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If policymakers or commanders don’t trust an intelligence service, that service will have little influence, and opportunities for gaining decision advantage will be lost. The trick in managing a superior intelligence service is to balance intimacy with distance; the key to disabling the adversary’s service is to destroy that balance or to undermine the managers whose job it is to sustain it. History is full of examples of strained relationships between policy and intelligence. S. 41 Similarly, Robert Blackwill, a senior foreign policy official who has worked at the upper reaches of the State Department and ­ National ­Security Council, mistrusted the Department of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and ­Research because its focus was, perhaps understandably, on support to the secretary of state, not to him.

S. 15 In contrast, offensive counterintelligence aims to manipulate an opponent so that he either chooses not to attack or attacks in harmless ways. Almost inevitably, offensive counterintelligence affects not just the opposing intelligence service, but the decision makers it supports by distorting their perceptions and thus influencing their choices. Offensive CI can be passive, involving the use of camouflage, “dummy” weapons, or the masking of military assets inside of innocuous-looking buildings.

Intelligence asset. 37 Although in this case there was no evidence that a foreign service engineered this result through baits and leaks, this kind of reactive curtailment of espionage capacity is certainly noticed by foreign services, which would see it as a vulnerability. 38 By knowing an adversary’s political system and inducing intelligence “failures” of this kind, an opposing service can stimulate risk aversion, greater oversight of intelligence operations, and a desire to please (and thus not deliver bad news) within the targeted service.