COURTING A RELUCTANT ALLY - National Intelligence University

Chapter 1THE STATUS OF INTELLIGENCE SYSTEMS IN THEUNITED STATES AND GREAT BRITAINSome of these difficulties stemmed directly from technical obstacleswhich limited the amount and type of intelligence that could beobtained....Those that were mainly organizational in character arose fromthe various pressures and resistances—administrative, psychological andpolitical—which complicate relations whenever several bodies shareresponsibility in a single field. They were all the more intractable, however,because developments in the field of intelligence were setting up conflictbetween the need for new organizational departures and theestablished, and perfectly understandable, distribution of intelligenceresponsibilities.Francis Hally Hinsley and others, British Intelligence in the SecondWorld War: Its Influence on Strategy and OperationsFrancis Hinsley’s comprehensive, official history of British Intelligence duringWorld War II describes the overall state of British intelligence on the eve of thewar. Hinsley’s comments about British intelligence could have equally beenapplied to its U.S. counterpart, which was also rife with bureaucratic rivalry andhad to cope with new organizational arrangements designed to handle newsources of intelligence. Understanding how each country approached intelligence,and how each managed the organizational structures they developed in theinterwar period to collect, analyze, and disseminate it, is fundamental to fathomingthe evolution of the intelligence relationship between the U.S. and the UK.Although many authors have denigrated U.S. intelligence capabilities during theinterwar years, recent scholarship has shown that, despite its many problems, theU.S. was probably not far behind the other major powers of the time. 2 Resourceconstraints, the ill-defined nature of the threat, and the lack of strategic directionall contributed to weaknesses in U.S. intelligence of the 1920s and 30s. TheNavy’s ONI suffered from other difficulties, as well, since it was beset withinternecine conflicts within the Navy Department over its role, and also lacked2Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, “The Role of British Intelligence in the Mythologies Underpinning theOSS and Early CIA,” in American-British-Canadian Intelligence Relations 1939-2000, ed. DavidStafford and Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones (Portland, OR: Frank Cass Publishers, 2000), 5-10; Richard J.Aldrich, Intelligence and the War Against Japan: Britain, America, and the Politics of Secret Service(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 96-97.1