For Queen and Company: The Role of Intelligence in the UK's Arms Trade
| Published date | 01 December 2007 |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2007.00669.x |
| Date | 01 December 2007 |
| Author | Robert Dover |
| Subject Matter | Article |
doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2007.00669.x
For Queen and Company: The Role of
Intelligence in the UK’s Arms Trade
Robert Dover
King’s College London
This article analyses the role that the UK intelligence services (particularly Secret Intelligence Service
[SIS or MI6], the Defence Intelligence Staff [DIS], Government Communication Headquarters [GCHQ]
and associated agencies) play in the legal UK arms trade. The article shows that intelligence has been used
in support of British-based private commercial businesses, and occasionally in providing intelligence on
the negotiating positions of rival manufacturers. This raises important questions about the role of the state
in the private sphere, particularly the use of a large number of government assets in support of private
interests and the elision of British government interests with those of a section of the manufacturing
industry. This article also challenges existing conceptions of how the UK’s intelligence agencies operate
and relate to their customers. Conventional typologies of UK intelligence have emphasised the impor-
tance of the ‘central machinery’, highlighting the Joint Intelligence Committee as the focal point of
intelligence tasking and analysis in the UK. However, in this case the intelligence support provided to the
sale of military equipment suggests a range of parallel practices that are much more decentralised and
often informal. This research therefore suggests that our conception of the UK intelligence architecture
requires some reassessment.
This article analyses the role that the UK intelligence services (particularly Secret
Intelligence Service [SIS or MI6], the Defence Intelligence Staff [DIS], Govern-
ment Communication Headquarters [GCHQ] and associated agencies) play in
the legal UK arms trade. Aside from research by Mark Phythian and Davina
Miller, the role of intelligence in the UK arms trade has been left relatively
unexplored (Miller, 1996; Phythian, 2001). In contrast to previous work in this
area, this article seeks to challenge existing conceptions of how the UK’s intel-
ligence agencies operate and relate to their customers. Conventional typologies of
UK intelligence have emphasised the importance of the ‘central machinery’,
highlighting the Joint Intelligence Committee ( JIC) as the focal point of intel-
ligence tasking and analysis in the UK (Cabinet Office, 2001, pp. 15–20; 2005, pp.
17–25; Cradock, 2002). However, the case of intelligence support to arms sales
suggests a range of parallel practices that are much more decentralised and often
informal. This research argues that our conception of the UK intelligence
architecture stands in need of some reassessment, since here the flow and dis-
semination of information and dynamics within the intelligence cycle are quite
different to what are perceived as ‘normal’ UK intelligence processes. The
evidence suggests that intelligence relating to the arms trade is heavily ‘stove-
piped’ and circumvents the normal process of intelligence, being fed directly and
relatively ‘raw’ to selected consumers, including officials, arms manufacturers and
© 2007 The Author. Journal compilation © 2007 Political Studies Association
684
RO B E RT D OV E R
politicians within the governing party. ‘Stovepiping’ is an intelligence term for
the process by which a request for data or a piece of intelligence that would
normally be passed through successive centralised verifications or bureaucratic
levels is instead taken directly to the relevant officer or consumer.
Moreover, this article also advances a wider proposition. The peculiar culture of
the UK intelligence system is notoriously ‘analysis-lite’, as the Butler Report
( Butler, 2004) which reviewed intelligence on Iraq and other states’ weapons of
mass destruction revealed, and indeed lacks a professional analytical service. This
lends itself to the stovepiping of raw intelligence to specialist consumers and
therefore suggests that intelligence scholars need to adopt a pluralist understand-
ing of the intelligence machinery. Anecdotal evidence suggests that, as with
other niche subjects, such as intelligence in Northern Ireland, there are a great
number of informal and local intelligence systems that remain tangential to the
central machinery of intelligence in the UK. The local intelligence systems often
have unique cycles and are relatively self-contained. The major exception to this
format is where the government labels a particular arms transfer as monetarily or
strategically significant. In these circumstances, discussed in detail below, separate
requirements are established by the central machinery to support the smooth
transition of the sale of military or dual-use equipment.
This research also illuminates the extent to which intelligence has helped facilitate
the sale of UK-developed and manufactured arms to third countries, often via
commercial agents, and has helped in protecting those markets from the manu-
facturers of rival exporting countries through covert actions. These activities have
mainly been executed by the Defence Export Services Organisation (DESO) and
Defence Attachés (DAs), who use intelligence to identify potential export
markets and who also use their respective positions within the UK Ministry of
Defence (MoD) to shape the ministry’s procurement practices for the benefit of
the export trade. Meanwhile, the available evidence suggests that a small and
informal effort is made to monitor the end-use of legitimately transferred
equipment which has led to some curtailment of trading. The extent to which
intelligence and ‘ordinary’ government converge to assist the UK arms trade in
securing commercial success abroad lends weight to the general argument put
forward by both Peter Gill and Philip Davies that the use of intelligence has
become a mainstream function of British government (Davies, 2004; Gill, 1994).
Certainly, after 1989, the end of the Cold War allowed spare capacity to be focused
upon a wider range of issues, and the lower security concerns associated with this
sort of intelligence allowed for greater distribution and the development of a
broader customer base in Whitehall.
The article is organised into sections that deliberately mirror the structure of a
transfer of military or dual-use equipment. This format is employed to illustrate
where and how the use of intelligence impacts on arms transfers. After discussing
the methodological approach employed here and offering a working definition of
intelligence, the pre-licensing (F680) stage of arms transfers is examined in some
© 2007 The Author. Journal compilation © 2007 Political Studies Association
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2007, 55(4)
I N T E L L I G E N C E I N T H E U K ’ S A R M S T R A D E
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detail as it is markedly under-explored in the academic literature. Following this,
the full licensing and sales stage is explored, together with the full role of the
DESO and Defence Attachés in facilitating the transfer of materials. In the final
section the role of intelligence in end-user monitoring is discussed.
There are three main approaches to the study of intelligence: the historical,
political and critical studies schools. The historical approach seeks to explain the
relationship between the agencies and government policy-making. The political
science approach seeks to explain at which bureaucratic level analysis was made,
why this was the case and similarly why a particular output was produced (Scott
and Jackson, 2004, p. 142). The critical studies approach focuses on intelligence
as a tool of oppression. Each of these approaches has its own assumptions and
readings of the political process and culture that provide context for intelligence
activity. Contemporary intelligence studies have developed predominantly within
historical disciplinary approaches and have therefore focused on archival work
rather than elite interviews, which are the mainstay of this research.
A reliance on elite interviews raises some notable methodological problems,
which are more acute in the sub-field of intelligence studies, although only
marginally more difficult than securing elite interviews within the mainstream of
Whitehall (Dorril, 2000; Dover, 2005). A considerable sector of intelligence
studies research relates to issues and time periods that afford a profitable explo-
ration of document records held in archives like the National Archives, for
example. These documentary records, as with interview evidence, should
however be viewed with some scepticism by the researcher; some government
papers kept at the National Archives have been subject to ‘sanitisation’ to remove
evidence of UK intelligence involvement in the cases they discuss (Aldrich, 2001,
p. 6; Davies, 2001, pp. 73–4). Supplementary documentary evidence that might be
shown to the researcher, such as Cabinet Committee or Departmental minutes,
does not often reveal individual positions or areas of tension between politicians
and officials and therefore misses some of the rich tapestry of bureaucratic
politics. The paucity of the official record is particularly clear in the case of JIC
papers, which explicitly aim to absorb individual positions, while constructing a
consensus that can be employed in government policy formulation (Herman,
2001; interview 04IS). It is therefore necessary, as other scholars have done, to use
elite interview data as a means to supplement sparse and deliberately obtuse
official...
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