An Inkling of Intelligence: What Game of Thrones Can Teach Us About the Intelligence Community

“My order serves.”

“Yes, but whom?”

“The realm…I will not claim to bear you any great love…but I cannot hate you either. Even if I did, so long as you hold Winterfell I am bound by oath to give you counsel.”

– Maester Luwin and Theon Greyjoy, A Clash of Kings

You might not think George R.R. Martin’s books-turned hit HBO television series Game of Thrones has much to say about the profession of intelligence. It is, after all, set in a medieval fantasy world inhabited by dire wolves, giants, and dragons. But think again. Martin’s epic is inspired by real events from history—notably England’s Wars of the Roses—in which intelligence collection networks were employed extensively by all sides, eventually evolving into the ‘intelligencers’ of the court of Elizabeth I less than a century later.

You may also be thinking this article is a shameless attempt to capitalize on the impending return of the most popular television series of all time—and you’re right. But it’s also an attempt to use the show’s popularity to allow a better understanding of what the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC)actually does—of which spying is but one piece.

When I let colleagues know I wanted to write a fun article about Game of Thrones, many assumed I would be writing about Lord Varys or Littlefinger—the former a spymaster, the latter a schemer (what we might today call an operations planner)—masters of intrigue, both. But the spy’s report by itself is not intelligence, nor are the schemer’s plots.

 No, the purpose of intelligence is to inform better decisions. The role of the intelligence officer is to facilitate the decision-maker’s understanding—to cohere the incoherent. In Game of Thrones this function is fulfilled by the order of Maesters, those guys who wear the chains around their necks and advise all the scheming lords and ladies of Westeros. They wear chains to symbolize their service to the realm itself—a refreshingly modern concept—over any individual lord, literally binding them to the idea of service to country over politics.

The epigraph above is an excerpt from a conversation between Maester Luwin of Winterfell, most trusted advisor to the Starks, and Theon Greyjoy, the usurper whom he had just witnessed murder what remained of the Starks and steal their ancestral home. Luwin literally raised the children he witnessed Theon kill, yet his duty was to give him sound counsel regardless.

Like the IC, the maesters reputation is tied up in the fact that they are apolitical. They revoke all familial ties and take an oath to hold no lands and father no children, removing them from the eponymous game of thrones. Another example is Maester Aemon of Castle Black, the elderly, blind advisor to the Night’s Watch. Aemon—surname Targaryen—surrendered the Iron Throne to serve the realm instead at its most vulnerable northern border. 

The maesters are known as the “knights of the mind,” and are probably the closest thing in the Seven Kingdoms to scientists. Like the best intelligence officers, they are cross-disciplinary. While many choose to specialize in certain areas of study over the course of a lifetime, in general, they retain a holistic approach to knowledge. Each subject they master becomes a new link in the chains they wear, with different metals symbolizing each specialty—gold for economics or iron for warcraft, for example.

In this regard, the maesters are close to Sherman Kent’s ideal model of an intelligence profession composed of elite scholars who police their own ranks and do not allow base political opinions to cloud their judgments.

Of course, like the Intelligence Community, the order has problems—some of which are very similar to our own. Despite their aspiration of independence, there are politics involved in the structure and appointment of maesters. The order’s leaders choose to dispatch members to castles across the Seven Kingdoms to advise those holdings’ rulers. If a castle doesn’t have a maester dedicated to it, it’s not considered significant enough to merit one.

Being a human institution, not all of the maesters are as inspiring as Aemon or Luwin. There’s a subplot that follows the sinister royal security advisor Qyburn, a former maester stripped of his title for his unethical behavior. Qyburn charms his way into the Queen’s graces, attempting to supplant the maesters’ authority by sycophantically supporting her aims. There’s an ethical allegory there about the risks of politicizing intelligence and using one’s position to seek retribution on political opponents. 

The Citadel—the maesters’ headquarters—is inspired by the Great Library of Alexandria, the ancient world’s repository of knowledge. It contains the enormous astrolabe from the series’ opening credits (which is about the most meta thing ever). It also houses a massive raven rookery from which all those birds carrying messages come and go, which makes it sort of like one of the National Security Agency’s massive data centers if you think of ravens as the Westerosi internet.

Anyway, the Citadel is quite literally an ivory tower; a not-so-thinly-veiled criticism of the sort of elitism the maesters order represents. By the time of the events depicted in the series, their reputation had already been in decline. Many judged them to be detached from the troubles that plagued everyday people, their experts mired in endless debates over minutiae like so many subject-matter experts drafting a National Intelligence Estimate.

This attitude is reminiscent of the darker periods in the IC’s history—for instance, a telling quote reflects the CIA’s analytic culture in the late 1970s when senior analysts at Langley disinterestedly declared, “it does not matter whether CIA papers are read downtown; this is what we believe." Of that period, former Director of Central Intelligence and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates wrote "CIA knew how foreign policy was made in every country except one—our own.”

In Game of Thrones, this sort of self-referential irrelevance is portrayed by Grand Maester Pycelle. The Grand Maester is an honorary position sort of like our own Director of National Intelligence. On paper, they serve as the senior advisor to the executive on all matters concerning intelligence and sit on Westeros’ equivalent of the National Security Council’s Principals Committee. In practice, they hold little actual authority and can be pretty easily ignored by a willful ruler. Pycelle is worse because he is not only irrelevant, but corrupt, craven, and conspiratorial, to boot. Nonetheless, Pycelle believes his counsel to be the most important in the kingdom, and himself to be the smartest person in any room.

Eventually, Samwell Tarly, putative maester of the Night’s Watch, (and arguably the true protagonist of the entire series) arrives at the Citadel to learn the ways of the maesters to help win the war against the White Walkers, an imminent and existential threat to the realm. Sam, the virtuous outsider, is more concerned with practicality than process, and quickly grows frustrated with the maesters, uh, let’s call them on-boarding techniques—learning by rote, menial labor, humiliating cleaning duties.

He is even more frustrated by their endless deliberations over the meaning of first-hand field reports. He takes it upon himself to acquire the information he needs which, like so often in our own intelligence enterprise, is locked away in a literal compartment that he doesn’t have access to. Sam basically steals classified information and keeps it at home—not a method we want to encourage. But his frustration with the order’s archaic knowledge management system is perhaps understandable. 

Obviously, there are many differences between the maesters and the IC. But there are some similarities, too. American intelligence officers don’t have to be shackled or celibate. They shouldn’t have to skirt procedures or develop workarounds to cumbersome and often outdated procedures. They are bound by oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution and seek to always put service to country over political preference. They must abide by applicable laws and protect the nation’s secrets that they’re entrusted to know. But they should also be empowered to use their judgment to share those secrets with others who need to know them to accomplish their own missions and advance the nation’s goals.

IC officers should possess an insatiable intellectual curiosity and forever remain unsatisfied with narrow expertise. If the job is to make sense of an increasingly complex world, we can’t do it by only knowing one issue or region. Instead, we must be comfortable with uncertainty, adroit enough to move within several domains at once, producing consilience for our clients.

Lastly, outcomes must, in the end, outweigh output. In other words, it doesn’t matter how many reports we write in the ivory tower if we don’t climb down once in a while to meet the users of intelligence where they are, in the trenches of competition and conflict. Intelligence is instrumental; it has no autarkic significance at all. Unlike academe, we in the IC do not pursue knowledge for its own sake, but to provide an advantage to our decision-makers.