Intelligence Sharing Runs on Trust That Is Wearing Thin
Liaison relationships depend on confidence that material will not leak or be used for domestic politics. Both assumptions have taken damage.
Intelligence liaison is not a treaty relationship. It is a set of habits between services, sustained by individual officers who trust their counterparts and by an institutional expectation that shared material will be handled a particular way.
The originator control principle is the load bearing element. A service shares on the understanding that the recipient will not pass the material onward, will not act on it in a way that exposes the source, and will not use it in a domestic political argument.
Each of those has been tested in recent years, in more than one country, and services respond to the tests the way any careful institution would. They share less, they compartment more tightly, and they route around a partner rather than confronting it.
The degradation is invisible from outside, which is what makes it dangerous. Nobody announces a reduction in sharing. The material simply stops arriving, and the gap is discovered later, usually during something that would have been easier to see coming.
Gregor Vance writes for The 13th Bell on security. This piece was edited and fact checked before publication.
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