ABSTRACT
What do we mean by intelligence? How does it differ from mere information? The Chinese do not have words in their vocabulary that makes this distinction, while the French prefer to talk of reseignment or ‘research’. Mark Lowenthal, the distinguished American scholar of intelligence, offers a useful taxonomy, arguing that we can think about intelligence in three ways. First, as process, through which intelligence is requested by policy-makers or operational commanders, then collected, analysed and fed to the consumers. This is often referred to as the intelligence cycle. Second, we can define it as product, once upon a time circulated as paper, but now increasingly distributed through multi-level secure electronic databases. Finally, we can talk of intelligence services and intelligence communities as institutions. However, as their name implies, these organisations that provide an intelligence service to government also conduct activities that go far beyond the mere collection of information, as we shall discover in this volume.2
