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ASSIGNMENT

SECURITY AND STRATEGIC STUDIES

SILENT WARFARE: Understanding The World of
Intelligence

NO NAME DEPARTMENT
1 Abukar Mohammed Ibrahim PS
2 Mahad Sharif Hassan IR
3 Nasro Hassan Abdulle IR
4 Hodan Mohamed Ali IR
5 Shamso Abdullahi Muhudin IR

ABRAM N. SHULSKY & GARY J. SCHMITT

Date of Submission: 13/12/2023

December, 2023
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SILENT WARFARE: Understanding The

World of Intelligence
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Summary Chapter 1
What is Intelligence?
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INTRODUCTION

Intelligence refers to information relevant to a government’s formulation and implementation

of policy to further its national security interests and to deal with threats from actual or potential
adversaries. (The term “adversary” is used here in a broad sense. For example, a friendly
government, with which one is negotiating a treaty, may be an adversary in the context of the
negotiation; at a minimum, the sides are presumably competing to maximize the benefits they
gain from the agreement, at least in part at the expense of the other.) In the most obvious and
often most important case, this information has to do with military matters, such as an
adversary’s capabilities and plans for military action
THE SCOPE OF INTELLIGENCE

When a nation is being invaded or is about to be, its national security concerns clearly center
on defeating or preventing the invasion and securing itself against similar situations arising in
the future. In less perilous times, it may be much less clear which foreign nations, events, or
circumstances threaten national security and therefore require the attention of the nation’s
intelligence agencies.
• Domestic Intelligence
• Intelligence and Law Enforcement
• Economics and Intelligence
THE ELEMENTS OF INTELLIGENCE

Collection refers to the gathering of raw data, through espionage; technical means
(photography, interception of electronic communications, and other methods involving
technology); exploitation of “open sources” (for instance, publications, and radio and television
broadcasts); or in any other manner. While the collection is fundamental to intelligence work,
opinions differ regarding the relative importance of the various methods. For example, students
of intelligence have debated the relative importance of “open source” collection versus
methods unique to intelligence services, and the relative importance of espionage versus
technical collection. However good the collected information, it rarely speaks for itself.
In other words, some analysis of the information is necessary if it is to be useful to policymakers
and military commanders. In the vast majority of cases, the collected information is
fragmentary, ambiguous, and susceptible to widely divergent interpretations.

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Summary Chapter 2
Spies, Machines, and Libraries: Collecting Data
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Human intelligence collection:

Human intelligence collection, or espionage, is what the term “intelligence” is most likely to
bring to mind. Typically, it involves the identifying and recruiting of a foreign official who, by
virtue of a position of trust in his government, has access to important information and who is
willing, for some reason, to pass it to officers of one’s intelligence service.
Types of Intelligence Officers

Since they must avoid the attention of the government of the country in which they operate,
intelligence officers cannot simply hang out shingles advertising their willingness to pay cash
for secrets. They require what in intelligence jargon is called “cover”—that is, a plausible
reason for being in the country, visible means of financial support, a pretext for meeting people
with access to sensitive information, and so forth.
• Human Intelligence
• Counterintelligence
• Imagery intelligence
• Intelligence Officer
• Navy Intelligence
Types of Intelligence Sources

Recruited sources are generally considered more reliable since the intelligence officer has had
a chance to study their character and motivation before attempting to recruit them. In addition,
sources to be recruited will have been chosen based on their access to important information.
Walk-ins, on the other hand, are inherently suspect, since there is always the possibility that
the supposed volunteer has in fact been dispatched by his own country’s intelligence service to
pass false or misleading information, i bring about his or her arrest or expulsion. However, an
intelligence service that is too suspicious of walk-ins may miss opportunities to obtain
information that it could have easily had. Intelligence lore and history contain stories of walk-
ins who were at first ignored or spurned but turned out to be valuable intelligence sources.
A famous case of this sort involved Fritz Kolbe, a German foreign ministry official during
World War II. Kolbe’s job included sorting through the mass of cable traffic that flowed into
Berlin daily from German embassies around the world.
✓ Human Intelligence (HUMINT)
✓ Open Source Intelligence (OSINT)
✓ Signals Intelligence (SIGINT)
✓ Geospatial Intelligence (GEOINT)
✓ Measurement and Signal Intelligence (MASINT)

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Summary Chapter 3
What does it all mean, Intelligence Analysis and Production
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What is Analysis?
Analysis refers to the process of transforming the bits and pieces of information that are
collected in whatever fashion into something that is usable by policymakers and military
commanders. The result, or “intelligence product,” can take the form of short memorandums,
elaborate formal reports, briefings, or any other means of presenting information. This section
indicates the breadth of analytical techniques.
Production of Finished Intelligence

The types of analysis described above are the necessary initial steps of the analytical process;
for the most part, the results of this work serve as sources for other intelligence analysts but do
not go directly to the policymaker or military commander (the ultimate consumer of
intelligence). This section discusses the kinds of finished intelligence produced. The analytical
techniques used are neither as technical as cryptanalysis or telemetry analysis, nor unique to
intelligence work. In some cases, such as the production of economic or political intelligence,
the techniques are not distinguishable from those of corresponding social science.
Military Intelligence: Military intelligence deals with information about foreign military
establishments and is needed for planning one’s military forces in peacetime or conducting
military operations in time of war. The most elementary military intelligence is what is known
as the “order of battle,” a tabulation of the basic information about a nation’s military forces—
the amount of manpower, numbers, and types of weapons.
Political Intelligence: Political intelligence consists of information concerning the political
processes, ideas, and intentions of foreign countries, factions, and individual leaders. The
analysis that produces this intelligence is similar to that underlying all academic and
journalistic writing and speculation on both international politics and the domestic politics of
foreign countries.
Economic and Social Intelligence: Economic and social intelligence deal with the same
phenomena as do the various social sciences, at least as far as they are concerned with major
contemporary issues. As with political intelligence, the focus of the intelligence analysis should
be determined by the information that policymakers require. Intelligence analysis here is often
less sophisticated— theoretically and mathematically than corresponding academic studies,
and the problem does not seem to be differences in work circumstances or goals.
These estimates are supposed to take the broadest view of their subject and project the current
situation into the future. In the United States, they are produced by a special staff, with the
support of analysts throughout the intelligence agencies. The estimates are supposed to
incorporate the views of all the agencies in the intelligence community.48 A good deal of effort
is devoted to finding a consensus position, but when this is not possible, a dissenting view may
be expressed in what is traditionally called a “footnote,” even though the dissent is in fact
sometimes included in the text.

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Summary Chapter 4
Working Behind the Scenes: Covert Action
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What is Covert Action?

Covert action, in the U.S. intelligence lexicon, refers to the attempt by one government to
pursue its foreign policy objectives by conducting some secret activity to influence the behavior
of a foreign government or political, military, economic, or societal events and circumstances
in a foreign country. As the term implies the defining characteristic of covert action is that the
government conducts the activity conduct it in a secret or covert manner.
Types and Examples of Covert Action
In its most general sense of the secret influencing of foreign behavior events, or circumstances,
the term “covert action” covers a wide spectrum of activities, running from the most pedestrian,
such as secretly providing technical assistance (such as security or communication equipment
or training) to a friendly foreign government to the most spectacular, such as assassination or
supporting or fomenting a coup d’état.
Covert Support of a Friendly Government

Nonintelligence Assistance: There is some reason to call such an activity covert action. The
support provided to a friendly government helps it stay in power and, in that sense, influences
the course of events in that country. In addition, the action takes place in secret, in that
information is not released to the public concerning the support.
Intelligence Support: Another common type of support rendered to a friendly foreign
government may be noted in particular: the providing or sharing of intelligence information. In
part, because this activity is routine, it would not typically be considered covert action.

Should Covert Action Be Separate?

Arguments against a Separate Covert Action Agency As noted in the first chapter, both the
United States and Britain have discovered through experience that having two organizations
involved in running clandestine operations— one for intelligence collection (espionage) and
one for covert action—can create serious practical problems. During World War II, the British
Special Operations Executive (SOE), charged by Prime Minister Winston Churchill with
“setting Europe ablaze,” was separate from the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, or MI6) and
reported to the minister for economic warfare.
Although conceptually different in function, covert action and human intelligence collection
rely on similar means, especially the secret cooperation of agents able to operate effectively in
the target country. In many cases, the agents who would be useful for one function can perform
the other function as well; two separate offices could easily find themselves competing for the
services of the same individuals.

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Summary Chapter 5
Spy versus Spy: Counterintelligence
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The Classification of Information

Levels of Classification
A classification system categorizes information according to its sensitivity, that is to say, the
amount of damage its revelation to a hostile foreign power could cause and, hence, the
importance of protecting it. In the United States, the first such system for protecting national
security documents was promulgated by the War Department in 1912; the War and Navy
Departments set up their own classification systems during World Wars I and II.
Sensitivity
The U.S. classification system attempts to classify information according to the degree of harm
to the national security its unauthorized release to an adversary would cause. The more
sensitive the information, the more carefully it is to be protected and the fewer the people who
are “cleared” for it (authorized to have access to it).
• Top secret: “exceptionally grave damage”
• Secret: “serious damage”
• Confidential: “damage.
Security
Security measures are steps taken to obstruct a hostile intelligence service’s ability to collect
intelligence. Such measures are designed to prevent a hostile intelligence service from either
gaining access or exploiting any access it may have to personnel, documents, communications,
or operations to gain important information; they constitute the wall surrounding classified
information.
Personnel Security
Personnel security involves procedures for screening potential employees before hiring them
for jobs that give access to information a hostile intelligence service might wish to collect, and
for ensuring that current employees continue to meet the standards for access to such
information. While current and basic intelligence to the work of any nation’s intelligence
services, Its importance varies from nation For example, in the United States, preparing
estimates is seen as the peak of the intelligence process.
Counterintelligence
As the discussion of double agents and deception indicates, protecting the integrity of
intelligence operations can become very complicated, involving much more than catching the
occasional spy. In fact, cases may be linked to each other in various ways; the overall task of
guarding an intelligence apparatus against penetration and deception Counterintelligence.

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Summary Chapter 6
Guarding the Guardians: The Management of Intelligence
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Secrecy and Control

In a modern government, with its many thousands of employees arranged in complicated
bureaucratic structures, the problem of controlling their myriad activities and ensuring that they
are by the law and the policies of their superiors is bound to be difficult. With respect to
intelligence agencies, this basic problem is compounded by secrecy, however legitimate the
need to keep knowledge of certain intelligence sources, methods, and activities secret from the
public and restricted to the smallest possible number of officials within the government.
For Whom Does Intelligence Work?
In any case, it is a peculiar control by a head of government that can be consistent with the
plausible-denial doctrine. It is unlike the ordinary control the head of government exerts over
departments or ministries through an official chain of command and written orders, cabinet
decisions, policy statements, memorandums, and so forth. Its basis is a direct, or personal,
loyalty of the intelligence service to the head of government, rather than bureaucratic
subordination. In past ages, intelligence services commonly worked for a monarch, chief
minister, or commander-in-chief in a personal capacity, outside the ordinary governmental
structures. For example, Sir Francis Walsingham, the powerful secretary of state to Queen
Elizabeth I of England, supported a very effective intelligence service.
The Independence of Intelligence
Given these potential sources of friction in the intelligence-policy relation, the question of how
independent policy intelligence should be is bound to be a complicated one. In a military
command, for instance, the chief intelligence officer is as much a part of the commander’s staff
(and hence as much under his command) as any other aide; there is no question of any
independence. Indeed, the very meaning of the demand that an intelligence agency be
“independent” is not clear. In principle, nobody would advocate that an intelligence service be
independent of the head of government. Nevertheless, as the above discussion indicates, people
often want to use intelligence as a neutral arbiter of policy fights—not only among government
officials but also between government officials and their legislative and intragovernmental
critics.
Democracy and Secrecy
Secrecy, as already noted, raises a potential problem for the control of intelligence agencies by
their nonintelligence superiors. The legitimate need to restrict knowledge of many details of
operations to the smallest possible circles may facilitate a cover-up of unauthorized actions,
thereby preventing higher, nonintelligence authorities from finding out about them.
In a democracy, however, secrecy poses an additional problem: the potential to call into
question the political legitimacy, as opposed to the actual control, of an intelligence service.

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Summary Chapter 7
Two Views of Intelligence
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HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE AMERICAN VIEW

The unsettled conditions brought about by the beginning of World War II and America’s
subsequent entry into it led to massive increases in resources the United States devoted to
intelligence. It also led to a new bureaucratic development, the creation of a central intelligence
service (known first as the Office of the Coordinator of Information and then as the Office of
Strategic Services, or OSS), whose purposes included the collection, analysis, and correlation
of national security information and data.
Despite President Franklin Roosevelt’s decision in July 1941 to create a central capability to
correlate information, none was in place by December 1941, when the failure to foresee the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor highlighted the lack of intelligence correlation and analysis,
since many relevant bits and pieces of information had been available.
Intelligence and Moral Issues
It may seem strange, when writing on a topic in the usually hardheaded field of national security
studies, to discuss moral issues explicitly. Certainly, one risks being accused of naivete for
doing so. Yet, those who reflect on the subject of intelligence have often had to deal with the
question of its morality or, more precisely, the difficult relationship between, for example, the
seeming immorality of inducing people to commit treason, on the one hand, and the great
usefulness and even necessity of doing so, on the other.
Needless to say, Stimson’s view did not survive the unsettled international conditions of the
1930s, let alone World War II itself. However, the new view of intelligence, as sketched out
above, has many characteristics that make it seem more moral than the “traditional” one in the
eyes of its proponents:
• The centrality of analysis (understood as a variant of science, and thus partaking of its
prestige) as opposed to espionage
• The primacy of “clean” technical intelligence over “messy” espionage
• The depreciation of counterintelligence and deception, diminishing the theunpleasant
awareness that intelligence involves a struggle between
• The expansion of intelligence to include areas (societal changes, demography, narcotics
trafficking, and so on) more remote from the political and military core of the struggle
among nations
• The widening of the intelligence audience, tending to convert handmaiden of policy
(which is used to enhance national interests, often at the expense of others) into a
morally neutral provider of information for the government, its opponents, and
eventually the domestic and world public

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Summary Chapter 8
Towards a Theory of Intelligence
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Towards a Theory of Intelligence

This concluding chapter returns to the original question: What is intelligence? Based on
discussion of the elements of intelligence, we are now better able to evaluate the various current
views of intelligence, particularly that presented in the preceding chapter as the “new American
view,” and to attempt a more general definition. The word “intelligence” is used to refer to a
certain kind of knowledge, to the activity of obtaining knowledge of this kind (and thwarting
the similar activity of others), and to the organizations whose function is to obtain (or deny)
it.1 Of these three categories (knowledge, activity, and organization), the first is the most basic,
since the other two are defined in its terms.
Thus, the first problem in defining intelligence is to determine the scope of the knowledge with
which it is concerned. Sherman Kent provides a definition of what he calls “high-level foreign
positive intelligence”: the adjectives are meant to exclude intelligence that is operational or
tactical intelligence (not “high-level”), domestic intelligence (not “foreign”), or
counterintelligence (not “positive”). According to Kent, “What is left is the knowledge
indispensable to our welfare and security. It is both the constructive knowledge with which we
can work toward peace and freedom throughout the world, and the knowledge necessary to the
defense of our country and its ideals

About the Authors

Abram N. Shulsky was a senior fellow at the National Strategy Information Center (NSIC) in
Washington, D.C., when he wrote Silent Warfare. At present, he is a consultant on national
security affairs, working in Washington. Previously, he was a member of the policy planning
staff in the office of the Secretary of Defense. In addition, he has held the positions of director
of strategic arms control policy in the Pentagon and of minority staff director (Democratic) of
the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. He has also been a consultant to the President’s
Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and the acting representative of the Secretary of Defense
at the U.S.–USSR Nuclear and Space Talks in Geneva. Dr. Shulsky is the author of several
articles on intelligence and related national security matters.
Gary J. Schmitt is president of the Project for the New American Century, a Washington-based
think tank specializing in national security affairs. He has served as executive director of the
President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and as minority staff director of the Senate
Select Committee on Intelligence. He has also been a consultant to the Department of Defense.
Dr. Schmitt has written extensively on national security affairs and American government.

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A Reflection: Silent Warfare: Understanding The World of Intelligence

With the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, the war in Afghanistan, and then the invasion
of Iraq, the word intelligence has become a household term and a catch-all expression used
daily by many people within the government, the media, and the general public alike.
Unfortunately, many people seem to misunderstand or misinterpret the concept of intelligence.
For them, and for anyone else with any degree of interest in the world of intelligence, Silent
Warfare is undeniably the best starting point for understanding the subject, although it was
written before the terrorist attacks.
Abram Shulsky, who wrote the original 1991 edition, and Gary Schmitt, who took part in the
1993 re-edition, present a dense and comprehensive treatise aimed at helping us understand the
intricate world of intelligence – hence the judiciously chosen title. Now in its third edition, this
book has incontestably become the best primer on intelligence available. Silent Warfare
provides us with a guide – virtually a textbook – covering all areas from intelligence-gathering
to covert action, from intelligence analysis to counter-intelligence, from the management of
intelligence to definitions of that elusive term. The reader will greatly enjoy the clear and
logical structure of the book and the fact that the authors go straight to the point. All chapters
are kept relatively short (either 10 or 30 pages long) and are subdivided for greater clarity. In
addition, well-chosen historical examples bring relevant and interesting illustrations to the
otherwise very academic style of the text.
A further strength of Silent Warfare is its ability to challenge the reader into making up his own
mind on certain issues by presenting many possible theories, or by discussing both the pros and
cons, without imposing a definitive truth. For example, the last chapter, "Toward a Theory of
Intelligence," despite being the shortest, is probably the most thought-provoking as it directly
addresses the question of what intelligence is. Although that chapter could have easily been
entitled, "A Discussion of Sherman Kent's Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy,"
it is rich in interesting questions and hypotheses on what intelligence really means and whether
it should be seen as a science in itself.
Some previous book reviews have mentioned the somewhat American ethnocentric bias to the
evidence presented by the authors, but that arguable bias is not detrimental to the overall quality
of the book nor is it a hidden bias, the preface stating clearly that Silent Warfare, written by
two Americans, was born out of a course taught at the University of Chicago and that "many
of the examples found in the book are drawn from the British and American intelligence
experiences." (p. vii) In fact, the authors seem to have put a lot of effort into remaining as
objective as possible, hence the textbook style and structure. On a few rare occasions, they do,
however, seem to take a position, such as when presenting arguments in favor of human
intelligence over technological means of intelligence-gathering (pp. 33-37), or when pointing
out that much of the criticism directed against covert actions would have been more properly
directed against the foreign policy they served.

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