The Importance of Cultural Diversity in Our Intelligence and Security Agencies

Searching for a Sana, in a sea of Sebastians...

By Robert Dover, Associate Professor in Intelligence and International Security at University of Leicester

11 September 2019 ([email protected])

Intelligence agencies are organisations like any other. But they work on subjects that impact upon life and limb, in guarding our political system and protecting our core national infrastructure and interests. Their subject matter sets them apart from other organisations, but so does the way they gather and treat their material. It is the process of intelligence that has historically led to the presence of monocultures, and the security imperative leads to reinforcing patterns of recruitment, in varying intensities across highly distinctive organisations. But, as Matthew Syed has convincingly discussed in his new book, intelligence needs cultural diversity and reflexivity to continue to improve the way it identifies, contains and rolls back threats, precisely because cultural blindness removes sight of the full threat picture.

Recruitment is no longer conducted by the famous ‘tap on the shoulder’, although there must still be space for this to capture niche skills or experiences. The shoulder tap replicated class, colour and cultural biases, because it is well-known that recruiters consciously or unconsciously tend towards people they identify as being like them. Open recruitment, with new processes and training behind it, has provided for a partial rebalancing of cultural, racial and social profiles in the intelligence world. A focus on identifiable and measurable characteristics runs the risk of organisations trying to game the system by aspiring to reach x or y percentage of any given characteristic, without necessarily improving the cultural diversity or range of perspectives in an intelligence setting.

If we think back to the August 2011 riots, what advantage would there be between middle-class, Russell Group graduates drawn from white or Asian backgrounds? We might reason that the latter is likely to have had more experience of discrimination and therefore a greater facility to understand alienation, but neither is likely to have ready access to the daily experience of poverty, gang activity and violence that coalesced into violence. So, we might want an intelligence officer who could operate in those environments without attracting undue attention, who was able to report back what he or she was seeing and hearing in a way that was translatable into the concepts used in the agency, coupled with an analyst with the skills to make an assessment of that intelligence that was translatable into action. Our intelligence officer would need to look right, sound right, and would need to be able to adopt behaviours to retain their cover. Crucially, they would need empathy – to understand where particular actions should be interpreted as hostile, and where hostile acts are actually symbolic rather than a trigger for violence. Our analyst would neither need to look nor sound right for this context, but they would also need the empathy to stand in the shoes of the adversary, which is where pressures on the intelligence agencies return us to the need for cultural diversity.

The difference between intelligence – as it is taught – and intelligence practice is stark. Academics teach the intelligence cycle as a convenient description of a set of discreet processes that begin with a question from a government customer, moves round to collection, onto analysis, and then a final product, which is disseminated to that customer. It is a cycle because the customer invariably asks for further work and so the process continues to turn. In reality, the discreet elements of collection and analysis are often collapsed into each other, and the process is more a continuous conversation between the end recipient and the officer acts as both collector and analyst. This system exists because the increased number of threats and reductions in budgets mean that officers have larger caseloads, but it also means that the officer is a point of vulnerability. My culturally appropriate officer in the 2011 riots, matched to my empathetic analyst, provided some reassurance that culture did not matter as much as we might think (and Syed argues) it does in intelligence. Conflating the two roles into one transforms culture into the most important determinant of whether intelligence product is useful or useless.

But my August 2011 example is a partial straw man, because it is based around a limited set of events, and thus misses the reality that most intelligence work is ongoing, enduring and – crucially – comprised of intelligence that flows in from multiple agencies, in multiple formats, and often from multiple countries. Consequently, the largest cultural vulnerability to intelligence agencies is misunderstanding the multiple lines of information they are receiving. The inquiries into the 2003 Iraq war highlighted how American and British intelligence officers understood the words ‘might’, ‘possible’ and ‘likely’. In their respective contexts ‘might’ meant unlikely to some, whilst quite likely to others. ‘Likely’ meant a fifty-fifty chance to some, whilst nearly certain to others, which is highly significant in a crisis. British and American agencies each have their own institutional memory and culture. Each uses their own jargon, and terms of references to create insider and outsider groups: again, something we would see in all businesses and organisations. But in a crisis, having to get over this cultural hurdle is a barrier to effectiveness and might cost lives. The situation becomes more complicated if we add non-Anglophone countries. For example, helpful input from the DGSE in France, their equivalent of MI6 creates additional linguistic, cultural and organisational barriers and producing a mission-critical common understanding quickly becomes more a question of judgment than of science.

Intelligence agencies have attempted to overcome these organisational-cultural barriers through their extensive ‘liaison relationships’ with foreign agencies. Domestically and internationally, agencies have constructed ‘fusion centres’ which are staffed by co-located officers from across organisations. In the UK, the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC), which is best known for producing official threat levels, draws together officers from MI5, MI6, GCHQ and the law enforcement community to create more efficient pathways to combatting terrorism. International security organisations like INTERPOL, EUROPOL and NATO have created their own intelligence fusion centres to co-locate international analysts to work on thematically driven security problems, such as cybersecurity, terrorism, and threats from specific regions of the world. These centres help to overcome the linguistic and culture barriers to intelligence, to draw upon different operational and life experiences, and to develop more inclusive analytical practices. These centres do still suffer from the problem of shared experiences and common attributes, due to the similarity of their value sets, belief systems and professional training.

There are clear advantages for a culturally diverse intelligence system, and laudable efforts have been taken to mitigate cultural difference. But there are two (largely insurmountable) cultural issues for intelligence communities to still tackle: the first around security clearances and the second is the reliance upon algorithm-driven computer systems that do more of the sifting, sorting and analytical heavy lifting in intelligence work.

Having security cleared staff is essential to intelligence agencies. Intelligence work is as much about protecting secrets as it is acquiring them. The scarring experience of the Cambridge Five still weighs heavily on intelligence recruiters keen to avoid employing the next big security leak. Achieving security clearances is a time-consuming, and invasive process. If you have ever wanted to tell someone about your most intimate private desires and experiences, your browsing history, and how you are not terribly good with alcohol or money, a vetting interview is the chance you have been looking for. Whilst the agencies have liberalised their views on sexuality (being gay is no longer considered a blackmail risk and therefore not a vetting risk), the standard test is whether an individual has anything in their life or past that would put them at risk of being compromised. In the age of social media, internet dating, online commentary and cloud computing finding a reason to exclude someone is simple. The cognitive skills required to work in intelligence are specific and relatively niche, serving to also exclude many applicants. We could surmise that achieving a good cultural mix will depend upon a wider range of schools and non-elite universities providing the right skills to their students, but also government recruiters recognising the unconventional presentation of skills. Alternative ways of ‘doing intelligence’ could include a wider array of people without requiring full security clearance. A larger intelligence estate, and focused on open source intelligence endeavours, would help to achieve this.

The second challenge comes from the dependence on algorithms. We collectively assume that computers are neutral processors of information providing objective answers. We are more likely to trust a computer judgment than a human one because we disregard human element in the computer programming, which bakes in the biases of these programmers. There are already examples of where AI security systems have been judged to discriminate on the basis of race, a further alienation of marginalised groups. A culturally aware ethical compact for security programming would be a reasonable first step to address this large vulnerability in our intelligence machinery.

We are a long way from understanding the full impact that cultural diversity – or more particularly cultural homogeneity – has on intelligence. To do requires high profile interventions, such as Syed has made, but also requires multi-disciplinary teams to capture the cross-cutting impacts of culture, race, gender, socio-economics, linguistics and organisational cultures on the production of usable intelligence for government. Whilst it is difficult to prove cause and effect in intelligence, historical examples show us that cultural failures have resulted in costly and embarrassing intelligence mistakes. The tools to critically examine intelligence practice are now available to us, but our senior security officials must rise to this challenge to add value to ‘the hidden wiring of the state’. 

By Robert Dover, is a leading thinker and intelligence expert, who has written about the importance of diversity in response to Matthew Syed's book, Rebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking.

More about Matthew Syed and Matthew Syed Consulting, please visit: www.matthewsyed.co.uk