National Intelligence Systems: Current Research and Future Prospects

A series of investigations, especially in the United States and Britain, have focused attention on the performance of national intelligence services. At the same time, the onset of an era of terrorism and a broad span of trans-national security challenges has highlighted the crucial role of intelligence. This book takes stock of the underlying intellectual sub-structure of intelligence. For intelligence as for other areas of policy, serious intellectual inquiry is the basis for improving the performance of real-world institutions. The volume explores intelligence from an intellectual perspective, not an organizational one. Instead the aim of the book is to identity themes that run through these applications, such as the lack of comprehensive theories, the unclear relations between providers and users of intelligence, and the predominance of bureaucratic organizations driven by collection. A key element is the development, or rather non-development, of intelligence toward an established set of methods and standards and, above all, an ongoing scientific discourse. Here, in the transformation from an experience-based proto-science to a science of intelligence in-being, the book argues, lies perhaps the most fundamental challenge for a field of immense impact on the international community, on nations, and on individuals.

Gregory Treverton is Director of the RAND Corporation's Center for Global Risk and Security. Earlier, he directed RAND's Intelligence Policy Center and its International Security and Defense Policy Center, and he was associate dean of the Pardee RAND Graduate School. His recent work has examined terrorism, intelligence, and law enforcement, with a special interest in new forms of public-private partnership. He has served in government for the first Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, handling Europe for the National Security Council and, most recently as vice chair of the National Intelligence Council, overseeing the writing of America's National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs). He holds an A.B. summa cum laude from Princeton University and a master's in public policy and Ph.D. in economics and politics from Harvard. His latest books are Intelligence for an Age of Terror (Cambridge University Press, 2009); Reshaping National Intelligence for an Age of Information (Cambridge University Press, 2001); and New Challenges, New Tools for Defense Decisionmaking.

Wilhelm Agrell is Professor in Intelligence Analysis at Lund University, Sweden, and visiting professor at the Swedish National Defence College, Stockholm, with a background in Swedish intelligence and military service in the Middle East. As an academic scholar, with a a Ph.D. in history from Lund in 1985, he has written more than 20 books, mainly dealing with Cold War history and Swedish security, including an account of the aborted Swedish nuclear and chemical weapons programs in the 1950s and 1960s. He has been active in establishing intelligence analysis as an academic field and became the first professor in the subject in Scandinavia in 2006. He has also written nine novels, some of them translated into other Scandinavian languages, Finnish, and German.