Landscape changes

Abstract

Inevitably, the professionalization of intelligence cooperation does not occur in a contextual or conceptual vacuum. As UK Foreign Secretary William Hague claimed during an interview in June 2011: ‘I don’t deny that there are problems in the intelligence world, but I would argue that in the UK we try to uphold the highest standards in the world.’ He continued: ‘We cannot cut ourselves off from all sources of information that might be unsavoury. Nor can we ever say that there is no risk attached to actions that we take — that somebody in another country could, through no action of our own, be mistreated in some way. But we can go to every possible length to minimise those risks.’ (Williams, 2011)¹