Studies in Intelligence Vol. 46 No.

3 (2002)

Wanted: A Definition of
"Intelligence"
Understanding Our Craft

Michael Warner

In a business as old as
recorded history, one would
expect to find a sophisticated ...all attempts to develop ambitious
understanding of just what theories of intelligence have failed. --
that business is, what it does, Walter Laqueur1
and how it works. If the
business is "intelligence,"
however, we search in vain. As
historian Walter Laqueur warned us, so far no one has succeeded in
crafting a theory of intelligence.

I have to wonder if the difficulty in doing so resides more in the

slipperiness of the tools than in the poor skills of the craftsmen or the
complexity of the topic. Indeed, even today, we have no accepted
definition of intelligence. The term is defined anew by each author who
addresses it, and these definitions rarely refer to one another or build off
what has been written before. Without a clear idea of what intelligence is,
how can we develop a theory to explain how it works?

If you cannot define a term of art, then you need to rethink something. In
some way you are not getting to the heart of the matter. Here is an
opportunity: a compelling definition of intelligence might help us to devise
a theory of intelligence and increase our understanding. In the hope of
 yo ellig ding op
advancing discussions of this topic, I have collected some of the concise
definitions of intelligence that I deem to be distinguished either by their
source or by their clarity.2 After explaining what they do and do not tell us,
I shall offer up my own sacrificial definition to the tender mercies of future
critics.

Official Solutions

The people who write the laws that govern intelligence, and administer the
budgets and resources of intelligence agencies, deserve the first word. The
basic charter of America's intelligence services—the National Security Act
of 1947 with its many amendments—defines the kind of intelligence that
we are seeking in this manner:

The term 'foreign intelligence' means information relating to the capabilities,

intentions, or activities of foreign governments or elements thereof, foreign
organizations, or foreign persons.3

Study commissions appointed to survey the Intelligence Community have

long used similar language. The Clark Task Force of the Hoover
Commission in 1955 decided that:

Intelligence deals with all the things which should be known in advance of
initiating a course of action.4

An influential report from the mid-1990s (produced by the Brown-Aspin

Commission) provides this definition:

The Commission believes it preferable to define 'intelligence' simply and broadly

as information about 'things foreign'—people, places, things, and events—
needed by the Government for the conduct of its functions.5

The Joint Chiefs of Staff qualify as both employers and consumers of

intelligence, so they deserve a say as well. Their latest Dictionary of
Military and Associated Terms defines intelligence as:

1. The product resulting from the collection, processing, integration, analysis,

evaluation and interpretation of available information concerning foreign
countries or areas.
2. Information and knowledge about an adversary obtained through observation,
investigation, analysis, or understanding.6

And finally, the Central Intelligence Agency has weighed in with the
following sentence:

Reduced to its simplest terms, intelligence is knowledge and foreknowledge of

the world around us—the prelude to decision and action by US policymakers.7

All of these definitions stress the "informational" aspects of intelligence

more than its "organizational" facets—an ironic twist given that all of them
come from organizations that produce and use intelligence, and which
thereby might be expected to wax poetic on the procedural aspects of the
term as well.

Private Attempts

Authors writing about intelligence for commercial publication might seem

to enjoy a little more freedom and flexibility than the drafters of official
government statements. Nonetheless, many outside authorities also say
that intelligence is basically "information." Here are some examples,
beginning with one of the earliest theorists in the field, CIA's re-doubtable
senior analyst, Sherman Kent:

Intelligence, as I am writing of it, is the knowledge which our highly placed

civilians and military men must have to safeguard the national welfare.8

Former Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Vernon Walters published a

chatty memoir of his long and eventful public career, Silent Missions, that
offers a more detailed definition:

Intelligence is information, not always available in the public domain, relating to

the strength, resources, capabilities and intentions of a foreign country that can
affect our lives and the safety of our people.9

Another high-ranking CIA officer, Lyman Kirkpatrick, was a true student of

the business while he served in the Agency and enjoyed a second career
as a respected commentator on intelligence topics. He contributes the
following:
[Intelligence is] the knowledge—and, ideally, foreknowledge—sought by nations
in response to external threats and to protect their vital interests, especially the
well-being of their own people.10

And last but not least, a study of the American intelligence establishment
commissioned by the Council on Foreign Relations in 1996 noted:

Intelligence is information not publicly available, or analysis based at least in

part on such information, that has been prepared for policymakers or other
actors inside the government.11

What Is Wrong with 'Information'?

Nothing is wrong with 'information' per se. Policymakers and commanders

need information to do their jobs, and they are entitled to call that
information anything they like. Indeed, for a policymaker or a commander,
there is no need to define intelligence any further.

For producers of intelligence, however, the equation "intelligence =

information" is too vague to provide real guidance in their work. To
professionals in the field, mere data is not intelligence; thus these
definitions are incomplete. Think of how many names are in the telephone
book, and how few of those names anyone ever seeks. It is what people do
with data and information that gives them the special quality that we
casually call "intelligence."

With all due respect to the legislators, commanders, officials, and scholars
who drafted the definitions above, those definitions let in far more than
they screen out. After all, foreign policy decisionmakers all need
information, and they get it from many sources. Is each source of
information, and each factual tidbit, to be considered intelligence?
Obviously not, because that would mean that newspapers and radio
broadcasts and atlases are intelligence documents, and that journalists
and geographers are intelligence officers. The notion that intelligence is
information does not say who needs the information, or what makes the
information needed in the first place. Intelligence involves information, yes,
but obviously it is far more.

Let us begin again. The place for definitions is a dictionary. A handy one
found in many government offices (Webster's Ninth New Collegiate) tells
 yg s( gia )t
us that intelligence is:

...information concerning an enemy or possible enemy or an area, also: an

agency engaged in obtaining such information.

Of course, one should hardly consult just any dictionary on such an

important matter. The dictionary—the Oxford English Dictionary—defines
intelligence as follows:

7a. Knowledge as to events, communicated by or obtained from one another;

information, news, tidings, spec. information of military value... b. A piece of
information or news... c. The obtaining of information; the agency for obtaining
secret information; the staff of persons so employed, secret service... d. A
department of a state organization or of a military or naval service whose object
is to obtain information (esp. by means of secret service officers or a system of
spies).

Sherman Kent expressed something similar in a 1946 article on the

contemporary direction of intelligence reform:

In the circumstances, it is surprising that there is not more general agreement

and less confusion about the meaning of the basic terms. The main difficulty
seems to lie in the word 'intelligence' itself, which has come to mean both what
people in the trade do and what they come up with. To get this matter straight is
crucial: intelligence is both a process and an end-product.12

This seems to be getting somewhere, but it is hardly concise. We need

something punchy. At this point, the same Walter Laqueur who
complained above about the lack of a coherent theory of intelligence
uncannily proved his own point by rendering Kent's point in a sentence
that contains no new insight but economizes on words:

On one hand, it [intelligence] refers to an organization collecting information and

on the other to the information that has been gathered.13

Professors Kent and Laqueur recognized that intelligence is both

information and an organized system for collecting and exploiting it. It is
both an activity and a product of that activity.

National Intelligence Council officer Mark Lowenthal reminds us that

intelligence is something broader than information and its processing for
policymakers and commanders, even when that information is somehow
confidential or clandestine. His useful primer on intelligence contains this
definition:
Intelligence is the process by which specific types of information important to
national security are requested, collected, analyzed, and provided to
policymakers; the products of that process; the safeguarding of these processes
and this information by counterintelligence activities; and the carrying out of
operations as requested by lawful authorities.14

Lowenthal is on to something important. Intelligence is several things: It is

information, process, and activity, and it is performed by "lawful
authorities"—i.e., by nationstates. But he still has too much freight loaded
on his definition. Information that is "important to national security" could
include intelligence, all right, but also many other things, such as the
number of American males of age to bear arms, the weather conditions in
Asia, and the age of a politburo member. Indeed, almost anything "military"
can be subsumed under Dr. Lowenthal's definition, and many things
diplomatic fit as well. He has the right categories, but he has made them
too broad. In addition, his definition is partly tautological in saying that
intelligence is that which is protected by counterintelligence.

Nonetheless, one senses that we have found the right road. Lowenthal
adds that interesting clause at the end: "the carrying out of operations."
Why did he associate operations with information processing? My guess is
that is he is a good observer who draws what he sees. He knows that
information agencies using secret information have been—and very often
still are—intimately associated with agencies that conduct secret
operations.

In ancient times that coincidence might have occurred because the agent
and the operative were the same man. In many cases, the operation and
the information are one and the same; the product of espionage could only
be known to its collector (for fear of compromising the source) and thus
the collector becomes the analyst. This is how the KGB worked, and no
one can say that the KGB lacked sophistication in the intelligence
business. Other nations, however, have differentiated analysis and
operations and placed them in separate offices, sometimes with and
sometimes without a common director. Funny, though, that both the
analytical and the operational offices are commonly described as "doing"
intelligence.

The Missing Ingredient

Why is it that the word "intelligence" is used to describe the work of
analytical committees and covert action groups? Of signals collectors and
spies? Why do so many countries—Western and Eastern, democratic and
despotic—tend to organize their intelligence offices in certain patterns
around their civilian leaders and military commanders?

Another good observer, Abram Shulsky, has noticed this aspect of the
intelligence business. Looking at this wide variety of intelligence activities,
he laments, "it seems difficult to find a common thread tying them
together." But soon he picks up the scent again: "They all, however, have to
do with obtaining or denying information." Furthermore, Shulsky explains,
these activities are conducted by organizations, and those organizations
have something in common: they have as one of their "most notable
characteristics...the secrecy with which their activities must be
conducted." Secrecy is essential because intelligence is part of the
ongoing "strugle" between nations. The goal of intelligence is truth, but
the quest for that truth "involves a strugle with a human enemy who is
fighting back."15

Shulsky thus emphasizes the need for secrecy in intelligence activities and
organizations. Indeed, he comes close to calling secrecy a constitutive
element of intelligence work, saying "the connection between intelligence
and secrecy is central to most of what distinguishes intelligence from
other intellectual activities." But then he retreats when confronted with the
problem of explaining how it is that covert action (clandestine activity
performed to influence foreign countries in unattributable ways) always
seems to be assigned to intelligence agencies, rather than to military
services or diplomatic corps. Why did it happen in the United States, for
example, that the covert action mission was assigned to the Central
Intelligence Agency despite the Truman administration's initial impulse to
give it to either the State Department or the Secretary of Defense?
Shulsky notices the pattern, but wonders whether it means anything:

Even if, for practical bureaucratic reasons, intelligence organizations are given
the responsibility for covert action, the more fundamental question—from a
theoretical, as well as a practical, viewpoint—of whether covert action should be
considered a part of intelligence would remain.16

The institutional gravitation that tends to pull intelligence offices toward

one another has been observed by others as well. In 1958 a CIA operations
officer noticed the same tendency that puzzled Shulsky. Rather than
setting it aside, however, he attempted to explain it. Writing under the pen-
 ting it aside p xplain it riting un ep
name R. A. Random in the CIA's then-classified journal Studies in
Intelligence, he sugested that intelligence, by definition, always has
something secret about it:

Intelligence is the official, secret collection and processing of information on

foreign countries to aid in formulating and implementing foreign policy, and the
conduct of covert activities abroad to facilitate the implementation of foreign
policy.17

This is getting somewhere. It calls intelligence an activity and a product,

says it is conducted in confidential circumstances on behalf of states so
that policymakers can understand foreign developments, and that it
includes clandestine operations that are performed to cause certain
effects in foreign lands. There is really little to quibble with in Random's
definition. It includes many things that it needs, but without incorporating
much or anything that it does not need.

Notwithstanding the quality of Random's definition, it drew a rejoinder six

months later in Studies in Intelligence from a CIA counterintelligence officer
pen-named Martin T. Bimfort, who complained that Random had
neglected the discipline of counterintelligence in describing the
constituent parts of intelligence. Bimfort amended Random:

Intelligence is the collecting and processing of that information about foreign

countries and their agents which is needed by a government for its foreign
policy and for national security, the conduct of non-attributable activities
abroad to facilitate the implementation of foreign policy, and the protection of
both process and product, as well as persons and organizations concerned with
these, against unauthorized disclosure.18

This does not seem to help. Bimfort has added bells and whistles to
Random, but the addition of "counterintelligence"hints that Bimfort has
missed one of the essential elements of Random's definition: its assertion
that intelligence is a state activity that involves secrecy. If Bimfort had
grasped that point, he should have conceded that an activity that is
official and secret ipso facto implies subsidiary activities to keep it secret.
Thus Bimfort's addition—"the protection of both process and product, as
well as persons and organizations concerned with these, against
unauthorized disclosure"—is not only ponderous, it is superfluous. It is,
moreover, unhelpful, because it reaches beyond counterintelligence and
subsumes all sorts of ordinary security functions common to many
government offices and private enterprises.
This criticism of Bimfort's critique brings us willy-nilly to something
important. What is the difference between security (and the law
enforcement aspects of catching and prosecuting security risks) and
counterintelligence? I would argue that the difference is secrecy. Plenty of
agencies and businesses have security offices; many also perform
investigative work. But not all of those organizations are thereby
intelligence agencies. Security and investigative work against foreign spies
becomes "counter-intelligence" when it has to be done secretly for fear of
warning the spies or their parent service.

Indeed, secrecy is the key to the definition of intelligence, as Random

hinted. Without secrets, it is not intelligence. Properly understood,
intelligence is that range of activities—whether analysis, collection, or
covert action—performed on behalf of a nation's foreign policy that would
be negated if their foreign "subjects" spotted the hand of another country
and acted differently as a consequence.19

Toward a Solution

A comprehensive definition of intelligence—one that says what it is,

without also including all sorts of things that it is not—would have several
elements. We can say now that "intelligence" is that which is:

Dependent upon confidential sources and methods for full effectiveness.

Performed by officers of the state for state purposes (this implies that
those officers receive direction from the state's civilian and military
leaders).

Focused on foreigners—usually other states, but often foreign subjects,

corporations, or groups (if its objects are domestic citizens, then the
activity becomes a branch of either law enforcement or governance).

Linked to the production and dissemination of information.

Involved in influencing foreign entities by means that are unattributable to

the acting government (if the activities are open and declared, they are the
province of diplomacy; if they utilize uniformed members of the armed
forces, they belong to the military).
Random's definition has come the closest to date to incorporating all of
these elements. I can make him more elegant, but I cannot supplant him.
Here is my definition:

Intelligence is secret, state activity to understand or influence foreign entities.

Conclusion

Plato's Republic is an extended dialogue between Socrates and his

students on the nature of justice. As their discussion begins, Socrates
addresses the distinguished father of one of his young admirers, seeking
the elder's opinion on the topic. As might be expected, the father replies in
utterly conventional terms, and soon leaves Socrates and the young men
to their theorizing, which takes off in several directions in turn. Toward the
end of the Republic, however, Socrates has led his students to an
understanding of justice that looks remarkably like what the old gentleman
had offered in the beginning. Convention often holds a wisdom that is not
lightly set aside.

Perhaps something similar has happened with our definition of

intelligence. The typical American, asked to define "intelli-gence," is likely
to evoke an image of some shadowy figure in a fedora and trenchcoat
skulking in a dark alley. We intelligence officers know that stereotype is
silly; intelligence is something far more sophisticated than a "Spy v. Spy"
cartoon. And yet the popular caricature possesses a certain wisdom, for it
intuits that secrecy is a vital element—perhaps the key element—of
intelligence. Intelligence involves information, yes, but it is secrecy, too. For
producers of intelligence, it is more about secrecy than information.
Convention holds a wisdom for us as well.

Why does this matter? Various agencies have gotten along well enough for
many years, thank you, without a suitable-for-framing definition of
intelligence. One can add, moreover, that providing them with such a thing
is hardly likely to revolutionize their work. And yet, the definition I just
proposed could assist the growing number of scholars who study the field
and might ultimately help the Intelligence Community in several respects.
It could provide a firmer institutional footing for covert action, which has
long been a step-child in CIA—in no small part because some Agency
leaders and policymakers downtown have regarded it as not really
"intelligence" at all, but rather something that the White House happened
to tack on to the Agency's list of missions. A better definition of
intelligence might also guide declassification policy by clarifying just what
are and are not the "sources and methods" that the DCI is obliged by
statute to protect. And finally, a stress on secrecy as the defining
characteristic of intelligence should help future oversight staffs and study
commissions to sort the various activities performed in the Intelligence
Community with an eye toward husbanding that which they and they
alone can do—and leaving the remainder to be performed by other parts of
the government.

Footnotes:

1 Walter Laqueur, A World of Secrets: The Uses and Limits of Intelligence

(New York, NY: Basic Books, 1985), p. 8.

2 I credit Nicholas Dujmovic, Directorate of Intelligence, and his fine

compilation of intelligence quotations for many of the definitions recorded
here.

3 50 USC 401a.

4 Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government

[the Hoover Commission], "Intelligence Activities," June 1955, p. 26. This
was an interim report to Congress prepared by a team under the
leadership of Gen. Mark Clark.

5 Commission on the Roles and Capabilities of the United States

Intelligence Community, Preparing for the 21st Century: An Appraisal of US
Intelligence [the "Brown-Aspin Report"] (Washington, DC: Government
Printing Office, 1996), p. 5.

6 Joint Chiefs of Staff, Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and

Associated Terms, Joint Publication 1-02, 12 April 2001, p. 208.

7 Central Intelligence Agency (Office of Public Affairs), A Consumer's Guide

to Intelligence, (Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency, 1999), p. vii.

8 Sherman Kent, Strategic Intelligence for American Foreign Policy

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1949), p. vii.

9 Vernon Walters, Silent Missions (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1978), p. 621.
10 Lyman B. Kirkpatrick, Jr., "Intelligence," in Bruce W. Jentelson and
Thomas G. Paterson, eds. Encyclopedia of US Foreign Relations, Volume 2
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 365.

11 Council on Foreign Relations [Richard N. Haass, project director], Making

Intelligence Smarter: Report of an Independent Task Force (New York, NY:
Council on Foreign Relations, 1996), p. 8.

12 Sherman Kent, "Prospects for the National Intelligence Service," Yale

Review, 36 (Autumn 1946), p. 117. Emphases in original.

13 Laqueur, p. 12.

14 Mark M. Lowenthal, Intelligence: From Secrets to Policy (Washington,

DC: Congressional Quarterly Press, 2002 [second edition]), p. 8.

15 Abram N. Shulsky (revised by Gary J. Schmitt), Silent Warfare:

Understanding the World of Intelligence (Washington, DC: Brassey's (US),
2002 [third edition]), pp. 1-3, 171-176.

16 Ibid.

17 H. A. Random, "Intelligence as a Science," Studies in Intelligence, Spring

1958, p. 76. Declassified.

18 Martin T. Bimfort, "A Definition of Intelligence," Studies in Intelligence,

Fall 1958, p. 78. Declassified.

19 The notion that people act differently when watched is a familiar one to
social scientists, who long ago dubbed it the "Hawthorne Effect." The
Western Electric Company's Hawthorne Works in the 1920s hosted a team
of researchers interested in the effects of lighting on factory workers. The
team, in sight of the employees, fiddled with the illumination levels and
learned to its surprise that both brighter and dimmer settings increased
output. Employees worked harder even when they mistakenly thought the
lights had been adjusted. Did they just like the attention, or did they worry
about the potential consequences of not increasing their output? As long
as the workers knew they were being watched, the research team could
not answer that question—or learn which light levels workers liked best. F.
J. Roethlisberger and William J. Dickson, Management and the Worker
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956 [1939]), pp. 14-18
Dr. Michael Warner serves on the CIA History Staff.

The views, opinions and findings of the author expressed in this article should
not be construed as asserting or implying US government endorsement of its
factual statements and interpretations or representing the official positions of
any component of the United States government.