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.
