The Intelligence Review | vol. 1 | iss. 1 |

Introduction
Dr. Joseph Fitsanakis
Assistant Professor, Intelligence and National Security Studies, Coastal Carolina University
Deputy Director, European Intelligence Academy
In the opening lines of his 1966 book Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy, Sherman
Kent proclaims that “intelligence means knowledge”. He goes on to explain that all intelligence
activity “consists basically of two sorts of operation: [...] the surveillance operation, [namely] the
many ways by which the contemporary world is put under close and systematic observation;
and the research operation, [which describes] attempts to establish meaningful patterns out of
what was observed in the past and attempts to get meaning out of what appears to be going
on now”. The analytical pioneer of the Central Intelligence Agency proposes that the two
operations “are virtually inseparable [and] closely bound together by their common devotion
to the production of knowledge” (Kent 2015:3-4).
Kent’s description of the intelligence process forms the methodological basis of the Chanticleer
Intelligence Brief (CIB). The CIB is a student-led effort supported by the Department of Politics
at Coastal Carolina University, which operates as an ancillary practicum for students in Coastal’s
National Security and Intelligence Studies (INSS) program. The CIB was founded in early
2015 because students in the INSS program asked for it. In the words of Benjamin Malone,
the CIB’s founder and first executive director, the “original vision was for CIB to be designed
for exceptional, dedicated intelligence students who wanted to […] show, at an undergraduate
level, that they are capable of doing more than just graduating with a degree”. In doing so,
students would gain “a better understanding of cultures and bring their regional familiarity to
a whole new level”, he adds (Harvey 2016).
The CIB, then, is an effort to implement Kent’s two-fold understanding of the intelligence process
in the undergraduate environment. The central idea is that students who aspire to master
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