Ethical Dilemmas in Intelligence

Ethical issues are very important for achievement of the mission and objectives of an organization. According to Arringo, there have been growing concerns of how effective is ethics in relation to the achievement of the mission and objectives of the intelligence. Unethical behavior can affect the performance of even the bets performing organizations. The intelligence agency is trying to improve its effectiveness and ethical issue should be considered. Three are several ethical issues in intelligence that must be addressed to improve the performance of the intelligence. Such issues include personal integrity, intelligence ethical behavior, ethical pursuit of truth and crossing the moral divide. Some of the ethical programs in the intelligence are outdated and unable to provide competent ethical values that affect the delivery of intelligence services.

The intelligence needs to perform well. Therefore, it needs to impact ethical issues into its staff. However, there have been concerns over the use of outdated ethical learning procedures in the intelligence. According to Drexel, ethical issues in intelligence is much of an organizational issue than an individual issue. The organization needs to undertake a review of its training techniques of ethical issues to match with the new emerging issues affecting intelligence services in terrorism. Integrity is one of the ethical issues that specifically connotes commitment of employees to ethical values even though it is against the employee's self interest. Being ethical means doing the right thing while the ability of an employee to have integrity means doing the right thing though it hurts.

Lynn argues that ethical issues in the intelligence have failed to provide the required results because they are undertaken alone. The lack of integrity on the part of employees leads to poor realization of ethical issues. In order for ethical issues to have significant effect on the intelligence system, they must be accompanied by integrity. Though employees in the intelligence agencies do not lack integrity, the ethical and unethical behavior usually reflects the operating culture of the organization and this culture must be examined using integrity. Integrity can help the intelligence agency check available fault lines and tensions that could cause problems in exercising ethical issues such as ethical behavior, crossing the moral divide and truth. In order to observe integrity and ethics in the intelligence agency, the management should have institutional structures and management practices that create ethical dilemmas. Kent notes that without attention to challenges facing integrity, even the best ethical training programs could be rendered irrelevant.