Let us distinguish technical intelligence from political intelligence. (I am talking about the CIA-sort of intelligence: intelligence, that is, as a line of business, not as a human attribute.) Technical intelligence deals with material, quantitative facts concerning weapons, industries, inventions, armed forces, geography, resources, and so on. Political intelligence tries to understand and predict the basic policies of major social entities (nations, classes, churches, races) and of individuals likely to influence political events.
Adequate technical intelligence is the laborious product of a vast, expensive, complicated mass operation. Millions of separate data—among them maps, formulas, photographs, equations, statistical tables, decoded messages, books, correspondence—have to be processed and painstakingly fitted together. The result is the knowledge of how many x-type weapons the enemy (or an ally) has and where, how deep his harbors are, where his missile-batteries or electronic laboratories are located, how much of y he has in storage, how near he is to flying a nuclear-powered plane.
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