‘Because I Don't Trust Him,We are Friends’: Signals Intelligence and the Reluctant Anglo-Soviet Embrace, 1917–24

Signals intelligence was crucial in helping British policymakers come to grips with Communist subversion – real or imagined – in this country. Still, though released by GCHQ in the late 1990s, Soviet diplomatic intercepts have yet to feature prominently in any study of early Anglo-Russian relations. While they ought not to be regarded on their own as the definitive source on Soviet foreign policy, GCCS intercepts tell us a great deal not only about how Moscow used the threat of subversion as a bargaining chip but also about personalities and bureaucratic rivalries on the Soviet side.     

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.     

Dramatising intelligence history on the BBC: the Camp 020 affair

This article considers an episode of the television drama-documentary series Spy!, broadcast on the British Broadcasting Corporation in 1980. The programme proved controversial owing to its depiction of a physical assault during interrogation at an MI5 facility, Camp 020, during the Second World War. Numerous 020 veterans complained, pointing out that, with one exception, such physical violence had never taken place there. As their complaints were largely made in private correspondence with the BBC, which stood by its programme, the association of wartime British intelligence with physical abuse was allowed to go unchallenged in the minds of the viewing public.     

Security Intelligence in the Middle East (SIME): Joint Security Intelligence Operations in the Middle East,c. 1939–58

Security Intelligence Middle East (SIME) remains an understudied aspect of British intelligence. In many respects it was a remarkable organization. Its wartime iteration was created in haste, ostensibly as a military body but based upon the Security Service's office in Cairo. It evolved into a truly ‘joint’ unit but culturally was closer to the Security Service (MI5) than either the military or the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). SIME changed dramatically as a result of the end of the Second World War: it became the sole responsibility of MI5; local cooperation between MI5 and MI6 was scaled-down and became the focal point of a broader inter-intelligence service dispute in London; and new nationalist threats caught SIME off-balance and eventually undermined its raison d'être. SIME's contrasting wartime and peacetime iterations provide a useful example of how intelligence agencies respond to external pressures. It also provides a window into wider jurisdictional and constitutional conflicts at the heart of the relationship between MI5 and MI6, both during and after the war. Finally SIME shows practitioners what can be achieved under the right stimulus and what can be lost when that stimulus fades.     

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.     

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.     

British intelligence and the middle east, 1900–1918: how much do we know?

Primary sources available in British and Israeli archives (first and foremost – the Public Record Office) allow serious study of the British intelligence apparatus in the Middle East and its contribution to the military operations and diplomatic-political process there, prior to and during the First World War. Yet, existing knowledge focuses on military intelligence, as documentation on the Secret Service and the Security Service (both in the form of EMSIB) as well as on army and naval signal intelligence operations in the region is barely available – destroyed or still classified. Examination of hitherto unexplored foreign depositories may serve as an indirect approach to overcome this paucity of material, owing to the close wartime cooperation between British, French, Russian and Italian intelligence on the Ottoman Empire.     

Intelligence Requirements at the Crossroads: The 1948 French Plan de Renseignement,Intelligence Requirements and the Role of Intelligence History

Very often intelligence history concentrates on the knowledge produced by a country's intelligence service and its impact on national decision-making, or – in the case of intelligence failures – the lack thereof. Using a previously unexplored document from the archives of the French Foreign Ministry, this research note proposes another contribution of intelligence history to diplomatic history: By analysing national intelligence requirements – the ‘top secret diaries’ of governments – intelligence history can provide a window into the minds of decision-makers. The 1948 French plan de renseignement illustrates this case. Written shortly after the Cold War started in earnest in 1947, the plan de renseignement shows a French government deeply worried about the danger of global conflict and of internal upheaval in its empire, but also a government not fully committed to the western cause and particularly sceptical about American intentions. French foreign policy was at a crossroads in 1947/48 and, quite sensibly, French policy-makers wanted to know exactly what lay on all the possible roads ahead. While these findings do not contradict existing scholarship, they may help to encourage a re-weighing of existing arguments.     

‘… the Defence of the Realm and Nothing Else’: Sir Findlater Stewart,Labour Ministers and the Security Service

In May 2013, a report on the British Security Service (MI5) by Sir Samuel Findlater Stewart was released by the Cabinet Office. Dated November 1945, the report on the future organization and activities of MI5 was significant in that it defined the Service's post-war remit, accountability and relations with the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), laying the groundwork of MI5's mandate until the introduction of the Security Service Act in 1989. The article also suggests that the report is significant, not just because it sheds important light on MI5's wartime and post-war role, but because it helps question existing assumptions about the relationship between the Security Service and the post-war Labour Government of Clement Attlee, often viewed as a troubled one.     

‘Toys’ and ‘Whispers’ in ‘16‐land’: SOE and Ireland, 1940–1942

This article explores SOE plans to organise stay behind parties in neutral Ireland in cooperation with Irish army officers, in anticipation of a successful German invasion, as well as efforts to prepare for sabotage operations and to plant rumours through its agent Roddy Keith, and later through the British press attache John Betjeman. SOE's ambitions were opposed both by MI5 and SIS. MI5 wished to protect its own links with Irish intelligence, while SIS feared for the security of its covert Irish networks (which in fact were already penetrated). The consequent rows drew in C, Sir Frank Nelson, and other senior figures. They were resolved by Churchill, who felt that to provide the Irish with war material would only encourage them in their neutrality policy. His verdict was taken as an instruction to SOE to quit Ireland.     

A Higher Form of Intelligence: Hugh Trevor-Roper and Wartime British Secret Service

Throughout his distinguished career, the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper was known in many incarnations and guises: the ‘sleuth of Oxford’; Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford; the Spectator's Mercurius Oxoniensis; Baron Dacre of Glanton; and Master of Peterhouse College. In addition, he was to gain wider notoriety in the early 1980s as the man who helped authenticate the forged Hitler Diaries. Nevertheless, his wartime embodiment as a British intelligence officer is one facet of his personal history that has never before been addressed by scholars in any great depth. Using previously unpublished material from Trevor-Roper's memoirs and personal papers, as well as excerpts from the Guy Liddell Diaries, this article aims to highlight the fact that, contrary to the impression engendered by F.H. Hinsley's dry and depersonalized multi-volume official history, British Intelligence in the Second World War, Major H.R. Trevor-Roper, and many other intelligence officers like him, not only had a ‘good war’, but a rich and colourful one. If historians are to escape the late Sir Maurice Oldfield's indictment of that official history, namely, that it was written ‘by a committee, about committees, for a committee’, they might do worse than begin to reappraise the role of the individual in the context of Britain's intelligence effort during 1939–45. The late Lord Dacre, so this article argues, is one such individual requiring further study.     

MI5 and the Cold War in South-East Asia: examining the performance of Security Intelligence Far East (SIFE), 1946–1963

From 1946–1963, MI5 operated a South-East Asian regional headquarters in Singapore: Security Intelligence Far East (SIFE). This article responds to growing interest in theatre-level intelligence organisation and the importance of intelligence to Britain’s Cold War and decolonisation by examining the performance of SIFE. On the organisational level, SIFE was strongest when it remained wedded to its charter functions and closely adhered to the priorities of its principal consumer: the Commissioner-General for South-East Asia. Its assessments were influential in shaping decision-makers’ understandings of key regional developments, although this did not always translate into public policy. Lastly, SIFE enjoyed success in developing lasting liaison relationships to cement British influence, but failed to utilise these to improve its intake of raw intelligence.     

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.     

British Intelligence and the Jewish Resistance Movement in the Palestine Mandate, 1945–46

At the end of the Second World War, British and Zionist interests came into conflict over the issue of Jewish immigration to Palestine, which raised the broader issue of what sort of National Home could exist within the British Mandate. As a result, in 1945–46, the three Jewish armed groups in the Mandate, the Haganah, Etzel and Lehi, started a loosely coordinated armed struggle against British rule. Even the moderates in the Jewish Agency rejected their former partner against Hitler, Britain, and used force against it in order to achieve their political goals. This article assesses British intelligence on these developments, and demonstrates that it failed to anticipate or even to understand the threat until the destruction of the King David Hotel. The article demonstrates that these mistakes occurred because British intelligence relied heavily on the intelligence organs of the Jewish Agency itself for intelligence about political threats within Palestine. The article assesses this intelligence failure, and its heavy costs. However, it denies that bad intelligence caused British failures in the Mandate. On the contrary, that failure stemmed from deeper problems of policy.     

British open source intelligence (OSINT) and the Holocaust in the Soviet Union: persecution,extermination and partisan warfare

Where does British open source intelligence (OSINT) fit into the intelligence debate surrounding Allied knowledge of the Holocaust? In particular what can this source of intelligence tell us in regards to the opening of the extermination phase of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union? Were the Allies conclusions being falsely influenced by their own OSINT analysts? Or conversely did OSINT provide further evidence (alongside SIGINT decodes) that the Nazis were now committing mass genocide. This article explores these questions by examining the FRPS/FORD OSINT reports from the civilian ruled territories of (and those intended for) the Reichskommissariate Ostland and Ukraine.     

Integration of strategic and operational intelligence during the Peninsular war

Wellington is well known for his understanding of the importance of intelligence, but so far history has recorded that he presided over a one-man intelligence department, himself being the only analyst of what proved to be a massive quantity of raw information. New research highlighted in this article reveals that this has been an inaccurate interpretation. The British government also acted to establish a civilian network of correspondents and agents communicating with the British ambassadors to Spain and Portugal. Wellington's main priority was to integrate the ‘strategic intelligence’ collected by government agents with his own ‘operational intelligence’. Instead, analysis was conducted more by Wellington's subordinates in the field, applying their personal localized expertise to the information they received. In this way, an early and primitive form of the staff system later developed by the Prussians was created in the Peninsular War.     

Operation ‘Surgeon’ and Britain's post-war exploitation of Nazi German aeronautics

After 1945, Allied acquisition of intelligence on Nazi Germany's wartime aeronautical innovations became one of the most important immediate post-war aims. From July 1945 to July 1947, Operation ‘Surgeon’ became the focus of British efforts to exploit Nazi aeronautical advances. The objectives of the operation were the evacuation of state-of-the-art equipment from aeronautical research institutes and the recruitment of high-grade aviation experts for postwar work in Britain. This article analyzes the conduct and results of Operation ‘Surgeon’. The limited literature on this topic has fuelled a popular orthodoxy which holds that the UK intelligence effort and policies to recruit German defence scientists were classic examples of the ‘British disease’, or a more general inability to exploit a technological opportunity that was harnessed so effectively by the other victorious Allies. Drawing on the experience of Operation ‘Surgeon’, the article challenges this orthodoxy that has dominated the historiography of Britain's intellectual reparations from the Third Reich.     

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.     

Collection ‘management by crisis’: strategic targeting and interrogation at Guantanamo Bay

This article examines human intelligence collection in wartime, and offers a methodology to help determine the relative success or failure of the detainee interrogation mission at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba (GTMO). It surveys the relevant background on GTMO, a brief history on interrogations during World War II and Vietnam, and draws comparisons among them to be considered in potential future mass-interrogation missions. Drawing from documentary research and two dozen original interviews, it argues that, to the extent an intelligence mission was one of the purposes of transferring detainees to GTMO, the relevant metric of success is whether collectors were able to obtain more or ‘better’ intelligence from the detainees than they would have been able to in-theater. At the strategic level, then, GTMO’s value to intelligence collectors is to be assessed at the margins, rather than the absolute value of the information educed.