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Just intelligence:
Prolegomena to an ethical
theory
Michael Quinlan
Published online: 15 Mar 2007.

To cite this article: Michael Quinlan (2007) Just intelligence: Prolegomena

to an ethical theory, Intelligence and National Security, 22:1, 1-13, DOI:
10.1080/02684520701200715

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 CENTRE FOR INTELLIGENCE AND INTERNATIONAL
SECURITY STUDIES ANNUAL LECTURE, 2005

Just Intelligence: Prolegomena

to an Ethical Theory

MICHAEL QUINLAN
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At various points in a career as a United Kingdom civil servant, working

mostly in the defence field, I was a customer of secret intelligence, and after
leaving full-time government employment I carried out in 1994 for the Prime
Minister of the day a study on certain aspects of it. (Though the fact of this
study soon became public knowledge, it was not until 2006 that limited
elements of the report were released to public inspection at the National
Archives.) I had long taken an interest in the ethics of military conflict, and in
2000, at an Oxford conference on intelligence (later reflected in a book1) I
ventured the suggestion that there was a case for developing a theory of
‘just intelligence’, on the analogy of ‘just war’ theory. I was subsequently
challenged to contribute to such a task; and the present essay – by someone
who is neither an intelligence professional nor a moral philosopher – offers
accordingly some prolegomena, in the hope of providing stimulus to more
thorough and expert addressal by others. In the course of developing it I have
become increasingly aware that the field is very far from being untilled; but
there is work yet to be done, particularly in the climate of heightened concern
about intelligence work in the context of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Two basic questions present themselves at the outset of reflection. First:
why should we be concerned at all with ethics in this field – is it not
quintessentially one where Machiavelli and realpolitik have to rule? There
are aspects of the intelligence business, as practised by all major countries,
that seem notably disreputable by the behavioural standards of normal human
settings; what purchase can ethics expect to have? ‘Intelligence ethics’ is an
oxymoron’, a long-serving officer from the US Central Intelligence Agency
was once quoted as saying.2 In the discussion at the Oxford conference one
hardened intelligence professional – not from Britain or the United States –
said of ethics in this field, with a dismissive wave of the hand, ‘I leave all that
to the clerics’. But that surely will not do. By contrast, Admiral Stansfield

Intelligence and National Security, Vol.22, No.1, February 2007, pp.1 – 13

ISSN 0268-4527 print 1743-9019 online
DOI: 10.1080/02684520701200715 ª 2007 Michael Quinlan
 2 INTELLIGENCE AND NATIONAL SECURITY

Turner, Director of the US Central Intelligence Agency in the 1980s, said

‘There is one overall test of the ethics of human intelligence activities. That is
whether those approving them feel they could defend their actions before the
public if the actions became public.’3 That is closer to the mark, if somewhat
subjective. The fact is that inescapably and inherently (to adapt Aristotle) the
human being is an ethical animal – that is part of what it means to be human.
We can no more step outside ethics than we can opt out of the force of
gravity. There is no area of human activity, whether public or private,
collective or individual, that has an a priori entitlement to require the
moralist to be silent. If the effective practice of intelligence raises awkward
ethical questions, we are obliged ultimately to face them.
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A consideration at a less elevated level, from practical expediency, points

in the same direction. In most major Western countries over the last couple of
decades, and especially since the 2003 Iraq episode, the business of
intelligence has for a mix of reasons emerged from the shadows into open
view far more fully than was customary in the past, notably in the United
Kingdom. Our publics, thus increasingly aware of the activity, would not
long remain content that what is undertaken in their name should be exempt
from moral standard, constraint and scrutiny.
The second basic question comes at the matter from a different angle. Why
should intelligence need any distinctive ethical consideration, any more than
do other governmental activities like diplomacy, bureaucratic administration
or military procurement? The answer lies in the characteristic already noted:
that its effective practice seems unavoidably to entail doing some things that
are plainly and seriously contrary to the moral rules accepted as governing
most human activity.

THE JUST WAR PARADIGM

The ‘Stansfield Turner’ criterion, taken in isolation, lacks objective

anchorage. We must look for something more systematic. In the search for
that the paradigm of the ‘just war’ tradition4 suggests a starting-point. The
thinkers who developed that tradition were wrestling with the harsh tension
between two truths about the activity of war both of which seemed
inescapable. The first was that it entailed doing things – above all, killing
people – which in any ordinary context were gravely wrong. The second was
that amid the bitter realities of human existence it surely did not make
practical sense – and therefore not moral sense – to demand that the entire
activity of war be dismissed by pacifist anathema insisting that the virtuous
abstain from it. What emerged from the wrestling was the concept, elaborated
over many centuries, of two levels of moral discipline to govern and limit the
activity of war, within the broader context of the duty of public authorities to
 CIISS ANNUAL LECTURE, 2005 3

sustain the well-being of their people – a goal that remains in itself, especially
in relation to tolerably well-ordered polities, a proper ethical good; national
interest (to use a modern term) is not an amoral concept. One level of
discipline concerned the criteria that ought to be met if war was to be justly
undertaken – jus ad bellum. The other concerned the constraints and
prohibitions that ought to be observed in the conduct of war once entered
into – jus in bello.
It is unnecessary here to go into the detailed content of either set of criteria.
The point for the present discussion is that this seems a natural way to
approach the ethical analysis of any activity that poses, prima facie,
considerations in awkward tension, through purporting to require or allow
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conduct towards others that would be reprehensible in most ordinary

situations. The rest of this essay seeks to explore how far and in what ways
the activity of intelligence as practised by the state (issues about information-
gathering by the media or other commercial organizations are not addressed
here) has to be viewed as presenting major ethical considerations in apparent
opposition to one another; and what we might begin to say about the
conditions under which it may properly be engaged in – jus ad intelligentiam,
as it were – and about the limitations that ought to be observed in carrying it
out even when it is properly undertaken – jus in intelligentia.
Two general difficulties about examining the subject need to be
acknowledged. Firstly, far less is dependably known about what is really
done in the business of intelligence than in the business of war. There are
mountains of vivid fiction, a certain amount of shrewd conjecture and hint,
and some wary memoir-writing, but the vast majority of citizens do not know
and cannot readily find out in any specific, comprehensive and dependable
way precisely what intelligence professionals do in concrete day-to-day
operational terms, in the way and degree that we know or can find out what it
is that soldiers do. Notably authentic glimpses of some aspects were provided
in 2004 and 2005 through after-the-event inquiries in the United States and
the United Kingdom into the role played by intelligence in relation to the
2003 Iraq war. The report of the Committee of Privy Counsellors chaired by
Lord Butler of Brockwell5 is a vivid United Kingdom example. But these
were special and limited instances.
The second general difficulty is partly related to the first. There might be
real disadvantage – not just presentational discomfort – in having
governments make to potential adversaries and wrong-doers a public present
of extensive and detailed knowledge about exactly what public authorities
will and will not be prepared to do in gathering information. There is again a
partial analogy here with the use of military force – consider, for example, the
matter of nuclear-weapon targeting for deterrence, on which governments
have scarcely ever been willing to go beyond making, at most, very general
 4 INTELLIGENCE AND NATIONAL SECURITY

statements rather than spell out exact limits to the action they would regard as
tolerable in extremis. And the underlying consideration seems if anything
even more cogent in respect of intelligence than of war.
All that noted, we can with reasonable confidence say a number of
descriptive things about intelligence work. First, much of it consists simply of
carefully collating and analysing material that is available to anyone with the
resources and inclination to gather it, especially in the modern world of
enormous information flows. No moral problem arises there. Second, within
the category of intelligence information that is not available more or less
openly, a great deal is collected by eavesdropping of one sort or another –
picking up communications not meant to be heard by outsiders, breaking
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codes that are intended to conceal content, and the like, including also
watching activities which the actor would have preferred to keep unobserved.
It is not obvious that this is in itself seriously wrong in moral terms; in
ordinary life it may often be a breach of courtesy or social convention, but
scarcely a grave evil. It may in some circumstances be imprudent to
eavesdrop – for example, while it might be highly interesting to install
listening devices in the offices of high functionaries of friendly countries, the
penalties of being found out doing so might well greatly outweigh the
advantages of knowing whatever might be learned. But that is essentially a
calculation about expediency, not moral value. Eavesdropping by intelligence
may nevertheless sometimes entail breaking the law, if not of the eaves-
dropper’s country then at least of the target country, and perhaps inter-
national law, as in Cold War penetration of territorial waters or airspace by
intelligence-gathering vehicles; and infringement of law is in itself prima
facie in need of special justification.
In addition, at least some eavesdropping is in itself, and almost irrespective
of the method employed, constrained by particular agreements voluntarily
entered into between states; and it may be that it would be in the general
interest to widen the ambit of such agreements.6 Whether or not there is such
a widening, any deliberate breach of such commitments must import moral as
well as prudential considerations; but it is then primarily the fact of breaching
agreement rather than the inherent nature of eavesdropping that would raise
the moral considerations.
But, third, it can be no secret that some of what is done in intelligence-
gathering, above all in the category commonly known as HUMINT (‘human
intelligence’) entails a good deal more than eavesdropping. This essay does
not address what is commonly called ‘covert action’ in the sense of physical
intervention to disrupt or prevent, not merely to discover, what an adversary
does; that raises other considerations. Even short of that, however, HUMINT
and other comparable intelligence business have to involve, just for example,
readiness to tell untruths about who and what one is. Conventional fictions
 CIISS ANNUAL LECTURE, 2005 5

like the Ruritanian Embassy presenting as its Deputy Assistant Cultural

Attaché a tough-looking personage of no obvious aesthetic sensibility cause
no problem, but covert operators have to be prepared to tell untruths seriously
intended to mislead public officials like immigration officers or policemen
who customarily have a particular right to be told the truth. Another example
might be stealing the documents of another government; and a further and
harsher one might be turning a blind eye at least temporarily to serious crimes
being committed – perhaps even, still more disquietingly, standing by when
one could have prevented them – by individuals with whom one is
interacting, in order to remain deceptively in their confidence for larger
purposes like penetrating a murderous terrorist organization. (A partial
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parallel is the occasional acceptance by British authorities in the Second

World War, so it is understood, of losses or reverses which the knowledge
gleaned by the ‘ULTRA’ code-breaking success could have been exploited to
prevent, but only at the cost of forfeiting greater long-term benefits expected
from continuing to conceal from the enemy that its signals traffic was being
read.) A yet further instance is that of inducing individuals in other countries
to breach the formal duties and loyalties of their public functions or their
citizenship, and thereafter protecting them in that breaching. Professional
insiders could undoubtedly construct a longer catalogue, but the examples
noted above suffice for the present analysis.
This evident reality, of doing things that in normal settings would merit
condemnation, is one component of the moral tension that besets the activity
of intelligence; it is the analogue, in the just-war comparison, of the fact that
engaging in war entails readiness to kill. In the just-war context the other
component of the tension is that it seems repugnant to practical and therefore
to moral common sense to hold that one must therefore never engage in war
even to stop an Attila or a Hitler. The analogue of this in the intelligence
context would need to assert that it is similarly repugnant to practical and
moral commonsense to hold that we must never engage in intelligence
activity of the kinds just exemplified, even to thwart murderous terrorists or
to strengthen our ability to resist wicked aggression. Governments throughout
the world have plainly been prepared to make that assertion. The next stage in
analysis is to consider what reasons might warrant it.
We need not attempt a comprehensive inventory – which might be long7 –
of situations or objectives in regard to which it would be unreasonable to
dismiss clandestine intelligence-gathering as immoral, or as conferring too
little distinctive benefit to warrant accepting ethical drawbacks. (The
adjective ‘clandestine’ is hereafter used as shorthand for intelligence
collection that has recourse to methods breaching normal ethical rules.
Some of what has been described above as eavesdropping and judged to be in
itself morally unproblematic is also clandestine in the normal sense of the
 6 INTELLIGENCE AND NATIONAL SECURITY

word, but that is not what will be being referred to.) Two categories provide
illustration. The first concerns terrorism. It would be absurd to disqualify
wholesale the use of mendacious deception to penetrate sinister organizations
like Al Qaeda now, or in Northern Ireland’s past the Provisional Irish
Republican Army or its ‘Loyalist’ counterparts, so as to enhance the chances
of preventing lethal violence. It by no means follows that absolutely anything
goes in achieving and sustaining such penetration, but wholesale prohibition
cannot be right. The other illustration is espionage against enemies in time of
war, as by the United Kingdom against Nazi Germany. That needs no
explanatory comment.
The foregoing paragraphs sketch a framework similar to that underlying
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just-war reasoning. They portray an activity which at least in some respects

cannot be conducted effectively without cutting across normal moral
expectations, but which is essential for public purposes that seem plainly
of compelling moral necessity and rightness. In just-war analysis, however,
that does not mean that we can morally engage in any war we like, and then
fight it in any way we like; any exemptions from ‘normal’ ethical behaviour
have to be justified and limited. Similarly, we cannot engage in the particular
class of intelligence activity here labelled ‘clandestine’ against any target we
like, or use any methods we like.
Invoking the concept of ‘moral commonsense’ does not pre-suppose a
purely utilitarian or consequentialist philosophy of public ethics. The just-
war tradition does not contend that, in war, good aims and expectations of
good eventual outcomes justify any means. In accepting that there is an
entitlement if necessary to kill enemy soldiers, it holds that by the nature of
their role such soldiers forfeit the normal human right not to be killed; and at
the same time it typically recognizes some deontological imperatives – that
is, that there are some things that absolutely ought not to be done even to
facilitate victory over an appalling aggressor. The application of the
paradigm to ‘just intelligence’ must be ready to acknowledge comparable
dimensions both of entitlement and of constraint. Entitlement might rest, in
the broadest terms, on a concept that we may legitimately collect
information, even – perhaps especially? – in the face of attempts to withhold
it, about activities that might lead to unjust injury to those for whom we have
responsibility. Constraint would accept that there are some methods of
collection that must never be used, however severe we may judge the
possible injury to be, and some that must not be used disproportionately –
that is, in circumstances where the breach of normal moral rules is
more severe than the importance of the legitimate objective reasonably
warrants.
Against that background, issues arise about what sorts of limit might be
appropriate in the selection of targets for clandestine intelligence-gathering –
 CIISS ANNUAL LECTURE, 2005 7

jus ad intelligentiam – and then in the choice of methods for such gathering –
jus in intelligentia.

JUS AD INTELLIGENTIAM

There is a very broad potential spectrum of things about which governments

would like to get knowledge through their intelligence services, in the widest
sense of finding out or confirming things which it would be helpful to them to
know but which the targets – whether states or other entities – are either
unwilling or unable to disclose promptly and dependably, and which cannot be
discovered as promptly and dependably, or perhaps at all, by other means. At
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one extreme of the spectrum might be getting solid warning of terrorist plans to
blow up Parliament; at the other, finding out what is the ‘bottom line’ of the
Ruritanian government in an impending negotiation about tariffs on trade in
cabbages. Clandestine intelligence-gathering would clearly be justified on the
former; but it seems hard, as a matter of proportionate judgement, to maintain
that it would be so on the latter. I consider later a subsidiary issue about whether
the moral situation is altered if we have grounds for believing that the
Ruritanians are themselves engaged in clandestine intelligence-gathering about
our own ‘bottom line’. That particular point aside, however, the question is
where along the spectrum the line of prohibition or limitation ought to be drawn.
For added complication, is it a single line or a series of lines, with a considerable
array of clandestine methods morally allowable at the top end of the threat
spectrum – that is, the end exemplified by major terrorism – but perhaps only a
more modest and restricted set at intermediate points? Many subject matters
may lie between the extremes. The development of military capability by states
whose long-term peaceful intentions towards us or our friends we believe we
cannot take wholly on trust? The faithful observance of arms control agreements
like the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty or the 1972 Biological Weapons
Convention, or of mandatory Security Council resolutions? Savage internal
repression by tyrannical regimes? Narcotics traffic? International organized
crime of other sorts? Illegal immigration networks? Violent animal-rights
protest? Large-scale and deliberate breach of agreed rules on trade?
It is surely evident that dividing lines ought to be drawn somewhere along
the spectrum of iniquity to be countered and proper interest to be served; but
it is much harder to formulate clear and precise proposals for where or how to
draw them. A first approximation might suggest that we are entitled to use
clandestine means (still in the special sense of ‘clandestine’ explained earlier)
if other means do not seem likely to suffice – that remains an important
qualification, analogous to the just-war criterion of ‘last resort’ – in order to
collect information that we reasonably believe may help us to forestall,
counter or alleviate actions that would be seriously damaging to peaceful and
 8 INTELLIGENCE AND NATIONAL SECURITY

constitutional order, or to the lives or the major human rights of our own
people or of others towards whom we accept significant responsibilities.
There is a great deal packed into that first approximation; and the
application of some of its elements would be highly judgemental – just how
damaging is ‘seriously damaging’, for example? Al Qaeda’s plans, yes; those
Ruritanian cabbages, surely no; but what about action that could inflict grave
economic damage leading to real hardship for our citizens, like attempts to
disrupt flows or distort prices in the international oil market? The economic
field cannot be totally excluded. It is inescapable that any general principle,
however skillfully shaped, will always leave a large middle ground within
which there have to be judgements made in all the particular circumstances,
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with ample room accordingly for disagreement and dispute, whether in good
faith or in bad, about on which side of the permissibility boundary particular
intelligence targets fall. That is in the nature of practical affairs amid the
manifold complexities of human life. Similar judgemental uncertainties often
beset the application of just-war concepts; but those concepts, honestly
applied, can nevertheless often lead to clear and important conclusions. That
can be equally true of just intelligence.

JUS IN INTELLIGENTIA

If clandestine intelligence-gathering is to be conducted effectively, actions

like (for example) agent-runners telling untruths about who they are or what
they are doing are unavoidable. It seems unavoidable also that they will have
to be ready to exploit the willingness of individuals from the target country,
or in whatever else is the target field, to act in breach of normal loyalties. But
are there limits to what they should be prepared to do in order to generate or
exploit that willingness? Ideological persuasion? Bribery, in one form or
another? So far, perhaps reasonable. But blackmail? Fostering narcotics
addiction? Entrapment? Threat to family? – surely not.
Once more, no ready formula suggests itself for where the line should be
drawn between the permissible and the impermissible, especially since, as
implied earlier, it might be appropriate to draw the line in different places
according to the gravity, and perhaps also the imminence and probability, of
the harm we are seeking to forestall or diminish. Such a concept would be the
analogue of the just-war criterion of proportionality. Broadly, however, the
line of prohibition might relate to whether serious coercive violence – or its
near-equivalent, as in blackmail – is done to individuals whom we are not
entitled to harm. The point of that last qualification – ‘whom we are not
entitled to harm’ – is that in, for example, the Second World War it would
surely have been legitimate to kill an enemy sentry in the course of a
breaking-and-entering operation to get crucial operational information. That
 CIISS ANNUAL LECTURE, 2005 9

would be a justifiable warlike action; but it would scarcely be allowable in

peacetime, though circumstances approaching those of wartime might arise
over imminent terrorism.
There then arises the difficult matter of interrogation, which is often an
aspect of intelligence-gathering and has been the focus of especial public
debate and concern in recent years. What is legitimate? Arbitrary and
sometimes covert imprisonment, as in Guantanamo Bay? – not of that scale
and duration, many (including this writer) would say. More awkward still,
what is to be said about torture, and what exactly is to be classified as that?
Little respect worldwide has been accorded to, or merited by, attempts made
within the administration of President George W. Bush to re-define ‘torture’
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away from its natural meaning and from the definition in the 1984 UN
Convention Against Torture, to which the United States is a party, so as to
encompass only extreme actions at the top end of the term’s range as
normally understood. It is at least more honest to claim, as others in that
administration or supporting it have occasionally done, that torture may be
justified (subject perhaps to some procedural safeguards) if the end is
pressing and important enough. But though it is possible to imagine elaborate
and far-out scenarios in which the temptation might seem very cogent, that
claim ought to be firmly rejected for reasons both of ultimate moral principle
and of pragmatism (including the grave ‘slippery-slope’ danger). Even within
a more moderate ethical calculus, however, and quite aside from
considerations about the frequent unreliability of information gained under
torture and also about the damage which use of such methods entails to any
prospect of subsequent criminal prosecution, there are questions of definition,
as was seen in the 1970s when the United Kingdom government changed its
practices to conform with the finding of the European Court of Human Rights
against some of the methods which had occasionally been used in the
counter-terrorist campaign in Northern Ireland. It would be absurd to say that
interrogation, perhaps of people whose malignity is incontestable, must be
conducted entirely without pressure – in a comfortable armchair, as it were,
with a cup of tea and a biscuit every hour and no harsh expression or
frightening tone. Again, some general guideline is needed to anchor
judgement. The core of the formulation in the 1984 Convention (tighter
than United States domestic law appears to be) seems well framed for the
purpose – ‘the intentional infliction of severe physical or mental pain or
suffering to obtain information or a confession’.
There is, however, a yet further issue in this zone: the matter of what might
be called ‘torture at second hand’. Media accounts have exposed a practice
termed ‘extraordinary rendition’, meaning handing over terrorist suspects to
friendly countries whom there is reason to think less scrupulous than the
hander-over about the methods of interrogation used. That would seem
 10 INTELLIGENCE AND NATIONAL SECURITY

plainly wrong as a deliberate action, and it is indeed prohibited by the 1984

Convention. But another awkward question arises: even where the handover
of individuals is not in question, what should be the moral evaluation of
continuing intelligence cooperation and information exchange, for example
over international terrorism, with countries known to use methods which we
ourselves regard as wrongful? If we come into possession of particular
information that is operationally important for the protection of our people
we cannot expunge it from our minds or artificially pretend not to know it
even if we believe or suspect it to have been wrongfully acquired; but a
systematic and ongoing relationship – to sustain which, moreover, we may be
expected to divulge information about individuals as well as to receive it – is
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a different matter. It is not easy to find a ready answer to this problem, which
is the more awkward in that it may sometimes in practice be precisely from
countries where the risk of brutal interrogation may be high that information
about terrorism is most needed.
There is some similarity here with the problem noted earlier, of how we
are to justify continuing to work, in our penetration of terrorist or other
criminal organizations, with individuals whom we know to be engaged in
evildoing. Once more, any purist demand for perfectly clean hands, both
directly and at one remove or more, is not easy to square with practical
realities – realities, moreover, which are becoming increasingly the normal
context of intelligence work as the prime working environment shifts away
from classical inter-state conflict.
We might consider now the ‘Everybody does it’ argument – the right of
retaliation, from another standpoint. If we have reason to believe that others
are collecting intelligence against us for purposes or by methods which we
ourselves would prefer to rule out, are we thereby dispensed from our own
obligations? The simple answer to this is ‘No’, or at least ‘Not entirely’. If the
obligations are founded not on basic moral principle but on particular
agreement or received international law, then indeed serious breach of the
bargain by other parties may properly remove or diminish their entitlement to
remain protected by the agreement or law. To take again an analogy from the
context of war, it is likely that some limited use of chemical weapons would
not always or in all circumstances have been contrary to moral principle on
the discriminate and proportionate use of military force, but under the 1925
Geneva Protocol states agreed to abstain from it entirely. Many of them,
however, attached a rider to the effect that if an adversary breached the
Protocol the right to retaliate was reserved. That was justifiable; but there
would still, in any such use, have been a moral duty to continue to abide by
the more basic ethical constraints – not to retaliate against non-combatants or
with a severity disproportionate to proper military objectives, whatever the
adversary might have done. Similarly, if there is an agreement with the
 CIISS ANNUAL LECTURE, 2005 11

authorities of Country X that we will not collect intelligence covertly from

one another, but we then find that Country X is in fact doing so, we would be
entitled in retaliation to eavesdrop (rather as during the Cold War there seems
to have been almost a tacit agreement, one or two special episodes apart, not
to make much public fuss about the intrusive intelligence-gathering
operations which both sides conducted in breach of strict international
law). But we would not be entitled to extract information by entrapment,
blackmail or torture even if Country X is guilty of such methods.

USING INTELLIGENCE
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The discussion so far has operated within the broad structural paradigm of
just-war reasoning. In at least one respect, however, intelligence calls for a
wider paradigm. Beyond the activity of collecting intelligence there lies that
of using it, and distinctive ethical questions can arise there too. This is not a
matter only of whether the intelligence product is culpably distorted (whether
by provider or recipient) to fit policy preference, or its limitations and
uncertainties brushed aside in order to justify or at least not impede decisions
desired on other grounds – issues such as those which the Butler Committee
and its counterpart in the United States examined over the 2003 invasion of
Iraq. Most of the moral questions in this area are general ones bearing upon
any use of evidence, not peculiar to that collected by secret intelligence
effort. But where, as is usually the case with secret intelligence, the evidence
is for good reason not made available openly for all hearers to probe and test,
a special moral responsibility lies upon intelligence authorities and their
customers not to claim wider knowledge or greater certainty than is genuinely
warranted – not to assert, for example, that evidence is ‘extensive, detailed
and authoritative’8 when its true quality is such that objective evaluation of
the same evidence by a broadly-composed committee of inquiry can lead its
chairman to conclude that it is in reality ‘very thin’.9
There are moral issues also about the use of secret intelligence when it is
brought to bear in ways that touch seriously upon the rights of individuals. It
would normally be wrong for public authorities to use to the disadvantage of
individuals information which those individuals had no opportunity to test or
rebut, and of which they might even be wholly unaware. Yet the product of
intelligence is occasionally used in such ways, for example to trigger
intrusion into normal privacy, to refuse or limit public employment through
processes like vetting, or more recently and controversially in decisions to
restrict liberty or withdraw right of residence. Moreover, such actions by
government may often rest upon judgements of probability, not upon proof of
the standard that court proceedings in criminal justice customarily require.
Given the entitlement of our societies to be protected as far as possible from
 12 INTELLIGENCE AND NATIONAL SECURITY

grave risks, we cannot reasonably say that the product of intelligence must
absolutely never be so used where we perceive pressing danger from traitors
or terrorists, or as it was during the Cold War when Western countries
honestly believed that this was necessary in order to guard against grave
potential threat from the Soviet Union. Once more there is no escape from
weighing conflicting considerations, rather than resting on some neat and
comprehensive rule. The weighing must, however, have an ethical dimension
and take into account, alongside whatever are the proper benefits that we
believe can be secured in no other way, the limitations and uncertainties of
secret intelligence as well as the disagreeable (and ultimately even
corrupting) subtractions which its use in such circumstances entails from
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the customary and proper standards of open democratic societies, and in the
long term from the valuable wider respect in which such societies seek to be
held. The bar ought to be set high.

CONCLUSION

There are further aspects of the topic on which this essay has not attempted to
touch, such as the proper relationship of intelligence activity with one’s own
domestic law. (Should the duty of obedience to that law be regarded as
absolute, or as open to be qualified in extreme circumstances by
considerations of proportionality?) In brief, however, secret intelligence-
gathering is a valuable, sometimes even an indispensable, tool in the ability
of public authorities to fulfil their duties of protection towards those for
whose well-being they bear responsibility. Its effective conduct must
sometimes require that action be taken which ought in most contexts to be
regarded as morally wrong. In face of that tension we cannot say that
morality must simply be set aside; we have to identify some conceptual
structure for legitimating and disciplining the activity. An ethical framework
is needed in at least two parts: the first for delineating the purposes important
enough to justify some stepping outside normal ethical expectation, and the
second to limit how far that stepping outside may reach and what forms it
may take.
It would be absurd and offensive to suggest that intelligence pro-
fessionals in countries like those of the West do not already have ethical
concepts which they bring to bear on what they do. For reasons sketched
earlier, it would moreover be unrealistic to expect to frame an open and
explicit code in specific terms to govern the entire activity. There would,
however, be merit – not least for public confidence and support – in seeking
to develop a wider and more systematic understanding of principles than
seems yet to have been generally established and recognized on either side
of the Atlantic.
 CIISS ANNUAL LECTURE, 2005 13

NOTES
This essay is developed from the author’s Annual Lecture to the Centre for Intelligence and
International Security Studies, Department of International Politics, University of Wales,
Aberystwyth, in November 2005.

1 Harold Shukman (ed.) Agents for Change (London: St. Ermin’s Press 2000) pp.61–71.
2 Duane R. Clarridge, quoted in the New York Times, 2 February 2006.
3 Admiral Stansfield Turner, Security and Democracy (Sedgwick & Jackson 1986).
4 For a brief overview see Michael Quinlan, ‘Justifying War’, Australian Journal of
International Affairs 58/1 (March 2004) pp.7–15.
5 Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction: Report of a Committee of Privy
Counsellors, HC 808 (HM Stationery Office 14 July 2004).
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6 See discussion by Michael Herman, ‘Ethics and Intelligence after September 2001’, in L. Scott
and P. Jackson (eds.) Understanding Intelligence in the Twenty-First Century (Routledge
2004) pp.187–92.
7 For a preliminary survey see Shukman (note 1) pp.62–65.
8 Prime Minister Blair on Iraqi possession of weapons of mass destruction, House of Commons
Official Report, 24 September 2002, col.3.
9 Lord Butler of Brockwell, House of Lords Official Report, 7 September 2004, col.463.