ABSTRACT
Intelligence services are integral parts of the modern state; as Sir Reginald Hibbert put it in the late 1980s, ‘over the past half-century secret intelligence, from being a somewhat bohemian servant or associate of the great departments of state, gradually acquired a sort of parity with them’ 2 . They have not withered away with the end of the Cold War. There has been some reduction in this decade, but not to the same extent as in the armed forces, and intelligence budgets have recently levelled off or begun to increase again. 3 American expenditure has been declared as $26 billion annually, around ten per cent of the cost of defence, perhaps with some recent increases in human source collection. 4 The equivalent British budget is probably more than £1 billion, rather more than the cost of diplomacy. 5
