Intelligence and the Machinery of Government
| Author | Philip H.J. Davies |
| Date | 01 January 2010 |
| Published date | 01 January 2010 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0952076709347073 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Intelligence and the
Machinery of Government
Conceptualizing the Intelligence Community
Philip H.J. Davies
Brunel University, UK
Abstract This article argues that the failure to address intelligence agencies as public
organizations part and parcel with the overt machinery of government
constitutes a significant lacuna both in the specialist study of intelligence and
the broader discipline of public administration studies. The role and status of
intelligence institutions as aspects of the machinery of central government is
examined, along with the prospects of certain key paradigms in the field for
understanding those institutions are considered. Finally, the implications for
the wider study of decision-making, policy and public management will be
examined.
Keywords core executive, intelligence, interagency, interdepartmentalism,
neoinstitutionalism, public management, security, public choice
The spy is as old as history, but intelligence agencies are new.
(Philip Knightley, 1986)
It is our constant problem under our departmentalised system to find means of arming a
joint authority . . . with sufficient powers to render it effective without encroaching upon
ministerial rights and responsibilities. (Air Chief Marshal Sir Douglas Evill, 1947)
Introduction
Despite Philip Knightley’s enviably quotable observation in the first epigraph to
this article more than two decades ago, it is only in comparatively recent years
something of a body of scholarship has begun to appear looking at the manage-
ment structure of individual agencies. There has, to be sure, been a substantial
DOI: 10.1177/0952076709347073
Philip H.J. Davies, Director, Brunel Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies, School of Social
Sciences, Brunel University, Uxbridge, Middlesex UB8 3PH, UK. [email: philip.davies@brunel.ac.uk] 29
© The Author(s), 2010.
Reprints and Permissions: http://
www.sagepub.co.uk/
JournalsPermissions.nav
0952-0767
201001 25(1) 29–46
Public Policy and Administration 25(1)
30
growth in historical scholarship on specific operations and intelligence apprecia-
tions, and their impact (or lack thereof) on equally specific policies and events.
Revelations about communications intelligence successes such as ULTRA, for
example, have transformed perceptions of the Second World War while the Cold
War was, in many respects, the intelligence war par excellence. And yet there has
been little effort to turn this historical narrative into a more general understanding
of intelligence institutions as part of the wider functioning of overt processes and
mechanisms of government.
This is peculiar because of the very palpable impact that intelligence manage-
ment has had on national security in many cases and countries around the world.
In America, the current intelligence community (or ‘IC’) was established after the
strategic surprise at Pearl Harbor in December 1941. That surprise was attributed by
a succession of executive and congressional reports to a failure to coordinate intel-
ligence (Andrew, 1995, pp. 75–122; United States Congress, 1946, p. 254; Warner,
2001, p. 1). Continued interagency coordination problems contributed directly to
US blindness to warnings and indicators of both the 1950 North Korean inva-
sion of South Korea as well as the subsequent Chinese crossing of the Yalu River
later in that campaign (Andrew, 1995, pp. 185–7; Brownell, 1981). Both the joint
Congressional inquiry in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks (United States
Congress, 2002) and the subsequent ‘blue ribbon’ 9/11 Commission (National
Commission on the Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States [9/11 Commission],
2004) pinpointed weak coordination, patchy and inconsistent information sharing
and running disputes between agencies as signficant contributors to America’s
vulnerability to those attacks.
Interagency dynamics have had similarly profound consequences for the UK
over the decades. For example, there is strong evidence that having the Foreign
Office chair the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) prior to 1983 gave it an influ-
ence over national assessments that may have contributed to significant policy
blindspots concerning crises such as the 1968 invasion of Dubcek’s Czechoslovakia
(Cradock, 2002, pp. 240–59) and Argentine intentions with regards to the Falkland
Islands in 1981 (Franks, 1983; Hughes-Wilson, 2003, pp. 260–307). And a dimin-
ished evaluation and validation branch in the Secret Intelligence Service, coupled
to difficulties coordinating validation between SIS and analysts at the Defence
Intelligence Staff, contributed directly to errors in UK national assessments of
Iraqi non-conventional weapons programmes prior to the invasion (Butler, 2004,
pp. 102–4, 138–9; Davies, 2005).
And yet, apart from a handful of studies, no systematic effort has yet been made
either to incorporate intelligence into the collective knowledge base of public
administration as a sub-discipline, or to incorporate the insights of public admin-
istration into the study of intelligence either. Such a state of affairs would hardly
be tolerable in the study of social services or defence. The same should be true
of intelligence. In which case, the natural point of departure should be to try and
articulate some kind of general understanding of how intelligence communities
To continue reading
Request your trial