Ok, so having reread the short story "Interlude at Darkknell" by Timothy Zahn and Michael Stackpole, Garm was nearly assassinated by agents working for Armand Isard, who is defined in that story as the Director of Imperial Intelligence. In the story, it also implies that Garm was not yet an active revolutionary or a full part of the Rebellion. My concern is on the fact that Isard was the one to have ordered the assassination on the senator. In other areas of the EU, it is strongly implied that Imperial Intelligence is a military agency, similar to the GRU, and was actively engaged in protecting the Empire on a defense basis through counterintelligence operations and active measures against resistance and rebel targets. The civilian counterpart to II was the ISB, which was explicitly established as a politically-focused secret police agency akin to the Gestapo or KGB. Given the nature of the target, it struck me as odd that the authors decided to utilize Intelligence to assassinate Garm when writing the story rather than ISB. The operation seems more like one that would be carried out by the secret police, as Garm was a senator. After all, it was ISB that attempted to arrest Mothma according to the Rebel Alliance Sourcebook.
This got me thinking about the nature of the Empire's intelligence and security apparatus and how numerous, and I mean numerous, authors either confused the two, combined them, or forgot about one or the other completely. In fact, it seems that outside of the WEG sourcebooks, ISB was basically not mentioned other than another one of Zahn's stories "Allegiance". The Imperial Sourcebook clearly states that the two were established to counterweight the other, and that book was written back in 1989, before the bulk of the EU material was released in the 90s and early 2000s, and I know they were provided with an abundance of material from WEG, per their own admission as well as the fact that they used so many other elements from those books.
Why did military intelligence attempt an assassination on a sitting senator rather than ISB?
Why was Armand Isard labeled both "Director of Imperial Intelligence" in Interlude at Darkknell and "Internal Security Director" in the X-Wing novels? Was he director of both? How would that have worked with their intentional rivalry? Was Ysanne also head of both? If not, that leads me to the next question:
Where was ISB following the Emperor's death, and why would they have tolerated Ysanne Isard assuming control of Coruscant? I mean, the two agencies were supposed to be rivals after all...
I am interested to hear your thoughts.