can be drawn with Britain’s domestic law and order. There are 43
different police forces, each with its own law-enforcement intelligence organiz-
ation, but they are supplemented by the coordination and strategic assessment of
the central National Criminal Intelligence Service. Supranational intelligence
machinery would play a comparable international role.
Two complementary principles should underlie it. One is that it should provide
for exchanges of national assessments, with peer review of them and a striving for
consensus; the system in fact of the British Joint Intelligence Committee and the
American National Intelligence Estimates.27 The second is that it should be more
than just a committee, and should be supported by an international professional
analysis and assessment staff, without national allegiances; rather like the
UNSCOM analysis staff, though more unambiguously international. Regional and
international organizations employ experts in almost everything else, but not for
intelligence assessment. They should have them.

Doctrine
Getting this model accepted would be quite a tall order. The proposed machinery
is based on US–UK–Old Commonwealth practice, only patchily emulated else-
where. At its root is the concept of assessment as a process separable (if only
 LEGITIMIZING INTELLIGENCE? 237

thinly) from covert collection on the one hand, and from policy-making and power
on the other; and driven essentially by a search for accuracy and objectivity. It is
distinct from ‘stealing secrets’ and from policy analysis of what should be done.
The concept has some western currency but is by no means universal.
Intelligence’s most powerful worldwide associations are still with covert
collection, covert action, repressive regimes and American imperialism. It is still
often seen as an instrument of power and ideology, inherently threatening; an
instrument of internal state power, or part of the power of rich states over poor
ones. Only a relatively small proportion of the world’s rulers see it as their
principal source of reliable information and unbiased forecasting.
The nub of the matter is therefore the concept of national intelligence itself,
and whether this can be modified to give more prominence to the assessment role.
The British Department for International Development’s encouragement of
objective threat assessment was geared to the Third World, but why stop there? It
is just as desirable elsewhere: Russia, China, the Middle East, South Asia, to say
nothing of the West itself. The idea of objective assessment should travel in the
baggage of western ideas. After the end of the Cold War, Britain and the US
successfully spread the concept of intelligence’s democratic accountability in
Central Europe, but should now go further and wider over intelligence’s
function.28 Britain’s defence diplomacy and diplomatic training courses for
foreign students may be tailor-made for the purpose. Perhaps Canada, Australia
and New Zealand could make particular contributions where US and UK advice is
suspect, as perhaps could Germany whose post-1945 intelligence has fewer
associations than most with covert activities. At all events, the condemnatory le
Carré view of intelligence should not be left with a clear field.
Part of this process might be the clarification of the West’s own profession-
alism as something not too far from the status of statisticians and government’s
other information experts. Professionalism is not easily defined. Its history is of
‘professions growing, splitting, joining, adapting, dying’,29 and 21 different
definitions of it have been quoted in standard works.30 Yet its important
connotation is of standards, something that seems particularly relevant to a
modified view of intelligence. The West should make its assumptions about
proper intelligence analysis and assessment more explicit – for its own benefit and
potentially as a worldwide model.

Restraint
These revised ideas about intelligence run up against the effects of its intrusive
collection against normal states; the territorial violations, espionage, bugging,
targeting of diplomatic premises and exploitation of diplomatic immunities already
discussed. Intelligence cooperation with other states can be squared with these
operations against them, but only up to a point. In the long run there is some
incompatibility between the two. If the US, UK and Russia want their new counter-
terrorist agreements to stick, some restraint in their mutual, cold-war-style targeting
238 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 16(2)

is called for. The potential benefit is wider than counter-terrorism. All three fear
foreign penetration of their secrets – Russia probably more than the other two,31 but
the US almost as much – and reciprocal reductions in targeting are a common
interest. Similar considerations apply to intelligence cooperation by other countries.
The remedy is easily suggested. Some tacit understandings on intelligence
intrusion already exist. Why not just raise these thresholds and introduce them
where they do not yet exist? The criteria of restraint, necessity and proportionality
set out in the doctrine of Just War is applicable to intelligence. Ethics should be
recognized as a factor in intelligence decisions, with the effect on interstate
relationships as the most obvious ethical criterion (though not the only one).
Restraint should travel in the western baggage along with objective assessment.
All states can practise it, but the leading intelligence powers would probably have
to set the example. Intelligence collaboration on terrorism provides the motive and
opportunity.
Some general ground-rules can be suggested. Restraint should apply to
intelligence collection against normal states, not the rogues or collapsing ones.
Reductions should be sought in the intrusive methods used against them, not in all
collection, and these reductions should not apply on targets of genuine national
security interest. Foreign intelligence services operating against oneself would
remain fair game for counter-intelligence and counter-espionage detection and
penetration, as a matter of legitimate self-defence. Targeting for requirements
bearing on international security, justice and humanitarianism would be similarly
unaffected. Restraint would be applied to intrusive collection on other states to
further non-security national interests, principally the collection of foreign secrets
on economic, financial and commercial matters, and on negotiating positions on
these and other subjects.
There are indeed some precedents for unlikely intelligence understandings of
this kind. Before the strategic arms control agreements touched on earlier it would
have seemed quite inconceivable that the US and USSR would legitimize aspects
of each other’s secret collection, and agree not to extend some of their encryption,
yet they did so for the mutual benefit of facilitating verification. Similarly, the
US–USSR Incidents at Sea agreement of 1972 restrained some intelligence
collection at close quarters. Russia was reported to have pressed the UN Secretary-
General in 1998 for an international treaty banning information warfare.32 Mutual
US and Russian reduction in espionage was raised, apparently from the American
side, in July 1999 in Washington discussions between the US Vice-President and
Russian Prime Minister, and remitted for further examination.33 Reducing the
scale of Russian espionage in Britain is said to have been raised by Blair with
Putin at a one-to-one meeting in March 2001.34 Even before 11 September the
idea of ‘intelligence arms control’ had had some airing.
Since then Putin has announced his intention to close the large Russian
interception station on Cuba, long a source of Congressional opposition to closer
US–Russian relations, and also the similar station at Cam Ran in Vietnam.
President Bush welcomed the announcement as ‘taking down relics of the Cold
 LEGITIMIZING INTELLIGENCE? 239

War and building a new, cooperative and transparent relationship for the twenty-
first century’.35 It would be pleasing if these closures turned out to be an example
of reciprocal restraint.
In this, as in other things, America’s attitude will set the international temper-
ature and curbing any aspect of its superpower capabilities may appear most
unattractive to it. But its highest priorities are moving anyway from the targeting
of normal states and restraint in collection on them may appear a reasonable quid
pro quo for their intelligence assistance. And the US should in any case have an
eye to the 2025/2050 scenario with China as its intelligence equal and most of
nearly 200 smaller states effectively established in the intelligence business.

An impassable twin-track?

Hence what is suggested is a twin-track approach, directed to a changed view of

intelligence: on the one hand objective assessment for adoption as a world
standard, and restraint over friction-creating activity on the other. Intelligence
would still be secret and special, but would acquire more legitimacy and inter-
national utility.
Is any of this practicable? Intelligence’s place has been determined historically
by ideas of national sovereignty, threats and interstate competition; despite
alliances, one state’s gain has usually been another’s loss. Developing reciprocal
restraints on collection would violate deeply entrenched taboos and be dismissed
as pie in the sky. And can anyone really visualize conscious US attempts to
encourage Russia and China to develop objective (hence better) assessment, or
Britain trying to do this for France?
Yet 11 September and the anti-terrorist campaign have produced an opportunity
for new ideas. States over time can radically change their working assumptions. In
the 19th century the Red Cross owed its development to a private initiative which
caught on and moved governments;36 and the Hague Conference of 1899 and its
contributions to the laws of war originated in an unexpected initiative from the
Tsar, possibly from reading a book on future war.37 Michael MccGwire has
written recently of the possibility of a ‘paradigm shift’ in the concept of national
security, and quotes among 20th-century examples the modification of the
centuries-old ‘freedom of the sea’ doctrine in the 15 years of Law of the Sea
negotiations ending successfully in 1982.38 In its own sphere a changed view of
intelligence might be a similar case.
So we have a mood for revising the mental framework. Sir Michael Howard
has reminded us that until the 18th century enlightenment war between states
‘remained an almost automatic activity, part of the natural order of things’.39 ‘If
anyone could be said to have invented peace as more than a mere pious aspiration,
it was Kant.’40 Perhaps it is now a good time for some similar intellectual shift
over intelligence, emphasizing support for international purposes and increased
legitimacy.
240 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 16(2)

The changing view of military power perhaps provides an analogy. Armies are
still national, but John Keegan argued in 1998 that democracy’s professional
soldiers are now also international society’s check upon violence; ‘those
honourable warriors who administer force in the cause of peace’.41 Mutatis
mutandis, the war against terrorism may help us to see intelligence partly in this
light.

Notes

This article is much influenced by Michael MccGwire’s articles, ‘The Paradigm that Lost its Way’ and
‘Shifting the Paradigm’, International Affairs, Vol. 77, No. 4, 2001, pp605–35 and Vol. 78, No. 1, 2002,
pp1–28. I am indebted to MccGwire, Geoffrey Best and Andrew Linklater for comments on drafts. For
the present author’s longer discussion of intelligence and ethics before 11 September, see his
Intelligence Services in the Information Age: Theory and Practice (London: Cass, 2001), Chapter 13.

1 Quoted from D. Ball in Far East Economic Review, 9 June 1997, by J. Ferris (1994) ‘Intelligence
After the Cold War: A Global Perspective’ in A. Bergin and R. Hall (eds) Intelligence and
Australian National Security, p8. Canberra: Australian Defence Studies Centre.
2 For a discussion of le Carré’s moral stance, see J. Burridge (1994) ‘Sigint in the Novels of John le
Carré’, CIA’s Studies in Intelligence 37(5).
3 H. Reiss (tr. H.B. Nisbet) (1991) Kant: Political Writings, pp96–7. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. But note that Grotius took a more robust view, that spies were ‘beyond doubt
permitted by the law of nations’ and can be dealt with ‘in accordance with the impunity which
the law of war accords’. (F. Kelsey [trs] [1925] The Law of War and Peace, Book 3, Chapter 4,
xviii, p655. Oxford: Oxford University Press.)
4 The Times, 26 May 1999.
5 The idea of ‘decent’ states – ‘not liberal, but nor are they outlaws in any behavioral or moral
sense of the term’ – in international society is discussed by C. Brown (1989) ‘John Rawls, “The
Law of Peoples”, and International Political Theory’, Ethics and Foreign Affairs 1.
6 It specializes in ‘the hard world of shocks and accidents, threats and crises . . . the dark side of the
moon, history pre-eminently as the record of the crimes and follies of mankind’. (Percy Cradock
[1997] In Pursuit of British Interests: Reflections on Foreign Policy under Margaret Thatcher
and John Major, p37. London: Murray.)
7 Quoted by Loch K. Johnson (1996) Secret Agencies: US Intelligence in a Hostile World, p28.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, from J.C. Thomson (1968) ‘How Could Vietnam
Happen’, Atlantic Monthly 221 (April).
8 NTMs are discussed in the author’s (1996) Intelligence Power in Peace and War, pp159–62.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. The UN reference to them in its Principles of
Verification is in UN document A/45/372, 28 August 1988, Section II. Article 23 (Verification) of
the CTBT permits NTMs to be used to back up a call for on-site inspection if the data has been
collected ‘in a manner consistent with generally recognized principles of international law’.
9 Author’s Intelligence Power in Peace and War, p156 (see note 8).
10 DFID Policy Statement ‘Poverty and the Security Sector’, the basis of an address at the Centre
for Defence Studies 9 March 1999, p6.
11 Vienna Convention 1961, Articles 3.1 and 41.3.
12 Intelligence and Security Committee Annual Report 1999–2000, para. 16. London: The
Stationery Office, 2000.
13 Luke P. Bellochi (2001) ‘Assessing the Effectiveness of the Economic Espionage Act of 1996’,
International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 14(3): 367.
14 Article by FSB Director N. Patrushev, Russian National Information Service, 20 December 2001
(BBC Monitoring Service).
15 Financial Times, 19 January 2002. Later it was suggested in Washington that they had been
inserted by a rival in the Chinese leadership.
 LEGITIMIZING INTELLIGENCE? 241

16 Covert action admittedly raises ethical issues for intelligence if it carries it out, or supplies
information specifically for it. Israel’s assassination of terrorist leaders is an extreme example.
But, in the western system considered here, covert action can be divorced from the prime
intelligence role of information-gathering.
17 Gregory F. Treverton (2001) Reshaping National Intelligence for an Age of Information, p137.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
18 See note 14.
19 See note 14.
20 Sunday Times, 17 February 2002.
21 Details from Statewatch 11(5) (August–October 2001).
22 Sir Jeremy Greenstock (Chairman), press conference, 19 October 2001 [http://www.un.org/Docs/
sc/committees/1373)].
23 S. Turner (1996) Secrecy and Democracy, pp280–5. New York: Harper and Row; W.E. Colby
(1992) ‘Reorganizing Western Intelligence’ in C.P. Runde and G. Voss Intelligence and the New
World Order, pp126–7. Bustehude: International Freedom Foundation.
24 Nicky Hager (1996) Secret Power: New Zealand’s Role in the International Spy Network, p139.
Nelson, New Zealand: Craig Potten.
25 A. Walter Dorn (1999–2000) ‘The Cloak and the Blue Beret: Limitations on Intelligence in UN
Peacekeeping’, Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 12(4): 422–5.
26 T. Trevan (1999) Saddam’s Secrets: The Hunt for Iraq’s Hidden Weapons, pp89–91, 143.
London: HarperCollins.
27 NATO operated nominally in the same way in its annual agreed assessment of the Soviet threat.
The UK habitually tabled threat assessments for discussion as part of its attempts to build up
CENTO and SEATO and other cold war cooperation outside NATO in the 1950s.
28 What is the current Russian view? Much play in official statements is now made on refraining
from covert action and seeking objectivity; for example the Russian National Security Blueprint
published on 26 December 1997 included ‘the objective and comprehensive analysis and
forecasting of threats to national security’. Clearly, the doctrine has changed from the KGB’s
official definition of intelligence gathering as ‘a specific form of political struggle used by the
intelligence agencies of a state to help it to fulfil its internal and external functions’ (Vasiliy
Mitrokhin [2002] KGB Lexicon: The Soviet Intelligence Officer’s Handbook, p200. London:
Cass). For a balanced discussion of the KGB’s foreign intelligence successor see Gordon Bennett
(2000) The SVR: Russia’s Intelligence Service. Camberley: Conflict Studies Research Centre.
29 A.D. Abbott (1988) The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor, pxiii.
Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press.
30 Philip Elliott (1972) The Sociology of the Professions, p5. London: Macmillan.
31 For example, the 1997 Russian National Security Blueprint (see note 28 above) laid surprising
emphasis on defence against ‘leaks of important political, economic, scientific-technical and
military information’, ‘the threat of foreign intelligence services’ agent and operational-technical
penetration of Russia’, and the need for ‘information security’; far more than in any comparable
western policy statement.
32 Sunday Times, 25 July 1999, p21.
33 Russian accounts of the press conference refer to ‘total mutual understanding’ having been
reached on ‘one sensitive topic’, and existing agreements ‘to work in a fairly correct sort of way’
(FBIS and BBC translations of 28 and 29 July 1999).
34 Sunday Times, 25 March 2001.
35 Details from the Association of Former Intelligence Officers Weekly Notes October 2001,
[http://www.afio.com/sections/wins].
36 Pam Brown (1988) Henry Dunant: The Founder of the Red Cross. Watford: Exley.
37 Geoffrey Best (1999) ‘Peace Conferences and the Century of Total War: The 1899 Hague
Conference and What Came After’, International Affairs 75(3): 622.
38 Michael MccGwire (2002) ‘Shifting the Paradigm’, International Affairs, 78(1): 10.
39 Michael Howard (2000) The Invention of Peace: Reflections on War and International Order,
p13. London: Profile Books.
40 Howard, The Invention of Peace, p31 (see note 39).
41 Concluding words in J. Keegan (1998) War and Our World, p74. London: Hutchinson (Reith
Lectures 1998).