Intelligence_ From Secrets to Policy - Mark M. Lowenthal [211]
NATIONAL INTEREST. The concept of national interest is not new. In the period that historians refer to as “early modern Europe,” roughly the seventeenth century, all statesmen agreed that raison d‘état—literally “reason of state”—guided their actions. Raison d’état implied two tenets: first, that the state embodied its own ends, and, second, that the interests of the state were the only guides for actions, not resentments, emotions, or other subjective impulses. Raison d’état, as practiced in early modern Europe, also implied the use of intrigue by one state against another and the ultimate sanction: the use of force.
In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, international relations were, beneath a refined veneer, brutal. One could argue that even the creation of an international body, the United Nations (UN), has done little to modify the behavior of states in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. For example, witness the brutality of many parties in the dismemberment of Yugoslavia or of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. A direct line follows from seventeenth-century raison d’état to twentieth-first-century national interest.
Is national interest a sufficient guide to the ethics and morality of intelligence? On the one hand, it is the only guide. If intelligence activities are not undertaken in support of the policies of the legitimate government, then they are meaningless at best or dangerous rogue operations at worst. On the other hand, legitimate governments—even those that adhere to democratic ideals and principles—can sometimes reach decisions and take actions that are morally or ethically questionable.
Thus, national interest is a difficult guideline, both indispensable and insufficient at the same time.
CHANGES IN ETHICS AND MORALS. Ethics and morals change over time. For example, slavery was accepted in Britain as late as the 1830s, in some parts of the United States as late as the 1860s, and in Brazil as late as the 1880s. Slavery reportedly continued in Sudan in the late 1990s. Less than one hundred years ago, in the 1910s, the issue of women’s suffrage was still being vigorously debated in Britain and the United States; in Switzerland, the debate continued into the 1960s.
Assuming that intelligence activities are undertaken on lawful authority, should they keep abreast of changes in ethics and morality? Citizens should want to say yes. But who decides when these changes have come? How quickly do changes in ethics and morals get translated into policies and actions? For example, political intervention of the sort undertaken in Europe during the cold war is probably insupportable today (with the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act, which publicly appropriated money to foster a change in the regime in Iraq, a notable exception). But when did that change come? When the Soviet Union collapsed, or earlier? In 1975 the United States faced the prospect of seeing one of its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies, Portugal, elect a communist government. After a strenuous debate between the U.S. ambassador (who opposed covert intervention in the Portuguese elections) and the national security adviser (who advocated it), the United States opted not to intervene, and the Communists lost the election. The decision was based not on a new morality but on the view that the United States had more to lose by intervening