Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acronyms
- Intelligence for an Age of Terror
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The Changed Target
- 3 The Cold War Legacy
- 4 The Imperative of Change
- 5 The Agenda Ahead
- 6 The Special Challenge of Analysis
- 7 Many Customers, Too Many Secrets
- 8 Covert Action: Forward to the Past?
- 9 Rebuilding the Social Contract
- Notes
- Index
Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acronyms
- Intelligence for an Age of Terror
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The Changed Target
- 3 The Cold War Legacy
- 4 The Imperative of Change
- 5 The Agenda Ahead
- 6 The Special Challenge of Analysis
- 7 Many Customers, Too Many Secrets
- 8 Covert Action: Forward to the Past?
- 9 Rebuilding the Social Contract
- Notes
- Index
Summary
This book very much stands alone, but it also takes up where my 2001 book, Reshaping National Intelligence for an Age of Information, left off. At the beginning of the last chapter of that earlier book, completed before September 11, I observed that the book had been mostly about how intelligence should reshape in continued fair weather for globalization. What, I asked, might turn that weather fouler? The first excursion I considered was a major terrorist attack on the United States (the other, haunting from the perspective of 2009, was a global economic collapse). This is hardly prescient – a stream of blue-ribbon panels had predicted an attack, sometime.
I imagined that an attack would make intelligence more important, which has turned out to be the case and thus became a reason for this book. (The other prediction I made was that military instruments would not turn out to be very relevant, and so military budgets would decline. On that score, I was either wrong or premature – depending on whether the war in Iraq is regarded as central to or a diversion from the fight against terror.) It struck me then, and continues to strike me now, that for all our talk about terrorism and other transnational threats as the preeminent targets of intelligence, the implications of that shift run much deeper than is usually realized. That became a second reason for doing this book.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Intelligence for an Age of Terror , pp. vii - viiiPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009