Cold War Pioneers in Combined Intelligence and Analysis

From its inception in 1947 until the late 1970s the primary missions of the United States Military Liaison Mission (USMLM) involved maintaining a presence in East Germany for confidence building measures and reporting on items related to indicators and warnings of hostilities initiated by the Soviet Army. While not abandoning its traditional missions, the unit underwent a major transformation in the early 1980s and became the first Humint integrated collection, analysis and production center. Through a combination of factors, USMLM was able to link targeting, single-source collection and analysis while providing insights in a wide range of areas, from nuclear weapons, troop morale, equipment production, technical data, health and ethnic issues and literacy. Most significantly, USMLM confirmed severely reduced manning levels in GSFG combat arms units.

‘Intelligence is best done by a minimum number of men and women of the greatest possible ability.’ (R.V. Jones, the ‘father’ of modern scientific and technical intelligence)     

Blond Queens,Red Spiders,and Neurotic Old Maids: Gender and Espionage in the Early Cold War

Many books have been written about the male spies of the early Cold War, but the women have not received nearly as much attention. In part, this is because journalists at the time reduced these women to gender stereotypes and portrayed them as neurotic old maids or svelte young seductresses. This article examines the cases of Elizabeth Bentley, Priscilla Hiss, Ethel Rosenberg, and Judith Coplon. It analyzes the gender constructions used in the media coverage of these women, and argues that exploring these constructions is crucial to understanding the significance of these cases.     

British Intelligence through the Eyes of the Stasi: What the Stasi's Records Show about the Operations of British Intelligence in Cold War Germany

Abstract

The German parliament's Law on the Stasi Records, passed in 1991, extended the principle of freedom of information to the records of a Communist security service. By so doing, it has given historians, former targets of Stasi intelligence collection and others an unprecedented insight into the operations of such a service. Enough records of the Stasi's trials department have been made available to reconstruct a picture of the work of British intelligence agencies in the years 1945–61, and above all the work of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). They show that SIS was a very skilful service which obtained the high-grade intelligence it sought. However, SIS's work in East Germany was undone in the late 1950s by the treason of the KGB's penetration agent in it, George Blake.     

Anglo-American Intelligence and the Soviet War Scare: The Untold Story

Abstract

During the Soviet war scare of the 1980s, British intelligence shared vital information from KGB officer Oleg Gordievsky with its American partners. The US intelligence community, however, was suspicious of the message and the messenger, dismissing Soviet ‘war talk’ as disinformation. Some officials even believed that the British had tweaked their reports to influence US policy. President Ronald Reagan, however, on the advice of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, listened to Gordievsky rather than his intelligence advisors. The war scare had a profound influence on Reagan's thinking about nuclear war, Kremlin fears, and Soviet–American relations that led him to seek a new détente with Moscow and the end of the Cold War through diplomacy rather than confrontation.?Subsequent events and post-Cold War revelations vindicated Gordievsky. Reagan sought his advice on the eve of his first summit meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev and later expressed his gratitude during a private meeting in the Oval Office.     

Beyond freedom,beyond control,beyond the Cold War: approaches to American culture and the state-private network

Cold War historiography has been through several recognizable stages over the last five decades, and the increasing interest over the last few years in cultural themes has added an important extra dimension to this. Yet the focus on ‘culture’ has rarely gone beyond studies of government support for particular cultural events and programs. Rarely have historical studies attempted to address the issue that such political uses of culture were part of an overall ideological offensive in both the East and the West. Recognition that the foreign policy of the Soviet Union was ideologically-driven is one thing, but historians have generally avoided a similar posture regarding the United States. Yet without sufficient attention as to how the US government attempted to mobilize and utilize all areas of social activity for the greater good of confronting the Soviet Union, there can be no satisfactory understanding of what the Cold War really involved In addition, this ‘ideological impulse’ has not disappeared with the end of the Cold War, as the reaction of the United States to the events of 11 September 2001 has demonstrated.     

Too Little,Too Late: The CIA and US Counteraction of the Soviet Initiative in the Six-Day War, 1967

The authors' previous research has established that the 1967 Arab–Israeli Six-Day War resulted from a deliberate Soviet plan to provoke Israel into a pre-emptive strike, which would legitimize and trigger a massive Soviet military intervention to aid an Egyptian–Syrian counteroffensive. However, US documents released until recently provided no evidence that the American intelligence community, and particularly the CIA, detected this threat or informed the political leadership about it – even though some indications were picked up at the field level. A newly declassified, retrospective report appears for the first time to show that there was awareness of major components of the Soviet operation (preparations for a naval landing and parachute drop). But closer scrutiny finds that this report reflects Soviet propaganda more than factual intelligence – thus further tarnishing what has hitherto been held as an outstanding achievement for the Agency and its chief.     

The secret service department: a British Intelligence Bureau in mid-Victorian London,September 1867 to April 1868

In December 1867 the Earl of Derby's government established a ‘Secret Service Department’ in London to extend Dublin Castle's anti- Fenian intelligence network to England and to contend with the perceived threat posed by domestic and international secret societies. This secret detective force – an early English intelligence bureau – lasted only until April 1868, but its disbandment reflected practical and administrative difficulties rather than a pervading prejudice towards spying. Indeed, the motivations for founding the department and the actions of those involved suggest that long before the establishment of the Special Branch in the 1880s, need rather than principle determined official actions in regard to political espionage.     

Crisis management in colonial states: Intelligence and counter-insurgency in Morocco and Syria after the First World War

This article addresses fundamental questions about power in colonial states by analysing the role and performance of intelligence agencies in response to internal rebellion. What was the relationship between intelligence agencies and the coercive instruments of imperial power? How far did intelligence-gathering help to maintain state authority? And what role did intelligence agencies play as architects of colonial state formation? These questions are discussed here with reference to two French overseas dependencies that proved especially turbulent in the 1920s: the Moroccan protectorate and the Syrian mandate. It will be suggested that colonial rule in these locations was so heavily dependent on intelligence-gathering that both could be termed ‘intelligence states’.     

Interrogating 24: Making Sense of US Counter-terrorism in the Global War on Terrorism

As an increasing number of scholars have argued, the fiction of popular culture and the reality of politics are inseparable. Fact and fiction, rather than remaining distinct, are mutually constitutive and interact to produce new meaning. A critical reading of Fox Television's intensely popular series 24 suggests that the series (re)produces key elements of the global war on terrorism discourse and is therefore a particularly useful case for under standing the importance of intertextuality for the production of meaning. Though the packaging of 24 may be new and exciting, the underlying messages remain the same, in the process rendering commonsensical the US global war on terrorism and the way that it has been waged.