Jan Ballast (MA)
(Senior staff member, involved with foreign intelligence, mission support and national security, working for the Ministry of Defence of The Netherlands. He has held numerous analytical and operational positions in both The Hague and missions abroad).
Copyright: http://www.ndc.nato.int - Research Division –NATO Defense College, Rome, Italy, No. 140, September 2017.
Since its establishment, NATO and Intelligence have been ‘a contradiction in terms’, as a CIA researcher coined it in 1984. Different languages, cultures, capabilities and infrastructures proved to be structural constraints. To make things worse, issues like lack of a common threat perception, differing national interests, and political distrust prevented NATO’s national services from sharing with the Alliance as a whole. Recent military missions in North Africa and the Middle East have underlined NATO’s problematic intelligence-sharing apparatus and, besides calls for synchronizing the flow of strategic and operational information, the need for coordinating the many different and inefficient intelligence structures of the Alliance has become apparent. We hope you enjoy this paper that provides a glimpse into bureaucratic politics and Alliance intelligence operations. - Jeffrey A. Larsen, PhD, Director Research Division--.... Read more