Ditchley had last considered secret intelligence in 1988, with the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union in place, the existence of intelligence agencies still unavowed in several countries, and the whole activity so shrouded in official reticence that even the holding of the conference had attracted eminent disapproval. We met now in a transformed international setting, and with at least some of the veils cast aside.
But with the Cold War over, what was it all now for? We were in no doubt that diverse threats remained to international order and legitimate national interest. The world was complex and uncertain; deviant political leaders were not a phenomenon entirely of the past; the exploitation and inexorable spread of technology brought new national and societal vulnerabilities. Military conflict, in particular, had not vanished from the global scene, and good military intelligence was a force multiplier essential for successful outcomes. Crime and terrorism – not always tidily distinguishable – increasingly crossed frontiers and commanded large resources and technical skills. If governments were to serve their people well in countering all these menaces, actual and potential, they needed pertinent, dependable and timely information.
All that said, it was evident that there were many fewer fiercely-closed societies than a decade ago for Western governments to interact with, and technology had itself massively enhanced the flow of open information. Was secret intelligence still needed on anything like the old scale, and how much value could it really add? Sometimes very little, we conceded; sometimes however, and crucially, a lot. We recalled the classic difference between mysteries - things inherently unknowable, like Saddam Hussein’s future intentions – and secrets – things kept hidden, like his chemical-weapon holdings; and we knew that secret intelligence could offer no sure access to the former. But opponents in adversarial settings were almost always minded toward concealment in one way or another, CNN, however rapid, was not always right or balanced; in other situations, needed data might become openly available too late for timely action; and secret intelligence could help in special degree towards sorting, integrating, calibrating and verifying the open flood.
We paused on commercial intelligence only long enough to note the dangers of its being collected by governments. It was understandable that they might wish to counter corruption or unfair competition operating to the detriment of their citizens, but the activity – especially if directed against activity in countries viewed as friendly – risked damaging relationships, not least within the intelligence field itself.
International cooperation engaged a good deal of our intention. The desirability of shared understandings of the world was evident, for example in relation to Europe’s aspiration towards a Common Foreign and Security Policy. There were areas of specific activity, as possibly in how to deal with the commercial dissemination of high-quality encryption capability or in combating international drug-related crime, in which most democratic governments might have similar interests and should therefore be capable of working together on intelligence. Bosnia and the pursuit of Saddam’s WMD capabilities had brought home to UN authorities, once apt to find the very notions of secret intelligence and of communications-security repugnant (and still suspicious of national manipulation), that these were essential components of a capacity to act effectively. And the costs of secret intelligence activity made ideas of burden-sharing and specialisation among like-minded countries in principle persuasive.
The difficulties however were extensive. It was, for instance, far from certain that UN activities involving a wide diversity of participants could command either the skills to use intelligence well or the disciplines, and genuine commonality of interest, to guard it and its sources. Some of these considerations weighed even upon cooperation with political friends; and thorough-going money-saving interdependence required an identity of recognised long-term interest, and perhaps also of governmental culture, that could not generally be taken for granted. Particular “clubs”, varying with issues and usually marked by a clear leadership country or group, were often the best practical route to cooperation. Nevertheless, our sense overall was that there needed to be more international sharing, especially in analysis as distinct from collection.
The need for better cooperation and coordination held good also, so several participants argued, at an earlier point, within nations: understanding, interaction and two-way dialogue could still be improved both among different collection agencies and between data-gatherers, analysts and decision-taking users. In at least some of our countries agencies and users still seemed insufficiently aware of and responsive to one another’s needs and capabilities; systems as a whole might need further reform to improve flexibility, relevance and reaction times (and perhaps also to sharpen skills in relating risk to importance and cost in targeting). We noted, too, that amid the data deluge private-sector competence might have a contribution to make, for example in analysis. We reached however no clear consensus on whether matters would be improved by the creation of intelligence “supremos” in executive charge of the whole field, though centralised assessment had strong support.
We wrestled with the concept of value for money in intelligence effort, and how it was to be measured and made operational. The notion of a straightforward market in which users paid for the particular intelligence efforts they wanted found no friends; even if value and cost were (and in fact they were not) in a tidy relationship, intelligence was a long-term broadly-based activity in which action-supporting outputs could rarely be neatly connected - especially before the event - with specific resource inputs. The principle of “customer pays”, even if bureaucratically workable at all, might encourage a short-termism wholly at odds with the reality that many aspects of intelligence-gathering required patient and in a sense speculative long-term investment The customer was often better qualified to influence where existing capability should be applied than where investment in future capability should go. There was however merit, we acknowledged, in regular post-mortem to examine value and to learn lessons; and it was suggested even that occasionally a “Team B” approach, with rival assessment deliberately fostered as challenge to mainstream structures, could yield healthy dividends. We heard voices - albeit contested ones - suggesting that the mainstream was prone to overvalue secret as against open sources; and that processes were too slow to adapt to the information revolution and the implications of the cyberspace arena.
We recognised, with a near-unanimity which might scarcely have been evident a decade ago, the crucial importance of persuading publics, as citizens and taxpayers, that secret intelligence was needed and useful, efficiently managed and not improperly conducted. The task was not easy against a background of opinion largely formed by a mix of imaginative fiction and occasional scandal, focused upon cloak-and-dagger activity that in reality formed at most a very small part of total effort. Failures – the emergence of the unforeseen, or penetration by hostile interests – tended to be evident, and successes – often in the form of disagreeable events headed off and so not happening – hard to advertise or to prove. Publics wanted to feel secure, but could readily be tempted to suspect a misuse of secrecy as cover for incompetence or wrongdoing. All this placed a high premium – higher than intelligence professionals had in the past been disposed to accept – upon justification and trustworthy oversight; and this became a major theme in our conference.
Oversight in the form of internal-to-government accountability to elected political leaders on every aspect was, so it was claimed, salutarily established in most (not all) of our countries. But this could not nowadays alone command public confidence; external political scrutiny was increasingly essential in order visibly to stimulate and demand good system performance, to defend the intelligence contribution where necessary, and to guard against malpractice - though we heard suggestions that political overseers might be excessively drawn to concentrate, for publicity reasons, upon this last. In some of our countries external scrutiny had made large advances within the past decade (and earlier worries about indiscretion among scrutineers had generally proved over-anxious). International dialogue and exchange of experience might strengthen these advances. In one or two countries however, perhaps for special reasons, oversight had still not taken root, to the detriment both of public respect and probably of system performance.
We noted, but did not find time to plumb, the contribution towards oversight and consequent public reassurance that might be made by the regular processes of financial audit, by the law and the courts, and by special devices like ombudsmen or commissioners to review particular categories of activity. Predictably, divergent opinions were to be heard about the contribution of the media, with some participants stressing their inescapable weight in forming opinion and others their role as competitors to intelligence and their propensity to exaggerate, demonise or trivialise its work. The majority perhaps felt, in this as in other fields, that the wise course was to help the media understand (even if the will to do that was fairly uneven) rather than to attempt exclusion.
Our discussion of the growing role of the intelligence agencies in countering crime raised several issues. We recognised that there was often a unique contribution to be made, and that provided that contribution was made in the service and under the authority of due law-enforcement authorities there was every reason to exploit it. There was misgiving expressed, though not generally shared, about consequent threats to proper civil liberties; and also a recognition that awkward trade-offs could arise between intelligence considerations like the protection of sources and the effective deployment of information under proper rules of evidence in the prosecution of malefactors.
The fields of crime and terrorism highlighted awkward issues about the ethics of intelligence-gathering where it rubbed up (not often, but not never) against the boundaries of normal domestic law, or where it entailed doing business with, and acquiescing to some degree in the continued activity of, unsavoury characters. Here again – if perhaps to the relief of some – time prevented our delving as deep as the issues warranted; we did little more than acknowledge the awkwardness of reconciling aspirations to strict propriety with the practical imperatives of protecting the public in arenas where adversaries played by no rules. Perhaps some doctrine of proportionality – a little law-breaking or blind-eye-turning to secure a big public benefit? – might help; but we left that mostly for Ditchley’s next conference on intelligence.
This report reflects the Director’s personal impressions of the conference. No participant is in any way committed to its content or expression.