Introduction
Intelligence gathering and analysis is undoubtedly the balance breaker between two warring powers, groups, or fronts in any battlefield. “Intelligence is any process producing knowledge that might be used in making a decision OR influencing the process, knowledge, or decisions of competitors AND in the face of competitors’ efforts – real or imagined – to affect one’s own processes, knowledge, or decisions in matters of national policy” (Dover et al. 2014, p. 27). For so many years, intelligence use has been undergoing a lot of transformations and development fueled by the need to commit espionage behind the lines and backs of the enemy. Gregory Elder wrote; “History repeatedly has demonstrated that inferior forces can win when leaders are armed with accurate intelligence” (Elder 2006, p. 13). In the past, warring nations not only fought in the battlefield, but also fought in the mind where belligerents wore each other out through their intelligence abilities. Intelligence has been pivotal since time immemorial playing an important role in supporting military forces and in international policy formation (Bennett 2014, p. 51; Elder 2006, p. 13). The United States and Britain are among the few nations in the world with the strongest intelligence systems that evolved from very simple traditional methods of intelligence gathering and analysis (McNeil 2008, p. 4).
This paper seeks to compare and contrast the historical approaches to intelligence gathering in USA and the United Kingdom prior to Al Qaeda attacks in the United States in September 2011. Through a close analysis of major conflicts and wars these nations were involved in, it seeks to show that the development and advancement of the approaches in intelligence gathering came as a result of the pressure to strengthen their military power, create a safer environment and increase international influence. It further goes ahead to examine how these approaches have evolved and what they have evolved into in the present day society.
Historical Approaches to Intelligence Gathering
Dover et al. (2014, p. 186) goes ahead to explore the historical approaches to intelligence gathering that have evolved through the history. The historical approaches include the oldest and ultimately the most used Economic intelligence, open source intelligence (OSINT), measurement and signature intelligence (MASINT), signals intelligence (SIGINT), and Human intelligence (HUMINT) discipline.
HUMINT involves gathering information about an interested subject by a person who is on the ground such as military attaches, prisoners of war, traders and travelers, diplomats, strategically managed reconnaissance by specialized individuals such as Special Forces, spies, scouts amongst other groups of people in contact with those in possession of the much needed information. The signals intelligence (SIGINT) involves gathering information through intercepting signals (Elder 2006, p. 14). Measurement and signature intelligence (MASINT) involves a wide array of complicated approaches that function to technically gather intelligence through detecting, tracking, identifying and describing the signature or characteristics of either a rigid or a mobile target source (Bigelow 2012, p. 14). The open source intelligence (OSINT) according to Dover et al (2014, p. 181) refers to a process of gathering intelligence from an open source which can either be general or technical also called scientific. Finally, economic intelligence (EI) entails gathering intelligence about the extent of a possible military threat which is useful in estimating the motives of a potential enemy in war.
Historical approaches to intelligence gathering by USA and Britain
The great American revolutionary war that started in 1775 is one of the most defining warfare the changed the history of military intelligence. According to Bigelow (2012, p. 1), the continental army relied on the traditional way of gathering intelligence that involved the use of spies and scouts. The continental army ran a number of spy rings and secret intelligence organizations, analyzed the data that was gathered by the agents and successively mounted a memorable campaign to distract and cheat the British armies. On the 13th of august 1775, an American soldier by the name Daniel Bisell deceived the British forces that he had deserted the continental forces only to live for 13 months in the British army gathering intelligence that was helpful to the Washington led army (Bigelow 2012, p. 1). Historians have shown that HUMINT was crucial in the continental army’s victory at Yorktown and helped them a big deal in evading their enemies during winters (McNeil 2008, p. 15).
The British army on the other hand enjoyed the advantage of being many and more equipped in terms of weapons and warfare resources. “Facing British forces that usually outmatched and often outnumbered his own, Washington needed good intelligence to exploit any weaknesses of his adversary while masking those of his own army”(Bigelow 2012, p. 1). However, there spy networks were not as sophisticated and clandestine as the American networks (Bowler 2015, p. 45). This gave them a difficult time keeping their moves secret. For example their plot to attack the French army before they could establish their defense properly in order to collaborate with the Americans leaked to the advantage of the continental army who deceived them by staging a false attack in Manhattan which made the British to abort their initial plan (Bigelow 2012, p. 3). Unlike the American forces spy rings such as the Culper spy ring that used coded reports with the secret ink to communicate with their forces, Bigelow (2012, p. 3) notes that British spy networks still used courier to transport uncoded reports although they later adopted the secret ink technique.
Intelligence gathering approaches in America by the time the civil war broke out in 1861 had evolved and advanced beyond using spies and scouts alone (McNeil 2008, p. 8). Signal intelligence approach of gathering information became important because of the widespread of telegraph in communication between the two warring groups (Bigelow 2012, p. 6). Each side attempted to tap cables and wires with the aim of gathering intelligence since telegraphs were widely used for communication between those in the battlefield and their headquarters. The use of codes and ciphers in communication was adopted and soon the warring armies in the civil wars started using single flags which aided in tactical communications as Bigelow (2012, p. 7) observes. It was also during the war that the use of balloons to gather and disseminate intelligence came into being even though it was later abandoned in spite of its initial successes. Britain on the other hand became the pioneers of electronic interception intelligence gathering during the Boer war that took place between 1899 and 1902 (Andrew 1985, p. 62). The British army took signal intelligence to another level by installing wireless devices on their naval ships (Steed 2016, p. 159). During this time, the British army was the only force that possessed the ability to transmit wireless signals and hence special analysis of seized signals was not quiet important. However, electronic interception became useful in 1904 when a British ship made an interception of the Russian naval wireless signals that were meant to marshal Russian navy for the Russo-Japanese war (Keegan 2010, p. 67; Steed 2016, p. 159). This was a breakthrough to signal intelligence which would later become useful in World War I.
The United Kingdom embraced Measurement and Signature intelligence (MASINT) for the first time during the First World War. The British military was the first one to come up with a working acoustic system. This device possessed the ability to detect destructive artillery in the battlefield utilizing sound. This formed the benchmark for further developments that would come later in the 1990s and later the modern acoustic locator and counter-battery radars. The United States incorporated the use radio-tractor trucks in pursuing the Villa’s guerilla bandits in Mexico after the 1916 attack in New York Columbus by Pancho Villa who was the then Mexican revolutionary leader (Bigelow 2012, p. 5). Bigelow (2012, p. 5) further narrates that under the leadership of MAJ James A. Ryan, the American forces conducted air surveillance with position sensors mounted on aero planes in search of the guerilla bandits. The American army was able to capture with the help of the radio tractors all communications by the Mexican government. The operation was relatively successful because Villa was not captured, but the deployment of their intelligence assets prepared them for World War I (Bigelow 2012, p. 5).
During the First World War, the approach to intelligence gathering in America took two parallel lines. According to Bigelow (2012, p. 14) Back in the United States, military intelligence became a fully recognized member of the war department general staff, a move that gave propelled intelligence to become what it is today. On the other hand, the American expeditionary forces (AEF) that had been sent into France developed their own intelligence organization in the field for purposes of aiding them in their tactical as well as operational needs. In June 1917, a Code and Cipher Bureau (MI-8) was born at the war department which successfully helped the American intelligence to arrest a German spy called Lothar Witzke after flouting a German cipher (Bigelow 2012, p. 15). A radio intelligence station was created in France by the AEF on the 12th of Nov 1917 to aid in signal intelligence. In the last four months of the war, Bigelow (2012, p. 15) reports that the American forces gathered intelligence about the German trenches and weapon emplacements aerially for the first time on 15th April 1918 where close to 1.3 million intelligence photos were taken during a flight reconnaissance.
Britain on the other hand started experimenting aerial photography as an intelligence gathering approach as early as 1912. The number 1 squadron RAF used by Fredrick Laws in experiments utilized the British dirigible Beta which was later fixed on naval ships and fixed-wing aircrafts (Spence 2016, p. 218; Bigelow 2012, p. 27). Arial photography proved crucial in the First World War where the British forces gathered intelligence about their German counterparts in the battlefield. Britain took signal intelligence a notch higher during the First World War with the successful decryption of the Zimmerman telegraph that wished-for a martial coalition between Germany and Mexico if USA joined the war against Germany being termed the most significant intelligence achievement during the war (Bigelow 2012, p. 33). The revelations of the contents inspired the American forces to declare total war on Germany and support the allied forces in April 1917 (McNeil 2008, p. 13).
The approaches to intelligence gathering in the Second World War by the United States resulted principally from the fundamentals that were laid in World War I (Keegan 2010, p. 57). Numerous intelligence training schools were opened such as the cryptographic schools and the Japanese training schools to trains interpreters graduating 4800 interpreters during World War II (Bigelow 2012, p. 24). In 1942, the army G2 established a specialized branch within the military intelligence service that dealt with the integration of intercepted communications from adversaries into larger pictures. The process of sophisticating intelligence gathering scaled higher on the 10th of December 1945 when the G2 army took over the operation of the Signal Security Agency (Bigelow 2012, p. 27). The British approach of gathering intelligence in this war depended largely on interrogating prisoners of war alongside the use of Radio interception, spies, scouts, and cryptography. Bigelow (2012, p. 32) notes that prisoners of war helped immensely in gathering intelligence about the movements of Germany and Japanese forces with over one third of all combat intelligence being sourced from them. Likewise, the 1969 war between Britain and the Provisional Irish Republic Army (PIRA) in Northern Ireland depended on members of the public to gather counterinsurgency intelligence alongside confidential telephone systems installed by the British security agencies (Jackson 2007, p. 79).
In spite of the many differences that in terms of the approaches the United States and Britain have taken in gathering intelligence, the two nations also have similarities that have defined and set them apart us leaders in the world of intelligence. Both nations have placed special emphasis on the need to have a strong and efficient human intelligence (HUMINT) approach since the times of the revolutionary war to date (Singer 1988, p. 117). The use of spies and scouts by both nations to gather intelligence during the revolutionary war revolutionized and changed perspectives about war from just a battlefield confrontation to preparation and war of the mind (Bigelow 2012, p. 3). The fact the Washington’s forces emerged victorious in spite of their low numbers and inadequate weaponry shows how much intelligence can strengthen military operations. Both nations utilized interrogation of prisoners of war and refugees to gather intelligence. This is true during World War II where both the united forces and the British military had to train translators in order to effectively gather information from refugees and prisoners of war. One such example is the Japanese training school that helped in producing translators who later proved important in gathering intelligence about the Japanese forces (Bigelow 2012, p. 14; McNeil 2008, p. 11).
The intelligence system of both nations saw the rise and establishment of permanent national intelligence and secret services in the last half of the 19th century. This is partly because this was the time when inventory science was taking root and each western society was attempting to establish itself with the aim of controlling its environment (Bennett 2014, p. 54). The Naval Intelligence Division (NID) and the office in charge of naval intelligence (ONI) in America came into existence in 1882 which prompted most European countries to also set up their naval intelligence services. In 1892, a military attaché system was established to gather intelligence at peacetime about foreign adversaries (McNeil 2008, p. 6). The Bureau of Investigation later FBI came into existence in 1908 to gather intelligence about crime and also to take part in counterintelligence. In 1943, the Signal Security Agency (SSA) was born during World War II to manage signal intelligence. In 1945, it was later replaced by the Army Security Agency (ASA) as America’s SIGINT element (Bigelow 2012, p. 28). ASA was then followed by the National Security Agency (NSA) that was formed in 1952 November majorly for counterintelligence purposes alongside foreign intelligence and SIGINT. The need to have a more strengthened and empowered intelligence gathering body around the world in order to counter terrorism utilizing human intelligence led to the formation of the Central intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1947 September (McNeil 2008, p. 16). Additionally, the U.S army intelligence and security command (INSCOM) was established in 1977 to tackle multidisciplinary intelligence and electronic warfare (Bigelow 2012, p. 28).
The Directorate of Military Intelligence (DMI) in Britain was established in the 19th century and it became an important part of the British War Office. In 1909, the British Secret Service Bureau was established with the aim of controlling the operations of secret intelligence within the United Kingdom and in other nations of the world (Andrew 1985, p. 71; Spence 2016, p. 217). This agency particularly concentrated on the operations of the Germany imperial government. In World War I, the administrative changes led to the formation of MI5 as the body responsible for gathering internal intelligence and MI6 being the foreign section of the British intelligence system (Spence 2016, p. 217). The Joint Intelligence Bureau together with its many intelligence sections was established in 1946 and later merged with other intelligence agencies to make the Defense intelligence staff (DIS) in 1964. DIS in 2009 adopted numerous reforms and came be known as Defence Intelligence (DI). An equivalent of the American FBI, the National crime agency (NCA) that was established 2013 gathers intelligence about criminal activities within the nation’s jurisdiction. Other intelligence agencies that preceded the National Crime Agency include the National Criminal Intelligence Service and The National Drugs Intelligence Unit (Spence 2016, p. 217).
The World Trade Center and Pentagon attach by Al-Qaeda on the September 11th 2001 the changed the world’s perception on intelligence and served to propel USA and its fellow ally forces such as the United Kingdom to international war on terrorism (Bigelow 2012, p. 56). Today, the U.S intelligence community comprises sixteen well-equipped government intelligence agencies that operate separately and at the same time together to gather intelligence necessary for the nation’s overseas relations and national security (McNeil 2008, p. 17). The British intelligence on the other hand is made up of five agencies responsible for domestic intelligence, two major agencies in charge of foreign intelligence, one signals intelligence agency and one agency responsible for joint intelligence.
Conclusion
Approaches to intelligence gathering have evolved over the years not only in the United States and Britain but also across many nations across the world. Intelligence continues to occupy a special place in military operations, counterterrorism and in war against organized criminal activities across in the United States and Britain. The fact that gaining information about an adversary multiplies the chances of emerging victorious in any engagement has inspired many governments to pump resources into intelligence gathering and analysis. In spite of the ever changing and dynamic world, the United States continues to lead and set new standards in the field of intelligence with Britain and other European superpowers following closely, all in a bid to make the world a safer place for humankind.
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