International Studies Compendium Project

Extract

Comment on this article   Diplomacy and intelligence have been intertwined since the beginning of recorded history and organized government. In the earliest periods, these two functions were not really differentiated because they were done by the same people ( Bozeman 1992 ; Hamilton and Langhorne 1995 ; Berridge 2005 ), but as governments began to become more complex, beginning with the Chinese and the Achaemenid Persians in about the sixth century BC, separate intelligence organizations began to appear. Over time, the Arabs, Turks, Mongols, and Hindus also copied these activities. While “reason of state” and “realpolitik” were not developed as concepts until the seventeenth century, the belief that diplomacy and intelligence for the survival of the unit were not subject to ethical codes dominated behavior until the organization of Westphalian diplomacy after the end of the Thirty Years War in 1648. The distinction between “intelligence” as information seeking and “covert action” as clandestine behavior to affect policy did not evolve until the twentieth century, and then in response to democratic notions of statecraft ( Olson 2006 :1–15, 33–45; Stempel 2007 ) during the further evolution of public, or “new,” diplomacy in the post-World War I period. From the diplomatic perspective, the mission of intelligence was to provide information about the activities, intentions, and ... log in or subscribe to read full text