ABSTRACT
When all is said, however, the world of the SIS in France remains shrouded in secrecy deeper than in Anglo-Saxon countries. For the researcher this secrecy is at worst an insurmountable obstacle and at best a fog in which one must tread with great caution. There are two consequences to this situation. First, it means that secrecy cannot be viewed as an accidental feature of our field of study. In the tradition of Simmel (1996) and Bok (1982), secrecy must become a theoretical object in its own right, as it already is in the work of Dewerpe (1994) and of Couetoux et al. (1981). Second, focusing on secrecy as an object of research in its own right reveals that it does not merely govern the relationships between the SIS and the outside world, but also the internal relationships between the members of the SIS themselves. The ‘need to know’ principle that governs operations is a prime example of the institutional culture of secrecy that permeates security intelligence agencies. As deep as you may be within the so-called intelligence community, you are always someone else’s outsider. As Dobry (1997) rightly argued, this situation ultimately means that fuzziness cannot wholly be expelled from the logic of research on the French SIS - and perhaps any other - because it only mirrors the systematic ambiguity that pervades this field of inquiry.
