The Relationship between Intelligence and Diplomacy in Democratic Foreign Policy: The Role of Secret Diplomacy

Intelligence organizations, with their expertise and experience in clandestine and covert actions, are a crucial channel for establishing secret diplomacy between countries. This helps guide and reassure politicians and diplomats. The goal of secret diplomacy is to assess the true intentions of other countries and create a conducive environment for establishing official diplomatic relations and future cooperation. Understanding the real intentions of the other parties, particularly their reliability, is a key application of secret diplomacy. This links intelligence and diplomacy together, based on the necessity of measuring reliability, without the intelligence agency monopolizing this task. However, the primary research question is: what is the relationship between intelligence and diplomacy, and how and when does secret diplomacy promote cooperation and trust between competitors? The hypothesis is that intelligence and diplomacy have a two-way and mutual relationship and intelligence-security organizations play a role in interacting with the diplomatic apparatus through secret diplomacy to discover the real intentions of the negotiating party/parties. The results indicate that the continuation of secret cooperation depends on the long-term interests of cooperation outweighing the benefits of intelligence disclosure. The research method is descriptive-explanatory in nature and employs a qualitative methodology based on the type of data. Data collection techniques include library research, internet research, objective observations, and field studies.