The previous chapter discussed warning failure and its relationship with other intelligence assessment, and it cast some light on the intelligence system's problems of making correct judgments. However it did not examine a complicating factor: intelligence's external relationships with its users. The need for close intelligence–user contacts has already been discussed (chapter 6), and their role in the intelligence production process will be examined in chapter 16. But to be of any value intelligence has to be credible to its recipients; its analysts need empathy with their users, as well as their targets. Yet the user relationship may affect objectivity on particular issues, or lead to systematic institutional bias. The problem can be illustrated by considering the special position of defence intelligence and its record in the Cold War.

Defence intelligence merits consideration in its own right. On the whole it provokes relatively little interest. In Britain it tends to be regarded as being concerned mainly with specialized defence decisions. In public controversies about intelligence accountability, no one has worried about the DIS, which constitutionally is simply part of the Ministry of Defence's central staff. In the USA its equivalent organizations have always had fairly low esteem.