Intelligence Professionalism in the Americas

(Revised 2004 - Full Version) This book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of intelligence services. "Intelligence studies" have developed over the last twenty-five years within the academic disciplines of political science and international relations, but the subject is still at a relatively early stage of development. There has been extensive published analysis of the United States intelligence system, and some also of its British counterpart; but there is little writing about Western-style intelligence as a whole, and almost nothing on contemporary non-Western systems. The subject as a whole lacks the comparative studies needed to identify the commonalities that give intelligence everywhere its place - an increasingly important place - in the international system now developing. This book fills an important part of the gap. Its subject is one that has been barely tackled anywhere else: What gives modern intelligence practitioners and their organizations their claims to professionalism, and what actually does this professionalism entail? Intelligence as an activity is partly a matter of special skills - agent recruitment and running; cipher-breaking and other SIGINT techniques; imagery interpretation; and all the others - but these merge into its broader professional canons for handling indications and evidence, drawing conclusions, and presenting these to decision-takers in ways that command attention while incorporating careful judgements of certainty and uncertainty. The intelligence professional is close to the policy adviser, but still keeps a certain distance from him. Intelligence's concern is with understanding and evaluating "them," rather different from the policy adviser's roots in "us" and in what "our" decisions should be. For this is the book's second contribution: It examines intelligence professionalism in a laboratory almost completely unknown to Anglo-Saxon readers, certainly to this one. Intelligence institutions have evolved in the last decade in the new, democratic Latin America at roughly the same pace as the successor systems that developed at the same time in the former Warsaw Pact countries of Eastern and Central Europe; and the two sets of development are of comparable international significance. Yet hardly anyone in Europe knows anything about Latin American intelligence, and the same ignorance exists in considerable measure in the United States. The gap is filled here by accounts of intelligence structures and recent developments in seven of the Latin American countries, along with three conceptual articles that relate these country-by-country accounts to the semi-hemisphere as a whole. Reading them all has been an eye-opening experience.