The field of
intelligence studies is a relatively new academic discipline that has developed
an identifiable intellectual community. It has served as a conduit through
which the history of war, the development and decline of empire as well as the
calibration of foreign policy have been subjected to fresh formats of inquiry
and analysis.
The study of the
relationship between the practice of intelligence and its impact on state
policy in so far as military action is concerned is one, given the
repercussions, respectively of the attack on 9/11 and the decision to go to war
against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, that is of particular interest to scholars,
policymakers and practitioners of the craft.
It is also a
subject area of inestimable fascination to a general reading public with a
ready appetite for stories on espionage and accustomed to a market in which
there has been a surge in the popular history genre. This has meant that
studies on the history of military intelligence, as is the case with other
genres of history, have been divided into those that fit alternately into the
academic and popular writing categories.
John Hughes-Wilson,
a retired British Army Intelligence Corps colonel whose career spanned active
service in the Falkland Islands and Northern Ireland as well as administrative
postings in Whitehall and NATO, is an author whose offerings on military
intelligence history fit into the popular writing category.
His brief but
robust introduction offers no apologies for avoiding “getting completely lost
in the thickets of philosophy and Hegelian dialectic” as an academic text might
tend to do. Instead, his work adopts a case study approach to explain and
analyze the operation of the intelligence apparatus within the context of
espionage and the conduct of war.
Before this, he
takes the reader through preliminaries: a chapter on a condensed history of the
development of what he refers to as the “Second Oldest Profession” from
biblical times to the modern era, followed by a brief consolidating chapter
stressing the importance of intelligence in national self-defense by references
to statements written by Machiavelli and Sun Tzu while at the same time
offering words of rebuke for the shortcomings of Clausewitz’s 1832 masterwork, On War.
He provides a lucid
overview of the fundamentals of the intelligence cycle, providing admittedly
simplified diagrammatic representations of the process, a collection plan as
well as an indicator and warning display. These are tools he deploys to
function as key reference points for analysis when he explores the different
themes which he proceeds to set out.
His consideration
of HUMINT and the factors typically enabling intelligence agencies to penetrate
their competitors is predicated on the traditional MICE acronym: Money,
Ideology, Compromise/Coercion and Ego. These factors provide the backdrop to
his retellings of major espionage failings and successes of American and
British intelligence agencies including that of the Walker family’s betrayal of
U.S. Navy secrets and Oleg Penkovsky’s role in the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Hughes-Wilson is
particularly adept at fleshing out the historical development of SIGNIT and
IMINT from the most rudimentary technology to the highly advanced equipment of
today. His case study on how signals intelligence was crucial in ensuring the
victory of the U.S. Navy over the Imperial Japanese Navy at Midway is
particularly gripping. It is also enlightening about the organizational
pathologies perpetually at play in contemporary intelligence structures, one
aspect of which relates to the vexed question of the ownership of SIGNET: does
it reside with the communicators and signallers on the one hand or with the
intelligence people?
Hughes-Wilson is an
engaging writer who brings the reader inside the mind of the prudent
intelligence operative: consistently asking questions and performing an
officious bystander test as he sifts through large amounts of information. He is
very good at guiding the reader through the practical application of the
theories undergirding the intelligence process.
This is
particularly illuminating in regard to his summation of the severe deficiencies
in the American intelligence apparatus in 1941 on the eve of a war that all
knew was coming. For it is the case that the problems leading up to Pearl
Harbor, including those of over compartmentalization and inter-organizational
rivalries, are ones of enduring relevance and
bring into focus the need for all-source integration and assessment; an
ideal which is difficult to achieve within any national security establishment.
The choice of case
studies tailored to fit a particular theme of the intelligence process, whether
related to failures or successes, provides the basis for a series of
illuminating deconstructions. For instance, the failure of the political
leaders of the Soviet Union and Israel to predict the oncoming onslaughts,
respectively, of Operation Barbarossa in 1941 and Operation Badr in 1973 was
due, Hughes-Wilson argues, not with non-possession of the correct information
predicting enemy intentions but instead centered on the translation of
information into intelligence.
In the former case,
it hinged on a developed organizational culture of only reporting information
which the dictator found palatable while the latter was caused by the
monopolization of all-source intelligence by Israeli Military Intelligence. On
the issue of protecting state secrets, he uses the recent high-profile cases of
Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden as exemplars explaining the
impact of an inadequate security checking mechanism, the increasing difficulty
of securing masses of electronically collected data in the high-technology age
and the eternal dilemma of balancing national security concerns with that of
protecting whistleblowers acting in the public interest.
For deception, the
Allied planning of the highly risky, but ultimately successful, D-Day landings
is used while the area dealing with intelligence fiascos considers the U.S.
Special Forces operations in Son Tay, Vietnam and Iran at the time of the
hostage crisis. The author also provides an excoriating analysis of the role
played by the leaders of the British intelligence community in enabling the
administration of Tony Blair to produce a “dodgy dossier” which led the country
into a war of dubious legality against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 2003.
The issue of
intelligence and the challenges posed to national security by terrorism and by
cyber warfare are also given consideration by the author. He provides a thoughtful summary on the
grievances and “catalysts for conflict” that often form the backdrop to terror
campaigns before focusing on the contemporary security concerns associated with
the “War on Terror”. He is adept at summarizing the interrelatedness of cyber
war, cyber terrorism and cybercrime. Here the threats posed by China, the
Russian Federation, and North Korea are pointedly noted as he stresses the
complexities associated with tracing the source of attacks and the severe
consequences that could impinge on civil and military capacities in the event
of an all-out war.
Hughes-Wilson
provides a lengthy but highly readable consideration of military intelligence
that succeeds in giving the reader a fairly comprehensive overview of the
practice of intelligence and security.
While it falls
short of the rigor expected of an academic text in terms of theoretical detail
and the provision of a comprehensive bibliography and citations, it cannot be
faulted for being unchallenging or lacking in analytical content. The
revolutionizing effect of technological advancement on the gathering,
dissemination, and evaluation of intelligence is cogently explained as indeed
is the underpinning rationale of his assessment that Julian Assange’s
“Wikileaks” project has succeeded in redefining security.
But it does have
its shortcomings. For instance, there is no discernible standard regarding the
selection or non-inclusion of case studies. Also, given the contemporary
prevalence of asymmetric warfare, an examination of the role of intelligence in
conflicts between state and non-state militaries would have been apt. The
conflict in 2006 between Israel and the Lebanese militia Hezbollah would have
presented an ideal case study. It is clear to military analysts that a series
of skillfully planned deceptions and security strategies on the part of
Hezbollah provided the means for the militia to withstand the might of the
Israeli Defence Force.
A thorough
consideration of intelligence ought arguably to have included an appraisal of
the darker aspects of the use of intelligence gathering in counterinsurgency
strategies. U.S. military intelligence covertly orchestrated death squads using
a recurring modus operandi to tackle insurgencies in Vietnam, Central America,
and Iraq while British army officer Frank Kitson’s concept of “gangs and
counter-gangs” was ruthlessly employed in Kenya and Northern Ireland.
In a similar vein,
the use of anti-Warsaw Pact “stay behind” cells under the command of NATO
during the Cold War-era communist containment strategy is not mentioned.
Still, as a work
which covers a great deal of ground and one that attempts to synthesize a
narrative and analysis of the broad aspects of process and organizational
efficacy within the political contexts of the day, it is likely to be of
interest not only to the connoisseurs of popular history, but also to scholars and
practitioners in the field of intelligence.
John Hughes-Wilson
(2016), On Intelligence: The History of
Espionage and the Secret World, First Edition. London: Constable. ISBN:
978-1-472-11353-5. 528 pages. £25.00
This review appears in the fall 2016 edition of Global Security and Intelligence Studies Journal.
© Adeyinka Makinde (2016)
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