Scrutinizing France: collecting and using newspaper intelligence during world war II

After the fall of France in June 1940, it became crucial for Britain to obtain grass-roots information on her former ally. Newspapers of all types were recognized to be a key source. This article investigates how intelligence material was gathered, analyzed and diffused and how it was used by a large number of government departments. The Royal Institute of International Affairs had set up the Foreign Research Press Service, which played an effective centralizing role. This article also demonstrates that the level of cooperation between the French and British departments was better than usually acknowledged and resulted in well-informed and perceptive reports.     

Forgeries and Spies: The Foreign Office and the ‘Cicero’ Case

This article seeks to analyze the Foreign Office reaction to the Cicero spy affair. Papers newly released in 2003 and 2005 provide some fascinating insights into leaks that were occurring at the Ankara embassy long before Cicero, how diplomats tried to trap the notorious spy and how the Foreign Office sought to block any outside interference in its investigations, particularly from the Security Service (MI5). The article also sheds light on how the Foreign Office attempted to deal with the fallout when the full scale of the Cicero leak became publicly known. At the time, the Foreign Office investigation into the leak failed to identify Cicero but it did highlight that Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, the British Ambassador to Turkey, was culpable in allowing documents in his possession to be photographed. It appeared, however, that Hugessen had got off lightly when he was rewarded with the ambassadorship at Brussels in September 1944. Why had this situation come about? Was the Foreign Office closing its ranks to protect one of its own? And, did this confirm oft-repeated accusations that as an institution, the Foreign Office could not be trusted when it came to security?     

Spying on chaos: the Somali model of intelligence on failed states

Failed states pose ongoing strategic challenges for governments concerned with terrorism, poverty and uncontrolled migration. Policy approaches to failed states have ranged from state-building efforts to humanitarian debacles, and outright inaction. This article approaches failed states primarily as intelligence challenges, and uses Somalia as a model of targeting intelligence collection for failed states. This model demonstrates that economic activity offers an approach to intelligence gathering in such environments. In tracing Somalia’s economic successes from the collapse of the Somali state in 1991, this research shows how the business activity produces the needed intelligence opportunities that a strategy for a failed state requires.     

Comparative insight into the status of the lobbying regulation debate in Estonia

The article looks at lobbying regulation polemic based on the Estonian case‐study—how lobbying as an issue came to be on the political agenda and what the outcomes of the discussion have been. The article also provides a focused overview of how Estonia's neighbouring states have tackled the issue. The article looks at the lobbying agenda setting and policy choices of Western Baltic Sea countries (Finland, Sweden and Denmark) and of a sample of postcommunist states that share the destiny of Estonia in contemporary history (Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic). Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

What News on the Rialto? The Trade of Information and Early Modern Venice’s Centralized Intelligence Organization

This article explores one of the earliest centrally organized state intelligence services in world history. Contrary to the orthodoxy that sees systematized intelligence as a modern political phenomenon, this was developed in early modern Venice. The article reveals the complex organization of Venetian systemized intelligence that distinguished it from other contemporaneous states’ espionage networks. It also shows how Venetian authorities commodified intelligence by engaging citizens and subjects in a trade of information for mutual benefits. Ultimately, the article challenges our understanding of early modern political communication and offers a fresh vista of intelligence as a business trait and economic necessity.     

An Uncertain Future for the BBC World Service

In recent years, the BBC World Service has undergone the most radical overhaul of its governance, finance and working practices since the Second World War. In examining these changes, the Foreign Affairs Select Committee report on The Future of the BBC World Service articulates ‘clear differences’ between it and the BBC about how the World Service should be governed, and ‘serious reservations’ about the transfer of funding in April this year from government grant‐in‐aid to the licence fee. With a new BBC Charter due in 2017, will the distinct ethos and culture of the World Service survive this major reorganisation?     

For Queen and Company: The Role of Intelligence in the UK's Arms Trade

This article analyses the role that the UK intelligence services (particularly Secret Intelligence Service [SIS or MI6], the Defence Intelligence Staff [DIS], Government Communication Headquarters [GCHQ] and associated agencies) play in the legal UK arms trade. The article shows that intelligence has been used in support of British-based private commercial businesses, and occasionally in providing intelligence on the negotiating positions of rival manufacturers. This raises important questions about the role of the state in the private sphere, particularly the use of a large number of government assets in support of private interests and the elision of British government interests with those of a section of the manufacturing industry. This article also challenges existing conceptions of how the UK's intelligence agencies operate and relate to their customers. Conventional typologies of UK intelligence have emphasised the importance of the 'central machinery', highlighting the Joint Intelligence Committee as the focal point of intelligence tasking and analysis in the UK. However, in this case the intelligence support provided to the sale of military equipment suggests a range of parallel practices that are much more decentralised and often informal. This research therefore suggests that our conception of the UK intelligence architecture requires some reassessment.     

Mussolini's Secret War in the Mediterranean and the Middle East: Italian Intelligence and the British Response

Little is known of the history, structure and operations of the Italian intelligence services in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. The challenge brought by Fascist Italy to the security of the British and French imperial systems is at the heart of this article, which sets out to assess not only the imperial dimension of Fascist intelligence but also the response provided by Britain's and France's colonial authorities to Mussolini's ambitions in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. An examination of British and French intelligence archival material sheds new light upon perceptions of power and threat afforded by British and French policy-makers keen to maintain political control over their colonial and client states. The paper suggests that despite comprising a multitude of competing agencies, the Fascist services could rely on the work of motivated individuals and on the support of Italian diplomatic representatives overseas. Their ability to establish relations – although short-lived – with Arab nationalist leaders and their intense activities in British colonies, protectorates and mandates generated concern within the British Foreign and Colonial Offices. Meanwhile, poor intelligence coordination and assessment coupled with misguided assumptions about the nature of Arab nationalism hindered Britain's response to the challenge mounted by Mussolini's regime.     

Hitler's opening gambit: Intelligence,encirclement, and the decision to Ally with Poland

This article asks why the German Foreign Ministry supported Hitler's radical reconstruction of Germany's eastern policy. Already by the fall of 1933, Germany was turning to an alignment with Poland against Soviet Russia ‐ the reverse of Germany's decade‐long Rapallo policy. The author identifies three principal factors that influenced the conservative, typically anti‐Polish diplomats in the Foreign Ministry to support the scheme: fear of a Polish‐Soviet alliance hinted at by recurrent intelligence reports; internal pressure from army and state police officials; and the constraints of the international system.     

Intelligence,security and information flows in CFSP

This article traces the growth of the intelligence support role that a number of relatively small bodies have assumed within the European Union's Common Foreign and Security Policy. The implications of the development of this role are considered in detail. The article concludes that a new type of intelligence capability is gradually emerging at the European level, which could not easily be reproduced at the national or bilateral levels.     

Ensuring the after-life of the Ciano diaries: Allen Dulles' provision of Nuremberg trial evidence

The relationship between Western intelligence officials and Nazi war crimes prosecutors has been, and in some aspects remains, a difficult one. It is increasingly apparent that it is precisely the selective nature of support war crimes prosecutors can expect from intelligence officials that merits particular scholarly attention. One such example in this case of positive assistance concerns the provision of a specific piece of evidence, the diaries of Ciano, Mussolini's Foreign Minister, obtained for the Allies by Allen Dulles, a senior US wartime intelligence official with the OSS, based in Bern, Switzerland, and used in the prosecution case against Ribbentrop at the Nuremberg war crimes trials. This article, based largely upon recently declassified American security files, closely examines Dulles' actions undertaken to retrieve the diaries and pass them to the prosecution.     

‘Intelligence,Public Confidence and Security’

Richard Gid Powers, Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover (New York: The Free Press, 1987). Pp. 624; $27.95.

Jeffrey Richelson, American Espionage and the Soviet Target (New York: William Morrow, 1987).

John Keegan, The Mask of Command (New York; Viking Penguin 1987). Pp. 368; $18.95.

Major General Rygor Slowikowski, In the Secret Service: The Lighting of the Torch (London: The Windrush Press, 1988). Pp. 285; £16.95.

Alexandre de Marenches and Christine Ockrent, The Evil Empire: The Third World War Now (London: Sidgwick &; Jackson, 1988), Pp. 224, £13.95

Robert Marshall, All the King's Men (London: Collins, 1988). Pp.314; £12.95. Brendan M. Murphy, Turncoat (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987). Pp. 301; $19.95.

Ray Godson (ed.), Comparing Foreign Intelligence: The U.S., the USSR, the U.K. and the Third World (New York: Pergamon Brasseys, 1988), Pp. 157; $18.95.

Stephen J. Cimbala (ed.). Intelligence and Intelligence Policy in a Democratic Society (Dobbs Ferry, New York: Transnational Publishers Inc., 1987). Pp. 262. $37.50.     

Analytic Outreach for Intelligence: Insights from a Workshop on Emerging Biotechnology Threats

This article describes a new effort to engage in analytic outreach between academic scholars and intelligence analysts on the issue of emerging biotechnology threats to US national security. The context of this outreach was a September 2012 meeting in London to explore possibilities for enhanced analytic outreach in relation to emerging biotechnology threats, supported by the UK Genomics Policy and Research Forum. This meeting consisted of a mix of current and former intelligence practitioners and policy officials, and social science and scientific experts, from both the UK and the US. As will be described below, this unique pairing of experts and subjects revealed new insights into how to improve intelligence assessments on biotechnology and bioweapons threats. It also revealed continuing challenges in reforming assessments within existing intelligence work routines.     

British Intelligence in the Middle East, 1898–1906

This article examines British intelligence efforts in Turkish Arabia at the turn of the twentieth century. It argues that intelligence collection was really three separate efforts, carried out by the War Office, the Foreign Office, and the Government of India, and it reflected concerns about British decline, the problems experienced during the Boer War, as well as an effort to penetrate the ‘information order’ of India's sub-empire. Although intelligence efforts suffered from bureaucratic disharmony in Whitehall, and between London and the Government of India, valuable contributions were nevertheless made to Britain's knowledge of Turkish Arabia.     

Covert Operations and Official Collaboration: British Intelligence's Dual Approach to Ireland during World War II

Neutral Ireland posed a unique challenge to the wartime British intelligence community and the latter responded by adopting a dual approach. On the one hand, it carried out covert intelligence operations in Irish territory, involving the Service intelligence branches, the Ministry of Information, and, most importantly, the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). On the other hand, unprecedented cooperation developed between military, police and intelligence agencies from Britain and Ireland, and in particular between MI5 and Irish military intelligence (G2). For most of the war British intelligence pursued this joint strategy of covert activity and official collaboration, and MI5 and SIS shared responsibility for Ireland. However, there was a gradual shift of emphasis towards cooperation and it was eventually concluded that the MI5-G2 link could serve all Britain's security needs. This article charts this evolution and places it within the context of Anglo-Irish wartime political relations.     

British intelligence in the twentieth century

SIR STEPHEN LANDER, the Director-General of the Security Service, describes his Service's approach to the management of its archives which is based on its obligations under the 1958 Public Record Act. In this article, he indicates the quantity and type of records held by the Service and, illustrating with some examples, explains his Service's current file retention and release policies. The systematic programme of file releases to the Public Records Office, begun by the Security Service in 1997, has resulted in a considerable amount of intelligence archive material being placed in the public domain.     

Entering the Lists: MI5's great spy round-up of August 1914

One of the most famous successes of the British Security Service, popularly known as MI5, was its great spy round-up of August 1914. According to all previous histories, official and unofficial, Vernon Kell, the first head of MI5, masterminded the arrest of 21 out of the 22 German agents working in Britain, crippling the German intelligence network within hours of the outbreak of the First World War. The event is still celebrated by MI5, but a careful study of the recently-opened records shows it to be a complete fabrication. This article examines the six surviving lists of suspects to show how and why MI5 created and perpetuated this remarkable lie.     

Comparing the Democratization of Intelligence Governance in East Central Europe and the Balkans

This article discusses the reform of intelligence governance in two sub-regional groupings of former communist states: East Central Europe and the Balkans. These two sub-regions are delineated according to the pace and nature of transformations that they have undergone since the collapse of communist rule and their relations with respect to the European Union, the key political and economic organization in Europe. A number of lessons are drawn from comparing experiences in the two sub-regions relating to democratic reform of the security apparatus, and in particular the intelligence sector. Significant factors in the consolidation of democratic governance of intelligence include the nature of precursor communist-era regimes and the legacies they created, whether armed conflict has occurred during the transition, the extent and character of external (especially EU) assistance, and the strength of media and civil society. These factors appear to have influenced how transitional regimes have sought to introduce institutional reforms to constrain the powers of those services and their susceptibility to arbitrary use. They also have influenced measures taken to redress abuses by intelligence services under the preceding communist regime and the legitimation of the post-authoritarian state.     

The Response of Chinese Intellectuals to the US War on Terror

Studying the Chinese intellectual response to the US War on Terror, and how the battle between the Chinese liberals and nonliberals fitted into the above debate, the article focuses on two cases, 9-11 and the war in Iraq. Each will be divided into the expressive response (i.e., how the intellectuals reacted physically); the ideological response (i.e., how they interpreted the incidents in ideologically); and the strategic response (i.e., how they proposed the right strategies for the party-state to manage global affairs). After studying the cases, we should discover how the Chinese intellectuals used nationalist rhetoric to disguise their real disagreements, i.e., their views on domestic politics as well as to advance their own national importance. Simon Shen is Research Assistant Professor in the Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies of the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). Dr. Shen is author or editor of Redefining Nationalism in Modern China: Sino–American Relations and the Emergence of Chinese Public Opinions in the 21st Century, Chinese Response to Anti-terrorism, Non-state Actors and Foreign Affairs of the Greater China Region (with Joseph Cheng). His articles have appeared in the East Asia, Journal of Comparative Asian Development, Pacific Review, Politics, Asian Perspective, and Journal of East Asian History. Research for this article was partially funded by a grant from the South China Program, Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong. The author thanks Dr. Rana Mitter of the University of Oxford and anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on the earlier drafts of this article.     

The perils of hyper-vigilance: the war on terrorism and the surveillance state in South-East Asia

The analysis examines the puzzle as to why the intelligence structures of South-East Asia largely failed to detect the evolving threat of violently inclined radical Islamic groups, despite the existence of elaborate and pervasive internal security arrangements within the states of the region. The article explores this issue by positing contending viewpoints about how authoritarianism in South-East Asia might have affected the awareness of such threats. Answers to these questions enable an assessment of the current ASEAN response to the ‘war on terrorism’ and to discern whether South-East Asia's elites will move either to improve the quality of their intelligence and threat analysis in the future, or whether they will, instead, extend the instruments of authoritarian rule, further curtailing civil and political space under the rubric of combating terrorism. The evidence so far suggests that the latter outcome is the more likely.