Intelligence in an Insecure World by Peter Gill & Mark Phythian

Author:Peter Gill & Mark Phythian
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509525195
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2018-10-12T00:00:00+00:00

Dissemination: Security versus Sharing

Dissemination is the crux of the intelligence process – the link between knowledge and power, between intelligence and policy. The adequacy or otherwise of agencies’ performance will be judged on the utility and timeliness of what they produce. If intelligence is to amount to more than a self-serving cycle of endlessly collecting and storing information and actually to inform ministers, governments and executives, then it must be communicated to them, but, in fact, dissemination ‘tends to be intelligence’s Achilles’ heel’.40 The central questions to be asked about this process are ‘what, how much, when, how and to whom?’. The fact that these questions so closely mirror Harold Lasswell’s definition of politics – who gets what, when, and how?41 – serves to remind us of the fact that this is an inherently political process.

The primary consumers of intelligence are the doers – political or corporate. How intelligence conclusions are presented is important: specifically, how does it present degrees of uncertainty? The use of language is crucial; indeed, it is determinative of what, in the end, is considered to be the knowledge upon which policy may be based or by which it is rationalized. Intelligence seeks to improve knowledge by reducing uncertainty, but is only ever partially successful. The way in which different national systems seek to convey this uncertainty varies. For example, US NIEs incorporate footnotes recording the dissents of particular agencies from the main conclusions and the CIA provides percentage probabilities of success in possible future operations, as shown in Figure 5.1.42

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