Intelligence Sharing and US Counterterrorism Policy

A chapter I wrote on the topic of intelligence sharing and US counterterrorism policy will appear early next year in Emerging Transnational (In)security Governance, edited by Ersel Aydinli. You can find a pre-publication version of the paper here, or just read the summary below:

A top foreign policy priority of the United States is the dismantlement of the al Qaeda terrorist network. Like all terrorist organizations, al Qaeda is most effective if it can successfully conceal its activities from the authorities. Accurate intelligence is thus a crucial part of the campaign against the group. And many states are in a position to develop valuable intelligence. Countries in western Europe, North Africa, the Persian Gulf, and South and Southeast Asia are able to collect intelligence that the United States is unable to gather, and can engage in mutually beneficial intelligence sharing with the United States.

But some of these states also face powerful barriers to full intelligence sharing. European governments face legal challenges to some of their foreign intelligence activities. Domestic political pressures prompt some states in the Middle East and Europe to curtail collaboration with the United States. Some countries contain religious or nationalist groups or elements of the government apparatus that are less enthusiastic about taking effective action against al Qaeda. Other governments may wish to exaggerate the effectiveness of their action against and the accuracy of their intelligence on al Qaeda in order to win the approval and support of the United States.

These cross-cutting motives pose an important challenge for the United States because less than full cooperation and sharing is very difficult for it to detect. All intelligence agencies seek to ensure that their sources of information remain secret. This involves strictly limiting the distribution of such information among government officials and carefully controlling its dissemination to foreign governments. But these security measures also make it very hard for the recipients of shared intelligence to verify its accuracy. The problem for the United States is that some of the states that have the most valuable intelligence on al Qaeda are also those with the strongest incentives to defect from agreements to share such intelligence.

Yet the United States has managed to strengthen intelligence sharing arrangements with many of these countries. How, if at all, do such arrangements address concerns about defection? At one extreme, it has been rather straightforward to arrange effective intelligence sharing with countries that have the fewest incentives to defect, such as those in western Europe. In many (but not all) areas, the United States and European countries have developed mechanisms for the regular exchange of intelligence. At the other extreme, the United States has largely eschewed intelligence sharing with countries that have the strongest motives to defect, such as Iran. More interesting are the arrangements pursued with many of the remaining countries that are formally committed to share intelligence with the United States but also face substantial pressures to renege on this commitment. Here the United States has created hierarchical mechanisms that give it some ability to directly monitor and control the intelligence activities of its partner. These mechanisms provide the United States with a way to secure intelligence from partners of problematic reliability. This paper explains how hierarchical relationships enhance intelligence sharing the conditions under which hierarchy will emerge. Specific mechanisms include financing the partner’s intelligence service to influence its objectives, providing training that imparts technical skills and socializes individuals to the goals of the United States, and rendering suspected terrorists to allied intelligence services in return for influencing their treatment and questioning. These hierarchical mechanisms provide the United States with a way to secure intelligence from rather unreliable partners.