Author: Marco Giaconi (Intuslegere.EU, President)

Intelligence is an activity that has many and different aspects; so we have to consider it also from an ethical point of view, not opposed to the common opinion but independent from the political value systems.

When Machiavelli asserts the specific “morals of politics” in the “Principe”, that, afterwards, during the Jesuit period, were summoned up in the famous aphorism “the end does justify the means” (which the Florentine Secretary never wrote) he doesn’t refer to the different ends of the political acting as to morals, but to means at times different from the usual ones to reach the aim of the common welfare.

The State and its stability are the foundations of the common welfare, because without the State there would be the situation described by Hobbes as “everyone against everyone” where the goods and lives of subjects are never safe.

Intelligence is an activity that has many and different aspects; so we have to consider it also from an ethical point of view, not opposed to the common opinion but independent from the political value systems.

When Machiavelli asserts the specific “morals of politics” in the “Principe”, that, afterwards, during the Jesuit period, were summoned up in the famous aphorism “the end does justify the means” (which the Florentine Secretary never wrote) he doesn’t refer to the different ends of the political acting as to morals, but to means at times different from the usual ones to reach the aim of the common welfare.

The State and its stability are the foundations of the common welfare, because without the State there would be the situation described by Hobbes as “everyone against everyone” where the goods and lives of subjects are never safe.

The modern concept of the State as the representative of the common will of its citizens, in addition to its essential and “old” duties, doesn’t exclude the necessity of the State Defence as the defence of the life, the goods, dignity and liberty of all its members.

But today western modern political cultures underline how the State acting has to be easily understood by its citizens, and so it must be homogeneous to the common morals, has to show the basic community values: assertion of democracy, liberty, equal rights between men and women, the fight against poverty.

These are all beautiful things, as policy and Ethics, but they undergo the effect of the “law of the unexpected consequence”.

In other words, if I use lawful means to obtain shareable ends this doesn’t always mean that I will obtain the prearranged end.

Voltaire in his “Philosophical dictionary” at the word “Laws” creates the apologue of an Essene (what today we would call a fundamentalist Jew) who, telling always the truth, lets his boss be killed by thieves and then is also put to death.

“I brought a just-au-corps to Paris and a fur in St. Petersburg” Voltaire finally states, drawing attention to how laws and all ethical rules are unforeseeable in their final effects. And laws are determined by history and personal and group interests.

But Intelligence bases all its activity on the large predictability of an enemy’s actions; so it can and must use value models for its analysis and its actions but must add a different conceptual sequence that let it foresee the unexpected consequences that surely will occur..

This refers both to analysis and to intelligence operations. So considering an Agency actions from a simple adequacy to a point of view simply derived from common morals is a big mistake.

But it’s even a bigger mistake to think that the actions of a service are “beyond good and evil”, as a famous Nietzsche’s title states.

Why? First of all because an Intelligence structure should be in the position to delegating some actions to other agencies outside its organizational chart; it’s useless to turn a Service unit into a police unit or the manager of a commercial bank.

But the Service has to control, manage, give directions and freely correct its operations and analyses on the basis of the delegation of power given by the political authority when and where it’s necessary; sometimes even illicit but right in the main political ends.

Even for an Intelligence Agency it’s suitable the Brecht's saying in “The Threepenny Opera”: first the belly and then morals.

But morals are indeed useful! We need ethics as well to avoid the same unexpected consequences in an action due to superficial, common morals. In the meantime it is needed to avoid that enemy elements or agents whom can manipulate an Agency to discredit it and then close its circle of operative and informative contacts. Morality in useful for fidelization, reliability, effectiveness in all the relations an Agency has with its informants and collaborators. Every lack of ethics calls an equal lack of correctness from every Agency member.

And Italians know something about this.

We need morals as a behavioural model to carry out operations, in order not to let them go off the rails and possibly considering their real effects.

After all, we need morality to see if the settled operation has reached the final goal foreseen by the political Authority in charge.

Then we need morals in an operation to give the right directions to the real actions necessary to settle it.

Finally, we need an intelligence ethics to clear the link between means and ends; not only to reach our result but even in a fair relation with the executives that had previously planned them.

The ethics problem in Intelligence is a problem related mainly to the political class: politicians go to power displaying ethics and values, but are sometimes obliged to act derogating to common ethics when planning Intelligence operations, and are afraid to be labelled as liars.

The easiest thing to do is to transform the Intelligence in a scapegoat according to the “diverted service” model.

So a modern Service has to be a third level master in foreign politics to educate ignorant politicians about the rules and the specific logic of foreign and sometimes even domestic politics.

So we can have an absolutely “ethic” Service sorting two effects: on one side we dully have to conform to the political slogans and produce the highest number of unexpected consequences, on the other side we have a Service that usually acts aside from the political Authority and has the lowest number of unexpected consequences; but produces the greatest domestic political instability. It’s clear that none of these options is acceptable.

We have to avoid on one side the “Carter effect”, occurred when that American president blocked all US aids to the Shah of Persia because of his scarce democratic record, and then almost automatically Carter paved the way for the Shiite revolution of Imam Khomeini, not particularly notorious for his liberal democratic ideas.

On the opposite side of the relation between a service and its political class, for example, we have the internal destabilization actions ordered by the KGB against the PCUS at the beginning of perestrojka.

The first “Carter model” action clearly casts its morality and ethical values on the intelligence operation; and is usually keen to accept as objective reality what the enemy propaganda wants to show; on the other side we have an instability created by a Service which dismantles its political chain of command, wrongly assuming that other State structures may operate as an enemy Service.

In substance, Intelligence ethics can be defined as the “morals of comprehension”: the repetition of ideological one’s own models or political sympaties makes people blind about foreign realities and creates confusion between the “real truth of a fact” and ideology, in fact, the image that the enemy wants to transmit about itself.

So morality can be considered an instrument of knowledge for the Intelligence operator, because avoids extreme and irrational reactions without playing the enemy’s game; and shapes the analysis and the Service actions to face “the real truth of the thing” stated by Machiavelli.

If a Service is obliged to act following illegal procedures, has already lost its game. If it acts as it were an altar boy or a religious preacher, it will point out to its enemies where, when, how damage its own domestic interests.

Finally, let’s remember that everything is Intelligence, or better, everything can be Intelligence.

So, every behavioural model, every OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) datum, every declaration of principle or behaviour is an element to be analysed as a part of an informative puzzle.

Every signal can be interesting and can lead to the conceptual paradigm that we need to discover.

Separating the analysis of values and important ethical behaviours in the political and mediatical scene takes away great areas from the Intelligence analysis.

We can believe that the enemy will keep his word or act according to his principles or even that he will act always against his plain intentions; both these two ways of thinking make one service blind about the real intentions and actions by an opposing agency.

The Islam taqiyya, the right to dissimulation against an unfaithful or an apostate, explains through an analytic comparison not what a jihadist soldier plainly says; but how the unsaid is the area to be explored by Intelligence in order to find the real intentions of the radical islamist at that moment.

Ethics, often different among various peoples and cultures, is an analysis and operative mean.

When the prefect Cesare Mori disjointed the Sicilian mafia in 1925, he made the trick to put a policeman in every house of the Mafia men in hiding; so creating rumours about their wives’ fidelity. In a culture where the appellative “cuckold” is worse than death, the hiding men came back to their towns and were arrested.

So ethics is either an offensive or a defensive instrument in Intelligence, either an analytic technique or a ruled principle in the relationship between Agencies and political authorities; or at last a subjective principle of the actors to avoid the unexpected consequences.

Marco Giaconi

(Translated by Paola di Cairano - www.attitude2web.net )