The uses and abuses of intelligence Defending British spies

Intelligence has been in the spotlight in the aftermath of the war in Iraq. The inquiry by Lord Hutton into the death of weapons expert Dr David Kelly - soon to report - has produced tantalising insights into the world of secrets.

All information is either true or it is false. It is either relevant or irrelevant. It is either timely or it is not. It is either properly judged by those who receive it or it is not. It is either acted on effectively or it is not.

There is no essential difference between secret and open information. Just because information is gained by secret means, however ingenious, does not mean that it is necessarily either true or useful.

But one should not go to the other extreme. The liberal press sometimes argues that secret intelligence is of no value, and that secret agencies are a menace to our civil liberties. But we cannot do without such intelligence to defend ourselves against enemies who are themselves operating in secret.

The Duke of Wellington's intelligence network in the peninsula gave him a decisive edge over his French opponents. The code breaker Enigma was an essential element in our victory in the battle of the Atlantic in World War II.

America's commanding lead in electronic battlefield intelligence was shown last year in Iraq. And of course it is impossible to conduct operations against terrorists and their organisations without a major effort of human and technical intelligence.

Unreasonable expectations

The most foolish criticism that can be directed against the intelligence agencies is that they have failed to predict great historical events: the rise of the dictators, the fall of the Shah, the end of communism.

The future is inherently unpredictable. Intelligence agencies are no better able to see into it than journalists, academics, diplomats, or ordinary people with common sense.

The coup against President Mikhail Gorbachev in the summer of 1991 is a good case in point. All of us thought a coup was possible. Only the Central Intelligence Agency got the timing right. And even they failed to predict that the coup would fail.

In his book Know Your Enemy, Percy Cradock, the most distinguished of all former chairmen of the Joint Intelligence Committee, JIC, put it like this: "(We must) accept that in the last resort intelligence is an attempt to know the unknowable, and scale down our expectations accordingly."

Intelligence agencies are no more immune to error than other human organisations. The technical agencies - code breakers, satellite photographers, eavesdroppers - produce intelligence that is in a sense documentary. But even this may be neither timely nor relevant. And historians know that documents have to be subject to critical evaluation.

That is yet more true of intelligence produced by spies, what is now fashionably called "humint". Spies are inevitably vulnerable to human error: greed, fear, a desire to please, an urge to fantasise, and of course the practical difficulty of operating in secret.

Our Man in Havana is a cruel satire. But like any good satire, it has a serious grain of truth. Good intelligence agencies, including our own, do their best to sort out the wheat from the chaff at the earliest possible stage. They do not always succeed, and then you get a scandal.
Making sense of it

It's the assessment, not the intelligence, that matters. From the autumn of 1940, Soviet intelligence agencies were able to put together a remarkably accurate picture of Hitler's plan to invade. Stalin refused to act for reasons which initially made sense, but eventually led the Red Army to the brink of catastrophe.

In the autumn of 1941 General Bernard Freyberg managed to lose the battle of Crete, although he had twice as many men as the attacking Germans and detailed Enigma intelligence about their plans.

Neither of these disasters was an intelligence failure. They were a failure of leaders to assess the information available to them and to make sensible use of it.

Assessment is a tricky business, a matter of judgment, not science. Information is always fuzzy. There is almost never enough of it. It rarely leads to an incontrovertible conclusion.

Clash or consensus

The Americans believe that truth emerges from a dialectical clash of opinions. Different agencies generate different interpretations. These are often only reconciled when they get to the White House. This method ensures that minority opinions are aired. But it also enables the political leadership to pick the interpretation that feeds its prejudices. The result has been a string of American intelligence failures.

The British, on the other hand, try to reach a consensus among interested parties. Their instrument is the Joint Intelligence Committee, lodged in the Cabinet Office.

It consists of the heads of the intelligence agencies and senior officials, who assess a wide range of secret and open information on matters of interest to the policy-makers. In the past the committee's role was to be intellectually rigorous; to support no particular policy conclusion; and to show a united front to ministers.

The result is often a bland lowest common denominator, which does not make exciting reading. One minister remarked that he found JIC assessments "very boring". And a colleague said they were "very unhelpful" on the subject. I took it all as a compliment.

The alternative is worse: the risk identified by Cradock that "the analysts become courtiers, whereas their proper function is to report their findings, almost always unpalatable, without fear or favour."

Action is more important than assessment. Even an objective assessment of the facts cannot guarantee sound decisions. Leaders in business or politics navigate by intuition and judgement. Those in their immediate entourage are driven by loyalty, the need to protect their boss, and to ensure that his or her decisions are implemented. Those inside the magic circle find it hard to be coolly objective.

The pressures in Downing Street are even greater because of the cross-current of political rivalries and the unrelenting curiosity of the press. It all works as long as the boss's judgment and intuition are in order.

But when these begin to fail, the damage is serious. It happened to former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. It went even more spectacularly wrong at the time of Suez, when we had to be rescued by the Americans from the consequences of Prime Minister Anthony Eden's gross misjudgments which were in part based on his faulty reading of unreliable intelligence.

Muddled

Even in 1993 we were trying to work out whether or not Saddam Hussain had weapons of mass destruction, and what he might do with them. The government's dossier in September 2002 was therefore nothing very new.

But it was a pretty muddled affair. It was entitled Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction, a terrifying subject. But large passages of it were not about that at all. They were about Saddam's unpleasant regime and his ruthless secret policemen.

Much of the information in the dossier was in the public domain. Much of it came from the UN inspectors.