ABSTRACT
Intelligence agencies need to provide policymakers with honest assessments that are free from any political bias. Uri Bar-Joseph observes that the relationship between policymaker and intelligence official is an ‘ongoing obstacle race’ where both sides often get irritated. Intelligence officials strive to give policymakers unbiased assessments to improve the quality of their policies. Policymakers might find that the intelligence advice goes against what they want to do and considerable tensions may follow as policymakers either ignore or twist the information to suit their own purposes. For all the money spent on intelligence collection, one of the biggest problems in government is the non-use of intelligence by policymakers. Intelligence consumers also need to maintain a balance between ‘intimacy and detachment’. ‘The best arrangement is intelligence in separate but adjoining rooms’, Sir Percy Cradock suggests, ‘with communicating doors and thin partition walls, as in cheap hotels’. The influence of intelligence can also change depending on the political system.
