Confronting the Colonies (35 page)

Firstly, events external to the JIC, both internationally and within Whitehall, prompted reform. The post-Second World War contextual framework increased Whitehall's focus on colonial security and again illustrates the important interplay between intelligence, policy responses and the international sphere. Against this backdrop, failures to predict insurgencies in Malaya, Kenya and Cyprus were particularly influential in pushing reform. They drove the centralised handling of colonial intelligence and security. Additionally, the JIC's transition to the Cabinet
Office was in part a reaction to the Whitehall context, involving the reassertion of cabinet government in the aftermath of the Suez mis-adventure.
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It seems highly likely that Anthony Eden's misuse of the JIC (and of the cabinet system generally) helped prompt the committee's move to the Cabinet Office to ensure it was no longer out of the loop. In this sense, JIC evolution was very much reactive. It broadened its understanding of what constituted a threat to national security only after such a threat had so obviously arrived on the agenda. A prime example would be the fact that a Colonial Office representative joined the JIC only after the outbreak of violence in Malaya. Moreover, one could argue that the JIC was slow to recognise the importance of non-state actors as threats to national security. Insurgent groups were often understood within a broader state-centric context. The committee was more interested in external state-level support than internal agency. That said however, the JIC had to be proactive in accepting change, otherwise it would have swiftly become an anachronism and have been dissolved.

It is vital not to forget the role of personalities. Certain individuals, aware of the international and Whitehall contexts, were influential in instigating reform and broadening the JIC's scope. A prominent example was the energetic, direct and irascible Gerald Templer. His 1955 review of colonial intelligence and security was highly influential. Having served both as a former director of military intelligence in Whitehall and as high commissioner during the violence in Malaya, Templer was uniquely placed to conduct such a review. He possessed the required authority and reputation to achieve results.

Patrick Dean, JIC chairman in the 1950s, must also take credit for recognising the increasingly interdepartmental nature of intelligence. Dean was influential within Whitehall's secret spheres and successfully argued in favour of the move to the Cabinet Office. Strong characters also drove reform in the 1960s. For example, successive JIC chairmen Bernard Burrows and Denis Greenhill were both powerful and authoritative figures within the Foreign Office. Alongside the Cabinet Secretary Burke Trend, himself deeply interested in intelligence, they were particularly prominent in reforming the assessment drafting system and the subsequent creation of the Assessments Staff. Such figures were more proactive in driving the committee forward. Similarly, certain chairmen were integral to challenging both the military's narrow view of security and its constraints on the committee's role in the immediate years after 1945.

However, change always creates some resistance. Reforms and expansion thus naturally created friction both interdepartmentally and within the JIC. Yet such tension and the subsequent debate provided the third vehicle for the committee's successful evolution. The 1957 reforms provide an interesting example of this. They can be conceptualised partly as the culmination of an acrimonious row between the JIC and the Colonial Office lingering for a long couple of years following the publication of Templer's recommendations. Colonial Office resistance caused reflection on the nature of intelligence and the scope of the JIC. Central to the British system, collegiality and interdependence created conflict but ultimately drove the committee to broaden its agenda.
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It should be noted, however, that the Colonial Office remained sceptical of the committee during and after its transition to the Cabinet Office.

Finally, and linked to the above factors, the JIC's sensitivity to the policy context aided the committee's successful negotiation of the Whitehall jungle. Illustrating the virtues of a more activist approach to intelligence assessment, a closer relationship between the intelligence and policy communities allowed the JIC to stay aware of the policy contexts in which it operated. It could thus be relevant, timely, influential and able to gain the trust of senior Whitehall personnel. It must, however, also be remembered that the JIC's own ambition would also have been a catalyst for its rise—after all, intelligence officers thrive on access to those in power. Moreover, one could perhaps argue that the broadening of the agenda was not driven so much by a renewed understanding of threats; rather it was driven by JIC empire-building. The Colonial Office certainly held such a view in the 1950s. This is likely to be a factor, but there is certainly a sense within the files that the committee did genuinely seek to reconsider the nature of security in the post-war world. The JIC's current status, position and role are the result of a long and difficult evolutionary process driven by a variety of factors. It would be difficult to create a similar body from scratch in the twenty-first century.

There was, however, one area or dimension of security on which the JIC was conspicuously silent for much of this period: the economic realm. Economic considerations clearly loomed large over much British thinking during the post-1945 period, as the impecunious British government sought to maximise influence with minimum resources. This was rarely translated effectively into intelligence assessments however,
and the committee remained largely uninterested in economic intelligence or of appreciations of the economic situation in various colonies on the road to independence. The JIC was effective at placing insurgencies into the broader political context, but neglected to consider their economic impact. In 1967 for example, one official complained to the cabinet secretary that JIC reports ‘suffered through the lack of economic content'. Philip Davies points to an interesting example regarding Sub-Saharan Africa: complaints were raised that an assessment overlooked the impact of economic trends in determining the type of leaders who would emerge in the countries concerned. This, the official continued, was ‘not the fault of those doing the studies, but a fault in the machinery in that the necessary machinery was not available to them'.
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It was not until the mid-1960s, when economic matters became increasingly intertwined with military and political aspects of security, that this was addressed. Burke Trend and Harold Wilson agreed that ‘much greater importance should be given in future to economic intelligence; and the effort in this field needed largely to be switched from concentration on the Communist world to the need for full and up-to-date intelligence about economic activity in the non-Communist world as it affected British interests in the financial, industrial, or commercial fields'.
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A separate JIC was created in 1968 to consider such economic issues. Although the experiment was short-lived, ‘international economic matters' remain on the JIC's terms of reference today.
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The evolution of the JIC is a story of the quest for inclusivity in determining threats. Challenging orthodox conceptualisations of security, the committee gradually broadened intelligence beyond conventional military matters to include political, and later economic, issues. This, as we have seen, sparked numerous debates between different departments about the intelligence agenda. These issues remain highly relevant. Fascinatingly, similar debates continue (sometimes fiercely) within Whitehall today. What constitutes a threat to national security? Are JIC conceptualisations and agendas inclusive enough? In the 1950s, the Colonial Office vehemently opposed the JIC's militaristic understandings of security, causing a Whitehall ‘showdown'. Despite the progress made since then, other departments today remain frustrated by what they see as a narrow intelligence agenda. Just as the committee was once perceived as a military body, the JIC can now arguably be seen merely as a foreign policy debating club. One could argue that it neglects
threats such as drugs, mass immigration, fraud from places such as West Africa and other organised crime. This has created familiar friction within Whitehall.
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It will be interesting, for example, to see how the new National Crime Agency, when created in 2013, will fit into the JIC and National Security Council structure. Will its head sit on the National Security Council alongside his colleagues from MI5 and SIS, thereby driving the JIC's agenda? Alan West, a former chief of defence intelligence, has recently speculated that the NSC does not consider issues such as organised crime. Although recognised as a threat by the National Security Strategy, the NSC, in West's view, is likely to be more selective.
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Indeed, crime falls into what one former MI5 director-general has described as a grey area. The point at which it becomes a national security issue is unclear.
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Insurgency was a grey area during the Cold War, and this blurred gap between inconvenience and threat remains something governments need to carefully consider when defining the JIC's role. There is a continuing trend for intelligence to be used in support of a larger number of policy areas across government. Accordingly, in the words of one former adviser, ‘Government needs to think about how best to manage and facilitate this through the JIC and within the context of the statutory reporting lines and authorisations of the single agencies'.
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Non-state actors and insurgencies continue to pose a threat to British strategic interests. They remain a core priority for the intelligence community. The 2010 National Security Risk Assessment exercise placed international terrorism as a tier one priority whilst overseas insurgencies followed closely behind as a tier two priority risk.
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Although the current context differs from that of the 1950s and 1960s, they are by no means entirely disconnected. In fact, one could argue, as leading scholar of warfare Lawrence Freedman and others have done, that certain contemporary irregular threats are rooted in the past. Freedman claims that ‘all the struggles upon which al-Qaeda had fed were by-products of the processes of decolonisation, set in motion by previous world wars, and the creation of numerous new states, many of which turned out to be extremely weak and conflict-ridden'.
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Certain issues underpinning colonial counterinsurgency remain relevant today. Firstly, in the Federation of South Arabia and Dhofar, Britain
gained experience of dealing with problems by operating alongside independent indigenous rulers. The same is very much true of twenty-first century counterinsurgency. Secondly, like Afghanistan and Iraq, colonial states were fragile. Governments were weak, struggled to maintain popular legitimacy and lacked a monopoly on the use of force. Thirdly, insurgents share similar objectives of forcing the West out by maintaining high levels of violence. They sought to make Afghanistan ungovernable and convince NATO governments that the operation was no longer worth the political costs. The same was done in Cyprus.
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There are also key differences. The United Kingdom of course no longer enjoys the benefits of colonial authority over host states. Instead, London now operates as a junior partner in a broader collation. Despite this fundamental paradigm shift, the JIC's role in the counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq can to a certain extent be conceptualised as part of the lineage dating back to Malaya.

Intelligence is crucial at the tactical level of counterinsurgency. It helps to distinguish the insurgents from the broader population and to generate contact information so as to capture or kill the enemy. Yet this book has revealed that the role of strategic intelligence in counter-insurgency was, and remains, equally important. Counterinsurgency is ultimately a strategic task and intelligence is therefore needed at the very top. All source intelligence assessment in Whitehall, in the form of the JIC, was important regarding local issues, which needed centralised coordination between departments or authorisation at government level. It had an important input into broader civilian and military planning, including on issues that extended beyond the specific counterinsurgency theatre—for example troop deployment against the backdrop of broader Cold War requirements.

All source intelligence helped inform policy practitioners of a number of factors from which broader strategic policy could be formulated. These included trends of violence, levels of external support, exploitable macro-level tension between various insurgent groups or within the leadership of an insurgent group, and implications of a broader policy or military strategy on the counterinsurgency effort or vice versa. Strategic intelligence therefore aided policymaking regarding both counter-insurgency specific policy (such as the centralised management of covert action) and broader regional policy, such as decolonisation, which needed to consider the progress of counterinsurgency operations. The
JIC, in effect, helped put intelligence into what the Cabinet Office has recently described as ‘a sensible real-world context' from which it is possible to ‘identify elements that can inform policy-making'.
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We now know that the JIC's nascent and evolving role in counter-insurgency involved four key facets that developed over time: warning, threat assessment, policy impact and intelligence reform. Warning remains an important function for the joint intelligence organisation. The JIC has an official warning role explicitly enshrined in its charter, whilst the chairman is now specifically charged with ensuring that this is discharged effectively.
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Such clarity, however, was not always the case. This book has revealed that the committee was initially strikingly unaware that this role was informally expected. Moreover, any limited warning capabilities that did exist were largely, and understandably, directed towards the Cold War and conventional military threats. Following a number of costly insurgencies however, the JIC did gradually acquire a warning role regarding irregular threats to British interests. This remains the case today. By 2010 the government was emphasising a key priority of intelligence as ‘providing early indications and warnings of the intentions of hostile or potentially hostile state and non-state actors, and insights into their capabilities'.
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