Building an Intelligence Culture From Within: The SRI and Romanian Society

摘要

Collective perceptions on intelligence services have been for centuries associated with a sense of mystery, obscurity, and clandestine behavior. At the same time, intelligence success could not be traditionally conceived and exercised in the absence of cover, duplicity, truth manipulation, and intentional avoidance, as well as of masks adapted to context. Therefore, intelligence would traditionally be based on secrecy and a mainly "no communication" approach. Thus, secrecy inherently marked intelligence, as both a barrier created from inside the organization towards the outside world and as a label placed by public opinion on the intelligence organization, therefore shaping knowledge of what cannot otherwise be known.1 At the same time, globalization has brought forth a significant shift of paradigm in which efficiency and benefit are granted to those who adapt to technological development, need for visibility, transparency, networking, public diplomacy, collaborative activities and, in a more general sense, to what is "open" (open society, open sources, open software, open information, and open intelligence). These changes have determined a new trend in intelligence, mainly in the way the services perceive and approach secrecy. In the period that followed the Cold War, a new all-inclusive horizon gradually emerged in which the ability to manage a culture of openness now seems to be as important as was the ability to manage a culture of secrecy during the Cold War. Essentially, this new horizon goes beyond the classic intelligence model based on secrecy, the use of expensive technologies, and the practice of exchanging intelligence inside the professional community in bilateral formats in which the principle of secrecy was considered the core and governing value.