In an earlier piece, I described the mystique culture; the deliberate cultivation of fear and opacity by practitioners who find an institution’s reputation more useful than its actual performance. The claim, treated across West Africa as settled doctrine, is that former officers owe their institutions a lifetime of silence. Some go further. Former officers should not be heard at all, on anything, ever. That is not doctrine. It is routine dressed up as law. It deserves examination.
The Best Case for Silence
The argument, stated fairly, goes like this. Intelligence runs on secrecy. Even an officer who reveals no secret normalises disclosure and slowly erodes the discretion the work depends on. Public commentary corrodes trust; with serving officers, with political masters, with foreign partners. That sounds respectable. It does not survive contact with evidence.
Secrets and Embarrassments Are Not the Same Thing
Expose a source and someone can die. Expose a live operation and you arm the adversary. Nobody serious disputes this. The duty to protect genuine secrets lasts as long as the officer does. Certainly, that is my position.
But writing about how a service trains analysts, or how it relates to its political masters, exposes none of that. What gets disturbed is not protective secrecy. It is institutional comfort, the fog that shields a service from questions about its own performance. The 9/11 Commission. The US Senate’s pre-Iraq War intelligence review. Britain’s Butler Review. All of them laid failures bare, in public, in detail. No source was burned. No partner walked away. The institutions came out better for facing what they got wrong.
Follow the Logic Wherever It Leads
If confidentiality covers the culture of a service and not just its secrets, then no former officer may ever say anything public about how intelligence works. Not in a lecture hall. Not in a book. Not before a parliamentary committee.
No serious democracy accepts that. And neither, in practice, has Ghana.
K.B. Quantson led the BNI and later served as National Security Coordinator. He has written extensively in articles and books about his experiences and continues to do so. A serving senior officer has just published a book on Ghana’s intelligence landscape as he sees it. I hope Yaw Donkor, who also served as both BNI Director and National Security Coordinator, will add his own account soon.
More than anyone, I want to read the reflections of Professor Ofosu Armah, former dean of the University of Ghana’s law faculty, whom Quantson himself who worked under him describes as the finest leader the BNI has ever had and but for the military takeover, was building the foundation for a modern professional agency with the full support of Prime Minister Abrefa Busia in the early 1970’s.
If writing were a breach, the breach is older than me and runs to the top of the service. The sweeping version of confidentiality is not a principle. It is a principle applied selectively and only against the voices that inconvenience.
Let us examine the Trust argument
Serving officers need to know the institution will protect them in the field. Writing about analytical standards does not touch that. If anything, it speaks for the many who privately want reform but cannot say so.
Political masters? The argument actually runs backwards here. West Africa and Ghana’s problem has never been too much honest friction between intelligence services and politicians. It has always been too little.
Foreign partners? The CIA is the most publicly dissected intelligence service on earth and remains the partner everyone wants. MI6 survived Chilcot with its partnerships intact. Show me one intelligence partnership that collapsed because a former officer wrote honestly about analytical culture. I will be waiting a long time!
What Israel Had to Unlearn
On October 6, 1973, Egypt and Syria caught Israel completely off guard. The information was there but the failure was something else. It was a belief that military intelligence had hardened into near-scripture. They called it “the concept”: Egypt would not go to war until it acquired the capability to neutralise Israeli air power. Every warning was filtered through that lens of an assumption. A junior analyst in Southern Command saw the signs clearly and was overruled.
Israel did not close ranks. The Agranat Commission examined the failure in full, ended careers, and drove reforms. A permanent devil’s advocate unit was built into military intelligence. Alternative analysis stopped being an act of individual courage and became part of the standard process.
The lesson is about unlearning. Israeli intelligence had to dismantle a way of thinking that its own best people had treated as self-evident. The danger lay less in what it didn’t know than in how it was thinking. Now the uncomfortable question. Which West African service has put a major failure under honest examination, drawn conclusions, and rebuilt its methods accordingly?
The loud silence is the answer. The failures have happened, some with body counts. The examinations have not followed.
“This Is How We Have Always Done It”
That phrase is the real disease. Across the region, much intelligence practice still runs on inherited dogma; methods from one political era handed down like heirlooms, unexamined, to officers working in an entirely different one. Rank seniority and age are mistaken for talent. Questioning is mistaken for disloyalty.
Meanwhile, the services we cite as best practice do the opposite. They treat their methods as provisional. Red teams and structured challenge are routine. They invest in what Richards Heuer, a CIA veteran, spent a career teaching: analysts must examine the mental models through which they see the world, because those models, not missing data, are where failures most often begin.
That is the capability West Africa most needs and least funds. We like to do the easier and visible work like buying equipment and building infrastructure. We expand headcounts. We rarely invest in the harder, cheaper thing: officers who can notice their own assumptions, test them, and drop them when the evidence demands. John Gardner warned that organisations decay when they stop questioning themselves. Our services are not short of loyalty. They are short of self-renewal.
You cannot unlearn in silence. Unlearning needs examination, and examination needs voices, including voices of those who have left and can speak publicly without a career at stake.
On “Intelligence 101”
An anonymous commentary made the rounds recently. Three claims: my writing falls below the standard expected of a former chief; it is “Intelligence 101”; I should either stay quiet or confine myself to very high-level statements that “put the intelligence community to work.” It is worth noting that the demand for silence of a named author arrives without a name.
Start with “Intelligence 101,” because it is the weakest charge. This series draws on Sherman Kent, Thomas Fingar, Mark Lowenthal, James Mattis, John Gardner, and the Agranat Commission. It has addressed intelligence priority frameworks, collection planning, the producer-consumer relationship, structured analytic techniques, mirror imaging, and the political economy of institutional capture. That is the professional literature of intelligence applied to Ghana by someone who served inside it. Either the critic has not read carefully, or this is rhetoric dressed as analysis.
The “standard” argument hides an assumption; that a former chief should write only at a height where other specialists can follow. But I am not writing for specialists. I am writing for the citizens who fund these institutions and the politicians who are supposed to oversee them. And when senior practitioners still confuse intelligence with investigation, the basics are not beneath discussion. They are precisely the problem.
Then there is the contradiction. Refrain from public commentary, but shape policy and strategy. You cannot shape public policy while staying silent in public. Pick one.
The same commentary questions my appointment. Others ask why I am only calling for change now, from outside. I will not relitigate careers in the media. My 2017 paper, Operating an Intelligence Agency in a Democracy, made this case before I held senior office. Besides, reforms from the inside and the supply side have a ceiling that is only sustainable in partnership with an interested and knowledgeable demand side. Directors General come and leave. Institutions remain. Durable change needs a public constituency, and only an open conversation can build one.
Protecting Whom, From What?
Ask of the total-silence rule what any good analyst asks of any security measure: protecting what, from whom, at what cost? Certainly not sources, methods, or operations. Discretion means judging what belongs in public, not declaring everything untouchable. Not the nation, which funds an agency it is never permitted to evaluate.
What it protects is a reputation from scrutiny and a habit from challenge. Comfortable arrangements from daylight; for political actors who use services outside their mandate, and for practitioners whose standing rests on fear rather than demonstrated competence. The silence is their shield. Not the nation’s.
The Verdict
The silence argument fails at every point. It conflates operational secrecy with institutional opacity. It predicts damage the evidence never shows. It dresses up an institutional interest as professional virtue.
High-functioning intelligence communities work differently. The questioning is built into the system, not left to courageous individuals acting alone. Former officers write. Legislatures examine. Academics critique. The lessons feed back into training and method. It is a loop, which is precisely why those services are respected for competence rather than feared for mystery.
West Africa has the talent for that loop. What it lacks is permission. Agranat did not weaken Israeli intelligence. It forced it to unlearn. That saved it. The silence here is saving nothing. It is preserving the habits that will produce the next failure and guaranteeing that when it comes, we will have built nothing to stop the one after that.
By Nana Attobrah Quaicoe
Write. Speak. Publish. Question how you think. The country needs this conversation far more than the institution needs the protection.
Nana Attobrah Quaicoe is an Intelligence and National Security Analyst and former Director General of the Bureau of National Intelligence (2022–2025). He writes on national security, intelligence sector reform, risk and integrity assessment, and institutional governance in the Ghanaian context.
