Spying on the World
SPYING ON THE WORLD
The Declassified Documents of the
Joint Intelligence Committee, 1936–2013
RICHARD J. ALDRICH, RORY CORMAC
AND MICHAEL S. GOODMAN
EDINBURGH
University Press
© editorial material and organisation Richard J. Aldrich, Rory Cormac and Michael S. Goodman, 2014
Documents in Chapters 2 –16 and 18 –21 reproduced by courtesy of the National Archives, London
Document in Chapter 17 reproduced by courtesy of the National Security Archive, George Washington University, Washington DC
Document in Chapter 22 contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v2.0
The authors would like to thank the British Academy for generously funding this project
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Published with the support of the Edinburgh University Scholarly Publishing Initiatives Fund.
CONTENTS
1. Introduction: The Rise of the Joint Intelligence Committee
2. Origins of the Joint Intelligence Committee
3. World War II and the Role of Intelligence in Strategic Planning
4. A Post-War Intelligence Machinery
5. Origins of the Soviet Threat
6. Sigint Targeting
7. The Berlin Blockade
8. Chinese Intervention in the Korean War
9. Estimating Soviet Capabilities
10. Counterinsurgency
11. The Suez Crisis
12. The Cuban Missile Crisis
13. Vietnam
14. The Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia, 1968
15. The Rise of International Terrorism in the Middle East
16. Northern Ireland: Direct Rule
17. The Falklands War
18. Changing Requirements at the End of the Cold War
19. War in Iraq: Weapons of Mass Destruction
20. War in Iraq: Aftermath
21. The Joint Intelligence Committee and the National Security Council
22. The Syrian Civil War
23. Through the Looking Glass: Illusions of Openness and the Study of British Intelligence
Appendix: Chairmen of the Joint Intelligence Committee
Document Sources
Bibliography
Index
1
INTRODUCTION: THE RISE OF THE
JOINT INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE
F OR MORE THAN half a century, the Joint Intelligence Committee or JIC has been a central component of the secret machinery of British government. It represents the highest authority in the world of intelligence, acting as a broker between the realms of the spy and the policymaker. According to Britain’s most experienced Whitehall watcher, Peter Hennessy, the JIC and its supporting staff constitute ‘the most sensitive of all the “black boxes” in the Cabinet Office’. 1
The official guide on this subject, entitled National Intelligence Machinery , claims that the JIC aims to ‘provide Ministers and senior officials with coordinated inter-departmental intelligence assessments’. 2 This rather broad definition can be better understood by a description offered by one former JIC Chairman, Sir Percy Cradock, who calls it the ‘final arbiter of intelligence’. 3 The JIC also acts as the government’s watchdog – monitoring global developments in an attempt to provide early warning. From the early Cold War days, the committee compiled regular reviews on activities around the Soviet perimeter. It has watched for impending wars ever since. In addition, during the Cold War, the JIC drew up a target list of subjects on which intelligence was urgently required by policymakers. This was then used to guide the activities of the intelligence services in their activities, ranging from agent running to communications monitoring and overhead photography.
The JIC was established in 1936 as a military body to serve the Chiefs of Staff. It performed strongly during the Second World War and its status was upgraded from sub-committee to full committee shortly after 1945, since when it has been involved in almost every key foreign policy decision taken by the British government. During the Cold War the role of the JIC expanded again – not least because intelligence was such a vital component in assessing the character and nature of the Soviet Union. In 1957 it was brought within the Cabinet Office, a move that, according to officials, was ‘a reflection of the broadened scope and role of intelligence’. 4 This ensured that the JIC was now at the centre of not just defence policy but also broader foreign policy and that it contributed to a growing culture of national security policy at the centre of government.
Today the JIC enjoys a remarkably high profile and since 2001 has often constituted a current political issue. Intense controversies surrounding the Iraq War and weapons of mass destruction, together with the Hutton Report and the Butler Report, ensured that the then JIC Chairman, John Scarlett, found himself centre-stage in a major political controversy. Even as an abbreviation, the initials ‘JIC’ are known to all and its importance is public knowledge. Moreover, the passionate interest evoked by the release of the government dossier Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Assessment of the British Government and the subsequent furore underline the public demand for more information about the precise connection between the core executive of British government and the intelligence services.
This dramatic growth in public interest has had a direct impact on the attention given to the workings of the JIC. For example, an internet search conducted by Dr Julian Lewis, a Conservative MP and member of the Intelligence and Security Committee, revealed that
in the 10 years from 1982 to the beginning of 1992, which includes the first Gulf War, there were just 99 references to the JIC in British newspapers. Even in the 10 years from the beginning of 1992 to the beginning of 2002, which includes the events of 11 September, there were only 431 such references. However, in the 18 months from January 2002 until [July 2003], in that year and a half alone there have been a massive 502 references.
In Lewis’s words, these figures implied that the ‘the JIC has become a matter of common currency and political controversy’. 5
The JIC and the Intelligence Community
How does the JIC fit into the broader intelligence community? How does the JIC work in practice? Partly as a result of the neglect of intelligence in wider writings on the British governmental system as a whole and partly as a result of the fragmentary nature of archival releases, the committee often gets treated in isolation by commentators. In reality, the JIC lies at the heart of a Whitehall intelligence machine. The committee is involved at the start and end of the intelligence process: it has traditionally set the requirements and priorities for the collection agencies, and it disseminates intelligence assessments to consumers under its own name (although it does not itself write the assessments).
&
nbsp; The British system contains three primary intelligence agencies responsible for collection: the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), the Security Service (MI5), and the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). After collection, validation of sources is carried out within each agency. Intelligence must then be analysed. This stage tends to take place within Defence Intelligence. Part of the Ministry of Defence and created in 1964, Defence Intelligence is Whitehall’s largest analytical body and conducts all source analysis from overt and covert sources. It is therefore a core, but often overlooked, player in the Whitehall intelligence machinery. Defence Intelligence also has some collection responsibilities in support of military operations.
Assessment then takes place inside the central intelligence machinery housed within the Cabinet Office. As mentioned earlier, the JIC does not write JIC assessments. During the Second World War, a body known as the Joint Intelligence Staff was created to act as the committee’s drafters. This group was strengthened and renamed the Assessments Staff in 1968. Consisting of around thirty individuals seconded from relevant government departments, the Assessments Staff collate and assess incoming intelligence from all sources. Having done so, they compose the intelligence report. The Assessments Staff, however, are not subject experts. Each assessment is therefore discussed in what are known as Current Intelligence Groups. Here experts from across Whitehall scrutinise and challenge the assertions. Once approved, papers are sent up to the JIC for further scrutiny and comment, before dissemination to consumers. 6 Most intelligence, unless it is particularly time sensitive, is then disseminated by the JIC.
Aside from the committee approach, the JIC system is also defined by a quest for consensus. The JIC does not rely on dissenting footnotes (as the Americans do), but instead aims to issue reports expressing an agreed interdepartmental viewpoint. On the one hand this prevents the policymaker from becoming his own intelligence analyst, from being able to cherry-pick the most desired evidence, and from bickering with colleagues over what constitutes the most accurate intelligence. On the other hand, it leaves the committee open to accusations of providing bland ‘lowest common denominator’ assessments. Using the declassified documents in this volume, readers can make up their own minds about which depiction is more accurate.
Strengths and weaknesses in assessment
Since its creation, the JIC has gradually increased in prestige, status and closeness to policymakers. It has evolved from a sub-committee of the Chiefs of Staff to lie at the heart of Whitehall’s core executive. After a slight dip in policy impact at the turn of the century, the JIC’s intelligence assessments are now read by the highest levels of government.
Certain academics have questioned the future of the committee. Philip Davies, for example, has suggested that the government has ‘effectively abandoned’ the tried and tested JIC formula. He has asked whether the committee has entered its twilight years. 7 Whitehall insiders are quick to argue the opposite and insist that the JIC is in excellent health for the future. The JIC may well be ‘just a committee’ and historians should be wary of misty-eyed nostalgia, but it is certainly an important one in terms of the relationship between intelligence and policy. It is also a committee (and part of a broader system) which has long been admired and indeed copied by British allies around the world.
The growing importance of the JIC is clearly underlined by the increasing rank of its chair over the decades. Although the JIC’s evolution is characterised by a remarkable ascent of the Whitehall hierarchy, numerous highs and lows have punctuated the committee’s history. Many will be brought out within this volume. Overall, the JIC’s record is broadly successful. Indeed, it would not have reached its seventy-fifth anniversary – quite an achievement for a government committee – in 2011 had it demonstrated a history of failure. Successes within these pages include the JIC’s performance during the Second World War when military consumers drew upon intelligence to inform strategically important offensives. Similarly, the committee was accurate on Suez and deserves credit for anticipating the nature of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Furthermore, its performance on irregular threats gradually improved as it became more experienced in assessing and understanding the issues involved. It was one of the first government actors to recognise the importance of non-traditional security issues and by the late 1970s had even broadened its scope to consider the threat of radioactive accidents at nuclear power stations.
Traditionally, the JIC has been most impressive in terms of providing cumulative, regular and cautious advice to military and political consumers. This background material gradually increases consumer knowledge and understanding to ensure that policymaking discussions are well informed. It would, however, be an oversimplification merely to state that intelligence informs policy. Indeed, policy is often devised independently of intelligence, rendering intelligence important only in aiding the operation and execution stages. Either way, intelligence is vital to at least one stage of the policymaking cycle.
A second area of traditional JIC strength is detail and analysis. The joint intelligence machinery receives a vast amount of intelligence from all available sources: human, signals, imagery, open and so on. This includes both qualitative and quantitative data. Staff must therefore assimilate this range of material, which may be contradictory, into a coherent report. Indeed, the committee has a strong track record of crunching data and reducing a great deal of intelligence into a manageable product for busy consumers.
The committee’s history also includes numerous intelligence failures. Broadly speaking, these revolve around forecasting and warning. For example, the JIC failed to predict a number of Cold War confrontations, including the Berlin blockade, the Korean War and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. It failed to warn of any early post-war insurgencies or of the Irish violence – although these are notoriously difficult phenomena to predict. Many of these intelligence failures can be ascribed to mirror-imaging. Korea, Czechoslovakia and the Falklands War are certainly instructive examples. Slow to learn lessons, the JIC continually applied Western values and thinking to foreign leaders, using home-grown cultural assumptions about a reluctance to use military force in place of hard intelligence. Despite offering broadly accurate strategic assessments regarding the Falklands, for example, the JIC misread the Argentineans and assumed a process of escalation in a way that was inherently unlikely. This case is particularly concerning given that the JIC was explicitly warned about this particular cognitive trap just twenty-nine days before the invasion. 8
Other notable failures include the Iraqi WMD fiasco, which has been blamed on a number of factors from groupthink and overcorrection to poor validation of sources. A further potential cause of failure is that of perseveration, or the danger of getting stuck in an assessment rut. If the JIC merely reports each week that a given situation has changed little, consumers become blind to the potentially large change over a longer period of time. This has occasionally proved problematic and has required the intervention of particularly sharp minds to correct. Underestimating the Argentine threat to the Falklands is a case in point. When the committee is used effectively, however, this potential danger can actually become a strength of the JIC’s all-source assessment function. In the case of assessing Middle Eastern terrorism, for example, the JIC used its interdepartmental authority effectively to overcome precisely this phenomenon, which was occurring at departmental level.
If the JIC is poor at warning of impending crises, its performance is generally impressive after they erupt. The committee has provided authoritative, regular and balanced briefings to consumers including at the highest levels of Cabinet. This is a pattern throughout the committee’s history. Crises and conflicts bring out the best in the JIC.
Producers and consumers
Accuracy of JIC assessments is only one half of the story. The most precise and insightful intelligence is rendered useless if it is not read by those making policy decisions. Impact is therefore vital. Broadly speaking, there are two main sc
hools of thought regarding producer–consumer relations. The first, a traditionalist approach, argues that the two should be kept separate. Intelligence must be apolitical and simply inform policymakers of the neutral facts from which they can make judgements. Distance would ensure objectivity of intelligence by reducing the dangers of politicisation.
This approach is too idealistic. In practice, intelligence assessments are rife with ambiguity and uncertainty. Political concerns permeate every aspect of intelligence work, from requirement setting all the way through to assessment and dissemination. Moreover, if intelligence is too distinct from policy, then the intelligence community struggles for relevance, becomes isolated and produces superfluous material. 9 Knowledge of current national policy and its impact on the wider international environment can also be a vital input into future forecasting.
The second, an activist approach, is more realistic. It argues that some level of interaction between the two camps is vital to ensure that intelligence is relevant, timely and useful. 10 This position does, however, increase the risk of politicisation and the abuse of intelligence by policymakers. It should be noted, however, that overt politicisation is rare. It more frequently takes the form of subtle pressure and, according to former JIC Secretary Brian Stewart, includes bias, prejudice, closed mindsets and the fear of harming one’s career or losing friends amongst peers. But politicisation can also be caused by ignorance, complacency, arrogance and lack of moral courage. 11 Although a danger of the ‘activist’ model, it can be overcome by better communication, trust and openness between producers and consumers. 12
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