Scholarship on intelligence studies suffers three key limitations: 1) it fails to grasp that the knowledge-production of agencies is value-laden and thus political in itself; 2) scholarship disre-gards most of the non-English speaking world and 3) focuses nearly exclusively on foreign intel-ligence. I suggest that these limitations are due to a broader theoretical poverty of intelligence stu-dies, and present three concepts through which a richer analysis may emerge: 1) »security« in the sense of understanding the meaning of secu-rity that intelligence agencies use as a basis for operating; 2) »secrecy« to investigate the concrete measures that agencies use to create and manage secrecy and 3) »bureaucracy« to investigate the day-to-day work done by the bulk of intelligence employees. These concepts turn the gaze towards the concrete, institutional processes of intelli-gence production, rather than towards abstract models such as the intelligence cycle, which do-minate current scholarship. Intelligence studies needs to borrow from the rich tradition of orga-nizational sociology and critical IR to develop a more thorough understanding of what intelli-gence agencies actually do, and what their effect on international politics is.