Singapore: ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute, 2019. xxvii, 248 pp. US$31.99, paper. ISBN 978-981-4843-77-5.
Myanmar’s military regime exercised tight control over the country prior to the beginning of its political opening in 2011. Among its most powerful instruments was an encompassing intelligence apparatus that played a central role in the country’s political, economic, and social affairs. Much to the surprise of outsiders, that apparatus was almost completely dismantled in 2004. Fascinating as this event was in isolation, it is also important as an antecedent to the initiation of the hybrid “discipline flourishing democracy” in place today. Intelligence organizations, by their very nature, play a murky role in politics even where transparency is among a state’s professed principles. Few would describe Myanmar’s state as anything but opaque. This makes Andrew Selth’s meticulously researched book, Secrets and Power in Myanmar, all the more remarkable, as it provides an accessible and insightful overview of Myanmar’s intelligence services and their role in the country’s politics over the past several decades.
It is difficult to overstate the expansiveness of Myanmar’s intelligence apparatus in the 1990s. Selth references estimates that there was one intelligence officer or informer for every twenty students in the universities, and one for every ten servicemen in the armed forces. Up to 30 percent of the military development budget may have gone towards intelligence. The service penetrated all levels of society from the inner elite circles down to the street level. Its head, General Khin Nyunt, was seen by the international community as among the most powerful figures in the country. The intelligence apparatus performed a wide range of conventional functions for the regime—from collecting and analyzing intelligence in the country’s ongoing ethnic conflicts—to rooting out dissidents in the military, civil service, and broader public. Other functions were less conventional. The Office of Strategic Studies (OSS), founded in 1994 under Khin Nyunt, became a quasi-state-within-a-state staffed by some of the country’s “best and brightest.” It took on a leading role in Myanmar’s domestic and foreign affairs, becoming the preferred point of contact for foreign missions looking to bypass the notoriously slow civil service. At its peak, it was instrumental in keeping the military regime—which struggled with a legitimacy deficit—in power, enforced by a conviction that “mastery of information [was] a vital component in the ability of a self-appointed minority to rule a large country with a diverse population…” (207).
This conviction makes the 2004 purge of Khin Nyunt and a large majority of the country’s intelligence personnel all the more remarkable. Selth provides five carefully formulated theories for the purge, all of which point to rivalries and factions within the Tatmadaw (the armed forces). Beyond making sense of the events themselves, the explanations provide valuable insights into the general functioning of Myanmar as an “intelligence state.” Much like Indonesia’s New Order, the military elite feared that Myanmar’s fractured history and the centrifugal forces of perpetual conflict along its periphery would break the country apart. They also believed that they were uniquely positioned to prevent that from occurring, provided they had the necessary intelligence to pro-actively engage threats when and where needed; that presented a fundamental dilemma. A consolidated intelligence service was clearly more powerful than a fragmented one, but it also empowered its chief—Khin Nyunt—to an extent that other senior military officials feared he could singlehandedly bring down the government. His historic 2003 speech, which outlined the proposed transition to “discipline-flourishing democracy” amidst festering tensions within the Tatmadaw pressed the issue. Ultimately, the intelligence service that propped up military rule was dismantled not from foreign or other domestic forces, but from within the military government itself.
Beyond providing an overview of Myanmar’s intelligence apparatus and the fall of Khin Nyunt, Selth covers the partial rebuilding of intelligence capacity, notable intelligence failures, the foreign relationships of the new intelligence apparatus, and questions of accountability. The discussion on intelligence failures in particular provides a unique perspective on current crises—including in Rakhine state—that will be of particular interest to scholars of conflict resolution. The chapters are all meticulously referenced, increasing the book’s value as a general reference on Myanmar.
Writing on the intelligence apparatus of a secretive state presents obvious challenges, particularly for an outsider. Selth is laudably open about this and the limitations it imposes for the book. The result is a generally cautious approach to interpreting available evidence that sometimes avoids even informed speculation, leaving several big questions unaddressed in the process. There are no explicit discussions, for example, on how the upheaval of the intelligence apparatus in 2004 shaped the country’s political opening several years later, though there undoubtedly are important implications. Similarly, while the section on intelligence failures in the country’s periphery engages the current conflicts, Selth keeps the discussion tightly focused and avoids broader conclusions about their trajectories. By doing so, Selth bolsters the credibility of the claims he makes, but leaves the job of connecting further dots to readers who likely have less expertise and fewer insights. Ultimately, the book provides a richly-detailed view into one of the most powerful but elusive institutions in Myanmar, which makes it fascinating not just for scholars of Myanmar, but more broadly for scholars of authoritarian regimes and other “intelligence states” as well.
Kai Ostwald
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver