Intelligence_ From Secrets to Policy - Mark M. Lowenthal [209]
SECRECY. Much intelligence work is done in secret, although the definition of intelligence set out in chapter 1 does not include secrecy as a necessary precondition. The question remains: Is secrecy necessary in intelligence? If so, how much secrecy? And at what cost?
If secrecy is necessary, what drives the need? Governments have intelligence services because they seek information that others would deny them. Thus, secrecy is inherent not only in what your intelligence service is doing (collection and covert action) but also in the information that others withhold from you. You also do not want the other state to know your areas of interest. Is this second level of secrecy necessary? After all, those keeping information from you often know—or at least presume—that you want it. That is one reason for hiding it from you (although many dictatorial states attempt to control all information, understanding that it poses a threat to their regime). Or is secrecy driven primarily by your attempts to gain access to hidden information? Is it based on not allowing those who are attempting to deny you information to know that, to some degree, they have failed? How necessary is that? After all, you will act on the intelligence collected, although you will attempt to mask the reasons for your actions. Won’t your opponents at least guess. based on your decisions and actions, that you have gained some access to the information they were safeguarding?
Beyond the motivations for secrecy are the costs it imposes. This does not refer to the monetary costs—for background checks, control systems for access, and so forth—which are substantial. The issue is how operating in a secret milieu affects people. Does secrecy inherently lead to a temptation or willingness to cut corners or take steps that might be deemed unacceptable if they were not cloaked in secrecy? This is not to suggest that thousands of people are morally compromised because they work in organizations that prize secrecy. But the nature of some aspects of intelligence—primarily collection and covert action—combined with the fact that they are undertaken in secret may lower an intelligence official’s inhibitions to commit questionable actions. These factors put a premium on the careful selection and training of officers and on vigorous oversight.
WAR AND PEACE. Moral philosophers and states have long presumed that the conditions of war and peace are different and allow different types of activity. The most obvious wartime activity is organized violence against the territory and citizens of other states. During peacetime, overt conflict is precluded. Does this division between acceptable peacetime and wartime norms extend to intelligence activities? Are efforts to subvert and overthrow the governments of enemy states acceptable in peacetime, as they are in wartime?
Even during periods of peace, the United States has relations with states that are hostile. The cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union may have been the epitome of such relationships: hostile at virtually all levels but never reaching the point of overt conflict between the two primary antagonists (as opposed to some of their surrogates).
A relationship such as that between the two cold war antagonists occupies a gray middle ground between peace and war. Intelligence activities—both collection and covert action—became one of the principal means by which the two countries could attack each other. Even in this unique situation, however, the United States and the Soviet Union accepted some limits. The two sides did not kill each other’s nationals who were caught spying. Instead, they jailed the spies and sometimes exchanged them, as was the case with Col. Rudolf Abel, a Soviet spy imprisoned in the United States in 1957, and U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers. (One’s own national caught spying for the other side could be executed, as were Julius Rosenberg in the United States and Col. Oleg Penkovsky in the Soviet Union.)