Nigeria's Intelligence System: An Analysis

National Security, it is argued, depends in part upon a nation's willingness to maintain indefinitely a war preparedness and forcesin -being, including intelligence forces previously marshalled only in war2. Such intelligence forces must be able to develop forecasts of what will happen or what possibly can be made to happen in future years3. Its ultimate objective being to acquire, collate and evaluate that is required for policy and decisionmaking. What is intelligence and how does it contribute to national security and policy and decisionmaking process? is information, gathered either secretly or openly, about military, strategic, political and, economic conditions of other countries and, about background and intentions of leaders of those countries . . .4. Or even better still, it is the product resulting from collection, evaluation, analysis, integration and interpretation of all available which concerns one or more aspects of foreign nations or of areas of operations and which is immediately or potentially significant to planning5. It is information on foreign policy and national defence that is complete, accurate and timely6. Intelligence agencies are therefore expected to perform one or more of following functions: collection or procurement of information, evaluation of which then becomes intelligence; dissemination of intelligence to those who need it and, protection of one's own from intelligence operations of an adversary''. These functions are usually performed by one or more agencies specializing in different aspects of intelligence activity. The activity falls into three very broad areas strategic intelligence, tactical intelligence and counter-intelligence8. It can be further subdivided into functional areas like, for example, signals or communications intelligence, security intelligence, political intelligence, economic intelligence and industrial intelligence. Furthermore, intelligence operates at different levels. There are short, medium and long-term intelligence requirements for different levels of policy and decision -making process. There are two different, but complimentary ways of gathering. Different in sense that staff that handle both usually have different training, orientation and, modes of operation. One way used to gather is through clandestine