[1997]

The British government's ‘intelligence’ is based on specialised intelligence organisations and their activities. Their main output is ‘foreign intelligence’ – on a range of foreign affairs, including military and other external threats – plus ‘security intelligence’ on terrorism, espionage and other threats with covert and domestic components. Intelligence also contributes to the protection of government's information (‘information security’), typically through personnel security and the protection of communications and information technology (‘ITSEC’). The offensive role of penetrating foreign security defences is combined with acting defensively to protect national secrets; intelligence acts as gamekeeper as well as poacher.

In 1940 Winston Churchill provocatively asked how ‘the Intelligence Service’ was organised. This ‘Service’ – or for the last half-century the ‘intelligence community’ – is based on four organisations. Three of them are officially the ‘intelligence and security services’, or ‘the Agencies’, and are:

• • Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the national agency for the production of signals intelligence (Sigint), from the monitoring of communications and other electronic emissions.

• • The Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), producing foreign intelligence from human and technical sources.

• • The Security Service which gathers, analyses and assesses security intelligence, as well as advising and acting upon it.

The fourth member is the Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS), which analyses defence-related intelligence for ‘the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and the Armed Forces and other Government Departments’. (Strictly speaking its Whitehall element is now the Defence Intelligence Assessment Staff – DIAS – but DIS remains the common usage and is retained here.) To weld the community together there is the interdepartmental machinery of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), with the twin roles of coordinating intelligence assessment and community management. It is served by the Cabinet Office Assessments Staff and a Secretariat.

Four features are important for understanding this community. The first is the continuum between security intelligence and foreign intelligence. Terrorism is international, and even when home-based it almost always has international connections; like espionage and the other targets of security intelligence, it manifests itself overseas as well as at home, as threats to British forces, ships, aircraft, embassies and citizens abroad. It can be supported by rogue states or directly practised by them.