Twilight of the Joint Intelligence Committee?
Dr. Philip H.J. Davies
Director
Brunel Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies
Brunel University
Uxbridge, Middlesex
UB8 3PH
Email: philip.davies@brunel.ac.uk
Tel: 01895 258 118
Twilight of the Joint Intelligence Committee?
Introduction1
The last few years have witnessed a number of significant, and often troubling, changes to the
top-level management structure of the UK’s national intelligence machinery.
The
conventional understanding of the British system is that, since the dark day of the Blitz the
Joint Intelligence Committee has provided continuously operating, tried and true apparatus
for coordinating and managing Britain’s national intelligence effort.2 The JIC is composed of
the heads of the three national security and intelligence agencies, the Chief of Defence
Intelligence, representatives of a number of policy departments, and has strong leading
figures in form of the JIC Chairman and an Intelligence Coordinator (although the latter
post’s formal title has varied somewhat over time). According to this orthodoxy, the JIC in
conjunction with the machinery under it known collectively as the Joint Intelligence
Organisation (JIO) coordinates the national intelligence and security agencies (SIS, GCHQ
and the Security Service3), sets their requirements and issues national intelligence
appreciations or ‘assessments’ that help inform the decision-making of ministers and senior
civil servants, and helps formulate the annual national intelligence budget. But this has not, in
fact, been an accurate description of British intelligence is actually run for some time. Since
summer 2009, in particular, the JIO’s functions have been steadily divided and redistributed
within the Cabinet Office and the JIC itself increasingly marginalised and ineffectual.
For seven decades the JIC has been seen as an enviably successful example to the rest of the
intelligence world, with even American observers often looking to its collegiality and
atmosphere of trust and mutual support as desirable albeit not necessarily easy to emulate.4 It
is surprising, therefore, that the UK has abandoned such a tried and true formula; still more so
that such significant changes should have been undertaken with so little real debate and
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deliberation both within government and without. And despite the publicity surrounding the
establishment of a new National Security Council and National Security Adviser by the new
Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government, they have elected to the troubling 2009
arrangements forward virtually unaltered. With the central coordination of intelligence in the
UK at its weakest since before the Second World War there is no sign that the new
administration in Downing Street is even aware that any problem exists. To make matters
still more alarming, pressure on the intelligence community is only likely to increase in the
wake of the Government’s budget-triaging Strategic Defence and Security Review.
Consequently, conditions are taking shape for Britain’s intelligence community to slide into
an unprecedented crisis in its top-level management with all that implies for the effective
provision of national security for the United Kingdom. (1)
Custom and Precedent
The conventional understanding of the JIC system recounted above actually describes a
formula that took shape during the Cold War and acquired much of its specific as a result of
reforms commenced by Cabinet Secretary Sir Burke Trend in 1964 5 and which culminated in
sweeping changes to Joint Intelligence Organisation in 1968.6 It is important, however, to
also keep in mind that the JIO did not function as a stand-alone intelligence architecture but
stood at the centre of an interlinked and cross-connected triad of hierarchies within the
Cabinet Office for policy, intelligence and security respectively. Each hierarchy answered to
a separate Cabinet Subcommittee of Ministers beneath which came various top-level civil
service committees of at the permanent undersecretary (PUS) level7, then interagency
executive-level committees under which would be arrayed a constellation of senior working2
Twilight of the Joint Intelligence Committee?
level subcommittees. These committees had interlocking memberships because many of the
same departments and agencies were involved in each sphere and frequently shared
administrative staffing arrangements.
Consequently, at the top of the policy machine was Cabinet’s Defence and Overseas Policy
Committee (DOPC) which had under it the Permanent Secretaries’ Overseas Policy and
Defence Official Committee (OPD(O)) supported by an Overseas and Defence Policy Staff
(2). Under OPD(O) was another assortment of task-specific executive and working level
subcommittees, such as the Joint Action Committee (JAC) which supervised covert action.8
In the same fashion, protective security and counter-intelligence answered to a Ministerial
Committee on Security which was supported at the by the Official Committee on Security
(S(O)) which, unlike the intelligence hierarchy, included representation at both the heads-ofagency and permanent secretaries’ level. Under S(O) were various specialist interagency
committees dealing with matters like general security policy or personnel security and
vetting.9 At the core of all of this, however, was the intelligence hierarchy, and at the heart of
that was the Joint Intelligence Organisation.
At the very top of the intelligence hierarchy was an overarching ministerial committee on
intelligence which changed names depending which party was in power. Under Labour it
was the Committee on Security and Intelligence (CSI) and under the Conservatives the
Committee on Intelligence and Security (CIS; no one appears to have had any plan for what
to call it in the seemingly unlikely event that the Liberals ever returned to power on their
own). The ministerial committee was chaired by the Prime Minister and its core members
were the Foreign, Defence and Home Secretaries and Chancellor of the Exchequer. Under
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the ministerial committee was the permanent secretaries’ ‘official committee’ called the
Permanent Secretaries’ Committee on the Intelligence Services (PSIS). This was chaired by
the Cabinet Secretary and included the Permanent Secretaries of the Foreign and
Commonwealth Office, Defence, Home Office and the Treasury with the JIC Chairman and
the Intelligence Coordinator in attendance.
At the executive level came the best known feature of the entire system, Joint Intelligence
Committee. Within the JIC membership, the Chief of SIS (sometimes called ‘C’), Director of
GCHQ and Director-General of the Security Service all held junior Permanent Secretary
seniority while the representatives of various policy departments, Chairman and Coordinator
were nominally appointed at Deputy Undersecretary level. The deputy chair was provided by
the head of the Defence Intelligence Staff which was also appointed at the military equivalent
of Deputy Secretary (i.e. three star).10 Formal rank differences, however, were rather a
subtext and discussion tended to proceed very much on a peer-to-peer basis11 although clear
leadership by a strong Chairman was essential to the process and is clearly visible throughout
the JIC’s archival record.
Below the JIC was a range of working-level subcommittees and staffs. These included an
Assessments Staff which drafted national assessments, the Current Intelligence Groups which
reviewed and agreed draft assessments for JIC ratification, a small Coordinator’s Group and
the JIC Secretariat who controlled the paper flow and published and circulated the reports it
generated.12 The CIGs were actually senior working-level JIC subcommittees, each with a
geographical or functional remit. The Chief of the Assessments Staff also sat on the JIC, and
heads of the Assessments Staff drafting teams typically chaired the various CIGs.
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Twilight of the Joint Intelligence Committee?
The Chairman and Coordinator formed the hub of the JIO. Broadly speaking JIC Chairman
managed the activities of the Committee and its subcommittees, the Secretariat and the
Assessment Staff while the Coordinator handled what today would be termed ‘the
interagency’; mediating disputes between the various agencies as well as steering and
facilitating the formulation of national intelligence requirements and budgets. The Chair had
originally been filled by the Foreign Office since 1939, although after Lord Franks’ 1983
Falkland Islands Review13 the position was provided by the Cabinet Office. The post had
started out as comparatively junior as a Foreign Office Assistant Secretary but by the 1960s it
was appointed at Deputy Secretary level. The Coordinator was one of the main innovations
of the 1968 Trend reforms, although the possibility of separating JIC management from the
interagency role had been considered as early as Air Chief Marshall Sir Douglas Evill’s postwar review in 1947.14 In principle the Coordinator was appointed at Deputy Undersecretary
as well, although in practice it was filled by a retired senior officer from one of the national
agencies, more often than not a former intelligence agency head. As a general rule,
nonetheless, the JIC Chairman held the leading role in JIC affairs.
The JIO system was concerned with four main functions: national assessments, interagency
coordination, national intelligence requirements and priorities and finally the budgets of the
three national agencies.15 The JIC was directly responsible for day-to-day management of the
first three, although the Permanent Secretaries committee was charged with ‘broad
supervision over the intelligence community as a whole’.16 Approval of the intelligence
budget, known originally as the ‘Intelligence Estimates’, was a PSIS matter and not handled
by the JIC as such, although elements of the JIO steered the calculation and negotiation of the
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Estimates. As noted above, the Assessments Staff drafted national assessments which were
subject to interagency challenge, review and coordination (in the American sense) by the
Current Intelligence Groups before being signed off by the JIC. Requirements were
articulated through an annual National Intelligence Requirement and Priorities Paper (NIRP).
The NIRP was formulated through interdepartmental discussions steered by the Coordinator
and the Coordinator’s Group. It was then reviewed and agreed by the JIC and forwarded to
the Permanent Secretaries’ Committee who passed it up to the Ministerial Committee for
approval.17 Budget discussions were handled similarly by the Coordinator and Coordinator’s
Group, but once formulated, the Estimates went directly to the Permanent Secretaries’
Committee and were then ‘sponsored’ during annual Cabinet budget debate by the Foreign,
Defence and Home Secretaries rather than being handled by the ministerial intelligence
committee.18 It is, however, easy to overstate this difference because these ministers were
also principal members of the Ministerial intelligence committee.
The JIO’s centrality reached beyond just intelligence. Activities by the national agencies in
support of security policy or covert actions formulated by Joint Action Committee in the
policy hierarchy and approved by OPDO(O) and DOPC all had to be funded from moneys
allocated under the Intelligence Estimates, and factored as far as possible into NIRP, both
promulgated by the JIC. The JIC’s Secretariat staffed not only the JIO but also the S(O)
machinery and elements of the policy machine such as the JAC. The JIO and its senior
officials managed the machine, set the requirements and supervised the purse-strings; it ran
British intelligence coherently and consistently and provided ‘joined up government’ for
intelligence long before the idea became the watchword of Civil Service reform in the 1990s.
It had its limitations, to be sure. It was both constrained as well as supported by the fact that
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Twilight of the Joint Intelligence Committee?
its decisions had to be a consensus.19 Formally it depended on buy-in and negotiation rather
than any ability to whip agencies and departments into line. But always behind the authority
of the JIC Chairman and the Intelligence Coordinator loomed that of the Cabinet Secretary
and behind him the Prime Minister and the ultimate authority of the Royal Prerogative. But
unlike the strife-prone and chronically deadlocked US intelligence community machinery20 it
worked, and by the standards of getting things done in any large organization, it worked well.
The Tinkering Years
After the Cold War the JIC came under pressure from a range of directions. First of these
was adjusting to the new strategic reality and the fiscal stringencies of the expected ‘peace
dividend’. Second was a new public scrutiny arising from the establishment of legislative
oversight via the Intelligence and Security Committee under by the 1994 Intelligence
Services Act. Then came the combined challenges presented by the New Labour government
of Tony Blair elected in 1997, a government whose leadership had no prior ministerial
experience and hence no first-hand understanding of government in general or intelligence in
particular. The first challenge was the impact of the Blair government’s campaign for civil
service reform.
The second was New Labour’s own hierarchy- and clique-oriented
organisational ethos which has been described as ‘Napoleonic’ even by one of its original
architects.21
Finally there were and finally the jolts of 9/11 and Iraq and the Blair
government’s determined (and largely successful) efforts to transfer blame for their policy
decisions to the intelligence community.
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Twilight of the Joint Intelligence Committee?
Initially, the ‘peace dividend’ austerities actually provided the JIC with means to reinforce its
role and authority.
Under John Major’s second government, former Permanent
Undersecretary of Defence Sir Michael Quinlan undertook a review of intelligence
resourcing and coordination which prompted an overhaul of JIC budgetary and requirements
systems that served to bind the two more closely together than ever.
22
The ‘Intelligence
Estimates’ were replaced with a new scheme termed the Single Intelligence Vote (later Single
Intelligence Account or SIA). Furthermore, the agencies would have their performance and
expenditure of SIA funds evaluated annually by the Coordinator against the tasks laid upon
them under the National Intelligence and Requirements Paper.23 The result was not merely a
budget on the one hand and a wish list on the other. It was a fiscal management formula
intended to help the agencies steer their expenditure while at the same time tightening up the
ability to assess their value-for-money.
At the same time, the intelligence community had to reckon with a new level of oversight
from the Intelligence and Security Committee. From its inception, the ISC persistently
expressed concern about the apparent inactivity of the permanent secretaries’ and ministerial
committees. Both rarely actually convened. Instead, the annual intelligence requirements
and Single Intelligence Account were simply circulated to their memberships individually
and signed off. Successive ISCs between 1995 and 2008 viewed this as an alarming sign of
lax supervision and weak oversight.24 There seems to have been no consideration of the
possibility that there was no real need for PSIS or the Ministerial committee to meet because
any contentious or unresolved issues were being effectively dealt with one or two echelons
down at the executive and senior working levels. And, if a truly intractable difference
amongst the intelligence community presented itself the possibility of meeting at the official
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Twilight of the Joint Intelligence Committee?
and ministerial levels was still there. Instead the matter was cast by the politicians on ISC as
a failure of governance rather than a success of management.
There was also dissatisfaction on the ISC regarding the roles and responsibilities of JIC
Chairman and Intelligence Coordinator. As noted earlier, there had long been discussion
over whether the two roles should be combined or separate; Evill had elected to keep them
together, Trend to separate them. During the 1990s the practice resumed of amalgamating
the two positions. One such combined JIC Chairman/Coordinator was Sir Peter Ricketts
(recently, of course, appointed the new National Security Advisor, to which we shall
return).25 At this point, the ISC began to sound a note of concern. While the Chairman had
been traditionally drawn from the FCO or Cabinet Office, the Coordinator had always been a
senior intelligence practitioner from one of the national agencies. Amalgamating the two in
the Chair meant that the interagency role was no longer handled by a career intelligence
professional. As a result, in its 1999-2000 annual report the ISC concluded that the combined
position was being ‘reduced in scale and influence’, resulting in their oft-quoted concern that
there might be a ‘a weakness at the centre’ of the JIC.26 The ISC’s conclusion seems
somewhat paradoxical given that the original reason Evill and Trend considering separating
the posts was the danger overloading the Chair rather than under-powering it. That being
said, the amalgamation was problematic from either point of view.
The impact of the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States the government
both accelerated the impact of New Labour’s civil service reform programme on the Joint
Intelligence Organisation. It also provided a lever for the Blair leadership bring intelligence
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Twilight of the Joint Intelligence Committee?
more into line with their preferred management model while making a public show of
mobilising the government to deal with the threat of Jihadist militancy. Despite its rhetoric of
‘joined up government’, Tony Blair’s New Labour appears to have been primarily geared
towards hierarchical, bureaucratic models of management. This stands in contrast with the
flexible, collegial and network-oriented ‘organic’ approaches that management research since
the 1960s has consistently concluded are best suited to the kind fluid, changing and complex
circumstances27 that confront intelligence organisations. This approach had already had an
impact on the Cabinet Office policy hierarchy under the Cabinet Defence and Overseas
Policy Committee. As part of a supposed modernisation of the Cabinet Office secretariat
system the old formula of the Overseas Policy and Defence (Official) Committee (OPD(O))
and its OPD(O) Staff had been replaced with a new, more mechanistic Overseas and Defence
Secretariat. (3)28 (4) ODS was, furthermore, detached from the Cabinet Office entirely and
transferred to the Prime Minister’s Office in 10 Downing Street. This ran somewhat counter
to the traditional proximity and interconnectedness of policy, intelligence and security,
although the head of ODS sat on the JIC and the working level policy subcommittees such as
the Counter-Proliferation Committee retained their interlocking memberships with the
intelligence and security bodies.29
The first phase (5) New Labour’s restructuring of intelligence was to replace the Trend-era
Intelligence Coordinator with a new Security and Intelligence Coordinator (SIC). The new
post was appointed at serving permanent secretary grade in the form of former GCHQ
director Sir David Omand. The SIC oversaw not only the intelligence interagency but also a
new Civil Contingencies Secretariat concerned with what became known as ‘resilience’
(effectively homeland security).30 The new post also took over the Cabinet Secretary’s
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intelligence role in order to free the latter to concentrate on civil service reform.
Consequently the Coordinator also acted as accounting officer for the SIA and chaired the
Permanent Secretaries’ committee. At the same time, the JIC Secretariat (6) was expanded
and formally subsumed the Coordinator’s Group to cope with the SIC’s new responsibilities
and was redesignated the Intelligence and Security Secretariat (ISS).(7)31
One of the side effects of this development was to once again decouple the Coordinator’s role
from that of the JIC Chairman. The latter post was taken up by SIS’s former Director of
Security and Public Affairs (now Sir) John Scarlett.32 However, after the revelations about
Iraq and reports by the ISC33, Lord Hutton34 and Lord Butler35 the Government reamalgamated the two positions in the form of a Permanent Secretary for Intelligence,
Security and Resilience (PUS/ISR). The original PUS/ISR was Sir Richard Mottram.36 In
the event, however, Mottram delegated the task of actually chairing the JIC to a junior
official for whom he served as both line manager as well as senior colleague on the JIC. The
historical relationship between Chairman and Coordinator had now been effectively reversed,
and national intelligence under New Labour was becoming increasingly geared towards
hierarchical leadership rather than collegial self-regulation.
Going Off The Rails
Despite trying to distance himself from Blair’s methods, once Gordon Brown took over he
introduced a succession of measures that would alter the JIO far more fundamentally and
counter-productively than his predecessor. Shortly after taking office in 2007, he abolished
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the long-standing Cabinet Defence and Overseas Policy Committee and replaced it with a
National Security, International Relations and Development (NSID) Committee.37 The
Brown administration appears to have established NSID in a large part to try and steal a
march on Conservative opposition leader David Cameron’s proposals for a new National
Security Council.38 NSID itself sat atop a set of ministerial and official subcommittees and
was supported by a new National Security Secretariat which initially subsumed the DOPC’s
supporting Overseas and Defence Secretariat (which had previously returned to the Cabinet
Office from Downing Street). In some respects, the change was less radical than press
releases suggested. NSID had much the same core Ministerial composition as its predecessor
although some additional departments were included.
However, the focus on ‘national
security’ was a much narrower remit and the NS Secretariat would quickly prove to have too
limited a field of interest. After all, there is much in foreign and development policy which is
not directly concerned with national security as such. Consequently, shortly before the 2010
election it proved necessary to re-create ODS in the form of a Foreign and Defence Policy
Secretariat.39
By 2008 the NSID hierarchy included a new sub-committee on intelligence, NSID(I). This
was evidently intended to replace the moribund Committee on Security and Intelligence40
although the two appear to have coexisted for some time on paper.
With Mottram’s
retirement, the Chair and Coordinator roles were formally separated once again. However,
the new Chairman, Alex Allan, had to operate in the shadow of an even more exalted
counterpart.
Mottram’s replacement, Robert Hannigan, was styled not merely Head of
Intelligence, Security and Resilience but Prime Minister’s Security Adviser as well.41 The
only significant reduction in the Coordinator role was that the role of accounting officer for
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Twilight of the Joint Intelligence Committee?
the Single Intelligence Account reverted to the Cabinet Secretary although Hannigan
remained responsible for ‘day to day running of the SIA’.42
There were also difficulties emerging for the coordination of security. Impelled not only by
the legacy of the July 7 2005 London bombings but by a series of coordinated (albeit
relatively ineffectual) attacks on Brown’s first day in office, his government established a
new interagency coordinating office strictly to deal with terrorism. Located not centrally but
within the Home Office, the Office for Security and Counterterrorism (OSCT)43 effectively
duplicated the JIC’s counter-terrorism intelligence role as well as the coordination of policy
and law enforcement against terrorism handled by the Cabinet Office security and resilience
machinery under S(O). The result was effectively two parallel counter-terrorist coordinating
efforts at work in two separate branches of government which were not particularly ‘joined
up’.
The most significant and problematic changes would, however, come from an entirely
different direction. Throughout the New Labour years, the Treasury (Brown’s erstwhile
department) had remained dissatisfied with the national agencies’ fiscal management,
sustained economic boom notwithstanding.
As a result, the old National Intelligence
Requirements and Priorities formula had been replaced in 2001 by a more streamlined
tasking scheme designated Requirements and Priorities for Secret Intelligence (RPSI).44 By
the end of the decade boom had turned to bust creating an almost unprecedented need for
fiscal restraint and Treasury renewed its pressure on the intelligence community. In summer
2009 the SIA management team in the Intelligence and Security Secretariat produced a paper
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that argued rather idiosyncratically that the SIA on its own – not in concert with requirements
and priorities -- was ‘the principal lever’ by which the work of the intelligence agencies was
managed and directed.
They therefore recommended abolishing both the ministerial
committee and PSIS and replacing the former with the NSID intelligence subcommittee and
the latter with a new PUS-level official committee chaired by the Cabinet Secretary’. These
committees were to be supported by their own, new secretariat.45
Rather than simply replacing the two existing senior committees however, Brown elected to
completely rework the senior management of intelligence. NSID(I) formally replaced the
ministerial committee and PSIS was supplanted by an NSID official committee on
intelligence designated NSID(I)(O). NSID(I)(O) did not merely replace PSIS however; it
also absorbed the JIC’s remit for day-to-day direction of the intelligence community.46
Consequently its membership included the heads of the national agencies as well as the
relevant permanent secretaries. To the JIC were left formulating and propagating the annual
national Requirements and Priorities for Secret Intelligence on the one hand and reviewing
and approving national assessments on the other. While the JIC retained the Assessments
Staff, it was stripped of its Secretariat which moved to the new committees to become the
Cabinet Office Directorate of Intelligence. 47
Whilst most of this information was included in the updated Intelligence Community pages
on the Cabinet Office web site, there was no public announcement and advocacy of the
changes as there had been of previous reforms after the Butler review. None of the changes
described above was ever reflected in an update of the Cabinet Office booklet on intelligence.
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The increasingly outdated and irrelevant 2006 version continued to be presented on the
Intelligence Community Website. Likewise, in neither of its reports since 2008 has the ISC
even acknowledged or reported on the changes to interagency coordination represented by the
division of tasks between JIC and NSID(I)(O). Instead it has confined its comments to
expressions of approval for NSID(I) supplanting the older Ministerial committee, and
discussion of a new JIC ‘matrix approach’ requirements and priorities formula as if nothing
more significant had changed at the executive level.48
Brown’s chopping and changing of the national intelligence machinery was already
generating problems by spring 2010 with a national election looming. There were now two
putatively central intelligence coordinating committees, both making potential demands on
the scarce time of agency heads – and one clearly held more real authority than the other.
This new division of responsibilities, moreover, seems to have been only weakly understood
outside 70 Whitehall with other branches of government confused and uncertain about how
national intelligence was now supposed to be managed. There were also signs of RPSI losing
authority with the intelligence and security agencies. According the 2009-2010 ISC report,
the Chief of SIS announced to the Committee that ‘JIC priorities are not gospel as far as SIS
is concerned’ and ‘Nobody tells me I have to report to the JIC’.49 To have the head of a
national agency speak so dismissively not merely of national intelligence requirements but of
the JIC itself, and do so on the record, is a truly alarming indication of the depth of malaise
Brown’s formula had created within British intelligence.
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With other priories and urgencies, the new coalition government has simply carried the
Brown-era arrangements for intelligence forwards under the new National Security Council.
Indeed, the NSC itself is essentially an enhanced NSID with a still further enlarged remit. By
the same token, the National Security Adviser role combines both Hannigan’s Prime
Minister’s Security Adviser with supervision of the foreign and defence policy machinery as
well. Consequently, the new post has two deputies; a Deputy NSA for Foreign and Defence
Policy overseeing the Cabinet Office policy hierarchy and another Deputy NSA for
Intelligence, Security and Resilience.50 Likewise, the intelligence coordinating machinery of
NSID has likewise carried over.51 The division of labour between the JIC and the new
Official committee therefore remains unaltered although the names have been changed to
reflect the current NSC formula (reportedly NSC(I) and NSC(I)(O)).52
To be sure,
appointment of a former combined JIC Chairman and Coordinator in the form of Sir Peter
Rickets may have offset some of the Brown-era irrationalities in practice. But the recent
announcement of Rickets’ impending departure in late 201153 highlights the importance of
formally resolving the structural problems generated by divorcing coordination from
requirements and assessment.(8).
Conclusion
Were this simply a case of reshuffling a deck of complementary committees with interlocking
memberships these developments would be almost entirely anodyne. Surely it hardly matters
whether the leading figures of the intelligence community convene as the JIC or NSID(I)(O).
The point here is not simply to say ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’. The JIC has existed since
the 1930s and may, indeed, have had its day. There are arguably very good grounds for
combining both the Permanent Secretaries and heads of agencies in a common body. Just
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such an arrangement has operated in the Cabinet Office Official Committee on Security since
its inception at the turn of the 1950s. Amalgamating the two echelons would, for example,
eliminate a layer of procedural process and lend still greater authority to the top-level
coordination of intelligence and to national assessments. But this is not what has happened.
Instead, key interlocking tasks have been dragged apart and divided between the new Official
committee and an increasingly hobbled JIC. Various aspects of the UK’s joint intelligence
apparatus have now become so scattered it is not unreasonable to assert that a single Joint
Intelligence Organisation as such no longer exists. Part of the problem is that the bodies and
functions traditionally headed by the JIC draw their authority and therefore their efficacy
from that of the authority of the JIC. NSID and NSID(I)(O) may have inherited their
predecessors’ responsibility for approving national requirements at the highest level, but as
C’s comments indicate, those requirements are still seen in the first instance as JIC product.
And if the JIC is in danger of becoming a debased currency, then the national assessments it
issues, the requirements it articulates and the efforts of the JIC Chairman as ‘head of
profession’ in intelligence analysis must be likewise devalued.
This does not merely affect the JIC.
The Brown reforms did not just formally
decoupledrequirements from coordination; they effectively undermined the very budgetary
and managerial control that they were supposed to enhance. Budgetary management only
makes sense set against clear and authoritative requirements and priorities that direct
spending and against which value-for-money can be evaluated. But if agency heads no
longer take the JIC's requirements and priorities as authoritative how effective can
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management and evaluation of spending under the Single Intelligence Account be? And if
coordination breaks down at the levels of requirements, finances, assessments and
professional standards what hope has the new official committee of genuinely providing
effective overall intelligence coordination? Tragically, after so many decades of the Joint
Intelligence Organisation serving as a template for successful intelligence governance,
effective intelligence coordination in the UK can no longer be taken as a given. And this is a
worrying conclusion to reach at a time when effective and coherent national intelligence is
more crucial than ever. (9)
Glossary
CIS
Committee on Intelligence and Security
CSI
Committee on Security and Intelligence
DOPC
Defence and Overseas Policy Committee
GCHQ
Government Communications Headquarters
ISC
Intelligence and Security Committee
ISS
Intelligence and Security Secretariat
JIC
Joint Intelligence Committee
JIO
Joint Intelligence Organisation
NIRP
National Intelligence Requirements and Priorities Paper
NSC
National Security Council
NSID
National Security, International Relations and Development Committee
NSID(I)
NSID Intelligence Sub-Committee
NSID(I)(O)
NSID Intelligence Official Committee
ODS
Overseas and Defence Secretariat
OSCT
Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism
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PSIS
Permanent Secretaries’ Committee on the Intelligence Services
PUS/ISR
Permanent Undersecretary for Intelligence, Security and Resilience
RPSI
Requirements and Priorities for Secret Intelligence
SIA
Single Intelligence Account
SIC
Security and Intelligence Coordinator
SIS
Secret Intelligence Service (aka MI6)
1
I am indebted to Dr. Kristian Gustafson for comments on earlier drafts of this article.
Research for this article was supported in part by a 2004 Leverhulme Research Fellowship.
2
It would seem almost superfluous to cite specific cases here, but it is important to stress that
the ‘conventional wisdom’ referred to here does not constitute a straw man. Official
government reports from the Falkland Islands Review through successive iterations of the
Cabinet Office Central Intelligence Machinery and National Intelligence Machinery booklets
(London: HMSO, 1993, 1996; TSO 2006) and even the otherwise critical scrutiny of Lord
Butler’s Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction (London: TSO, 2004)
pp.12-14 uniformly represent the JIO as a smoothly oiled machine. This view is generally
endorsed by alumni of the system such as Percy Cradock (Know Your Enemy: How the Joint
Intelligence Committee Saw the World. (London: John Murrary, 2002)) with the principal
dissenting voices being scientist R.V. Jones (R.V. Jones Reflections on Intelligence (London:
Jonathan Cape, 1989) p.27) and soldier Francis de Guingand (Francis de Guingard Generals
at War (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1964), p.170), neither of whom had much patience
for the pleasantries of consensus judgements and painstaking wordsmithing. Although
Herman has expressed some concern about ‘toothlessness’ in his Intelligence Services in the
Information Age (London: Frank Cass 2001) p.105, he also concludes that it is, après
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Churchill, the ‘least worst’ system so far developed. Independent academic scholars like
Christopher Andrew and Richard Aldrich also tend to present a view of a coherent, firmly
bound together JIO machine whatever doubts the latter might express about the specific
judgements and interests of that machine, see for example Andrew ‘Intelligence in the Cold
War: Lessons and Learning’ in Harold Shukman ed. Agents for Change: Intelligence Services
in the 21st Century (London: St. Ermin’s Press, 2000) and Aldrich The Hidden Hand: Britain,
America and Cold War Secret Intelligence. (London: John Murray 2001).
3
The Secret Intelligence Service, SIS (aka MI6) is responsible for espionage abroad,
Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) for the interception of communications
abroad and protection of UK government information systems, and the Security Service (aka
MI5) handles domestic counter-intelligence and counter-terrorism investigations.
4
For example, Presidential Commission on the Roles and Capabilities of the United States
Intelligence Community Preparing for the 21st Century: An Appraisal of US Intelligence
(Washington DC: USGPO, 1996); Twentieth Century Fund Task Force on the Future of US
Intelligence Final Report ((New York: The Twentieth Century Fund Press 1996) p.11.
5
Papers covering this initial period of change can be found in CAB 163/130, The National
Archive (TNA).
6
See, e.g. ‘Reorganisation of Interdepartmental Intelligence Committee Structure’, Annex to
letter from Burke Trend to William Armstrong, 5 March 1968, CAB 163/124 TNA.
7
Unlike the USA, the UK as a politically independent and nominally non-partisan civil
service the seniormost rank within which is permanent undersecretary (PUS), also known as
20
Twilight of the Joint Intelligence Committee?
permanent secretary, beneath which one historically found subsequent grades of deputy
(under)secretary (DUS), assistant (under)secretary (AUS) and junior secretary. Apart from
PUS, however, contemporary senior civil service grades have been substantially reformed
and redesignated as PUS, Director General, Director and Deputy Director. The nearest
equivalent to the UK PUS is probably the Canadian position of Deputy Minister. For a
classic comparative discussion of US and UK public service systems, see Richard E.
Neustadt ‘White House and Whitehall’ The Public Interest 2 (Winter 1966).
8
The JAC remains one of the least known and examined components of the intelligence and
Cabinet Office machineries; see, for example, Clive Jones Britain and the Yemen Civil War,
1962-1965: Ministers, Mercenaries and Mandarins, Foreign Policy and the Limits of Covert
Action. (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2004) p.111; Joint Action
Committee‘Memorandum by the Joint Action Committee’, 25 November 1964 in DEFE
13/404 and R.A. Butler to the Prime Minister ‘Supply of Arms to Dissident Group in Taiz’,
11 September 1964, DEFE 13/570, TNA.
9
Originally S(O) had been chaired in the 1950s by the Treasury, see the various Cabinet
Office Committee Organisation handbooks between 1953 and 1965 in CAB 161, TNA.
10
The DIS post was originally a civilian Director General of Intelligence at DUS level until it
was replaced in the 1980s with a military three-star Chief of Defence Intelligence.
11
In the JIC’s early post-war days one rank-sensitive Director of Military Intelligence who
was Major General was informed bluntly by the JIC Secretary C, ‘a much more exalted
figure’ than his own two-star rank suggested, never complained about sharing the table with a
21
Twilight of the Joint Intelligence Committee?
Director of Naval Intelligence who was only a Commodore. See Capell-Dunn to CavendishBentinck, JS/72/45, 20 February, 1945, CAB 163/6, TNA.
12
See, variously Cabinet Office Central Intelligence Machinery (London: HMSO, 1993)
pp.12-13 and Central Intelligence Machinery (London: HMSO, 1996) pp.4-5; Michael
Herman Intelligence Services in the Information Age (London: Frank Cass, 2001) pp.168171.
13
Lord Franks Falkland Islands Review: Report of a Committee of Privy Counsellors.
(London: HMSO, 1983); By the mid-1990s, however, the Chairmanship had reverted to the
FCO; see Michael Herman Intelligence Services in the Information Age pp.124-125.
14
‘Review of Intelligence Organisations, 1947’, Mis/P(47) 31, 6 November, 1947, CAB
163/7, TNA; for a brief discussion of the Evill review see Michael S. Goodman ‘Learning to
Walk: The Origins of the UK’s Joint Intelligence Committee’ International Journal of
Intelligence and CounterIntelligence, 21: 1 (March 2008) p.53.
15
The long-term stability of this process is striking; see, variously, ‘Reorganisation of
Interdepartmental Intelligence Committee Structure’, Annex to letter from Burke Trend to
William Armstrong, 5 March 1968, CAB 163/124 TNA and Cabinet Office Central
Intelligence Machinery (London: HMSO, 1993) p.13, 17, 25 and the later edition Central
Intelligence Machinery (London: HMSO, 1996) pp.4, 7, 11-12.
16
‘Reorganisation of Interdepartmental Intelligence Committee Structure’, Annex to letter
from Burke Trend to William Armstrong, 5 March 1968, CAB 163/124 TNA, n.b. especially
pp.2-3 on the original formulation; language on JIC terms of reference varied somewhat
always including ‘review’ of the ‘organisation and working of intelligence as a whole’ to
22
Twilight of the Joint Intelligence Committee?
formally expressed ‘direction’; see, e.g. Cabinet Office Central Intelligence Machinery
(London: HMSO, 1996) p.24 for an example of the latter.
17
For accounts of the assessments and NIRP processes see the various iterations of the
Cabinet Office Central Intelligence Machinery booklets cited above.
18
ISC Annual Report 1999-2000 paragraph 23.
19
It is important to stress that the JIC’s consensus rule does not entail suppressing dissent as
has been suggested by Angelo Codevilla (‘Comparative Historical Experience of Doctrine
and Organization’ in Roy Godson ed. Intelligence Requirements for the 1980s: Analysis and
Estimates (Washington DC: National Strategy Information Center, 1986) pp.23-24). In
practice, the dissent rule means either wordsmithing a form of words that both sides in an
argument could live with, or incorporating the point of dissent in the body of a report or
assessement as an alternative reading of the evidence – typically due to a lack of solid
evidence or reporting (see, for example, Jones’ and de Guingand’s dissatisfactions referenced
in note 2 above).
20
Here again, it seems almost unnecessary to cite specifics, but the levels of both
dissatisfaction and consensus on the troubled nature of US intelligence is no less dramatic
than the Whig consensus on British intelligence. Some typical expressions can be found in
National Commission on Terrorist Attacks on the United States. The 9/11 Commission
Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United
States. (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2004) pp.86-92, 407-415, William Odom
Fixing Intelligence for a More Secure America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003);
Michael Warner Central Intelligence: Origin and Evolution. (Washington DC: Center for
23
Twilight of the Joint Intelligence Committee?
Intelligence Studies, 2001) and Amy B. Zegart Flawed by Design: The Evolution of the CIA,
JCS and NSC (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).
21
Peter Mandelson interviewed on the first installment of the BBC 2 documentary ‘The Blair
Years’, broadcast 18 November 2007.
22
Intelligence and Security Committee (hereafter referred to as ISC) Annual Report 1996
(London: HMSO, 1996) p.21; Urban UK Eyes Alpha (London: Faber and Faber, 1996)
pp.199, 260-261.
23
ISC Annual Report 1996 (London: HMSO, 1996) p.21; Cabinet Office Central Intelligence
Machinery (London: HMSO, 1996) p.7.
24
ISC Annual Report 1995 (London: HMSO, 1996, CM 3198) pp.11-12, Annual Report
1999-2000 paragraph 19; Interim Report 2000-20001 (London: TSO, 2001, CM 5126),
Annual Report 2001-2002 (London: TSO, 2002 CM 5542) p.7; Annual Report 2002-2003
(London: TSO, 2003, CM 5837) p.17; Annual Report 2003-2004 (London: TSO, 2004, CM
6240); p.31; Annual Report 2004-2005 (London: TSO, 2005, CM 6510) p.8; Annual Report
2005-2006 (London: TSO, 2006, CM 6864) p.10.
25
Foreign Office ‘About Us: Permanent Under-Secretary of State’ pdf,
http://www.fco.gov.uk accessed 2 February 2007.
26
ISC Annual Report 1999-2000 para.23.
27
The reliance on collegiality of structure and ethos in organisations dealing with complex,
information-impacted and change-intensive environments is a consistent finding in
‘contingency theory’; see, for example, George M. Burns and Tom Stalker, The Management
of Innovation. (London: Tavistock, 1961); Paul R. Lawrence and J.W. Lorsch Organisation
and Environment: Managing Differentiation and Integration (Cambridge, Mass.: Division of
24
Twilight of the Joint Intelligence Committee?
Research, Graduate School of Business Administration, Harvard University, 1967); Lorsch,
J.W. and Allen, Stephen. Managing Diversity and Interdependence: An Organisational Study
of Multi-Divisional Businesses (Boston: Harvard University, 1973); Parker, Glenn M. CrossFunctional Teams: Working with Allies, Enemies and Other Strangers. (San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1994). For explicit application of these concepts to national
intelligence organisations, see Philip H.J. Davies MI6 and the Machinery of Spying (London:
Taylor and Francis, 2004) and Christopher Grey and Andrew Sturdy ‘A Chaos that Worked:
Organizing Bletchley Park’ Public Policy and Administration 25:1 (January 2010).
28
For a brief discussion of Blair’s reorganisation of the ‘traditional secretariats’ in the
Cabinet Office, see Paul Fawcett and Oonagh Gay The Centre of Government-No. 10, the
Cabinet Office and HM Treasury, House of Commons Research Paper 05/92. London: TSO
2005 p.81.
29
Butler Review of Intelligence pp.12, 37-39.
30
Omand himself has drawn this equivalence in his evidence to the Hutton Inquiry on 26
August 2003; http://www.the-hutton-inquiry.org.uk/content/transcripts/hearing-trans19.htm
accessed 15 October 2010.
31
32
ISC Annual Report 2003-2004 p.32, Annual Report 2004-2005 p.8
Butler Review of Intelligence p.12; ISC Annual Report 2003-2004 (London: TSO 2004)
p.31.
33
ISC Inquiry into Intelligence, Assessments and Advice Prior to the Bali Bombings on Bali
12 October 2002. CM 5724 (London: TSO, 2002).
34
Lord Hutton Report of the Inquiry into the Circumstances Surrounding the Death of Dr
David Kelly C.M.G. (London: TSO, 2004).
25
Twilight of the Joint Intelligence Committee?
35
Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction (London: TSO, 2004).
36
Cabinet Office National Intelligence Machinery (London: TSO, 2006) p.21-23.
37
Cabinet Office ‘Ministerial Committee on National Security, International Relations and
Development (NSID)’
http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/secretariats/co
mmittees/nsid.aspx accessed 17 June 2010.
38
Tania Branigan ‘Embattled Cameron opens new front with national security plan’ The
Guardian 27 July 2007; Michael Evans ‘Call for Britain to Copy US Security Council’ The
Times (London) 17 March 2008.
39
Cabinet Office ‘Foreign and Defence Policy Secretariat’
http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/secretariats/foreign_and_defence.aspx accessed 25 March
2010.
40
ISC Annual Report 2007-2008 (London: TSO, 2009) p.33; Cabinet Office ‘Ministerial
Committee On National Security, International Relations and Development: Sub-Committee
on Intelligence (NSID(I))’
http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/secretariats/committees/nsidi.aspx accessed 21 July 2009;
Cabinet Office ‘Cabinet Committees: Composition and Terms of Reference’ accessed July
2007.
41
Cabinet Office ‘The Prime Minister's Security Adviser and Head of Intelligence, Security,
and Resilience’
http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/security_and_intelligence/community/central_intelligence_
machinery/head_isr.aspx accessed 18 March 2009.
42
ISC Annual Report 2008-2009 (London: TSO, 2009) p.5
26
Twilight of the Joint Intelligence Committee?
43
Home Office ‘Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism’
http://tna.europarchive.org/20100419081706/http://security.homeoffice.gov.uk/about-us/
accessed 19 April 2010.
44
ISC Annual Report 2001-2002 (London: TSO, 2002) p.8; Annual Report 2002-2003
(London: TSO, 2003) p.17.
45
N.A. ‘Improving the Central Intelligence Machinery’ (July 2009)
http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/media/300268/improving-the-central-intelligencemachinery.pdf accessed 8 October 2009.
46
Cabinet Office ‘Directorate of National Security’
http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/secretariats/intelligence_and_security.aspx accessed 25
March 2010.
the excision of the budgetary role from the JIC’s remit is notable in its terms of reference
from late 2009: Cabinet Office ‘Joint Intelligence Committee – Terms of Reference’
http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/security_and_intelligence/community/central_intelligence_
machinery/joint_intelligence_committee/jic_terms.aspx accessed 27 October 2009.
47
Cabinet Office ‘Directorate of National Security’
http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/secretariats/intelligence_and_security.aspx, accessed 25
March 2010.
48
ISC Annual Report 2007-2008 (London: TSO, 2009) pp. 31,33.
49
ISC Annual Report 2009-2010 (London: TSO, 2010) p.32; the report does not indicate
whether this was Scarlett or his replacement John Sawyers.
50
‘Written Evidence Submitted by Oliver Letwin MP, Minister for Government Policy,
Cabinet Office (GS 02)’ in House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee: Who
Does Grand Strategy?, http://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons-committees/public27
Twilight of the Joint Intelligence Committee?
administration/AllmemosforwebsiteGS.pdf accessed 2 October 2010. I am indebted to
Andrew Brunatti for bringing this source to my attention.
51
Cabinet Office ‘Structure Charts’ pp.12-13;
http://download.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/organogram/co-organogram.pdf accessed 17 June 2010.
52
Private information.
53
‘David Cameron's Security adviser Sir Peter Ricketts to Stand Down’ The Guardian 2
August 2010. (10).
28