The UK imagery intelligence architecture

The UK's imagery architecture currently consists of three organisations, all currently under the DIS, two at the strategic level and one tactical. The tactical element is a former reconnaissance and mapping element of the Royal Engineers current designated the Joint Aeronautical and Geospatial Organisation (JAGO), based on what was originally called the Geographical Engineering Group (GEG). This element's main function is the gathering and collation of geographical information required for the operations of elements like the Royal Engineers such as undertaking military earthworks.Footnote ¹⁹ Its work is purely at the battlefield level, and has a minimum of impact in terms of the national intelligence machinery at the interdepartmental and Cabinet Office levels. The two strategic level elements are what is now called the Defence Geographic Centre (DGC) and the Joint Air Reconnaissance Intelligence Centre (JARIC), the latter also being officially designated the National Imagery Exploitation Centre.Footnote ²⁰

DGC was originally called the Military Survey, the armed services' (originally Army) map-making organisation which can trace its history back some two hundred and fifty years.Footnote ²¹ It gives its current mandate as being to ‘[d]eliver GEOINT [geospatial intelligence], Geospatial information, services and liaison to Defence, including deployed forces and to OGD [other government departments] and international partners, underpinning strategic to tactical level decision-making and action, in order to support the achievement of Defence objectives’. In other words, it is the contemporary, technology-intensive evolution of the Military Survey's original cartographic role during the Napoleonic wars. DGC's staff has varied between 1,150 and 1,500 since the Second World War, and at it is currently based at RAF Feltham.Footnote ²²

JARIC has its roots in interservice photographic intelligence machinery of the Second World War Allied Central Interpretation Unit. Regularised originally as the Joint Air Photographic Intelligence Centre in 1947, the Centre was renamed the Joint Air Reconniassance Intelligence Centre in 1953 when its work moved beyond visible spectrum photography to include ‘exploitation of Radar Scope photography for intelligence purposes.’Footnote ²³ JARIC was established from the outset on a joint service basis much as the wartime Central Interpretation Unit had been. That is to say, imagery analysts, research and development staff and other operational personnel were provided by the three armed services and a civilian component made up of Civil Service employees. The Centre's manpower has been relatively stable throughout its existence being between 475 and 500, with a 1996 Ministry of Defence review confirming a normal complement of 500.Footnote ²⁴By the end of the 1990s, roughly two thirds of JARIC's complement of imagery analysts were drawn from the armed forces, the remainder being civilians.Footnote ²⁵ Although housed and supported by the Royal Air Force, it was mandated to act as the national centre for imagery intelligence expertise, successive charters designating it the ‘recognised authority for photographic intelligence’.Footnote ²⁶

One of JARIC's most important functions is exploitation of imagery provided by the United States from their substantial reconnaissance satellite capability. The steady increase in the dependency on satellite imagery rather than what are known as ‘air-breathing platforms’ (such as aircraft and unmanned aerial vehicles) since the 1960s can be indicated by the changed impact of imagery from the UK's own overhead reconnaissance from platforms like reconnaissance version of the Canberra bomber, the PR9. Prior to the emergence and pre-eminence of America's satellite systems and their products handled under the cryptonym TALENT-KEYHOLE (TK) in the second half of the 1970s,Footnote ²⁷ the PR9 was the main source of UK strategic overhead imagery. JARIC's access to TALENT-KEYHOLE product is secured through a series of agreements with the US imagery organisation, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. The longest standing aspect of the exchange is the UK permitting the USA to fly U2 reconnaissance aircraft from sovereign bases such as that in Cyprus.Footnote ²⁸ However, the UK appears to have secured a role in the new US overhead surveillance programme, the Future Imagery Architecture (FIA), by providing a portion of the investment in the new programme. In exchange for which, it has been reported the UK will be able to task the new systems in proportion to that investment.Footnote ²⁹

Despite the national intelligence significance of imagery intelligence, however, JARIC is not tasked directly under RPSI nor is it funded directly from Single Intelligence Account under JIC authority as are the national intelligence and security agencies. Instead, its requirements are within the Ministry of Defence by the Defence Intelligence Staff through the ‘Collection Coordination and Intelligence Requirements Management’ (CCIRM) process.Footnote ³⁰ CCIRM is the UK implementation of NATO's armed service intelligence tasking proceduresFootnote ³¹ and is oriented in the first instance towards the strategic and operational needs of the armed forces. Consequently, despite the importance of imagery to national intelligence it is managed, funded and directed at a purely departmental level. And much of imagery's difficulties in the UK can be traced to that basic, unreconciled tension between national and departmental intelligence needs.

Turf wars in the Cold War

The initial thinking on a post-war system for imagery intelligence was articulated in a 1945 review of the wartime system conducted by JIC Secretary Denis Capel-Dunn. The Capel-Dunn report acknowledged that ‘the principal part in aerial photographic reconnaissance must […] be taken by the Royal Air Force, since it is they who operate the aircraft.’ On the other hand, it argued that ‘the interest of the consumers is so considerable that we do not believe any one Ministry should be burdened with exclusive responsibility for general control and direction of this branch of intelligence.’ There was even the possibility that photoreconnaissance might enter ‘the commercial field’ for urban and industrial planningFootnote ³² on a basis similar to Royal Ordnance Survey mapmaking. In any event, because of its broad, multi-departmental relevance, it was essential that PHOTINT continue to be directed by a JIC Photographic Reconnaissance Committee.Footnote ³³ In other words, while any new arrangement might be quartered by the Royal Air Force, its work would be directed at a national level by the JIC and its attendant machinery.

Once the wartime Allied Central Interpretation Unit was shut down most of its UK personnel demobilised and released to civilian life. The residual component was regularised and re-designated the Joint Air Photographic Intelligence Centre (UK) (JAPIC (UK)) in 1947. JAPIC(UK) was placed under exactly the dual-control arrangement proposed in the Capel-Dunn report. Administration and quartering for the Centre was given to the Royal Air Force's Coastal Command. This appears to have been chiefly on the grounds that JAPIC (UK) operated within mainland Britain which placed it in Coastal Command's theatre of operations. Within Coastal Command, JAPIC(UK) was managed on a day to day basis by an element called the Central Photographic Establishment.Footnote ³⁴ As a result, it could be tasked by both CPE for Air Force requirements and the JIC's Joint Air Photographic Intelligence Board (JAPIB) for national and interdepartmental needs. This arrangement lasted barely five years however. In March 1950, CPE was disbanded and Bomber Command secured control of JAPIC(UK) as part of an overall consolidation of strategic photoreconnaissance and photographic interpretation activities nominally on efficiency grounds.Footnote ³⁵ This made a degree of sense because Bomber Command was one of JAPIC's largest consumers in the RAF because of its production of bombing target intelligence. Moreover, Bomber Command also controlled the country's principal overhead reconnaissance platforms such as the then-newly developed PR9 version of the Canberra bomber.Footnote ³⁶ But it also marked the start of a series of tugs of war for control of imagery intelligence in Britain.

Besides the establishment of JARIC, 1947 also witnessed the first post-war review of the UK's intelligence system led by Air Chief Marshal Sir Douglas Evill. Evill's review briefly examined the difficult position JARIC in the UK's intelligence community. Besides struggling to process and exploit a very large volume of captured Axis reconnaissance photography, the Centre was also undergoing both the transition from peace to war and restructuring as a post-war interdepartmental enterprise. On the one hand, he noted, there was already work in hand to reconstitute JARIC as an ‘integrated, interservice’ operation under ‘RAF administration.’ On the other, however, he warned that there was also an urgent need for better facilities and additional expert technical staff including ‘draughtsmen, photographic interpreters and model makers.’Footnote ³⁷ While the administration appeared to be on course, imagery intelligence was already significantly under-staffed and under-resourced.

Despite Evill's confidence about the prospects for JAPIC(UK)'s establishment on an ‘integrated, interservice’ entity in 1947, by 1950 at least one of its most important consumers was dissatisfied enough to make the case for a new round of review and reform. In December that year the War Office formally complained, as one Air Force official put it ‘to the effect that the JAPIC was not under proper Joint Intelligence Services [sic] control.’Footnote ³⁸ In response, an Interservice Working Party was convened to review the unit's direction and management. The Working Party reported in the spring of 1952, by which time JAPIC(UK) and CPE had been transferred to Bomber Command.

Whatever scale economies might have accrued to the RAF from consolidating imagery collection and analysis under Bomber Command, the change went no further towards addressing dissatisfaction with the JARIC's joint and national duties. Consequently the Working Party concluded that CPE should be abolished and all tasking placed on a national basis under JAPIB. The Working Party's findings were reviewed and approved by the JIC, at which point Bomber Command was notified that while it might retain administrative control of JAPIC(UK), operational control was now a JIC concern. The point was made somewhat firmly to Bomber Command by the Air Ministry that ‘[i]t has now been decided that [JAPIC(UK)] shall in future be responsible to the Joint Air Photographic Intelligence Board […] for the performance and maintenance of its tasks, and that these tasks and priorities form them shall be laid down by the Board.’ As if the loss of operational control was not already sufficiently clearly articulated Bomber Command was placed on notice that ‘[r]equests for the assistance of [JAPIC] […] should be made to the Air Ministry (ACAS(I) [Assistant Chief of Air Staff (Intelligence), the Air Ministry member of the JIC] for coordination by JAPIB with the needs of other users.’Footnote ³⁹

Bomber Command was less than receptive to the new arrangements. They had had control of IMINT for less than two years, and Commander in Chief Bomber Command protested the decision on a number of grounds. In the first place, he argued, CPE had been shut down and JAPIC(UK) moved to Bomber Command precisely because ‘it was decided that overall efficiency could not be achieved unless Operational [sic] and Administrative [sic] control were exercised through a common channel.’ Subordinating JAPIC(UK) to the JIC meant that the control of imagery collection and analysis would be decoupled, a development he considered ‘fundamentally wrong in principle’. It would ‘act as a serious deterrent to progress’ in the ‘common’ photographic collection and interpretation ‘field’ which ‘might well have disastrous consequences in the event of war.’ Consequently, ‘[u]nless control of these resources continues to be exercised through this headquarters it will not be possible to obtain optimum benefit from them.’ He also warned that the emergence of radar imagery as a new field would be significantly hampered by separating imagery analysis from collection. Concluding the case by expressing serious doubts about the practicality of trying to use an interagency committee that met weekly to ‘exercise day to day functional control of the tasks which it allocates or the supervision of the policies which it directs’ he pressed for the JIC's decision on JAPIC(UK) ‘be reconsidered.’Footnote ⁴⁰

In July 1952 Bomber Command got its way. Under a revised charter for JAPIC(UK), the Centre in principle remained tasked by the Joint Air Photographic Intelligence Board in principle, but in practice its was to be ‘responsible through HQ Bomber Command’ to JAPIB.Footnote ⁴¹ Under the new scheme, a senior Air Ministry official noted to Bomber Command, JAPIB would be ‘the co-ordinating authority for Naval, Army and Air Force air photographic requirements and will issue directions to you periodically.’Footnote ⁴² Bomber Command and the RAF now became the gatekeepers on how national requirements would be implemented by JAPIC(UK). Under the new charter the Air Ministry also secured the right to appoint the Officer Commanding JAPIC(UK). The only real compromise to joint requirements and joint interests in what was supposed to be a national centre was a provision for the War Office to appoint the Deputy Officer Commanding.Footnote ⁴³ Significantly, under both the July 1952 and December 1953 Charters for the Centre – the latter changing JAPIC(UK)'s name to JARIC(UK) and the JIC subcommittee's name to the Joint Aerial Reconnaissance Committee or JARIB – the Air Ministry was to ‘be responsible to the Chiefs of Staff through the Joint Intelligence Committee’ for JARIC(UK) performance and for seeing that requirements laid down at the joint level were actually carried out by the RAF-controlled Centre.Footnote ⁴⁴ In response to such an ambiguous solution, Bomber Command adopted a persistently obstructive on administrative matters of detail that was described by one official at the time as ‘a little bit naughty’ and another as ‘nit picking’.Footnote ⁴⁵

By 1955 a palpable tension was beginning to develop over the tension between civilian and service demands for IMINT being articulated through JARIB. Concerns were raised by members of the Air Ministry Establishments Committee about the degree to which JARIC was able to meet the full range of demands laid upon it. After an inspection of JARIC by members of the Committee, it was found that JARIC generated imagery product for a range of ‘civilian purposes both for Government departments and for commercial bodies sponsored by civil departments’ and this raised questions about how it was tasked compared with its resources. It was noted that the existing practice of JARIB simply inviting bids for JARIC product created the ‘theoretical risk’ that in such an approach ‘capacity creates demand rather than being determined by it.’ Despite assurances that the demand expressed on JARIB would be ‘severely pruned to bring it within available capacity’ concerns over whether JARIC could be expected to meet civilian demands ‘beyond what may be possible with an establishment based solely on Joint Service needs’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Indeed, another official noted that, because of the volume civilian demand in addition to that from the armed services, the requirements articulated ‘at any one weekly meeting’ of JARIB ‘may be far in excess of the whole weekly capacity of JARIC.’Footnote ⁴⁷ There simply was not enough imagery capability to go around.

The status of imagery intelligence in the UK was further hampered by the fact that the Joint Intelligence Committee did not appear to know quite what to do with the discipline. The JIC view of imagery and the work of JARIC were as ‘a subject which does not really fall within any of the three categories of work of the JIC defined as collation (assessments), organisation (coordination and management) and security’. Seemingly unaware of the levels of demand for imagery already presenting a challenge to the existing system, the JIC confined itself to the ‘coordination and supervision of demands for photographic and radar reconnaissance and photographic intelligence and the allocation of priorities.’Footnote ⁴⁸ Consequently, the JIC was far less ‘hands-on’ in supervising imagery than in overseeing other areas of intelligence activity. All but overlooked by the JIC, therefore, JARIC did not significantly benefit from the JIC's 1957 move to the Cabinet Office. And despite a decade's development in the field, it did not figure at all in Sir Burke Trend's reforms to the JIC system during the 1960s either.Footnote ⁴⁹

In early 1957 an attempt was made to try and rationalise JARIC's tasking through the creation of a Central Reconnaissance Establishment (CRE).Footnote ⁵⁰ The new mechanism was supposed to create a single, centralised tasking element for all of the UK's air reconnaissance assets, including the RAF's air reconnaissance units as well as JARIC and its associated training facility, the Joint School of Photographic Interpretation (JSPI). Far from rationalising IMINT the CRE formula complicated it. Under the new scheme, Bomber Command retained managerial control. CRE controlled most but not all operational tasking because a separate element, No.3 Section, was sequestered specifically for RAF needs and subject to direction from the Assistance Chief of the Air Staff (Intelligence). Even with this restructuring, CRE still acted as an intermediary for national requirements articulated by the JIC air reconnaissance subcommittee meaning that the RAF kept control of how and in what measure national requirements would be addressed by JARIC.Footnote ⁵¹

Coupled to a wider reorganisation of the RAF at the end of the 1960s CRE was disbanded,Footnote ⁵² and JARIC was subordinated to a new line management under the recently created Defence Intelligence Staff. Under the new scheme, JARIC continued to be supported administratively by Bomber Command's successor Strike Command. But operational control of its actual work and product was routed through DIS's Director of Management and Support of Intelligence (DMSI), one of four principal directors under the DIS's head, the Director General of Intelligence (DGI) and his deputy. Increased DIS control led by 1970 to national tasking under JIC being completely eliminated. The Joint Air Reconnaissance Board was reconstituted as a purely Ministry of Defence body under DIS authority with a much reduced remit. In parallel, a new Joint Targeting Board took over the production of targeting information for air strike operations and a Joint Exploitation Board managed broader imagery production and analysis.Footnote ⁵³ The central, civilian authority of the Joint Intelligence Committee had been virtually eliminated. Subsequent reforms to the Defence Intelligence Staff after the Falkland Islands War in 1982 would serve only to tighten DIS control with the abolition of the three joint requirements boards in favour of central DIS tasking under CCIRM.Footnote ⁵⁴ Imagery intelligence in the UK would languish in much the same state until the end of the Cold War.

Institutional flux in a time of strategic flux

JARIC's status has fluctuated continuously throughout the post-Cold War era. Like much of the UK defence community, it had felt the impact of the military side of the post-Cold War ‘peace dividend’ which culminated in the 1994 Front Line First Defence Cost Study. Despite the reduction in intelligence funds during that decade, requirements for intelligence actually multiplied with the deteriorating state of Soviet strategic and nuclear forces requiring continuous monitoring and a succession of peace support operational needs in the former Yugoslavia and elsewhere. With the increasingly forward leaning strategic posture of the Labour government elected in 1997, the demands on the agency increased still further. JARIC noted in its annual report that ‘operational imagery tasks’ had increased between 1997 and 1999 from 450 to approximately 700.Footnote ⁵⁵ The Commons Defence Committee further observed of this jump in requirements that ‘[t]he additional workload of the Kosovo campaign meant that for a brief time JARIC could not meet one of its non-operational ‘“priority three” targets’Footnote ⁵⁶ although it was likely to make up the shortfall later in the year. One immediate consequence was a strengthening of JARIC's position in defence expenditure under the a new Strategic Defence Review (SDR) which commenced in 1997 and aspects of which were still under way when the terrorist attacks on the United States occurred in 2001.

In May 1999, the government announced its intention to merge JARIC with the Military Survey Agency. The amalgamation, effective on 1 April 2000, combined the two into what was originally designated the Defence Geographic and Imagery Intelligence Agency or DGIA. To some degree the move was seen as intended to bring the UK's imagery intelligence architecture more closely into line with America's recently established national imagery agency, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (later renamed the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency).Footnote ⁵⁷ However, the decisive motives were the expected scale economies of administration and technology that it was thought the merger would bring about. The move had originally been suggested during the 1994 Defence Cost Review under the previous Conservative administration of John Major. It received further support four years later in a report produced as part of Labour's SDR. According to a Ministry of Defence minute provided to the Parliamentary Defence Committee, the 1998 review concluded that ‘a number of business areas across [JARIC and Military Survey], if brought together, would provide operational benefit, in terms of effectiveness gains and improved customer service, and possible efficiency savings’. Admitting that ‘a large proportion of the current core processes were assessed to be too different to justify merger on that basis alone’, there was a compelling case for ‘convergence’ that would ‘allow a common tasking and production managements function to better control all available resources, giving improved surge capability in crises and improved responsiveness in tasking […] facilitate interoperability of softcopy products and information [and] allow rationalisation of Agency overhead functions.’Footnote ⁵⁸

Although the creation of DGIA was welcomed by parliamentarians on the Defence Committee, their counterparts on the Intelligence and Security Committee were less enthusiastic. JARIC was, they argued ‘a national resource and could be better tasked from the national level’ as a consequence of which ‘the JIC National Intelligence Requirements paper would act as the prioritizing document and […] JARIC would then serve the national requirement and have its performance assessed by the JIC.’ The ISC were convinced not only that this would not compete with or degrade JARIC's fulfilment of the DIS requirements process but moreover that such a change ‘opens the way for JARIC to be funded in part from outside the MOD budget’Footnote ⁵⁹ – in other words at least in part under the JIC-managed national intelligence budget or Single Intelligence Account. The CDI and DIS were, however, firmly unwilling to lose control of JARIC as a service enterpriseFootnote ⁶⁰ and the government flatly rejected the proposal on the grounds that CCIRM already took place under the overall terms of national priorities and therefore ‘the JIC's requirements already guide JARIC's work.’Footnote ⁶¹ The prospect of funding JARIC independently under SIV, the thin end of a wedge that could eventually imply autonomous status for JARIC as a national agency, was not even addressed.

On 1 June 2006, the collection side of DIS under went a re-organisation (the second in barely twelve months).Footnote ⁶² Amongst other changes, Defence Geospatial Intelligence was abolished, and the Military Survey and JARIC became separate entities once again. While JARIC retained its original identity, what had been the Military Survey Agency became the Defence Geographic Centre. The entire experiment of a consolidated imagery intelligence agency had been abandoned after barely half a decade's effort and expense.