Intelligence

Intelligence (pronounced in-tel-i-juh-ns)

(1) Capacity for learning, reasoning, understanding, and similar forms of mental activity; aptitude in grasping truths, relationships, facts, meanings, etc.

(2) Describing the manifestation of a high mental capacity.

(3) The faculty of understanding.

(4) Knowledge of an event, circumstance, etc., received or imparted; news; information.

(5) The gathering or distribution of information, especially secret information; the evaluated conclusions drawn from such information; an organization or agency engaged in gathering such information.

(6) The interchange of information.

(7) In the sect of Christian Science, a fundamental attribute of God, or infinite Mind; an intelligent being or spirit, especially an incorporeal one, as an angel.

(8) News or information (now obsolete except as applied to the military, government or others who practice espionage).

(9) As used in intelligence quotient (IQ) tests, refers to an individual's relative standing on two quantitative indices, namely measured intelligence, as expressed by an intelligence quotient, and effectiveness of adaptive behavior.

1350-1400: From the Middle English intelligence (the highest faculty of the mind, capacity for comprehending general truths (and later "faculty of understanding, comprehension")), from the Old French intelligence, from Latin intelligentia & intellegentia (understanding, knowledge, power of discerning; art, skill, taste), from intelligentem (nominative intelligens) (discerning, appreciative), present participle of intelligere (to understand, comprehend, come to know),from intellegere (to discern, comprehend (literally “ choose between”)), the construct being inter-, (between, amid), a form of prepositional inter (between)+ legere (to choose), from the primitive Indo-European root leg- (to collect, gather (with derivatives meaning "to speak; to pick out words)) or the Proto-Italic legō (to care).

The meaning “superior understanding, sagacity, quality of being intelligent” is from the early 1400s and the particular application to spies dates from later that century although at much the same time it was applied in general to "information received or imparted; news". The word assumed its modern meaning (being endowed with understanding or knowledge) in late 1300s, influenced by the use in Old French where it had existed since the twelfth century.  The first formerly structured intelligence quotient (IQ) tests were conducted in 1921.  Intelligential is the adjective and intel the usual abbreviation.

Military Intelligence

The record of military intelligence during the first world war was mixed and the troops would joke there were three types of intelligence: human, animal & military.  It was during WWI that some British military intelligence units began to pick up their familiar identification codes (M(ilitary) I(ntelligence)1, MI4, MI5 etc).  MI5 and MI6 remain well-known, thanks to Ian Fleming (1908–1964; the former naval intelligence officer who wrote the James Bond novels) and other writers but there were many other MIs, researchers uncovering amidst the alpha-numeric soup references to entities up to MI25 but not all existed at the same time and most have long since been either disestablished or folded into MI5, MI6 or GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters; the UK government's clearing house for signals intelligence (SIGINT)) in the post-war years.

The records are occasionally contradictory but researchers have synthesized what are thought to be the most reliable sources and the list has been little amended since first it was published in the late 1990s.  The list should not however be misinterpreted; some of the MIx entries identified better thought of as project codes for operations which were, either at once or shortly after their creation, appended to other departments rather than becoming or remaining distinct entities with a personnel establishment and physical accoutrements of infrastructure.  Other were ad-hoc creations of wartime exigency that were dissolved as circumstances rendered their purpose redundant.  There’s also another reason why the list may be incomplete: given all this operates at least notionally under the auspices of the notoriously secretive military and it could be there are any number of still secret departments.

MI1: During WWI, the army’s MI1 (there were a number of sub-sections labelled MI1a, MI1b etc) and the Admiralty’s NID25 had operated separately as collectors and interpreters of SIGINT, including code-breaking.  After the war, they were combined into the inter-service Directorate of Military Intelligence and Cryptography which ultimately evolved into GCHQ.  However, the army, navy and newly created Royal Air Force (RAF) all maintained, sometimes in great secrecy, their own intelligence operations, the Admiralty especially jealous of its independence in as many fields as possible.

MI2: A divisional title, the “desk” or section devoted to intelligence relating to Russia & Scandinavia.

MI3: A divisional title, the “desk” or section devoted to intelligence relating to Eastern Europe.  This originally included Germany but so important did the German threat become that MI14 and MI15 were created exclusively to handle Britain’s fears of things Teutonic.

MI4: Matters related to aerial reconnaissance.  MI4’s original remit included not only the analysis of photographs but also the technical aspects of the process (cameras, lens, film stock, mounting techniques etc) and as civil aviation expanded, spying on foreign territory was accomplished sometimes with the use of civil airliners.  MI4 was transferred to Military Combined Operations in April 1940 when the MI15 was hived-off as an operation concerned purely with engineering aspects of photography and attached to the Air Ministry.

MI5: The well-known domestic intelligence service, the focus of which varies according to changes in the threat environment (Germans, feminists, communists, fascists, homosexuals, Freemasons, terrorists et al).  It’s known also as the Security Service but the authorities never make much of this, presumably because they don’t like the idea of people calling it "the SS".  MI5 is responsible to the home secretary (the UK's minister for internal affairs).

MI6: The foreign intelligence service, almost always called MI6 because of its historic origins but actually correctly styled the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and as the Secret Service Bureau, it actually pre-dated WWI, the MI6 tag not used until WWII.  The SIS is responsible to the Foreign Secretary and is well-known because of the connection with spies real and fictional: James Bond, Graham Greene, John le Carré, Ian Fleming, Somerset Maugham, Kim Philby etc. 

MI7: Military Communication Interception, later known as the Propaganda Section and transferred to the Ministry of Information during the Battle of France (the Western Campaign (Westfeldzug to the Germans) May-June 1940)).

MI8: Better known as the WWII Special Operations Executive (SOE), the covert ops department set up “to set Europe ablaze”, concentrating on sabotage and political subversion in Nazi-occupied Europe.  Said at the time to be of great psychological value, post-war analysis of its operations suggested success was patchy.  In the inter-war years, MI8 was concerned with the interception and interpretation of communications.

MI9: A WWII creation concerned with undercover operations, especially assisting escape and evasion by both civilians and prisoners of war.

MI10: Weapons analysis, a WWII military-civil partnership which conducted tests and provided analytical services.

MI11: Military security.  Although concerned with internal matters such as leaks and the theft of intelligence, most of its staff were in field security and the Military Police dealt overwhelmingly with normal police matters or military discipline.

MI12: Military censorship, always a growth industry in the armed forces.  One WWII US general held the view the civilian population needed to be told about the war only when it was over and then only that “we won”.

MI13: There is no evidence MI13 ever existed.  Whether this was because of the superstition the British attach to the number 13 isn’t known.  Conspiracy theorists wonder if it’s something so secret that it’s never been spoken of.

MI14 & MI15: Divisional title, the “desk” or section devoted to intelligence relating to Germany.

MI15: In April 1940, the MI15 title was recycled, German matters having long been exclusively the domain of MI14.  MI15 became the aerial photography branch which was purely technical (how best to photograph stuff) and attached to the Air Ministry while MI4 (aerial reconnaissance) decided what should be photographed.

MI16: Scientific analysis.  As WWII progresses, the importance of advances in science and technology became increasingly obvious.  MI16 wasn’t a collection of scientists but an administrative centre to coordinate research and ensure efforts weren’t being duplicated.  It interacted with existing instruments such as the Ministry of Supply in matters of resource allocation.

MI17: Secretariat for Director of Military Intelligence.  This was an attempt to coordinate the back-office and administrative overhead of all the MIx departments but it also added to the bureaucracy.

MI18: There is no evidence MI18 ever existed.

MI19: A WWII prisoner of war debriefing unit, best known for the transcripts they provided by secretly bugging German generals in captivity in England.  The transcripts are especially interesting when read in conjunction with some of the generals’ memoirs published after their release.

Conspiracy theorists find it intriguing that there’s no documentary evidence for the existence of MI13, MI18 & MI20 and MI21-MI25 remain classified as secret.  Over the years, the most popular conspiracy theory has been there’s a MI unit somewhere concerned with a covering up what the government really knows about UFOs.

The SIS Building, 85 Albert Embankment, Vauxhall, Lambeth, London.  Opened in 1994, nicknames include Legoland, The London Lubyanka, Ceaușescu Towers & The Ziggurat.

The British government did not until 1994 officially acknowledge the existence of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, aka MI6), and the identities of its staff and location of their offices were classified secret and subject to a D-Notice (now called a DSMA-Notice (Defence and Security Media Advisory Notice)) which was an official request by government to publishers and broadcasters not to publish or broadcast items about certain matters, a system which worked rather effectively in the pre-internet age.  However, the location of the SIS’s headquarters in the London suburb of Lambeth was apparently the UK’s “worst kept secret” appearing in training materials for taxi drivers although the story it was once in Lonely Planet’s London guide seems to have been apocryphal.  When the new SIS building was commissioned, it was decided to solve the problem of the secret leaking by publishing the details and ensuring the new structure was about the most obvious thing on the Thames.  An eclectic mix of styles, shapes & structures, when opened in 1994 it attracted criticism from those architects who decry anything other than 1950s New York modernism but it has aged rather well, the lines and proportions having some charm.