I'll preface today's blog posting with this: while I do not claim to have worked for any intelligence agencies, I've taken multiple courses in intelligence analysis, and I've been both a producer and consumer of intelligence in my "day job" in cybersecurity, so this is all coming from a place of some experience.
Some micronations establish spy agencies. They probably don't need them.
First, why do spy agencies exist? Simply put, the way it's supposed to work is that intelligence informs policy. Policy-makers rely on intelligence to make decisions, support or change policies, and gain a knowledge advantage.
Thus, since micronations for the most part don't have policies beyond who they are friends with, they don't need intelligence agencies.
However, if you decide that your micronation really MUST have a spy agency, at least learn the basics. For starters, there's something called the Intelligence Cycle.
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| The Intelligence Cycle |
Requirements come from the policy makers - they come to the intelligence group with questions which could include military (i.e., what is the strength of the navy of country XYZ?), economic (How is XYZ's economy faring?), political (Who is favoured to be the next leader of XYZ?), social (How do XYZ's citizens feel about their leadership?), and so on.
Next is gathering - this starts with a plan based on the requirements. For example, given the question, "what is the strength of the navy of country XYZ?", you might rely on satellite imagery, human intelligence (maybe you have someone on the inside?), open-source intelligence (maybe they publish the information on their website!) and so on.
Then you have to process the information - this may include translation from other languages as well as assessing the reliability and accuracy of the information and its sources. Do you trust your person working for the navy of XYZ, or have they been compromised and used to feed you false information? Often, this assessment is done using the Admiralty Code, which assigns values to both the source reliability (A = completely reliable, F = completely unreliable) and the reliability of the information itself (1 = verified accurate, 6 = known to be false), and plots the results on a table similar to the below.
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| Admiralty Code for assessing information reliability |
Here, anything that lands "in the green" should be considered reliable unless you have reason to suspect otherwise, anything "in the red" should be discarded or discounted, and anything landing in the yellow zone would require further investigation or collaboration.
Analysis involves taking all of the disparate pieces of information you've gathered and determining the "big picture". If your source in the XYZ navy is saying their fleet is in the harbour for refit, but the satellite imagery shows the docks are empty, that's a mismatch that needs to be taken into account.
Finally, dissemination is the act of reporting your findings back to the policy makers - answering their original questions. This almost invariably leads to more questions, which is why the whole thing is a cycle.
Classification is about assigning a level of secrecy to intelligence. Often, this is more about protecting the source, rather than the information itself. For example, if you've got a mole in XYZ's navy, you want to keep that fact protected, both to protect the mole and to ensure the information keeps coming, so information coming from that source would be highly classified.
Typically there are several levels of classification:
- Public - Can be published on the external website, etc.
- Classified / Internal - Information should be kept within the organization
- Secret - Information is only to be viewed by those with a specific "need to know", and generally means that individuals must pass a reliability assessment and sign some sort of non-disclosure agreement to view it.
- Top Secret - May require additional clearance or special restrictions to view - this can include modifiers such as "Eyes Only" (meaning you can't make copies or take notes) or "NOFORN" (meaning no foreigners should be allowed to view this information).
If you want to know more, there are various online sources to pursue. For example, here is a US Army Intelligence Analysis field manual, and here is a manual from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) on criminal intelligence (which focuses on what criminal groups are doing, rather than nation states, but the basic techniques are similar). You can also find reprints of both modern and historical intelligence manuals on sites like Amazon, although a lot of that tends to be stuff that you could find online anyway, if you looked for it.
Oh, and you can take a look at West Who's spy agency - they're having fun with it anyway.
