Countering an insurgency effectively requires intelligence collection. Bradley Bamford’s “The Role and Effectiveness of Intelligence in Northern Ireland,” details the ways the British gathered and used intelligence to counter the Provisional Irish Republican Army’s goals and strategies. Alistair Horne’s “The Battle of Algiers” focused on the French’s use of interrogations and informants in Algiers as a means of breaking up a bomb making network in Algeria. For the British, their counterinsurgency effort was mostly a success. For the French, their counterinsurgency efforts mostly ended in failure and the eventual loss of Algeria as a colony. Bamford argued that British intelligence was successful in countering the insurgency in Northern Ireland,…show more content… Whereas the British used three techniques to gain their information, the French used two. The British employed surveillance in the communities of Northern Ireland to gather background information on possible insurgents and their ties to other people. One of the most successful surveillance operations was where British intelligence officers posed as a laundry service and were able to observe and converse with unsuspecting individuals while performing the duties of a door-to-door laundry service. The British recruited informants from the PIRA and were able to penetrate the PIRA with their own officers for intelligence gathering purposes. France, by comparison, did not employ much surveillance against the Algerians. French officials did however, conduct interrogations and recruit informants for intelligence gathering purposes. Surveillance in Algeria might have been more difficult to carry out compared to Northern Ireland, and thus was not employed by French officials. A few reasons for this could be the layout of the city of Algiers as well as its population density, which would make it hard to keep track of one individual in a large…show more content… British intelligence efforts were focused on collecting insurgent’s background (political), operational (military) and criminal information. Although the information could have been used more effectively if it were centralized, Bamford claims that British intelligence efforts were falling short on their operational effectiveness because the information was compartmented. The French, on the other hand, were only focused on collecting contact information in order to arrest and interrogate suspected insurgents. The fact that 30-40% of the male population in Algiers was arrested by French officials even though a majority of those arrested were not affiliated with insurgent or terrorist activities is evidence that the French were not effective in their counterinsurgent efforts. They were not concerned with similar types of information as the British were in Northern Ireland and thus wasted their resources arresting non-relevant