Espionage: A Writer's Guide Part II
Intelligence
The Basics
Even if what the intelligence community does in practice is complicated (which it is), the theory of the whole thing is quite simple: Policy makers and senior leaders need information to help them make better policy and strategic decisions. If you must define intelligence, it would sound something like this: An activity in which professionals a) collect and b) analyze information to help guide and assist leaders and policy makers in their decision making.
The thing that drives intelligence is a leader’s need to know, his or her need to be able to gauge the a) capabilities and b) intentions of enemies and allies alike. Intelligence is the collection of raw information by a variety of techniques, some human and others technical, and the analysis of that information in order to produce cogent and timely information.
It doesn’t sound terribly complicated or nefarious, does it?
A dirty little secret of the intelligence community is this: most information intelligence officers collect is not highly classified foreign secrets. It is mundane minutia that most of us wouldn’t recognize as intelligence at all. It is bridge capacities, lengths of airport runways, hospital bed counts, opinions of foreign policy makers on various events, or something so routine as the fact that a senior military leader might be on holiday on a given weekend—or a million other things.
Do intelligence agencies seek foreign government secrets? Yes, absolutely. That is one reason operational security (OPSEC) and information security (INFOSEC) are so important within intelligence agencies. But there’s another reason: the very fact a government a) doesn’t know the answer to a certain problem, and b) is trying to obtain that information, is itself a secret. It’s a secret because discovering a country’s gaps and weaknesses gives foreign intelligence services (FIS) a look into that country’s intentions and capabilities. When playing poker, you never want another player to know what cards you are holding (or not holding), and you never want another player to know whether you know what cards s/he is holding.
Hence, OPSEC and INFOSEC are paramount. It’s why spies are so bloody obsessed with secrecy. I will go into that in more detail below in a small section called Security and Counterintelligence, but always remember that everything an intelligence officer does, especially while stationed in a foreign country, is done under the shadow of possibly being caught, uncovered, or compromised—or being spied upon by foreign intelligence agents.
So, who engages in espionage?
Mostly, it’s national governments, through a variety of intelligence agencies. Just about every country in the world has some sort of intelligence apparatus, and many have deep and robust ones. Some governments, in fact, are more-or-less extensions of their intelligence services. The people of some countries (such as old East Germany, Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and others) were so heavily controlled and surveilled by their own intelligence apparatuses that a significant percentage of the population at any given time either was employed directly by one of those agencies or reported to them as informants.
In open democratic societies, such influence is far less pervasive, but even in a country like the United States there are many hundreds-of-thousands of civilian (federal employees and contractors) and military personnel in the Intelligence Community, spread among more than a dozen agencies, and collectively spending more than one-trillion dollars of taxpayer money per year.
Less common are private companies that engage in espionage activities, but such things do exist. Even non-state actors such as terrorist organizations have intelligence arms, some of them quite vigorous.
Of course, none of those counts of personnel include the many confidential sources used and employed by intelligence agencies throughout the world. Such people provide information to intelligence agencies covertly and often illegally and are the bread and butter of HUMINT collection, about which we’ll talk throughout most of this pamphlet.
Where does this all take place?
State intelligence services send their agents to neighboring countries, to trading partners, and to any other countries where that state’s interests might be at stake. Only a few countries have the resources to have a truly global reach, countries like the United States and China. Intelligence agencies even spend a fairly significant amount of resources spying on each other, an activity that doesn’t encompass the broad and vigorous counterintelligence (spies who thwart other spies) activities in which most countries engage.
Next question: What constitutes intelligence? And, equally important, how is it collected, processed, and turned into a useful product?
As I mentioned briefly above, any gap in knowledge to which a policy maker wants an answer is fair game for collection by the intelligence resources who report to that policy maker. Many pieces of information collected by agents in the field (within the IC, the term ‘collector’ far more often is used than ‘spy’ to describe such persons) are mundane and banal, tiny little puzzle pieces of an enormous and multilayered jigsaw puzzle, puzzle pieces often so trivial that most of us wouldn’t recognize them as ‘secrets.’
The many, many thousands of such tiny puzzle pieces gathered by intelligence collectors in the field (and by intelligence officers manning technical surveillance and collection equipment at remote, mobile, or centralized technical stations), are then written up as raw and un-analyzed reports. Such reports then are sent through the collector’s supervisors to analysts, groups of specialists in various fields who usually are located at secure facilities far from where the information was collected. Analysts do all of the comparing and vetting and weighing of information to determine which of the raw data are accurate, and which of it are bunk. They then produce fully-vetted reports for senior policy makers.
Raw intelligence/information becomes vetted and published intelligence through this production-and-analysis cycle, a cycle that is an ongoing and endless process: 1) Policy makers send collection requirements to agencies, 2) human and technical intelligence assets collect the necessary information and push the information via raw reports to analysts, 3) analysts piece together the many tiny puzzle pieces from the raw reports into processed intelligence and provide that information in carefully revised and vetted reports to policy makers, and 4) policy makers read the reports and come up with a new set of collection requirements to replace or augment the old.
And the circle continues.
Every new nugget of information a collector/officer finds raises new questions, and every new piece of information requires some sort of verification, confirmation, or vetting. Throughout this process, called the ‘intelligence cycle,’ the questions of policy makers change and change constantly, as policy makers’ needs and knowledge levels change. The spy business is never-ending.
That's just a quick overview. In later posts, I'll go over some of this in detail. Next post I'll talk a bit about the various intelligence disciplines, the techniques and technical platforms intelligence agencies use to collect raw information.
Until then, thanks for reading.
The Basics
Even if what the intelligence community does in practice is complicated (which it is), the theory of the whole thing is quite simple: Policy makers and senior leaders need information to help them make better policy and strategic decisions. If you must define intelligence, it would sound something like this: An activity in which professionals a) collect and b) analyze information to help guide and assist leaders and policy makers in their decision making.
The thing that drives intelligence is a leader’s need to know, his or her need to be able to gauge the a) capabilities and b) intentions of enemies and allies alike. Intelligence is the collection of raw information by a variety of techniques, some human and others technical, and the analysis of that information in order to produce cogent and timely information.
It doesn’t sound terribly complicated or nefarious, does it?
A dirty little secret of the intelligence community is this: most information intelligence officers collect is not highly classified foreign secrets. It is mundane minutia that most of us wouldn’t recognize as intelligence at all. It is bridge capacities, lengths of airport runways, hospital bed counts, opinions of foreign policy makers on various events, or something so routine as the fact that a senior military leader might be on holiday on a given weekend—or a million other things.
Do intelligence agencies seek foreign government secrets? Yes, absolutely. That is one reason operational security (OPSEC) and information security (INFOSEC) are so important within intelligence agencies. But there’s another reason: the very fact a government a) doesn’t know the answer to a certain problem, and b) is trying to obtain that information, is itself a secret. It’s a secret because discovering a country’s gaps and weaknesses gives foreign intelligence services (FIS) a look into that country’s intentions and capabilities. When playing poker, you never want another player to know what cards you are holding (or not holding), and you never want another player to know whether you know what cards s/he is holding.
Hence, OPSEC and INFOSEC are paramount. It’s why spies are so bloody obsessed with secrecy. I will go into that in more detail below in a small section called Security and Counterintelligence, but always remember that everything an intelligence officer does, especially while stationed in a foreign country, is done under the shadow of possibly being caught, uncovered, or compromised—or being spied upon by foreign intelligence agents.
So, who engages in espionage?
Mostly, it’s national governments, through a variety of intelligence agencies. Just about every country in the world has some sort of intelligence apparatus, and many have deep and robust ones. Some governments, in fact, are more-or-less extensions of their intelligence services. The people of some countries (such as old East Germany, Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and others) were so heavily controlled and surveilled by their own intelligence apparatuses that a significant percentage of the population at any given time either was employed directly by one of those agencies or reported to them as informants.
In open democratic societies, such influence is far less pervasive, but even in a country like the United States there are many hundreds-of-thousands of civilian (federal employees and contractors) and military personnel in the Intelligence Community, spread among more than a dozen agencies, and collectively spending more than one-trillion dollars of taxpayer money per year.
Less common are private companies that engage in espionage activities, but such things do exist. Even non-state actors such as terrorist organizations have intelligence arms, some of them quite vigorous.
Of course, none of those counts of personnel include the many confidential sources used and employed by intelligence agencies throughout the world. Such people provide information to intelligence agencies covertly and often illegally and are the bread and butter of HUMINT collection, about which we’ll talk throughout most of this pamphlet.
Where does this all take place?
State intelligence services send their agents to neighboring countries, to trading partners, and to any other countries where that state’s interests might be at stake. Only a few countries have the resources to have a truly global reach, countries like the United States and China. Intelligence agencies even spend a fairly significant amount of resources spying on each other, an activity that doesn’t encompass the broad and vigorous counterintelligence (spies who thwart other spies) activities in which most countries engage.
Next question: What constitutes intelligence? And, equally important, how is it collected, processed, and turned into a useful product?
As I mentioned briefly above, any gap in knowledge to which a policy maker wants an answer is fair game for collection by the intelligence resources who report to that policy maker. Many pieces of information collected by agents in the field (within the IC, the term ‘collector’ far more often is used than ‘spy’ to describe such persons) are mundane and banal, tiny little puzzle pieces of an enormous and multilayered jigsaw puzzle, puzzle pieces often so trivial that most of us wouldn’t recognize them as ‘secrets.’
The many, many thousands of such tiny puzzle pieces gathered by intelligence collectors in the field (and by intelligence officers manning technical surveillance and collection equipment at remote, mobile, or centralized technical stations), are then written up as raw and un-analyzed reports. Such reports then are sent through the collector’s supervisors to analysts, groups of specialists in various fields who usually are located at secure facilities far from where the information was collected. Analysts do all of the comparing and vetting and weighing of information to determine which of the raw data are accurate, and which of it are bunk. They then produce fully-vetted reports for senior policy makers.
Raw intelligence/information becomes vetted and published intelligence through this production-and-analysis cycle, a cycle that is an ongoing and endless process: 1) Policy makers send collection requirements to agencies, 2) human and technical intelligence assets collect the necessary information and push the information via raw reports to analysts, 3) analysts piece together the many tiny puzzle pieces from the raw reports into processed intelligence and provide that information in carefully revised and vetted reports to policy makers, and 4) policy makers read the reports and come up with a new set of collection requirements to replace or augment the old.
And the circle continues.
Every new nugget of information a collector/officer finds raises new questions, and every new piece of information requires some sort of verification, confirmation, or vetting. Throughout this process, called the ‘intelligence cycle,’ the questions of policy makers change and change constantly, as policy makers’ needs and knowledge levels change. The spy business is never-ending.
That's just a quick overview. In later posts, I'll go over some of this in detail. Next post I'll talk a bit about the various intelligence disciplines, the techniques and technical platforms intelligence agencies use to collect raw information.
Until then, thanks for reading.
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