Reforming Intelligence: Obstacles to Democratic Control and Effectiveness

Five: Cultural Legacies of French Intelligence

five cultural legacies of french intelligence Douglas Porch M any countries have ambiguous relations with their intelligence services. Even mature democracies find intelligencestate relations to be subjects of some delicacy. Given a history of war, invasion, empire, and on occasion a shaky but ultimately triumphant tradition of republican control of the military, one might logicallyconclude that, of all countries, intelligence should playa critical , central role for France. But while that role has been central, it has seldom been critical. Why is this so? In France, as elsewhere, part of the explanation lies in bureaucratic mechanisms that translate to a lack of systematic evaluation of intelligence. However, beyond these often personality-driven bureaucratic interactions that impact intelligence-state relations, in France a special intelligence culture has developed from the stormy historical relationship between government and intelligence agencies.To paraphrase Tolstoy’s famous observation about families—successful intelligence services resemble each other in that they have managed to master the basics of collection and analysis and their product is trusted by the decision maker. Unhappy intelligence services, however, are all unhappy in their own way. In the French case, it is because a special culture of state-intelligence relations has developed that has caused a particularly dysfunctional relationship to develop between intelligence services and decision makers. Before sketching a catalog of French intelligence failures, it is perhaps proper to begin by noting French intelligence successes, of which there are at least three. First, in the realm of code breaking, the French services excelled through the First World War. Unfortunately, they failed to keep pace in the era of the mechanical cipher. Nevertheless, French counterintelligence at least played midwife to the cracking of the enigma codes in the 1930s, a second accomplishment, by acquiring douglas porch the codebooks from a German spy named Hans Thilo Schmidt, and passing them on to Polish code breakers in Warsaw.1 And even though most French intelligence operatives remained loyal to the Vichy regime between 1940 and 1943, they never revealed to the Germans that the Allies possessed replicas of enigma. Third, the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST), the equivalent of the British Security Service (MI5), although small, is considered an extremely professional organization. With that said, all intelligence services operate on two basic levels— collection and analysis. Intelligence is then ‘‘packaged’’ in some form or another for the decision maker, who decides to act, or not, upon the information provided. The French are probably as proficient as most services in collecting and analyzing information, within the limitations imposed by size and lack of technological support; however decision makers’ ability to ‘‘accept’’ intelligence is unique to the French case. Still, analyzing ‘‘what did the ‘decider’ know and when did he know it?’’ is largely guesswork because it is complicated by a sixty-year restriction of access to intelligence documents. Minutes of cabinet and military staff meetings are fragmentary when they exist at all. French intelligence documents for the 1930s, captured by the Germans, eventually ended up in Moscow and are only gradually being repatriated to Paris. The preference of French politicians for back-channel information , sometimes supplied by private intelligence sources, precisely because they often distrusted official ones, makes information difficult to track. Intelligence bulletins are decidedly unhelpful, because they usually adopt a smorgasbord approach, simply listing snippets of information without prioritizing them. This allows decision makers to select intelligence that accords with their preferred course of action, while giving intelligence services the ‘‘out’’ that they had indicated the risks should the strategy prove disastrous—as in 1940. The question of ‘‘what did the decision maker know and when did he know it?’’ is also complicated by the tendency of many exprofessionals to rush into print as soon as they reach retirement age. At their best, these memoirs offer interesting glimpses into the workings of French intelligence services and compensate up to a point for the absence of archives.2 Their strength is that they portray the French secret services, in particular military intelligence, as relatively efficient organizations that managed to gather much useful intelligence on German capabilities in the 1930s. Unfortunately, they ignore the 122 french intelligence complex relationship—one might say complicity—that exists between intelligence specialists and decision makers. They also make sweeping claims for the strategic as well as the operational value of the intelligence that they produced, claims that are unverifiable and...