‘One of our Most Valuable Sources of Intelligence’: British Intelligence and the Prisoner of War System in 1944

During the Second World War, secret information derived from enemy prisoners of war (POWs) was a valuable asset to British intelligence. Until 1944, the POW system had expanded from a small interrogation camp in the Tower of London to a multi-step structure with the so-called Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre, United Kingdom (CSDIC(UK)) at its top. The methods employed to collect reliable information included microphones, stool pigeons and different interrogation techniques. The results were read by all services and several ministries which provided a unique insight into German capabilities, intentions and thoughts.     

Diplomatic Sigint and the British Official Mind during the Second World War: Soviet claims on Turkey, 1940–45

Historians of Soviet foreign policy have recently revisited the issue of Soviet claims against Turkey: a Stalinist objective during the period of the Nazi–Soviet Pact and in the immediate post-war era. Recently opened archives show that the British response to Soviet claims in 1945 was driven by comprehensive access to Turkish diplomatic correspondence. However, the British failed to recognize wartime decrypts that indicated continuity in Soviet ambitions in Turkey since 1940. This failure reflected the responsibility of the operational departments of the Foreign Office for the assessment of diplomatic Sigint, and the absence of a genuine political intelligence department with eyes for anything other than current lines of policy.     

‘Flexicurity’ as a policy strategy: the implications for gender equality

Abstract

The ‘flexicurity’ strategy reached the top of the European Union's policy agenda in the mid-2000s. The strategy assumes an adult worker model family and aims to promote better, as well as more, jobs and to ensure that policies should further both flexibility in the labour market and security for workers. The article explores, first, the meaning of internal and external flexibility, and of employment-based security and the different implications for men and women. While the policy documents assume that flexicurity will increase gender equality, the mechanisms have not been specified. In fact, as the article shows, women are often more ‘flexible’ workers than men, particularly regarding their contractual arrangements and hours of employment. However, they tend not to be economically autonomous and, we argue, the supply-side policies advocated on the security side of the flexicurity matrix are insufficient to improve their position, which is strongly related to the gendered divisions of paid and unpaid work.     

‘In the way’: intelligence,Eden, and British foreign policy towards Italy, 1937–38*

In 1937–1938 a divide emerged over Italian appeasement between Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and his Foreign Minister, Anthony Eden. Chamberlain wanted to appease Mussolini with de jure recognition of his Ethiopian conquest. Eden disagreed and even resigned over the matter. Historians have struggled to define clearly Eden’s resistance. The intelligence archive allows for a reassessment of British policy towards Italy and Eden’s resignation. It shows that secret intelligence was central to Eden’s decisions and demonstrates the importance of intelligence in diplomatic history. It shows that Eden, almost alone, correctly read ambiguous intelligence on Mussolini and recognized him as an enemy of Britain.     

Vietnam’s ‘socialization’ policy and the moral subject in a privatizing economy

Abstract

The Vietnamese term for socialization, xã h?i hóa, is grounded in its history of socialist construction, originally referring to the collectivization of property and resources. Since the country shifted to a market economy, yet remaining under the leadership of the Communist Party, the term has come to imply the individualization of responsibilities and the privatization of public goods. As a policy, however, it continues to evoke the idioms of ‘the whole society’ or ‘all the people’ as the basis of wellbeing and development. This paper examines the practices of socialization as part of broader shifts in welfare provision and local dynamics of exemplarity. I show that socialization concerns not only the mobilization of resources, but also the production of a moral subject that is self-optimized and yet sensitized to helping others, self-governed and yet governable by the party state. In a socialist country that is rapidly marketising, this moral subject plays into governing rationalities that blends new-prudentialist logics with socialist genealogies, privatization with a notion of society within which individual actions can be made morally meaningful. While the tension and contestation induced by people’s greater burdens are immanent, the continued reference to collective idioms appeals to people’s moral sensibilities, and thus makes socialization meaningful to some extent, even as they resent the turn away from broad-based structures of wellbeing.     

‘My object is to be of service to you’: Carl Ackerman and the Wilson administration during World War I

The press was outraged in the 1970s when investigations exposed the CIA’s use of American journalists as undercover informants during the Cold War. This was treated as a shocking break in the traditional line between journalism and government. A study of journalist Carl W. Ackerman’s activities in the Great War, however, reveals such cooperation had precedents. While reporting oversees, Ackerman, later dean of Columbia Journalism School, worked behind the scenes with officials to shape and promote the Wilson administration’s foreign policy. This paper is a first step to understanding that pervasive, close relationships between journalists and government were well established at the beginning of the twentieth century.     

Intelligence and the ‘Mindset’: The German invasion of Norway in 1940

‘Weserübung’, the German invasion of Norway and Denmark on 9 April 1940, was a brilliantly successful surprise attack, both strategically and tactically. Strategic surprise was obtained because the idea that Germany was about to launch a major invasion of Norway was remote from any of the preconceived scenarios about Germany's next move. Germany's achievement of tactical surprise was also aided by bad weather in the North Sea. The main reason for the failure of both Norwegian and British policy-makers to comprehend what the Germans were up to lies in the importance of the ‘mindset’. On both sides of the North Sea the conventional wisdom was that Germany would not attempt an invasion of Norway against the supremacy of British sea power. Hence all incoming information was interpreted in Oslo in the light of the next mindset, namely that only a determined British attempt to take control of the Norwegian coast could trigger an armed German retaliation. In London, incoming intelligence was interpreted so as to conform to the Admiralty's preconceived scenario of a German naval breakout into the North Atlantic.     

‘Standing on the shoulders of giants’: diversity and scholarship in Intelligence Studies

This study takes stock of the field of Intelligence Studies thanks to a quantitative review of all the articles published in the two main journals in the field: Intelligence and National Security and the International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence. Particular attention is paid to the diversity of the authors publishing in these two journals and the evolution of the issues they discuss. Publications in the field are widely authored by males based in the United States and the United Kingdom who write about Western intelligence and security organizations. Recent years have seen a slight diversification in the field but further efforts will be necessary to develop a more eclectic body of researchers and research on intelligence and national security.     

A conversation with former DCI William E. Colby: Spymaster during the ‘Year of the Intelligence Wars’

In this previously unpublished interview, William Colby, former US Director of Central Intelligence, discusses the Intelligence Community's relationships with Congress and the White House, the value and conditions for effective human intelligence, the challenges of managing the Central Intelligence Agency, and his experience leading the Agency during the domestic spying scandals of the 1970s. Colby argues that the attentiveness of congressional intelligence committees waxes and wanes, just as it does for any other oversight committee. He states that Congress and the press, along with the integrity and initiative of individual citizens working in the intelligence community, provide the strongest guards against abuse. The interview was conducted in 1991, the last year of the Cold War.     

Operation ‘Robin’ and the British overflight of Kapustin Yar: a historiographical note

It is now nearly 40 years since the story of the British reconnaissance mission to overfly and photograph the Soviet missile test base at Kapustin Yar in 1953 or 1954 first surfaced in public. Yet, despite declassification and research, the full story is still elusive. This is a small but significant episode of Cold War history, which historians could reasonably expect to have been clarified by now. This research note seeks to review the evidence.     

Voting in the UN: a Second Image of China’s Human Rights

It is generally agreed that China has a poor domestic human rights practice. In contrast, China has a better-than-average voting record on human rights in the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). Based on a new UNGA human rights dataset that we identified, we found that since joining the United Nations (UN) in 1971, China voted in the affirmative on human rights resolutions 79 % of the time, compared to the world average favoring ratio of 75 %. This positive image of consistently voting in the affirmative on UNGA human rights resolutions suggests a second image of China’s human rights. However, while the Chinese government is willing to accept the international human rights regime, it also strategically alters its endorsement of UNGA human rights resolutions based on changing levels of domestic threats.     

British Intelligence and the ‘Fifth’ Occupying Power: The Secret Struggle to Prevent Jewish Illegal Immigration to Palestine

At the end of the Second World War, British intelligence struggled to enforce strict limits imposed on Jewish immigration to Palestine. Holocaust survivors and Jews wishing to escape communism in Eastern Europe flooded the western Zones of occupation in Germany and Austria, while the Zionist movement worked to bring them to Palestine. Illegal immigration to Palestine was the key policy dispute between Britain and the Zionist movement, and a focus for British intelligence. Britain sought both overt and covert means to prevent the boarding of ships at European ports which were destined for Palestine, and even to prevent the entry of Jewish refugees into the American zones. This article highlights Britain's secret intelligence-gathering efforts as well as its covert action aimed to prevent this movement. It highlights a peculiar episode in the ‘special relationship’ between Britain and the United States, during which cooperation and partnership was lacking. British intelligence promoted a rumour that Soviet agents were using Jewish escape lines to penetrate Western Europe and the Middle East in order to persuade American authorities to prevent the movement of Jewish refugees. Instead, this article argues, American intelligence secretly cooperated with the Zionist organizers of the escape routes so to expose Soviet agents. Britain's attempt at deception backfired, and provided effective cover for the movement of hundreds of thousands of Jews during a critical period. Meanwhile its intelligence had dramatically improved, but policymakers failed to reassess Britain's ability to sustain immigration restrictions and the indefinite detention of tens of thousands of illegal migrants.     

Post-neoliberal protest in Latin America as a struggle over the name of ‘the people’

If the ‘move to the left’ in the 2000s in Argentina and Brazil was the result of a longer process of contentious mobilization from below, enacted primarily during the latter part of the previous decade, what kind of social imaginaries have been enacted in the newest wave of discontent and what is its likely effect on the post-neoliberal form of governance? The argument put forward here is that the newest wave of social protest elicits the re-enactment of the liberal imaginary indirectly expressed under the notion of the republic. This operation tends to undermine the bases of post-neoliberalism, i.e. ‘the popular’, ‘the national-popular’ and ‘anti-neoliberalism: the imaginaries that defined the move to the left in the region. A new activated public, associated with middle-class sectors, raises new demands and does not identify with the ‘anti-neoliberal’ camp. Inasmuch as this activation entails a dispute over the name of the people, it signals a slowdown in the efficacy existing populist formations possess to deepen the movement towards more radical reforms.     

‘He is a cripple an’ needs my love': Porgy and Bess as Cold War propaganda

In 1952 the Department of State sent a touring production of Porgy and Bess to Berlin and Vienna in an effort to counter Soviet charges that America was a cultural wasteland and socially backward in its race relations. The tour was both the culmination of efforts by the US government to bind Germany and Austria to the West and the first attempt to use entertainment as a way of fighting Soviet communist ideals. This study explores the goals of those involved in the Porgy tour and assesses the success of their efforts to use art as propaganda. It concludes that, although the tour was deemed a great success, State Department officials were numb to the complexities of theatre production and reception and that Porgy never escaped the prejudices and misperceptions it was dispatched to counteract.     

Drawing policy implications from the ‘Operational Code’ of a ‘new’ political actor: Russian President Vladimir Putin

Policy Sciences - The task of both foreign policy makers and foreign policy scholars is complicated by the appearance on the international stage of a ‘new actor,’ about whom little...     

Spatial egalitarianism as a social ‘counter-movement’: on socio-economic reforms in Chongqing

Abstract

Through a framework drawn from Karl Polanyi's substantivist theorization of economic practices, this paper evaluates the quest for equitable urbanization in Chongqing, a major city-region in south-western China. Illuminating the tensions arising from two interrelated reforms, namely the ambitious attempt to construct 40 million m² of public rental housing between 2010 and 2012, and the large-scale drive to ensure peasant migrants enjoy equal access to social benefits as current urban residents, the paper explains how the quest for equitable urbanization magnifies two nationwide dimensions of institutionalized uneven development, namely (i) the caste-like categorization of populations according to ‘urban’ and ‘rural’; and (ii) the coastal bias in national economic development. The paper concludes that this state-driven pursuit of spatial egalitarianism in Chongqing expresses the dialecticism of economic development in China: it is a social ‘counter-movement’ against the effects of an uneven spatiality that was instituted to drive and deepen the marketization of Chinese society.     

ASEAN as the ‘regional conductor’: understanding ASEAN's role in Asia-Pacific order

This paper analyses ASEAN's prominence in regional order negotiation and management in Southeast Asia and the Asia-pacific through the lens of social role negotiation. It argues that ASEAN has negotiated legitimate social roles as the ‘primary manager’ in Southeast Asia and the ‘regional conductor’ of the Asia-Pacific order. It develops an English School-inspired role negotiation framework and applies it to three periods: 1954–1975 when ASEAN's ‘primary manager’ role emerged from negotiations with the USA; 1978–1991 when ASEAN's role was strengthened through negotiations with China during the Cambodian conflict; and 1991-present when ASEAN created and expanded the ‘regional conductor’ role. Negotiations during the Cold War established a division of labour where great powers provided security public goods but the great power function of diplomatic leadership was transferred to ASEAN. ASEAN's diplomatic leadership in Southeast Asia provided a foundation for creating its ‘regional conductor’ role after the Cold War. ASEAN's ability to sustain its roles depends on maintaining role bargains acceptable to the great powers, an increasingly difficult task due to great power rivalry in the South China Sea.