Introduction
No better lesson than the Dreyfus Affair will ever be shown to the people; they have to make the effort to distinguish between liars and truthful men. They have to read, question, compare, verify, think.
- Georges Clemenceau
“This essay is only a start for the work of developing a robust theory of counterintelligence,” I wrote at the end of “What Are We Talking About When We Talk About Counterintelligence?” in the June 2009 issue (Vol. 53, No. 2) of this journal. Almost as soon as the article appeared, however, I began to have doubts about it. Was it a weaker starting point to understanding
counterintelligence (CI) than I had hoped? What might I have gotten wrong or ought to have said differently? But, I decided, what’s done is done. I went on with other projects and didn’t think about the article again for years.
What is Different in CI Today?
The CI world is not static, however, and around 2020 I began to wonder how it might have changed since 2009. Much remains the same, but the social, technological, and
political contexts in which CI is situated—the understanding of which I argued is critical to the work—was by then going through a series of changes as great as any in the past.
Simultaneously, legal and geostrategic shifts, the spread of collection methods hitherto available only to the services of major powers, the rise of social media, introduction of ubiquitous private and public surveillance systems, privatization of intelligence work, and the dependence of
state services on new generations of employees with outlooks vastly different than those of their predecessors were driving profound shifts in counterintelligence.
It is with these developments in mind that I believe the time has come to look at the original article and ask, 15 years on, what are we talking about now, when we talk about counterintelligence?
Download PDF to read entire article. (12 pages, including recommended readings.)