Intelligence - Adapting to the Threats
CIA headquarters
The origins of the modern intelligence agency can arguably be traced back to the beginning of the Cold War. Over the course of five decades, the West and its Warsaw Pact counterparts subsequently pursued increasingly ambitious intelligence programs that sought, among other things, to measure each other’s defense capabilities and to understand each other’s geopolitical calculations. In fact, the RAND Corporation’s Gregory F. Treverton argues that the primary responsibility of the United States’ intelligence agencies throughout the Cold War was to solve puzzles – i.e., to seek answers to questions that had them, even if we did not know what they were. To assist in this imperfect process, intelligence agencies on both sides of the Iron Curtain used signals (SIGINT) and human (HUMINT) intelligence in order to divine each other’s strengths and weaknesses. They did not always succeed.
Nor did Western agencies always succeed after the demise of the Soviet Union. For a considerable period of time, many of them were left without a strategic mandate or an adversary comparable to the former Soviet bloc. Moreover, their failure to predict a dramatic increase in extremist violence demonstrated that most agencies were not fit to conduct intelligence activities in a security environment that Treverton likens to a world of ‘mysteries’ rather than ‘puzzles’. These mysteries, in turn, lay buried in a sea of threat scenarios.
In order to better understand how intelligence agencies are trying to adapt to an age afflicted with the above problems and others (to include the challenges and opportunities presented by open source intelligence), we begin our analysis this week by first looking at the problem set intelligence agencies now confront. On Tuesday we then ask a fundamentally important question: does an era of open source intelligence, which we are now in, mean that we are all, in some way or another, intelligence operatives? This enquiry is followed on Wednesday with a look at how intelligence agencies have attempted to overcome problems associated with expanded intelligence sharing. We then round out our week by specifically looking at the intelligence gathering and reform efforts being pursued by a selection of European agencies and the United States.
Additional Content
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- Intelligence Failure and the Importance of Strategic Foresight to the Preservation of National Security (Publication)
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- Intelligence and National Security: The Case of Greece (Article)
The woebegone Greek economy is subverting the National Intelligence Services' ability to support Ath...
- Mercyhurst College Institute for Intelligence Studies (MCIIS) (Organization)
The Mercyhurst College Institute for Intelligence Studies (MCIIS) is a center of excellence which pr...
- Trends in the Intelligence Environment Ten Years After 9/11 (Audio)
Dr Gregory Treverton, Director of the RAND Center for Global Risk and Security, discusses the adjust...
- Past, Present and Future of OSINT (Audio)
Even though policymakers may feel more comfortable obtaining information from classified sources, Ar...
- Colombia's Intelligence: Putting the Country at Risk? (Article)
Over the past decade, the Colombian state has misused a run-down intelligence system in a bid to con...
