Suchergebnisse

Discusses ethical and legal issues raised by use of religious personnel as agents by intelligence agencies, with or without their consent. Some focus on collaboration of the Roman Catholic Church and Russian Orthodox Church with the security agencies of the US and Russia, respectively.

Intelligence scholars are drawing on behavioural decision theory to improve decision-making under risk and uncertainty in intelligence and counterintelligence. Such an undertaking is essentially lacking without the Austrian school's concepts of knowledge, discovery, (entrepreneurial) judgement, ignorance, rational calculation and, more generally, its analysis of human action in the face of true uncertainty. Decision theory, both orthodox and behavioural, depicts decision rather narrowly as a prioritisation task undertaken within a delineated problem space where the probabilities 'sum to one'. From such a perspective, certain perennial challenges in intelligence and counterintelligence appear resolvable when in fact they are not, at least not when approached from the usual direction. We explain how Austrian concepts can complement efforts to improve intelligence decision-making. We conclude that the future strategic value of intelligence analysis is located beyond information acquisition, however fast and however vast. Intelligence agencies have no price signals to help them determine how much intelligence to produce. And governments have no price signals to moderate their appetites for the intelligence product. Ultimately, those agencies that recognise the implications of intelligence agencies as non-price institutions and adapt their decision-making processes may find that they have the upper hand over their rivals.

In this paper, we investigate the economic returns to industrial espionage. We show that the flow of information provided by East German informants in the West over the period 1970–1989 led to a significant narrowing of sectoral TFP gaps between West and East Germany. These economic returns were primarily driven by relatively few high-quality pieces of information and particularly large in sectors closer to the West German technological frontier. Our findings suggest that the East-to-West German TFP ratio would have been 13.3 percent lower at the end of the Cold War had East Germany not engaged in industrial espionage in the West. (JEL L16, N44, O33, O38, O47, P24)

This pioneering work, based on many years of reading and research and ranging mainly from the seventeenth century to the present, breaks new ground in intelligence bibliography. It is the most comprehensive and thorough bibliography of English-language nonfiction books on intelligence and espionage to date.