A series of investigations, especially in the United States and Britain, has focused attention on the performance of national intelligence services. At the same time, the onset of an era of terrorism has highlighted the role of intelligence in trying to detect and prevent possible terrorist acts. In many countries, intelligence services have expanded and been reorganized, or both, and new training programs for intelligence have sprung up around the world.

In these circumstances, it seemed propitious to take stock of the underlying intellectual substructure of intelligence. What is the current state of research on and relevant to intelligence? This is the question addressed by this book. The project that spawned it was conducted by the Centre for Asymmetric Threat Studies at the Swedish National Defence College, with funding from the Swedish Emergency Management Agency. The purpose of the book is primarily to assess the state of research. However, that purpose runs beyond pure understanding because the book's premise is that for intelligence, as for other areas of policy, serious intellectual inquiry is the basis for improving the performance of real-world institutions. The volume explores intelligence from an intellectual rather than an organizational perspective. Our ambitions do not run to systematically covering the various applications or “subdisciplines” of intelligence (e.g., foreign, domestic, counterespionage, counterterrorism, and covert operations) in the way that most traditional accounts of intelligence do.

This book was part of a project of the Centre for Asymmetric Threat Studies (CATS) at the Swedish National Defence College. It was sponsored by the Swedish Emergency Management Agencies (SEMA), which in 2008 were combined with another agency to form the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency (MSB). SEMA and MSB had the wisdom, from our perspective, to see benefit for their operations in asking deeper questions about what is required of intelligence for homeland security and the fight against terrorism.

In this portion of the project, we sought to ask about the state of serious, academic research on intelligence. Our purpose was, first, to improve understanding and lay out suggestions for where additional research might fill gaps or enrich our understanding. To that end, we assembled a distinguished set of experts on various facets of intelligence, and in particular sought to reach beyond the native English speakers that dominate so much of the literature on intelligence. The result is a book that is different from many other recent volumes on intelligence. It is a little more academic in style and international in composition.

Yet, our second purpose was to build better understanding in the hope of improving the practice of intelligence. A theme that runs through the entire book, and is turned to explicitly in the conclusions, is where intelligence stands as a profession. Is it an experience-based activity or a science, or something in between?

In May 1939, a young British Ph.D. in physics from Oxford, R. V. Jones, was approached by a staff member of Sir Henry Tizard's Committee for the Scientific Survey of Air Defence. Britain was, in this period, ahead of most other nations in integrating the academic scientific community and defense research and development (R&D), as illustrated by the lead that the Royal Air Force enjoyed in radar technology over the main adversary, Germany. However, as war drew closer, the Committee had experienced a problem regarding intelligence or, rather, the lack of intelligence: the British services simply were unable to collect material that might provide any insight into German efforts to apply science in aerial warfare. Jones was offered the task of looking into this problem and he accepted – by coincidence, agreeing to start his new job on September 1, the fateful day that Germany invaded Poland.

Jones's experience underscores the central theme of this book. Our purpose in surveying the state of research on intelligence is not only to suggest promising topics or even to promote better understanding by academics and others of what intelligence does – although later in the chapter we assemble some of the research suggestions that derive from the assessments of the book's chapters. Rather, our ultimate purpose is also to improve the practice of intelligence.

The change in targets for intelligence is dramatic. To be sure, for all the emphasis on terrorists and other nonstate (or transnational) targets, the change is hardly absolute. Intelligence dealt with nonstates before, and nation-states – such as North Korea, Iran, and China – still loom large in the work of U.S. intelligence. While some of those state targets, such as North Korea, are familiar in the sense that they resemble the secretive Soviet Union, others present different and unfamiliar – if not entirely new – challenges.

This chapter defines the change in targets, focusing on transnational targets such as terrorists. The change is widely acknowledged, yet its implications run far deeper than are usually recognized. The change goes to the heart of how intelligence does its business – from collection to analysis to dissemination, to use the labels that are increasingly less apt. Before turning to transnational targets, some discussion of remaining state targets is appropriate because those also cover a range. The chapter then details the challenges of transnational targets, concluding by illustrating some of the implications of that change with the issue of possible acquisition of WMD by terrorists.

THE RANGE OF STATE TARGETS

States will not only remain targets for intelligence; they will also remain, for all the competition from transnational actors – ranging from NGOs to international business, to drug lords and terrorists – the key actors in the international system. Thus, they will remain an important target for intelligence.

If the boundaries served the democratic nations tolerably well during the Cold War – in particular, by safeguarding the privacy of citizens – they set up those nations to fail in an age of terror. Terrorists respected none of those boundaries. They were not “over there” – they were both there and here, with the precise configurations changing and unpredictable. By the mid-2000s, for instance, the terrorist threat to Britain was almost entirely “domestic” – homegrown cells with tentacles reaching abroad, to Pakistan in particular. By contrast, for the United States, the problem was still primarily “over there,” although with its tendrils reaching into the United States. Whether that would change remained to be seen – and remained a task for intelligence in an age of terror.

Terrorists targeted not armies but rather private citizens. As a result, the so-called war on terrorism not only hyped the threat but also mislocated it, implying that military instruments, in which the United States reigned supreme, would be primary. While those terrorists might commit crimes, they might commit only one, and then it would be too late. They could not be dealt with as either an intelligence or a law enforcement problem; rather, they had to be treated as both.

By the same token, if organizing intelligence – on the collection side, by source, and on the analysis side, by agency – may have made a certain sense during the Cold War, it cannot be the right way to organize now.

The main challenge ahead is also the reason for having a DNI in the first place – to better manage the entire set of U.S. intelligence agencies so that the nation gets the most for the $43-plus billion it spends each year on intelligence. For Negroponte to deliver the PDB was a bureaucratic victory, but the nation did not need a DNI to deliver the PDB; for that, the prior DCI was fine. Negroponte's relatively brief tenure as DNI was distinguished mostly by bureaucracy-building, thereby reinforcing the argument of the skeptics that the creation of the DNI would only add one more layer of organizational “clutter.” Negroponte conveyed the air of a person who had taken the job out of duty rather than real interest or commitment. He seemed from the start eager to return to his career home, the State Department, and made the move quickly in 2007 when the position of deputy secretary was offered. Indeed, that he was prepared to trade the post of DNI for the number-two job at State was a commentary on the status of the reshaping of intelligence – and not a good one.

Much of the task ahead is implicit in the DNI's mandate to break down the stovepipes, asking how best the United States might get the information it needs. The challenges to existing organizational culture are daunting. The DNI needs to be a major player in programmatic decisions, especially about collection systems, which consume most of intelligence's budgets.