Abstract
Perhaps there is no need to mix intelligence and ethics. The Times took a strictly realist view some years ago that ‘Cold War or no Cold War, nations routinely spy on each other’, and the British Security Service’s official handout takes the view that ‘spying has been going on for centuries and as nations emerged they began spying on each other and will probably always do so’.1 Some would say that that is all that need be said. Intelligence is information and information gathering, not doing things to people; no-one gets hurt by it, at least not directly. Some agencies do indeed carry out covert action, which confuses the ethical issues, but this is a separable and subsidiary function; thus the British Joint Intelligence Committee is emphatically not a covert action committee.
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