Communication aimed at the public has been an almost absent topic in intelligence studies. This is despite a growing recognition of the importance of communicating towards the public in preventive security, counterterrorism, cyber security and organized crime prevention. This article attends to the practice of communicating intelligence to the public. It does so in order to show the diversity of communication practices in Western intelligence today. By investigating how the intelligence community communicates about ‘communication’ to the public, the article identifies three different concepts of communication, that each exposes different understandings of the public and democratic concerns.