ABSTRACT
The course of such discussions, of course, begs a larger question: why look for theory at all where intelligence is concerned? Espionage has got along just fine for thousands of years without much scholarly reflection. But longevity does not automatically mean understanding. Indeed, as reliable accounts of intelligence operations and then their actual documentation became available to scholars over the course of the last century, the lack of an intellectual context for these revelations hampered scholarship, both on intelligence itself and on the events it had affected. Christopher Andrew and David Dilks (1984) noticed a ‘missing dimension’ in historical comprehension in 1984; what they could well have added was that a better understanding of what intelligence is and does might have helped the gap from opening in the first place.
