1. Methodological aspects
The perspective of using intelligence services against organised trans-national crime, integrates the debate on the increasingly economic profile of national intelligence in the aftermath of the cold-war but it also implies the concept of a trans-national intelligence.
This perspective feeds, autonomously, on two parallel realities: the first is that organised crime is now a structurally trans-national phenomenon; the second is that the operative techniques of organised crime cannot be contrasted any longer without the advantages of the intelligence modus operandi, because the grey area between illegal activities and legal use of the profits has widened.
The criminal organisations have built around their illegal core several layers of activities that gradually allow them to infiltrate the flow of legal activities in developed countries in a less evident but very effective way. In developing countries, instead, they directly challenge the institutions or they place themselves strategically in sectors the institutions are interested in, economy, export, financial policies or the military sector.
Furthermore, in both kinds of nations, organised crime has entered the realm of political life either directly or indirectly, both in restrictive and permissive regimes as to the financing of political parties. Also, the growing internalisation of the political, economic, social and cultural life has offered new opportunities to organised crime.
There is a third aspect to be considered: organised crime uses violence for two main purposes - either to settle internal disputes, or to widen its influence in new areas eliminating local resistance - just lately though it has started to be interested in microterrorism, born from ideological macroterrorism, as a way to divert the attention of law enforcement bodies.
All this leads to carefully consider the use of intelligence services in the fight against organised crime in the economic field, which is quite different from the so called economic intelligence. Such an important turning point in the history of intelligence, usually little concerned with ordinary crime, must be conceptually clear. This is essentially my purpose here today, to point out some problems which must absolutely be faced and solved beforehand. In this methodological approach I have been guided by the oldest master of strategy who lived 25 centuries ago, the Chinese SUN ZU and his three axioms. He stated that, in setting up a strategy, three principles must be observed:
- first, you will be defeated if you know yourself but not your enemy;
- second, you will be defeated if you know your enemy but not yourself;
- third, you will be victorious if you know yourself and your enemy.
This means that we must have clear ideas on the use of intelligence against trans-national organised crime. It means that we must define precisely the notion of trans-national organised crime, by identifying the nature and the contents of the threats it represents.
On the methodological plan, therefore, it is necessary to give an answer to some questions:
- Are the present intelligence structures, conditioned by their long experience in the cold-war, ready, willing, and able to perform this task?
- Is the essentially national nature of intelligence services able to adjust, and to what extent, to an action which entails an organic, international or even supranational coordination?
- Where do we draw the line between the traditional activity performed abroad by the national intelligence services and the new field of intervention which appears as a grey zone?
- Is it better to create new ad hoc intelligence structures to fight organised trans-national crime, or wouldn't be better to widen and strengthen existing intelligence structures and connect them institutionally to other agencies already operating in this field?
- What must be done, in both cases, is to avoid the application of conceptual and operative patterns mainly thought out for other purposes which therefore could, with difficulty, be adapted to new tasks?
- What should be the relation between intelligence bodies tasked with the fight against trans-national organised crime, and the judiciary that remains typically national and not inspired by the same principles in all nations?
- In more general terms: what is the relation between trans-national organised crime and national security? Or rather: which aspects of national security are threatened by trans-national organised crime? Economic, political, moral? And which are the strategic implications, that is, what effects will be produced in the far future?
- Finally: Does the concept of trans-national organised crime imply a concept of trans-national security? But who must define this concept? Who will partially or totally accept it? Who will oppose it either out of interest or simply out of suspicion?
- and therefore: How can the concept of national security and the concept of trans-national security combine? And, in the ensuing phase, how can operative methods and criteria be standardised? In more general terms; is it possible to create an institutional counter-power of trans-national intelligence to contrast the real power of trans-national organised crime?

2. Why intelligence against organised crime
The perspective of using intelligence to contrast organised crime at a trans-national level must be understood not as "let's use intelligence too". It is not a matter of giving the intelligence services an exclusive right of action, nor of reducing or suppressing the activity of other structures working in this field; but neither should the services be involved only upon justified request.
We are moving towards the hypothesis of asking the intelligence services for their specific and peculiar contribution, above all for their own particular operative capacity in information gathering, analysis and forecasting, in order to uncover with their methodologies the invisible ties among different subjects or consequences, in the long run, considered as negative.
It is very different to use intelligence to counter organised crime within national borders and to conceive an intelligence action at a trans-national level, with an operative co-ordination which is largely unknown in the culture of the national intelligence structures. Some of the criteria of recruitment, training and operativeness must be modified.
On the other hand, we cannot think that the ordinary operative structures already existing are ready to welcome the involvement of intelligence bodies in the fight against organised crime, which always seems to entail a territorial dimension and therefore can be, as it were, operatively thought of in national or territorially limited terms.
In this respect, I was impressed by the tv series "Miami Vice" - American produced but distributed in several countries - which celebrates the successes of the Police forces in their fight against drug-traffickers in Florida. But Police Forces are often in competition with D.E.A., C.I.A. or other federal agencies that are never shown under a favourable light.
A result of purely commercial strategy, this tv series underlines the historical difficulties of co-operation between the different security forces, but it also indicates a road to follow: whatever institutional operative decision is made, must be "sold" to the public opinion, even indirectly through the mass media so that a general consensus, indispensable in democratic countries, can be created. This is true for the inclusion of intelligence into the counteraction of trans-national organised crime.
Developing this concept, I must underline the fact that while the cold war intelligence benefited from strong support by the mass media, through films and literature celebrating the hero but also the structures in their effectiveness. The fight against organised crime has relied mainly on the individual action of the single hero who fights not only against the criminal organisation, but often even against corruption in his/her own corps and amongst its political-administrative referents, feeding people's mistrust in the nation's structures. The intelligence aimed at the fight against crime must therefore promote its public image from the efficiency point of view directly and indirectly.
This can be made easier by the current debate on the future of intelligence, accelerated after the cold-war, which already tends to go beyond the division between the services protecting the national security against threats coming from within the national borders and the services protecting national security from external threats.
Generally speaking, internal security has had as its main objective the fight against forces threatening the stability of a political system while the external security is mainly concerned with threats of a military nature. The cold-war enhanced this division of roles but now this has changed and it has given way to a reflection on the very concept of security, flanking the socio-economic dimension to the politico-military one.
And yet it is easy to see that, as soon as you do without with the concepts of internal political stability or of external military security, both the idea of stability and the idea of security become containers in which different elements flow: trafficking in weapons for mass destruction, in materials, technologies and know-how connected with the aforesaid; the violation of the embargoes decreed by the UN; the dark and sometimes criminal aspects of humanitarian aid; drug-trafficking; clandestine migration; money laundering; industrial, technological, and financial espionage to which many private intelligence structures dedicate themselves in consideration of the ever rising demand; the movement of speculative capital on the financial markets; counterfeiting not only of money but also of government stocks; the trafficking of organs for transplants or illegal adoptions in developed countries with a low birth rate; and the organisation of black labour or slave-like child-labour.

All of this without forgetting the politico-economic corruption which involves important commercial and financial flows, not only at a bilateral level among nations but also at a multilateral level through 2.000 government and non-government international organisations with hundreds of thousands of employees.
The definition of trans-national organised crime will end up including all the above listed cases. This alone would entail the use of huge human and practical resources available in real
time all over the world and also regular intrusions into privacy and require a harmonisation of legal national systems. Otherwise the field of action for intelligence services would be drastically limited with little or no consequence for the big criminal organisations.
In reality, intelligence is already involved in the fight against national or trans-national organised crime. Therefore what is important is that this new presence should be legally and formally defined, so as to avoid duplications, conflicts of competence or legislative gaps with organised crime being the first to benefit from them. The political power, who has the final word on the matter must set precise objectives, rules, responsibilities and guarantees for an intelligence activity aimed at combating trans-national organised crime. It cannot simply authorize the activity and then wait for its results.
It is obvious that in this matter the fundamental principle valid for agencies such as Interpol, founded on international cooperation agreements and the habit of exchanging information between the intelligence services based on the principle of reciprocity, are not sufficient to guarantee an effective intelligence action against trans-national organised crime. Collaboration and exchange of information must come away from the traditional protective attitude that sees reactions only on stimulation, to welcome instead the permanent flow of information from those who know more to those who know less. The structures, tasks and the relations between the intelligence forces operating against organised crime and other national or international and, if necessary, supranational agencies engaged in the same field, must be precisely established. And with this, I think I have brought to light the need to satisfy SUN ZU's first requisite: "know yourself".

3. The nature of organised crime
Sun Zu's second principle states "know your enemy". In the case of organised crime, the image which is normally perceived is the one projected by organised crime itself . This happens for two reasons; the first, a very natural one, is to create an internal consensus within the organisation; the second is to give externally an image of the organisation in some way favourable.
The criminal associations appear as State duplicates. They in fact have a territory, a population, and rules, judicial system legitimated by the consensus they receive through a mixture of violence, persuasion and interest.
This aspect, as it were, ideological, is fundamental for the protection of the internal and external image of the criminal association. Believing in it, and in some ways respecting it, is already giving a tactical advantage to organised crime. The question is how much popular literature, films, journalistic or tv stories have strengthened, perhaps not always unintentionally, the ideological image of organised crime. All Mafia trials, all confessions of the "supergrasses", for example, have objectively publicised the theory of the "code of honour". No strategic operation against organised crime can neglect the management of the enemy's image. Public opinion should see the "code of honour" as a "code of dishonour". It is possible that the "Godfather" ‘s film saga has done more good than harm to the Mafia's public image.
As any other association, organised crime pursues definite aims. I will rapidly say that, in all its manifestations and in all its forms, crime has only one objective, making money. Everything else is functional to reaching this goal. This aspect is the basis for any action against it.
The matter then moves to analyse the mechanism which allows organised crime to pursue its aim. Paradoxically it must be clear that organised crime is not against a society or its institutions. The existence of a society is functional to the existence of crime, better if the sociey is in "good health" and in good working order because if it produces wealth in an ordinate and regular manner crime can easily live off it. Also a undeveloped society can offer some advantages when organised crime can penetrate its productive structures.
The first consequence is : the more complex the society and its organisations and istitutional structures, the bigger the interests, the opportunities and the means available to organised crime. This means that criminal productivity - please forgive this term - is not inversely proportional to the level of authoritarianism or efficiency or development of a nation because criminal organisations can adjust to suit any institutional regime. They will compete with it but will not destroy it completely. They will exploit its operative limits and unload on the other part of society the human, social, and economic costs resulting from their illegal activities.
It should be clear that organised crime is interested in economic and social development, in dynamism, in initiatives in the economic field, in the multiplication of political and administrative authorities, in international commerce, in the most ambitious development plans, in conflicts between nations, in the redistribution and circulation of money as revenue, that is, in its buying power. In this last case, the expansion of the welfare state necessary to win the cold-war has had as an undesirable by-product that is the distribution to masses of a buying-power which organised crime has exploited.
Crime, in other words, does not kill nor wants to kill the chicken that lays the eggs. In this, it differentiates itself from terrorism that, ideologically motivated, has as its objective power, that is it wants to destroy a certain political system and replace it with another. Crime can see terrorism as a way to weaken the strength of the nation, but only as long as it can aid the reaching of its essential objective, which is to make money, but it will disassociate from it when and if terrorism becomes powerful enough to provoke a strong reaction from the nation thus affecting its interests. If terrorism considers itself stronger than crime, because it manages the military force, it goes wrong, because crime manages the money, without which terrorism cannot survive. When they come into contact, terrorism becomes corrupted and begins to slide down towards criminal activity.
The curve of social complexity and that of criminal activity grow together and when the second cuts the first and goes beyond it, it must undergo a transformation and invest its illegally obtained financial resources in apparently legal activities. The development phases of a society from mainly agricultural, to mainly industrial, to mainly service oriented and now finally to a post-industrial one, always correspond to the development of crime. From taxing farm workers and protecting the land owners in exchange for money, crime passes to the control of the working masses, of transport, of commerce and finally moves onto the highly profitable service activities, the holding companies and others, adjusting its profits in function of the overall wealth of the society in which it works. If in the past it could have acted in favour of economic and social conservation and stagnation, there is no doubt that it has seen bigger profit opportunities in the acceleration of the economic development. Besides, organised crime has anticipated the economic globalisation through an international sharing of sectors of activity. The world has entered into the information and communication era, organised crime has long before anticipated the relevance of these two aspects. Organised crime as State duplicate acts already in the cyberspace, that is a real and a virtual State at the same time, crossing through political States like a technological motorway.
Organised crime follows every phase of the development: from the distribution of capital to its local destination, from the selection of the initiatives to promote, to the ways of allocating the resources. It is therefore concerned with infiltrating the decision-making political environments at central and local levels, but also in the financial channels and the administrative monitoring structures, not only directly, through people, but also indirectly.
The illegal action itself, is not the core of organised crime's activity any more, it has today become the final result.
In 1994 world trade has reached 5,000 billion dollars, of them 4,000 from the trade of goods and 1,000 from the exchange of services. Cosa Nostra's turnover in the US in 1991, as published by the magazine "Fortune", amounted to 120 thousand dollars, double the General Motors' one. Only drug trafficking in 1989 turned over 500 billion dollars, well over 10% of the whole world trade.
Organised crime operates in an environment created by others. We must just ask ourselves how far has organised crime contributed, in Italy and in other countries of Europe, to keeping alive the issue of "deprived areas" in the mass media and through political leaders within the European Community. It is not difficult to see this mechanism extending to the world division between North and South, to the theme of humanitarian aid, and to the role of international organisations whether governmental or not.
The power of trans-national organised crime is to go with the stream not against it: it is sufficient to think about such issues as the freedom of movement for people, goods and money. Ten years ago financial markets dealt with 300 billion dollars every day; today they deal with 1,000 billion dollars. It is well known that organised crime plays a substantial role in it.
Not only does organised crime need society and the nation but, often it has a stabilising role in relation with the institutions whose task it can help. I am not referring to the role of the police informers from the underworld, nor to past agreements between political authorities or some members of the secret services and some leaders of organised crime, for example in time of war, or cold-war. I am thinking about subtler cases and strategically handy, as the Italian one where the Sicilian Mafia, in order to defend its own interests contributed to the elimination of banditry in the South of Italy after the unification in the last decades of the eigthteenth century.
The same happened in the U.S.: the control of the chaotic flow of immigrants, the discipline in ports and in building sites, which were ensured through the different national Mafias, were a help for the Police forces and the federal authorities. Ever since the Prohibition era in the U.S. we can see a particular strategic meaning. If on the one hand organised crime challenged the police forces, on the other it helped them to gain ground in the public opinion and to widen their power in a nation not ready to accept the strengthening of the central State bodies. By providing society with those alcoholic products for which there was a precise demand, it performed a stabilising task.
Organised crime, on the national or trans-national level, is not simply the sum of individual criminal activities. It is also something else. Therefore, to fight it with a direct strategy of the police forces, even if they collaborate on an international level is not enough. It is necessary to use also indirect strategies which fall within the intelligence expertise.
Even in totalitarian regimes organised crime has contributed to the control and social stability cooperating with the official authorities. Today it helps democratisation and liberation while it sustains, in the countries of recent industrialisation, governmental export oriented economies, the systematic use of child-labour in conditions of violence and real slavery, the export of counterfeited products, the uncontrolled management of international aid.
It is therefore necessary to recognise that, in this century, the evolution of the national state and the evolution of the international community have, even if not deliberately, favoured rather than damaged the expansion of organised crime which, this must always be remembered, has as its fundamental objective the making of money and in order to reach this objective it makes its decisions.
The two World Wars and the two post-war periods have offered formidable occasions for the expansion of organised crime's activities. In these cases, both for the war effort and for the reconstruction, States intervened in the economic life of the country in unprecedented ways opening an important gap for political and administrative intermediation where organised crime found wide operative spaces. The same happened with post-war reconstruction, accompanied by a fast industrialisation process, big movements of population, increase in income and diffusion of well-being. It is a process which, wherever it occurs, offers organised crime several opportunities of intervention. Now, it is rather evident that anyone interested in the game will with some difficulty remain impartial.
The fact derives from the symbiotic, rather than parasitic nature of the relation that organised crime has been able to impose on a country and on the international community: any initiative of the state or of the international community, no matter how good in itself, could be exploited by organised crime for its own ends. Even the most ordinary ones like establishing a custom duty. Smuggling stems from the protection of customs. In the former-communist countries, organised crime used to be in charge of the introduction into the market of goods which could not, or only in limited numbers, be imported legally. Therefore, any national law or any international body's decision, in their process of formation should be thought out trying to close beforehand, all the possible openings which organised crime could infiltrate.

Conclusion
All this has a price and, in this exchange, some States may have achieved some tactical successes but organised crime has often gained strategic advantages. The nations cannot face the fight against organised crime accepting the existence of grey areas of collaboration because in this case no successful operation could ever solve the problem.
SUN Zu, unlike CLAUSEWITZ who considers war to be the continuation of politics in a different form and therefore always as communication, prescribed instead that a conflict should be prepared even through a complete interruption of communications and contacts with the enemy. The enemies, or presumed enemies, living within the State should be isolated. CHURCHILL, who wanted to win the war, did not speak with Rudolph HESS, but rather put him in isolation.
For this reason the final point is not on the opportunity to use intelligence in the fight against organised crime of economic nature, but rather on the will by nations to set up the operative conditions so that intelligence can perform this task, not being satisfied with some isolated successes but with the purpose of favouring the development of national and international security. It is now clear that whoever does not collaborate is not neutral.