Artificial Intelligence

International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence, Vol. 18, No. 2, Summer 2005

People have long been fascinated with the shadowy milieu of espionage, what former British intelligence officer and novelist John Le Carré christened the "secret world." Although its name may not suggest a compelling page turner, the International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence is as gripping for the serious student of intelligence as the spy novels tourists buy in airport bookstores.

If the journal has a strong grasp of the challenges facing the intelligence community, it is probably because many of the authors are drawn from its ranks. Headed by Richard R. Valcourt of the American Military University, the editorial board and roster of contributors boast active and retired intelligence professionals, ivory tower academics, and a handful of spooks turned scholar. (For example, frequent contributor William J. Daugherty, now a professor of government, was not only a career CIA officer but a hostage in Tehran.)

The Summer 2005 issue shows the editors take the "international" in the journal’s name seriously, with features on the arms embargo against Bosnian Muslims, the role of religion in global intelligence, and former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s use of spies. But the issue’s most compelling pieces examine the need for a global postmortem on intelligence analysis, reminding us that the United States is not the only country that needs to sharpen its skills.

Indeed, two pieces focus on the particular challenges that Europe faces. After the Madrid commuter train bombings in March 2004, intelligence agencies from Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain coordinated their responses, following leads that pointed them across Europe and North Africa. In his article, Glen M. Segell, director of the Institute of Security Policy in London, credits the effectiveness of this cooperation with ultimately connecting the central suspect to Islamic militants. Of course, many of these intelligence services cooperated with each other even before the Madrid bombings, which leaves open the question why they were unable to thwart the attack in the first place. Here, Segell provides a useful critique of how various agencies’ failure to integrate different approaches to intelligence analysis left Madrid — and any other potential targets, such as London — vulnerable to attack.

John M. Nomikos of the Athens-based Research Institute for European and American Studies has developed a solution for such deficiencies: a single, integrated European spy agency. In his essay, Nomikos makes the case for a new European Union (EU) agency modeled on what the CIA was originally supposed to be — an organization focused not on covert operations, but analysis. Nomikos imagines an independent EU intelligence outfit that would initially focus on providing the European Commission and European Council with strategic insights based on open sources and information voluntarily contributed by member intelligence services. To be sure, spy chiefs are usually leery of sharing or leaving their organizations open to penetration. But casting such a service as primarily analytic and focused on terrorism, as Nomikos does, is hard to disagree with on practical grounds.

For intelligence professionals and laypeople alike, the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service, is vested with near-mythical qualities of effectiveness and precision, particularly in on-the-ground operations. It is that reputation that makes reading Ephraim Kahana’s look at the faults and foibles of Israel’s famed intelligence service so interesting. Besides providing a historical inventory of Israeli operations gone awry, Kahana, a professor at the College of Western Galilee, examines scores of analytical failures by the Mossad. These are not small errors. By his estimation, the "number of significant and costly failures" by Israel’s intelligence service, rooted in both underestimation and overestimation of threats, has cost the country both on the battlefield and at the negotiating table.

In the wake of recent intelligence failures, including July’s bombings in London, many critics have charged that Western intelligence services have lost their nerve, that they are no longer willing to risk dealing with the dirty underworld of espionage. Whether it is a fair point or not, these essays demonstrate that running agents and collecting intel from unsavory characters is never sufficient. The underlying message is clear: Although field agents may argue that procuring information is paramount, intelligence is useless if you can’t break it down into meaningful parts, if the tools of analysis are weaker than the tools of collection. Which is another way of saying that, to succeed, spies need more than a cloak and dagger.