Abstract
This explorative chapter focuses on top-level coordinated US strategic intelligence during the Cold War and considers the history of secret intelligence as a history of knowledge production and circulation. The chapter asks how production processes were organizationally structured and methodologically oriented and what stature as a body of knowledge national strategic intelligence developed over time. These are huge questions and the chapter only presents outlines of answers. It posits that the knowledge of US strategic intelligence was produced in a complex and disaggregated intelligence system and, though the latter had been distinguished since 1950 by a robust function for coordinated strategic analysis, strategic intelligence, including coordinated strategic intelligence, never dominated strategic assessment within the US government. This reality was never per se an appraisal of the veracity or quality of the knowledge produced by strategic intelligence. The chapter highlights six sources which generated pressure against a manifestation of the idea that coordinated strategic intelligence assessment might provide the ultimate analytic basis for US strategic planning and policy: predominance of policy, the difficulty of gauging intentions, competing logics in decision making, systems analysis, politicization, and net assessment.
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