Introduction To Intelligence Studies

Introduction to Intelligence Studies (third edition) provides an overview of the US intelligence community, to include its history, organization, and function. Since the attacks of 9/11, the United States Intelligence Community (IC) has undergone an extensive overhaul. This textbook provides a comprehensive overview of intelligence and security issues, defining critical terms and reviewing the history of intelligence as practiced in the United States. Designed in a practical sequence, the book begins with the basics of intelligence, progresses through its history, describes best practices, and explores the way the intelligence community looks and operates today. The authors examine the "pillars" of the American intelligence system—collection, analysis, counterintelligence, and covert operations—and demonstrate how these work together to provide "decision advantage." The book offers equal treatment to the functions of the intelligence world—balancing coverage on intelligence collection, counterintelligence, information management, critical thinking, and decision-making. It also covers such vital issues as laws and ethics, writing and briefing for the intelligence community, and the emerging threats and challenges that intelligence professionals will face in the future. This revised and updated third edition addresses issues such as the growing influence of Russia and China, the recent history of the Trump and Biden administrations and the IC, and the growing importance of the cyber world in the intelligence enterprise. This book will be essential reading for students of intelligence studies, US national security, foreign policy and International Relations in general.

Introduction to Intelligence: Institutions, Operations, and Analysis offers a strategic, international, and comparative approach to covering intelligence organizations and domestic security issues. Written by multiple authors, each chapter draws on the author′s professional and scholarly expertise in the subject matter. As a core text for an introductory survey course in intelligence, this text provides readers with a comprehensive introduction to intelligence, including institutions and processes, collection, communications, and common analytic methods.

Introduction to Intelligence: Institutions, Operations, and Analysis offers a strategic, international, and comparative approach to covering intelligence organizations and domestic security issues. Written by multiple authors, each chapter draws on the author′s professional and scholarly expertise in the subject matter. As a core text for an introductory survey course in intelligence, this text provides readers with a comprehensive introduction to intelligence, including institutions and processes, collection, communications, and common analytic methods.

Since the September 11 terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, the intelligence community has been scrutinized. Consequently, the 9/11 Commission recommended how to improve the quality of intelligence analysis. Those recommendations and the United States' involvement in the war in Iraq have spawned additional charges of the politicization of intelligence. In turn, the intelligence community has reconfigured itself with newly created departments supported by an expanded and inexperienced workforce that was not envisioned when intelligence agencies were formally established in 1947.

This book critically analyses the concept of the intelligence cycle, highlighting the nature and extent of its limitations and proposing alternative ways of conceptualising the intelligence process. The concept of the intelligence cycle has been central to the study of intelligence. As Intelligence Studies has established itself as a distinctive branch of Political Science, it has generated its own foundational literature, within which the intelligence cycle has constituted a vital thread - one running through all social-science approaches to the study of intelligence and constituting a staple of professional training courses. However, there is a growing acceptance that the concept neither accurately reflects the intelligence process nor accommodates important elements of it, such as covert action, counter-intelligence and oversight. Bringing together key authors in the field, the book considers these questions across a number of contexts: in relation to intelligence as a general concept, military intelligence, corporate/private sector intelligence and policing and criminal intelligence. A number of the contributions also go beyond discussion of the limitations of the cycle concept to propose alternative conceptualisations of the intelligence process. What emerges is a plurality of approaches that seek to advance the debate and, as a consequence, Intelligence Studies itself. This book will be of great interest to students of intelligence studies, strategic studies, criminology and policing, security studies and IR in general, as well as to practitioners in the field.

This book offers a new research agenda for intelligence studies in contemporary times. In contrast to Intelligence Studies (IS), whose aim has largely been to improve the performance of national security services and assist in policy making, this book takes the investigation of the new professionals and everyday practices of intelligence as the immediate point of departure. Starting from the observation that intelligence today is increasingly about counter-terrorism, crime control, surveillance, and other security-related issues, this book adopts a transdisciplinary approach for studying the shifting logics of intelligence, how it has come to involve an expanding number of empirical sites, such as the police, local community, prison and the Internet, as well as a corresponding multiplicity of new actors in these domains. Shifting the focus away from traditional spies and Anglo-American intelligence services, this book addresses the transformations of contemporary intelligence through empirically detailed and theoretically innovative analyses, making a key contribution to existing scholarship. This book will be of much interest to students of intelligence studies, critical security studies, foreign policy, and International Relations.

In their Second Edition of Cases in Intelligence Analysis: Structured Analytic Techniques in Action, accomplished instructors and intelligence practitioners Sarah Miller Beebe and Randolph H. Pherson offer robust, class-tested cases studies of events in foreign intelligence, counterintelligence, terrorism, homeland security, law enforcement, and decision-making support. Designed to give analysts-in-training an opportunity to apply structured analytic techniques and tackle real-life problems, each turnkey case delivers a captivating narrative, discussion questions, recommended readings, and a series of engaging analytic exercises.

This topical volume offers a comprehensive review of secret intelligence organizations and activities. Intelligence has been in the news consistently since 9/11 and the Iraqi WMD errors. Leading experts in the field approach the three major missions of intelligence: collection-and-analysis; covert action; and counterintelligence. Within each of these missions, the dynamically written essays dissect the so-called intelligence cycle to reveal the challenges of gathering and assessing information from around the world. Covert action, the most controversial intelligence activity, is explored, with special attention on the issue of military organizations moving into what was once primarily a civilian responsibility. The authors furthermore examine the problems that are associated with counterintelligence, protecting secrets from foreign spies and terrorist organizations, as well as the question of intelligence accountability, and how a nation can protect its citizens against the possible abuse of power by its own secret agencies. The Handbook of Intelligence Studies is a benchmark publication with major importance both for current research and for the future of the field. It is essential reading for advanced undergraduates, graduate students and scholars of intelligence studies, international security, strategic studies and political science in general.