Intelligence in War: The Value--And Limitations--Of What the Military Can Learn About the Enemy Read Online Free PDF

century B . C . Wellington, Caesar and Scipio all operated as intelligence-gatherers in exactly the same way. Their earliest concern was to discover the lie of the land (Wellington was a great collector of maps and almanacs) and the characteristics of the enemy. The collection of tactical intelligence—who was where when, what he intended and of what he was capable—was left to the month, the week, the day. 11
    Wellington had the population on his side, in both Portugal and Spain. France, the invader, was resented, and after the excesses of 1808, hated. Wellington did not have to seek intelligence. It was brought to him by the bucketload. The difficulty was to sort wheat from chaff. Much more illuminating, as an example of intelligence-gathering in the pre-electric age, was the organisation of intelligence during his campaigning days in unconquered India. Wellington (Arthur Wellesley) was in active command of armies in India from 1799 to 1804. Britain, through the East India Company, controlled large enclaves in Bengal, Bombay and Madras but huge areas of the sub-continent were under the rule of local warlords or freebooting hordes. The French, by diplomacy, bribe and direct intervention, sought to bring a majority of anti-British elements to their side. Wellington, operating with small armies of mixed British–Indian composition, was mainly concerned with putting down such independents as Tipu Sultan and Hyder Ali, feudatories of the effete Moghul emperor, who were effectively running their own armies and states.
    In order to win, Wellington needed a steady stream of up-to-date information, from both far and near, so as to anticipate the movements of his enemies and gain forewarning of shifts of alliances, the gathering of stores, the recruitment of soldiers and other signs of offensives in the making. The conventional means of securing such a supply of intelligence was to form a reconnaissance corps, of troops either already under command or recruited from the population. The British in India had recourse to another method. They took over a pre-existing intelligence system and made it their own.
    The
harkara
system seems to have been unique to India. Because of the sub-continent’s enormous size, difficult terrain and—until the building of the railways and the trunk roads of the British raj—lack of long-distance routes, power tended to be local. Even when centralised under the Moghul conquerors of the sixteenth century, it remained quite diffuse. The Moghuls in Delhi ruled by devolution, either to mighty provincial officials or by arrangement with local princes, particularly in western and southern India. The system could be made to work only if the court was supplied with regular reports of events at the lesser courts. It came to be supplied by two groups of news-providers: writers, often scholars of high status in the Indian caste system, and runners, who carried verbal or written messages and reports over long distances at high speed.
    Over time the system yielded a peculiarly Indian product: the newsletter, usually written in Persian, the language of the Moghul court, in a highly stylised form and on a regular, typically weekly, basis. The letters began as official documents but became, as writers and even runners acquired independence, a sort of private newspaper. Eventually not so private; to whom to distribute the newsletter became a decision of the
harkara,
who himself acquired a blurred identity, part intelligence-gatherer, part distributor. He also acquired odd rights, to be paid, of course, but also to be accepted as a sort of local correspondent at court, known to be working for other powers at a distant centre.
    The
harkaras
survived because, through their indispensability to those at both ends of the system, they established their independent status. It was an uneasy independence; flogging or even execution could follow the provision of dubious or misleading news. The punishment, however, was personal;