On Thinking About Intelligence

Intelligence matters. Robert Schuett offers a first set of reflections on his experience in intelligence and the questions it continues to raise.

I never stopped liking the work I did in intelligence. It has always fascinated me to serve my country in this particular way, and I remain proud of having done so, not least because of the extraordinary people I met along the way. Truthfully, I did love the thrill that came with it, including the long hours and so much more.

For all that, however, I never quite fitted in; and that unease stayed with me long after I left government service. It is also one of the reasons I keep returning (perhaps rather obsessively) to the question of what intelligence actually is. I do not mean what intelligence does, or how we might want the Western intelligence community to be reformed. What I do mean is what kind of political practice ‘intelligence’ is, and how—if at all—it fits within the moral and conceptual categories we use to make sense of the struggle for power and its corollary, the yearning for justice.

Part of the explanation is straightforward enough, at least to me. I worked in military intelligence as a civilian. I was institutionally inside, but culturally and professionally out of place. That mattered, and it mattered to me quite a lot. I have always believed that intelligence, whether in its civilian or military form, benefits from diversity, and that groupthink and uniformity are the very enemies of good, democratic intelligence work. But this is not the whole story, and probably not the most important part of it.

The deeper tension had less to do with organisational culture than with democratic identity. I am, by temperament and training, a political theorist—an ‘ideas person’. My instincts are broadly liberal, shaped by classical liberalism in the Kelsenian rule-of-law mould, and I am deeply wary of unchecked power wherever it appears. At the same time, as a classical realist, I have always been relatively hawkish on questions of national security and international order. I do not doubt in the slightest that states face real threats, or that coercion and secrecy sometimes matter. This very combination, however, made me uneasy everywhere.

To colleagues and friends on the liberal left, my work in intelligence marked me—and often still does—as complicit in something morally suspect: a sort of greyish or dark apparatus of secrecy, surveillance, and coercion, always one step away from potential abuse. To colleagues and friends further to the right, I have often been perceived as insufficiently reliable, perhaps too inclined to ask questions about legal limits and the rule of law rather than so-called strategic necessity. Even when I agreed on both the importance of national security narrowly defined (which I do) as well as on the ‘pluralist’ maintenance of international order (which I do), I rarely shared the broader quasi-nationalistic worldview that often accompanied it—and to this day I remain convinced that one does not have to. Being strong or hawkish on national security is not wedded, at least to me, to any particular personal or political philosophy.

At no point did I feel morally opposed to intelligence work a priori, and I do not feel that way today. Again, I was never in the slightest doubt about the necessity of intelligence as a core function of the modern state in a Westphalian-style international order.

Nor was I fully at ease with its justificatory language, however, which often relied on a rather bland, pseudo-realist vocabulary of ‘national interest’. Anyone familiar with the history of realist political thought knows that there is no such thing as a singular national interest. At best, it is a simplifying fiction; at worst, it is an ideological device used to naturalise power. And yet, at the level of daily practice, of course I knew with great clarity and moral purpose what I was doing, and why. Intelligence work has its own internal logic, and I found parts of its justificatory and moral language intellectually demanding and politically consequential.

What troubled me was something else entirely: I did not know how to place this work within the kinds of political and moral categories that help us make sense of power elsewhere, let alone within my own understanding of the political as a fierce, consequential struggle over power, peace, and justice.

Jurists ask what the law is. Political philosophers ask what the state is, or what justifies political authority. These are not idle questions. They are fundamental ways of rendering power intelligible and contestable. They allow us to argue not only about effectiveness in a crude might-makes-right sense, but also about legitimacy, obligation, loyalty, critique, and refusal. Intelligence, by contrast, seems oddly resistant to this kind of reflection. The practice of stealing secrets has been everywhere in politics and is as old as politics itself, yet it remains strangely elusive as an object of sustained thought.

The questions I found myself asking were therefore not operational, but rather philosophical. And, in retrospect, they were bound up with questions of personal and democratic identity as much as with political and international relations theory. What kind of political practice is intelligence? What authorises it? What limits it? And how should intelligence be understood by those who do not share its internal vocabulary, which often borders on impenetrability?

Liberal political thought has long been suspicious of secrecy, fearing its corrosive effects on accountability, privacy, and trust. Conservative traditions, by contrast, tend to place greater confidence in necessity, discretion, and the claims of state survival. In a democracy, intelligence sits uncomfortably between these traditions, drawing selectively on both while fully belonging to neither tradition. It relies on liberal orders for its legitimacy, yet it often operates in ways that sit uneasily with liberal sensibilities. It invokes necessity in conservative terms, yet it rarely submits that necessity to sustained justification.

What struck me then, and continues to strike me now, is how rarely the absence of intelligence theory or intelligence philosophy is treated as a problem. Intelligence is often presented as self-evident: a technical necessity rather than a political form. Even as intelligence has become more visible in public life, there has been remarkably little sustained reflection on what, precisely, it is we are actually talking about.

Perhaps this is inevitable. Perhaps intelligence resists such reflection by its very nature. Or perhaps it is simply easier not to ask. To dwell too long on the meaning of intelligence may threaten the fragile settlements within a democracy that allow it to operate at all.

I am still asking what intelligence is, and I do so because (my) commitment to the work never resolved the tension between what intelligence is, what it does, and how it fits politically, morally, and philosophically. In a time of domestic polarisation and geopolitical turmoil, when questions of friends and foes, interests and justice, anarchy and law, war and peace—and the role intelligence plays in shaping them—are once again central, that unresolved tension is difficult to ignore.

In an age defined by realism and rivalry, robust intelligence capabilities are as crucial as they have always been. A lack of sustained reflection on the very idea of intelligence, however, may be more consequential than we care to admit.

Robert Schuett is the 2025-26 Fulbright-Botstiber Visiting Professor of Austrian-American Studies at Stanford University. His work focuses on political theory and international relations. He serves as Chair of the Austrian Political Science Association.

Photo by Furkan Elveren