We need to be smarter about intelligence

Government, academia should create world-class study plan, James Cox says.

A recent news article from the Canadian Press revealed the federal government's reticence in releasing old security and intelligence documents with historical value. But the article uncovered only a mere symptom of a more troubling pathology.

Government engages academia in some serious research, but it has been downright apathetic, if not outright dismissive, of anything approaching education related to the Canadian intelligence enterprise. There is no — repeat no — intelligence education program in government to develop the future Canadian intelligence workforce. Moreover, Canadian academia itself shows little interest in engaging in serious intelligence studies.

Government and academia need to come together to produce world-class Canadian intelligence studies programs for both practitioners and the public at large, if Canada is to sustain any credibility among its closest intelligence allies.

Intelligence, broadly defined, is the acquisition and analysis of information from various sources to support decisions or policy-making. Canadians are generally uneducated about the government intelligence enterprise. While all parliamentary and government intelligence-review bodies in Canada exercise close scrutiny for legal and moral propriety, no one seems bothered with the need to review intelligence activity for efficacy.

Intelligence studies are largely absent from most Canadian universities. Some serious intelligence educational activity appears sporadically at the graduate and postgraduate level, but only if individual students choose to conduct research in the field. Academics who see no problem here, deeming intelligence studies to be unworthy of serious (or any) academic attention, should recall that virtually all historical events have an intelligence antecedent, which may still be unknown because of excessive secrecy.

For instance, when the book The Ultra Secret was released in 1974, it led to demands for immediate and wholesale revision of historical assumptions related to the course of the Second World War in the North Atlantic theatre. Think about that: without historical intelligence studies we really know only half of history.

Of particular concern is the fact that the Canadian intelligence community itself excludes intelligence studies from its professional development programs. Some intelligence training is conducted, most prominently at the Canadian Forces School of Military Intelligence, and some in-house analytical and tradecraft instruction occurs at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, but training only teaches how to do a particular job in an organization. Nowhere in the Canadian intelligence enterprise is there any intelligence education, which is a higher intellectual activity searching for understanding about intelligence in a broader sense.

Finally, lest the reading audience become too smug, it is also necessary to make serious intelligence studies available to Canadians at large, so that intelligence is no longer thought of as a dirty word. Imagine how much more comfortable we all would be if Canadians actually understood what the government intelligence enterprise was supposed to do and how it is supposed to do it.

Having a better public understanding of the Canadian intelligence enterprise, brought on by effective intelligence education programs, would go a long way to enhancing public confidence in a practice that constitutes Canada's national security front line.