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The Function of Intelligence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Willmoore Kendall
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Extract

Strategic Intelligence can be read variously as: 1) a general introduction to intelligence work which, say, the director of almost any section of Central Intelligence might give a new recruit to read on his first day at the office; 2) a memorandum from an Old Hand at intelligence work who has thought it all over—like the bird in Peter and the Wolf, from a safe distance—and has a thing or two to tell those of his colleagues who have stayed on in Washington; and 3) an attempt by that same Old Hand to make sense—inter alia for himself—out of a greatly expanded United States government activity in which, as all who know it can testify, sense does not leap to the eye. Because the book is in part each of these three things, it is not perfectly satisfactory as any one of them. But it is evidently not offered as a learned treatise on any or all of them: indeed, the gap in the existing literature in the field is so great that one can hardly be surprised at Mr. Kent's failure to define his task with precision. The great merit of his book is that it provides a body of descriptive material which will enable serious public discussion to begin on the relation of intelligence to policy in a democratic system. Since it is American policy on which the future of the free world seems to depend, it is high time for the public debate to commence.

Type
Review Articles
Information
World Politics , Volume 1 , Issue 4 , July 1949 , pp. 542 - 552
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1949

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References

1 Curiously, however, he reproduces with evident approval a passage of Walter Lippmann's which urges the reverse of this (p. 200). Mr. Kent's views on Kämpfende Wissenschaft (ibid.) vary sharply from chapter to chapter.

2 The italics are mine.

3 If you were director of an intelligence agency in France, and wishedto know “what goes on” in the United States, which would you do first: take out an airmail subscription to the New York Times, or send four ex-Deuxième-Bureau men to dispense largesse in Washington? And now that you have answered that question in the manner that the present writer expected, how sure are you that you would send the four menat all?

4 The italics are mine.

5 And he says elsewhere that if we are looking for “the encouraging element in departmental intelligence,” i.e., the departments that have “realized the importance of the task,” shown “a decent respect for full and accurate knowledge,” and “employed the right kind of professional people,” it is to Labor, Commerce, and Agriculture (thus, one infers, not to State and Defense) that we must go (p. 115).

6 An example of absolute prediction would be: “General DeGaulle will come to power this day six months”; or “Japan will attack Pearl Harbor on x-day at y-hour.” The contingent prediction would read: “The following factors, which can be influenced in such and such a fashion by action from the outside, will determine whether, and if so, when, General DeGaulle will come to power.”