4 - Intelligence and Ethical Foreign Policy

Summary

[1999]

Intelligence services are integral parts of the modern state; as Sir Reginald Hibbert put it in the late 1980s, ‘over the past halfcentury secret intelligence, from being a somewhat bohemian servant or associate of the great departments of state, gradually acquired a sort of parity with them’. They have not withered away with the end of the Cold War. There has been some reduction in this decade, but not to the same extent as in the armed forces, and intelligence budgets have recently levelled off. American expenditure has been declared as US$26 billion annually, around ten per cent of the cost of defence, perhaps with some recent increases in human source collection. The equivalent British budget is probably more than £1 billion, rather more than the cost of diplomacy (contemporary figures).

Does this investment pose questions of international morality? Most Western governments recognise issues of democratic accountability and restrictions on domestic targeting, but like the rest of the world accept the need for ‘foreign intelligence’. On coming to power in 1997 the Labour Foreign Secretary, Mr Cook, emphasised the ethical dimension of his foreign policy, but at the end of his first year spoke with unexpected warmth of the intelligence support he had received. The Clinton Administration sponsored a study of the CIA's ethics, but what emerged focused on intellectual integrity, not morality. The media make great play with intelligence leaks, whistleblowing and failures, but remain thrilled by secrecy. Its ethical concerns over intelligence tend to be inward-looking, concentrating on what it suspects to be part of the domestically repressive ‘national security state’, rather than on its foreign coverage. The Times pronounced in 1999 that ‘Cold War or no Cold War, nations routinely spy on each other’.

Nevertheless an underlying liberal distaste is evident for stealing others’ secrets. Peter Wright's autobiographical account of his ‘bugging and burglary’ of foreign embassies in London is frequently quoted. John le Carré's novels denigratingly portrayed Soviet and Western intelligence as two halves of the same apple. CIA-bashing remains a world industry, an element in the bien pensant view that the US is ‘becoming the rogue superpower’. At a more thoughtful level, two British academics have dismissed all espionage as ‘positively immoral’ apart ‘from certain extreme cases’ (undefined).