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4 The seeds though of a change in attitude were germinating throughout the late 1990s. Although intelligence had become less sexy, it was about to become enmeshed in a wider battle within our society—between those who believed human rights and tolerance should take a central place in our struggle for security and those who believed that a ‘‘back to the future’’ world of religious or ethnic hatreds required a return to realpolitik. Battle lines for a new ideological schism were being drawn as early as the mid-1990s.

In Britain, the budgetary pressure finally built in 1993, to the point where cuts were made in the intelligence agencies. The time of troubles coincided, surprise, surprise, with an unprecedented period of briefing by MI5 and MI6. The departure of Thatcher meant that the Security Service was free to resume press and parliamentary contacts, lobbying for work on organized crime and, eventually with much greater success, for the leadership of the campaign against Irish Republican Army terrorism in Britain.

This term, often employed by British experts to depict the changing strategic environment, reflects both the relative lack of resources at the disposal of Islamic fundamentalists compared to those of the United States and the West as well as the capacity of the Islamic fundamentalists, even with limited resources, to inflict substantial physical and economic damage on the West. S. intelligence community, understanding the nature of asymmetric warfare and developing the analytic tools requisite for providing insights into it represents its most pressing challenge in the first part of the twenty-first century.