Diplomats are, and have always been, in the information business. Across history, amid a great diversity of tasks, diplomats have engaged in three areas of activity above all: representation, negotiation, and information exchange. It is the last of these that has consistently consumed the largest share of diplomats’ time, and produced an enormous volume of written records. From its beginning, the state has demanded information, and it has been the task of the diplomat “to inform” both those who send them and those to whom they are sent. The worth of diplomats has historically been assessed in part according to the accuracy and utility of the information they provide.
Spies, like diplomats, are information professionals, but traditionally there has been a distinction between their respective brands of information gathering. We generally associate “intelligence” with the work of spies, with a distinction drawn between diplomatic activity and the gathering of intelligence. Intelligence is information collected with a particular end in mind, from sources deemed to have especial authority, access, or insight, in the hope that the resulting knowledge might inform or facilitate the implementation of policy; the purpose of intelligence, whether as human intelligence (HUMINT) or signals intelligence (SIGINT), is to equip decision makers with timely truths, by which to monitor threats, form alliances, and make war. It was a role acknowledged as long ago as Sun Tzu in the fifth century BCE when the Chinese general and philosopher wrote in The Art of War: “Thus, what enables the wise sovereign and the good general to strike and conquer, and achieve things beyond the reach of ordinary men, is foreknowledge.” The collection of intelligence is often furtive in nature, and its yield regularly subjected to appraisal for its verisimilitude and utility.
This difference between diplomacy and intelligence gathering has been implicit in the many warnings to ambassadors not to be seen as acting like spies. An eleventh-century Persian treatise called the Siyāsatnāmeh, or Book of Government, which drew in part on sources from the earlier Sassanian period, declared that “it should be realized that when kings send ambassadors to one another, their purpose is not merely the message or the letter which they communicate openly, but secretly they have a hundred other points in view.” The fifteenth-century Venetian Ermolao Barbaro, in his treatise De officio legati, emphasized that it was in the gathering of information that an ambassador most clearly demonstrated his value to his sovereign, but that he must take care not to cross the line of propriety and look like a spy. In his 1681 treatise L’ambassadeur et ses fonctions (The ambassador and his functions) Abraham de Wiquefort described diplomacy as the “the trade of an honest spy,” and François de Callières, in a 1716 work on the art of diplomacy, described the ambassador as an honorable espion, an “honorable spy,” because he was expected to uncover the secrets of the court to which he was sent by winning over those who could inform him.
Although secrecy is sometimes seen as a hallmark of intelligence (hence the “secret service”), and one that distinguishes it from diplomacy, secrecy is not a requirement of the work of spies and intelligence services. And much important diplomatic activity takes place away from public view, and sometimes entirely in secret, as seen in the distress among American policy makers over the release of thousands of diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks. In practice, diplomacy and intelligence work are almost always intertwined.
Some of the earliest written records we have of government document diplomatic activity. The so-called Mari tablets, dating from the eighteenth century BCE, record the travels of Bronze Age diplomats across the Near East, from Mesopotamia to the Aegean. One letter describes the delivery of leather sandals in the Minoan style by an official named Bahdi-Lim to the famed Babylonian king Hammurabi. Unfortunately for the Marian ambassador, Hammurabi rejected the footwear, for reasons not indicated, and a short time later would invade and conquer Mari. This is one of dozens of diplomatic missions recorded in the tablets, an indication not only of active diplomacy four thousand years ago, but also of one of its essential features: the informational paper (or, in this case, clay) trail that it generates.
The Rigveda, the great collection of Sanskrit hymns composed in the second millennium BCE, indicates that the various Vedic tribes of India engaged both in espionage and in the regular exchange of envoys to negotiate disagreements over land and form alliances with like-minded partners. In their accounts of the two great wars that convulsed ancient Greece, both Herodotus and Thucydides repeatedly describe the dispatch of spies and the exchange of envoys, sent out not only to negotiate but also to report and gather information. Herodotus tells us that Histiaios, the tyrant of Miletus, sent an envoy with a message tattooed on his head, which would be revealed when its recipient shaved the envoy’s head. While typical of Herodotus’s partiality to fantastic stories, this tale is nonetheless indicative of the regular long-distance exchange of information in ancient Greece.
While for most of its existence the Roman Empire had no formal, centralized foreign policy apparatus, and there is no indication that the Romans kept systematic records of their diplomatic activity, information furnished by diplomats and spies was vital to the Roman imperial project. The Romans operated an imperial secret service attached to its extensive courier network known as the cursus publicus, whose aim was to direct sensitive and useful information and intelligence to the imperial metropole. The sixth-century historian Procopius wrote that both the Romans and their rivals in Sassanid Persia spent significant public monies on spies “to go secretly among the enemy in order to examine their affairs accurately, reporting to their rulers on their return.” The Byzantine Empire placed especial importance on information gathering, buffeted as it was for centuries by antagonistic neighbors. Gathering information about the politics and policies of bordering states was regarded as critical and one of the foremost concerns of the envoys dispatched by the Byzantine emperors. The imperial chancery, the drome, had the scrinium barbarorum (Office of the barbarians), dedicated to drafting letters and keeping records related to the empire’s diplomatic and intelligence-gathering activity, and led by an official known as the logothete, dedicated to the collection and organization of sensitive information.
The calculus of information for diplomats fundamentally changed in the *early modern period. Starting in Italy in the fifteenth century, and then spreading elsewhere in Europe and beyond, states exchanged ambassadors who remained resident at court, establishing households that in time would develop into permanent embassies. Permanent residence meant that information gathering became a daily concern for diplomats. As early as 1458, Duke Francesco Sforza of Milan, who was the first sovereign systematically to send out resident ambassadors to multiple states, told one of his ambassadors that he wished to become “the lord of the news” (signore di novelle). The duke also had within his chancery a team of *code makers and breakers.
The advent of resident diplomacy had informational repercussions that went beyond diplomats’ daily tasks. With the constant drafting, exchange, receipt, and copying of diplomatic correspondence, institutions emerged to handle the production and storage of documents. Diplomatic chanceries like that of Louis XIV of France handled “worlds of paper” related to statecraft, and diplomats themselves, like the chancery secretaries, oversaw voluminous paper flows. Diplomatic records became tools to guide policy, establish precedent, and, in some cases, assert political legitimacy.
In the modern world, statecraft, like commerce and finance, increasingly depended on the provision of timely information, with both diplomats and spies playing essential roles. The institutional lines between diplomacy and intelligence, however, tended to become more finely drawn. In nineteenth-century Europe we see the precursors to the intelligence agencies that would emerge in the following century. The Austrian foreign minister and chancellor Klemens von Metternich is rightly famous as the chief diplomatic architect of the nineteenth-century “Concert of Europe,” but he also developed one of the continent’s most effective intelligence services. Staffed by secret police and a team of *cryptographers operating in a so-called cabinet noir (black cabinet) it excelled in the acquisition of both HUMINT (human intelligence) and SIGINT (signals intelligence), the latter through code breaking and the interception of letters. No wonder Metternich referred to himself as the “chief minister of police in Europe.” In the next generation, Otto von Bismarck, the master German statesman, also oversaw a two-pronged effort of diplomacy and intelligence. Bismarck’s “Prince of Spies,” Wilhelm Stieber (1818–82), ran a vast network of underground informants across Europe and even donned disguises to engage in hands-on intelligence work himself. His intelligence reports were vital to Prussian successes in its wars against Austria and France. Building on Stieber’s work, Bismarck established the first genuine national intelligence office, known as the Central Information Bureau.
The nineteenth century also saw the appearance of the telegraph, after which “reading the cables” became a daily requirement of diplomats. In the 1840s, the British foreign secretary, Lord Palmerston, after he had received his first telegram, lamented, “By God, this is the end of diplomacy.” Palmerston was wrong, but there is little doubt that the telegraph transformed the circulation of diplomatic information. Allowing as it did near-instantaneous communication between the metropole and agents in the field, the telegraph compressed time and space. Over time, it led to a reduction in the autonomy of the ambassador, for he could expect an immediate reply to any information he provided and instructions on what to do. The telegraph also encouraged the centralization of diplomatic decision making, increased the importance of signals intelligence, and accelerated the pace of diplomatic activity (especially during crises). The rapid exchange of information could lead to misunderstanding and miscalculation, especially in an age of mass communication, which energized public opinion. Telegraphy was also vulnerable to tapping, which might yield sensitive intelligence, perhaps most famously with the so-called Zimmerman Telegram of January 1917, a secret message from the German Foreign Ministry to Mexico that proposed an alliance against the United States were the Americans to enter the war against Germany. Decoded by British intelligence, the telegram played an important role in the lead-up to American entry into the First World War on the side of the Allies.
In the twentieth century, it became customary for states to establish a dual-track approach to information from abroad, with separate agencies dedicated to diplomacy and intelligence. The latter became commonplace by the middle of the twentieth century and were given further impetus by the armed peace of the Cold War. Examples include the Central Intelligence Agency, formed by the National Security Act of 1947; the Japanese Public Security Intelligence Agency, founded in 1952; and the KGB, which emerged from the consolidation of several existing bodies in 1954. In some cases, the size and scope of these entities eclipsed those of the foreign ministries. Thus in the United States, the “intelligence community” dwarfs the diplomats on the government payroll.
As communication technologies diversified in the past century, so too did the avenues for intelligence gathering. Phone taps and bugging devices penetrated the most intimate of spaces. Thus, at the Allied conferences at Tehran (1943) and Yalta (1945), listening gadgets at the conference venues gave Stalin unvarnished insight into the American outlook and intentions. In the age of cellular telephony, listening in on the phone conversations of officials and civilians alike is a widespread, and controversial, practice. At the same time, satellites and spy planes gathered imagery intelligence (known as IMINT) from great distances above. In a global Cold War involving the deployment of nuclear assets, IMINT precipitated a number of flashpoints, including the shooting down of an American U-2 spy plane over Russia in 1960 and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, which followed the discovery of nuclear launch sites on the island of Cuba via U-2 flyovers. Satellite intelligence largely replaced spy planes from the 1960s forward, with “eyes in the sky” monitoring everything from nuclear treaty compliance to troop movements. In the course of the Vietnam War, American aerial and satellite assets gathered significantly more IMINT than the available manpower could possibly process. IMINT from satellites is more important than ever, especially for insight into closed societies such as North Korea. Some estimates have suggested that together the National Reconnaissance Office and National Geospatial Intelligence Agency represent the largest tranche of the US intelligence budget, the exact numbers for which are classified.
The age of *digital information has wrought transformations in the roles and conduct of both diplomats and spies. The proliferation of social media networks, the availability of *big data, and digital applications that allow for rapid exchange all combine to generate global connections and information flows. Emails and encrypted digital message have displaced telegraphy, although diplomats still speak of “cables” when describing their communication. The availability of digital media has made diplomatic activity simultaneously easier, in that digital communication does not require the same sorts of investments in personnel and bricks and mortar that traditional diplomacy does, and more complex, given the great increase in potential participants and stakeholders in diplomatic activity, such as NGOs, banks and corporations, academic concerns, and private citizens. It is customary today to speak of “networked diplomacy,” which links people, ideas, interests, and audiences through digital communicative mechanisms. The application of “soft power” is an essential concern and requires the broadcast of information not only to fellow state officials, but also to civilian populations and social organizations. In the late twentieth century, economic information assumed a particularly important role for diplomats, who were expected to act as advocates for the national commercial and financial interests. States and major corporations alike became increasingly concerned with commercial and industrial espionage, especially in businesses deemed vital to national security, such as defense contracting and telecommunications. Computer *hacks and malware presented especial vulnerabilities, compromising both intellectual property and the personal data of both employees and customers. The Chinese government, in particular, has been credibly accused of orchestrating widespread espionage efforts against foreign concerns, and Silicon Valley is the target of such intensive Russian and Chinese espionage efforts that it has recently been called a “den of spies.” In many cases, such espionage proves to be considerably more time- and cost-effective than R&D.
The business of spying, too, has been changed radically by the emergence of digital information. While boots-on-the-ground human intelligence remains extremely important, a spy is just as likely to be sleuthing for intelligence seated at a computer console or watching incoming footage from a drone. Cybersecurity and online information flows are now fundamental foreign policy concerns that occupy an increasing number of intelligence professionals. This reflects the reality that in modern diplomacy and espionage the key step in the information-gathering process, for diplomats and spies alike, is triage, during which they extract the genuinely important information from amid the noise. This was the challenge, per the 2004 report of the 9/11 Commission, at the heart of the failure to foresee and interdict the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. American intelligence agencies “knew,” but they did not “know that they knew.”
The embassy retains the important role it has had ever since the advent of permanent, resident diplomacy, remaining the primary venue for the exchange of information in bilateral contacts. It also retains important information-gathering capacities, employing a broad range of people in doing so. The “intelligence officer” is a vague category of functionary often assigned to embassies, operating under “official cover.” It has been estimated that during the Cold War, the Soviets stationed some eight hundred of these intelligence officers in western European embassies alone; they were, in essence, spies. Embassies thus occupy a gray area—a locale for both diplomacy and espionage, and the official diplomatic presence of a state, granted diplomatic immunity, but often tasked with illicit intelligence tasks, acting as hubs for the acquisition of both HUMINT and SIGINT.
The use of digital information has transformed the contours of public diplomacy, creating new avenues by which to transmit information to the public through cultural exchanges, educational initiatives, and national publicity and advocacy campaigns. In the early twenty-first century, diplomats expend as much time and effort composing messages for virtual audiences on television, podcasts, and online interfaces as they do communicating with other diplomatic officials. While statecraft at the highest level between government representatives remains important, the inclusive and collaborative nature of much of this digital activity suggests a new ethos.
Diplomats in the digital age have been called “bureaucrats of transnational knowledge” and, like so many others, find themselves acting as information managers. The Economist magazine in 2012, in surveying the turn of governments toward the use of Twitter feeds, described a new army of “tweeting Talleyrands.” Nearly all developed nations now practice what is called Twiplomacy. Consular hashtags are now a diplomatic calling card. The US president Donald Trump regards Twitter as his primary means of communication, not only with domestic supporters and antagonists, but also with foreign nations and leaders. For better or for worse, his Twitter feed has become an instrument of statecraft. The US State Department has an Office of eDiplomacy overseeing its *internet presence and maintains an internal wiki called Diplopedia, to which diplomats and other officials add information relative to their expertise. The State Department also employs massive online open courses (MOOCs) as part of its educational outreach abroad.
Spies in the digital age, in addition to collecting information, expend increasing time and resources on stemming digital threats and interdicting and responding to deliberate misinformation originating from geopolitical rivals. They also have to combat digital *leaks and hacks intending to reveal information they wish to keep secret. Their shadowy adversaries might be WikiLeaks (founded 2006) or Russian hackers in an office basement in St. Petersburg. As WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange once observed: “The Internet is the biggest spying machine the world has ever seen.”
In the longer term, we might ask if the flows of information in the digital age change the fundamentals of diplomacy and espionage. Digital diplomacy raises searching questions over where the boundaries of diplomacy lie and who gets to practice it. Does the surfeit of information and the ease with which it is shared portend a diplomacy without diplomats? Much of the information amassed by foreign and intelligence ministries is *open sources intelligence (OSINT), which does not require the expense, personnel, and subterfuge of long-established information-gathering methods. The traditionally clear boundaries between the diplomat and nondiplomat are being subtly, but steadily, eroded. Diplomats historically have been distinguished by their privileged access to certain categories of information, but in an age when information abounds and is largely open source, that distinction is considerably less clear.
Does the information provided by diplomats and spies end up making a critical difference? Demanding from their diplomats and spies an uninterrupted flow of information, policy makers routinely demonstrate an untenable confidence that possession of certain information assures a capacity to determine the course of events. But intelligence failures are as routine as intelligence triumphs. Even good information does not necessarily lead to good policy. In an age of information saturation, this is perhaps true more than ever.
Paul M. Dover
See also archivists; bureaucracy; computers; data; databases; digitization; documentary authority; governance; information, disinformation, misinformation; networks; secretaries; storage and search; telecommunications