Intelligence Failure
Secrecy is often considered central to the British state because the secret services are woven into its fabric in an intimate way. The British secret state has long been admired for its cohesiveness and the refined mechanisms which relate intelligence closely to policy. This is in direct contrast to the French system, which locates secret things on the periphery of government. It is also very different from Washington, where the 13 agencies that form the American intelligence community have engaged in what has become known as the ‘beltway wars', resulting in an atmosphere that is anything but communal. The British intelligence community displays commendable collegiality. In part this may reflect its relatively small budget set against ambitious tasking. In London the intelligence community is still a village, not a city; moreover the tight budget ensures that managers have sometimes been trying to give areas of responsibility away, rather than competing for turf.
Britain's so-called ‘Central Intelligence Machinery' is often considered to be synonymous with the Joint Intelligence Committee, which conducts high-level assessment. Beginning life as a low-level subcommittee in the 1930s, it grew in importance during the war as the major filter for integrating intelligence into strategy and operations. The Cold War, with its relatively glacial pace, was even more suited to intelligence by committee, and the continued rise of the JIC was denoted by its migration to the Cabinet Office in 1957. After the failure to spot the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 it was concluded that the tradition of Foreign Office chairmanship of the JIC was warping its judgement, and thereafter the chair of the JIC was drawn from the intelligence community itself. While the JIC machine has been much venerated, it has been not been infallible. The JIC failed to spot the Falklands invasion in 1982, the end of the Cold War in 1989 and the invasion of Iraq in 1991. Its tradition of strong distinctions between objective intelligence and subjective policy advice was not much liked by Tony Blair, and so the traditional JIC culture of objective reporting was eroded under his premiership. One of its oddities is that, despite the praise heaped on the JIC, the British system is relatively light on analytical machinery, with much intelligence being fed ‘raw' into operational departments of state such as the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence. In effect this means that these Whitehall departments are de facto part of the assessment machine.25
The JIC is often portrayed as the main controlling mechanism of the secret state, but this is misleading. Although the JIC has set intelligence priorities and targets for the intelligence services, overall control of the secret state has lain in the hands of the Cabinet Secretary and a brace of Cabinet committees. Typically, budgetary control of the secret services has been handled by the Permanent Secretaries Committee on Intelligence Services (PSIS). There is also a long-standing Ministerial Committee on Intelligence (although under the Blair administration this has never met), and several committees that oversee security. In 1968 Harold Wilson's Cabinet Secretary, Burke Trend, a great advocate of the intelligence services, instituted the practice of appointing an Intelligence Co-ordinator, who resided within the Cabinet Office and who has sometimes acted as chair of the JIC. The first incumbent was Sir Dick White, who had enjoyed the unique distinction of previously heading the MI5 and then SIS. Contemporaneously with the attacks on the World Trade Centre in September 2001, the Cabinet Office decided to replace the post of Intelligence Co-ordinator with a higher-level post of Intelligence and Security Co-ordinator, in effect a second Cabinet Secretary. Sir David Omand, previously director of GCHQ, was the first to undertake this new role, which embraced a very broad range of intelligence, security and civil contingency functions.
War plans were produced throughout Antiquity but usually only dealt with aims. Nevertheless, Pedicles is described as having drawn up a more detailed plan at the time of the Peloponnesian War. The advent of artillery fortifications in the sixteenth century and the concomitant rise to importance of the military engineer resulted in broader and more varied war plans. The development of detailed planning also arose from the desire to wage short, decisive wars. One of the earliest examples was the preparation by Louis XIV and Louvois for the Dutch War in 1672 which was conceived as a lightning operation. Napoleon's plans, on the other hand, were as much campaign plans as war plans since he was engaged in practically continuous warfare. Among the most celebrated plans was that of Moltke, produced in the winter of 1868-9, which was carried out almost to the letter in 1870-1. The campaign plan should be based on a detailed study of all the relevant factors; the aims, including the predicted aims of the enemy, an evaluation of the forces facing one another, reserves, morale, battle tactics and geographical features. Once again, it was the sixteenth century which saw the first coherent campaign plans. This may entail partial or general mobilization, the former comprising such steps as the recall of reservists or the placing of frontier troops on a war footing and the latter a total call-up. The mobilization plan is altered every time that modifications are made in army organization, on receipt of credible intelligence of foreign developments and when the political situation changes. Between 1875 and 1913, the French general staff produced seventeen mobilization plans.
Popular images of the secret state in Britain are notably schizophrenic. In particular the fictional image offered by films and writers of spy thrillers and the ‘factual' image offered by the press have been diametrically opposed. Let us begin with ‘factual' representation. The press and makers of television documentaries have spent more than four decades portraying the real inhabitants of this world as public school bunglers and disaffected offs. The boundless public appetite for this sort of material was revealed as early as the Profumo affair in 1963. Public interest reached new heights in 1968 with the publication of the memoirs of Kim Philby, a famous KGB double agent within British intelligence, and was sustained by a steady stream of speculation about the identity of further ‘moles'. The most memorable mole was perhaps Anthony Blunt, the Keeper of the Queen's Pictures, the so-called ‘fourth man' revealed in 1979. Investigative journalists produced a substantial critical literature on intelligence during the 1970s that was characterized by ‘molemania' and pursued this issue to the exclusion of other subjects.
Whether the secret state was, in reality, bungling or brilliant, Bond also captures a further essential truth about the nature of the secret state since 1945. While we have tended to think of the post-war British secret service as entirely enmeshed in the Cold War, in reality it has been employed against a remarkably diverse array of messy problems, often in the context of the ‘end of empire'. It has served as a general fixer and force multiplier for government at home and abroad. Much of the time, the secret service has been deployed in support of Britain's commercial interests and their significant role in protecting national ‘economic well-being', now explicitly set out in legislation. Above all, Britain's secret state has played a central part in the long struggle against that most implacable of enemies, post-imperial decline. It has allowed Britain to punch above its weight in the international arena since 1945. Certainly from 1997, the determination of the Blair government to play a leading world role ensured that any decline in the size or importance of the secret state was soon reversed. The Blair administration, which was embroiled in at least six overseas conflicts between 1997 and 2003, expanded intelligence faster than any British government since the Second World War. Michael Herman, one of Britain's most eminent writers on the subject, has argued persuasively that states have ‘intelligence power' in the same way that they have economic or military power. Perhaps modern Britain is a prime example.
If intelligence advice creates such a unique dilemma, then intelligence covert action is even more problematic, for here the special characteristic of intelligence -- secrecy, responsibility for controversial operations, and "plausible denial" -- may come into full expression. The military, of course, must maintain a high level of secrecy regarding some aspects of its activity, as a means to surprise the enemy. But although secrecy is essential for military success, it is only one component of the military way of thinking and behavior. For intelligence organizations, on the other hand, secrecy is the necessary condition for proper functioning; indeed a way of life; and unlike military action, the success of intelligence action is dependent to a large extent on its being kept secret even after it has been carried out.
In the 1980s Christopher Andrew founded a new journal with Michael Handel of the US Army War College, called Intelligence and National Security. This journal, together with Andrew's landmark study, Secret Service: The Making of the British Intelligence Community sent out an important message. Persistent and ingenious research could allow an integrated study of the way in which intelligence, both at home and abroad, interfaced with the core executive of British government. Appearing at the same time as a series of official accounts of intelligence during the Second World War produced by Harry Hinsley and his team, Andrew's study was also openly critical of the Thatcher government and its censorious attitude towards non-official intelligence history.
The praetorian approach of the British government to intelligence during the 1970s and 1980s did not prevent the ‘British school' from developing on firm historical foundations. Government efforts to close down aspects of the secret state to researchers were only partly effective. Wartime Whitehall had responded to the strains and stresses of the Second World War by massive expansion, resulting in an increased the flow of paper. In 1972, when the Second World War records were opened in one go, most core intelligence records were held back. But historians quickly discovered that it was, in practice, impossible for the authorities to extract all the intelligence material from this huge body of records. Files relating to wider issues of diplomacy and strategy teemed with overlooked intelligence material. Pioneers in the field, including Bradley Smith and David Stafford, were able to write detailed accounts of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) at a time when SOE records were closed, by taking a lateral approach and by piecing the story together in a sophisticated way. A few years later, Julian Lewis did much the same for the history of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) during the early Cold War, more than a decade before the core records for this subject were open. The cult of the archival intelligence ‘hacking' was under way.15
In 1992 the absurd conventions for keeping files on the secret state from the eyes of historians were revised by William Waldegrave's ‘Open Government Initiative'. At this point government had to admit that, even as late as 1992, it had been holding back files on postal interception from 1764 as much too secret for the British public to gaze upon. Soon thousands of files relating to MI5, SOE and Bletchley Park were released into the Public Record Office. Most files released related to the period before 1945, but the records of the JIC, Britain's main intelligence analysis body, were released up to the 1960s. Opinions differed markedly about the extent to which this changed our ability to know the secret state. Government had clearly intended the release of secret materials to form a flagship for the Open Government Initiative and had calculated well. The media descended in droves to view newly released files, and their reaction was extremely complimentary.
Alternatively, Peter Gill has argued that this new ‘openness' was just an exercise in manipulation by a more sophisticated secret state. The new releases tended to focus on subjects where Britain had obvious foreign enemies. Indeed, critics would argue that the secret state deliberately developed the idea that its main focus was upon nasty foreign enemies in wartime rather than its own citizens. Accordingly, this new material is bound to implicitly legitimize the secret state. Moreover, there is no doubt that, whether intended or not, the new archive releases have had a directing effect upon the next wave of intelligence historians. New research students are less inclined to attack subjects that require ingenious lateral research, and are more likely to head for the latest batch of files declassified by the secret services themselves. Whether influencing historians in their choice of subject was ever an intention of this new policy or not, it has had this effect.16
Generalizing about the texture of the writings of the ‘British school' of intelligence history is not easy, for much of the work tends to be very specific. Indeed John Lewis Gaddis has singled out intelligence historians for stern criticism on the basis of their love of the particular, and their corresponding failure to explain why intelligence might make a difference to policy in a broader sense.17 This criticism notwithstanding, it might be suggested that the overall focus has been on the activities of foreign enemies working inside or outside Britain and the implicit tone on the issue of the legitimacy of secret state response has therefore been either ‘neutral' or ‘favourable'. In part this is because the historical wing of intelligence studies in Britain has served, to a degree, as a refugee camp for diplomatic historians who had become bored with diplomatic history. Accordingly, their outlook and their instinctive comparative benchmarks tend to be international. Their assumption - often well founded - is that the British secret state, although sometimes nasty, was never as nasty as those of the Axis or the Soviet bloc. Nor was it ever as nasty as those deployed by the French or the Americans, who fought alongside Britain in the same cause. The absence of McCarthyism in Britain has been a noted theme of these writers when looking at Britain in the 1950s.18
The issue becomes even more problematic owing to the difficulty in making a distinction between functional and political secrecy. Any organization has its own political secrets. This obviously includes the military, which has a parochial interest in concealing its own failures, whether they involve gross mismanagement such as the C-5A scandal of the 1960s or operational flops such as the failure of a super sophisticated and costly "Stealth" fighter to hit undefended targets in the Panama campaign of December 1989. But given that in the intelligence community everything is kept secret and that, more than any other state organ, intelligence resorts to controversial means, it has both more political secrets to hide and better means to hide them. Given, moreover, that in many cases the line between functional and political secrecy is very fine, what intelligence officers may regard as functional secrecy is often considered by outsiders as purely political.
Other officers, as we have seen, reached similar conclusions. Yet, with the exception of Engler and Hawkins, 94 they all failed to challenge Bissell on professional grounds. The main reason for this failure was that, like their bosses, they were overcommitted to the operation and its implementation. This commitment was partly psychological and social, the result of investing so much of their energies in the project for over a year. But as one CIA officer who was not a member of the Cuban task force argued, they also had a strong vested interest in it -- the prospect that its success would lead to personal promotion and that its abortion might mean the opposite.
Challenging Bissell, moreover, was a very hard task for these officers precisely because they believed in his intellectual brilliance and were influenced by his impressive record of past successes. Thus they acted according to administrative norms that allow some criticism but then demand compliance with the final order. Such norms are well suited to military organizations in which hierarchy and obedience are predominant but not to intelligence organizations that conduct special operations and call for more open and constructive criticism.
For these reasons none of the task force officers found the courage to break the bonds that held the group together and warn other senior officers in the agency, or even outside officials, that the emperor was naked. By avoiding such action, they like their superiors betrayed the ethical ingredient of their professional responsibility.
To be sure, we need to separate Dulles's misbehaviour from that of the task force officers; as the DCI for eight years and one of the few survivors of the change of administration, Dulles had the graver ethical and professional responsibility. But the task force officers also failed to function as they should have. If they did not grasp how infeasible their operation was, then they failed as experts; if they grasped its real prospects and nevertheless failed to express their views vigorously enough, then their failure was ethical.
In the 1980s, Kennedy historiography veered sharply away from mythology and toward a critical reappraisal. The public had become disenchanted with government because of Vietnam and Watergate, a disenchantment exacerbated by revelations in the Pentagon Papers and the report of the Church committee concerning the secret machinations of the national security state. A new group of counter-Camelot historians including Garry Wills and Thomas C. Reeves focused on Kennedy's sexual exploits and his arrogance. Wills (1985) blames Kennedy's disdain for bureaucracy for the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion and argues that he did not learn from his mistakes, but continued to act without restraint. Reeves (1991) delve more into Kennedy's personal life. He argues that Kennedy had no moral compass and this lack of character affected his decision-making in both domestic and foreign policy.
Thomas G. Paterson's (1989) compilation of essays also fits into the counter-Camelot camp. Paterson contends that Kennedy's policies came up significantly short of their goals and most of his contributors agree. Included in the anthology are Frank Costigliola's look at Kennedy's policy toward Western Europe, Stephen Robe's essay on Latin America in general, Paterson on Cuba, and Douglas Little on the Middle East. Written during the heyday of the Clinton scandals, Seymour Hersh's Dark Side of Camelot (1997) is an attempt to compile as much controversial material on Kennedy as possible. This most scathing critique of Kennedy yet details Kennedy's sexual life which, Hersh points out, continually opened him up to potential blackmail. According to Hersh, Kennedy's performance during the missile crisis was less than heroic; he brought the world dangerously close to nuclear annihilation and then swapped missiles with the Soviets. Unfortunately, Hersh's frequent reliance on hearsay and his indiscriminate use of sources undermines his work's credibility.
Over the past two decades a more balanced approach to the Kennedy historiography has emerged. Post-revisionist writings portray the president as a complex personality who both succeeded and failed during a pivotal time in Cold War history. Herbert S. Parmet (1983) renders a typically balanced look. Parmet's Kennedy was initially aggressive in the international arena, even risking nuclear war, while he appeased the Right and neglected his domestic agenda. But he learned on the job and matured in office. Parmet applauds Kennedy's diplomacy in the Middle East and Central Africa and criticizes his efforts in Cuba and Vietnam. Giglio (1991) provides a similar analysis. Despite a multitude of potential disasters lurking in a world that was trying to cope with decolonization, modernization, and a host of other problems in the midst of the Cold War, Cuba was the only major foreign policy crisis to emerge during Kennedy's presidency, and Vietnam was the only place that remained a hot spot after Kennedy's death.
To Giglio, Kennedy was a good, though not great president; he concludes that the United States was better off after than before his tenure. Timothy P. Maga's (1994) contribution is a brief (159-page) look at the administration and some of its policies, including the Alliance for Progress, the Peace Corps, the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the Cuban missile crisis, and the isolation of China. Maga depicts Kennedy as a visionary, who was able to articulate lofty goals, but unable to carry through in policy implementation. Burner (1988) praises Kennedy's liberal rhetoric and his style and purpose, but lays bare his many shortcomings. Part of the Library of American Biography, Burner's brief synthesis was taken from a 1984 biography of Kennedy written with Thomas R. West. Nigel Hamilton's Reckless Youth (1992) focuses on the maturation of Kennedy. Hamilton discusses Kennedy's promiscuity, but praises Kennedy for refusing to assume some of his other traits, namely his anti-Semitism and his isolationism.
References
Gaddis, J. L. (1989) Intelligence, Espionage and Cold War Origins, Diplomatic History, (13), 2, pp. 191 212.
Gill, P. (2005). Reasserting Control: Recent Changes in the Oversight of the UK Intelligence Community, Intelligence and National Security, (11), 2 (1996), pp. 313 20.
Porter, Bernard. (2005). Secrets from the Edge, Intelligence and National Security, (9), 4 (1995), pp. 759 63.
Watt, D. C. (2006). Intelligence Studies: The Emergence of the British School, Intelligence and National Security: 3 (2) pp. 338 42.
