Britain’s new National Security Council is built along much the same lines as its counterpart on the other side of the Atlantic – but if we’re copying the American model, how come we didn’t create a National Intelligence Council to go with it?

In the US, the NIC partly plays the role that the Joint Intelligence Committee performs in the UK system (although the National Intelligence Estimates that NIC produces are much more in-depth than JIC assessments). But the NIC also performs several additional tasks which are not well performed in Britain’s new system for foreign policy co-ordination.

For instance, in the US the NIC has the job of overall risk surveillance in the foreign policy domain over a 3-5 year timescale, including transnational threats and global issues as well as individual regions, and with strong emphasis on connecting the dots to see the larger picture (as for instance in NIC’s recent report on Global Trends to 2025). Unlike the JIC, the NIC uses both secret and open source data in drawing together this composite assessment – rather than falling into the Cold War trap of assuming that all the important information will come from covertly obtained data. And while the UK has experimented with a Strategic Horizons Unit in the Cabinet Office, it has suffered from being divorced from actual policymaking – unlike the NIC, which is firmly embedded in all levels of the NSC process.

This in turn allows the NIC to perform the second key role missing from the current UK configuration: the ‘red team’ challenge function that David and I call for in our Chatham House report Organising for Influence.  The NIC’s seat at the NSC table in Washington comes with a clear mandate from the President to test other players’ assumptions, challenge policy options, and provide an additional view for policymakers. In the UK, by contrast, no part of the government enjoys the same ‘licence to be awkward’ – which creates a risk of groupthink, or alternatively of inter-departmental turf warfare with inadequate attention paid to the big picture.

Third, the NIC has a critical role in briefing Congress on long range foreign policy issues, increasing legislative awareness of the foreign policy context (senior NIC staff describe the role as complementary to that of the Congressional Budget Office in creating shared awareness of challenges facing the US). While the UK’s Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee does get access to (some) JIC data, the security classification of JIC assessments clearly prevents them from being shared with, say, the Foreign Affairs, Defence and International Development Select Committees. A UK version of the NIC, on the other hand, could provide unclassified, open source assessments to Parliament – enhancing Parliamentary involvement in, and oversight of, Britain’s foreign policy context.

Finally, the NIC plays a crucial role in bringing external thinking in to government on foreign policy issues by trawling the academic and think tank communities for ideas, including through its NIC Associates program. The UK, by contrast, tends to find this a lot more difficult.  While the Strategic Horizons Unit undertook extensive outreach for the update of the NSS, it was badly linked to actual policymaking as noted above; and while FCO’s Policy Planning Staff is theoretically charged with maintaining close links with think tanks, in practice it has not done so for several years.

Admittedly, the NSC probably needs a bit of time to bed down before any more changes are made to the UK’s foreign policy architecture (there’s also the small matter of the Strategic Defence and Security Review to get out of the way). But when the government reviews its new arrangements, probably some time next year, it should give serious thought to a UK NIC.

Daniel Ellsberg, in 1968, speaking to Henry Kissinger, who was just entering government for the first time:

“Henry, there’s something I would like to tell you, for what it’s worth, something I wish I had been told years ago. You’ve been a consultant for a long time, and you’ve dealt a great deal with top secret information. But you’re about to receive a whole slew of special clearances, maybe fifteen or twenty of them, that are higher than top secret.

“I’ve had a number of these myself, and I’ve known other people who have just acquired them, and I have a pretty good sense of what the effects of receiving these clearances are on a person who didn’t previously know they even existed. And the effects of reading the information that they will make available to you.

“First, you’ll be exhilarated by some of this new information, and by having it all — so much! incredible! — suddenly available to you. But second, almost as fast, you will feel like a fool for having studied, written, talked about these subjects, criticized and analyzed decisions made by presidents for years without having known of the existence of all this information, which presidents and others had and you didn’t, and which must have influenced their decisions in ways you couldn’t even guess. In particular, you’ll feel foolish for having literally rubbed shoulders for over a decade with some officials and consultants who did have access to all this information you didn’t know about and didn’t know they had, and you’ll be stunned that they kept that secret from you so well.

“You will feel like a fool, and that will last for about two weeks. Then, after you’ve started reading all this daily intelligence input and become used to using what amounts to whole libraries of hidden information, which is much more closely held than mere top secret data, you will forget there ever was a time when you didn’t have it, and you’ll be aware only of the fact that you have it now and most others don’t….and that all those other people are fools.

“Over a longer period of time — not too long, but a matter of two or three years — you’ll eventually become aware of the limitations of this information. There is a great deal that it doesn’t tell you, it’s often inaccurate, and it can lead you astray just as much as the New York Times can. But that takes a while to learn.

“In the meantime it will have become very hard for you to learn from anybody who doesn’t have these clearances. Because you’ll be thinking as you listen to them: ‘What would this man be telling me if he knew what I know? Would he be giving me the same advice, or would it totally change his predictions and recommendations?’ And that mental exercise is so torturous that after a while you give it up and just stop listening. I’ve seen this with my superiors, my colleagues….and with myself.

“You will deal with a person who doesn’t have those clearances only from the point of view of what you want him to believe and what impression you want him to go away with, since you’ll have to lie carefully to him about what you know. In effect, you will have to manipulate him. You’ll give up trying to assess what he has to say. The danger is, you’ll become something like a moron. You’ll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they may have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours.”

….Kissinger hadn’t interrupted this long warning. As I’ve said, he could be a good listener, and he listened soberly. He seemed to understand that it was heartfelt, and he didn’t take it as patronizing, as I’d feared. But I knew it was too soon for him to appreciate fully what I was saying. He didn’t have the clearances yet.

Recounted in Mother Jones; h/t Nils Gilman.