Denaturalisation and conceptions of citizenship in the ‘war on terror’

The threat of American and British nationals returning home after fighting with ISIS sparked calls in 2014 for legislation to allow the revocation of terror suspects’ citizenship. Using content analysis, this paper compares how citizenship was renegotiated during the debates that followed in both countries. For proponents of the new powers, acts considered prejudicial to national security did not simply constitute a ‘bad’ or dissenting citizen, but were incompatible with the status of citizenship itself. I find that republican discourses of citizenship conceived as loyalty to the state were used not as an alternative to liberal discourses that espouse individual rights and a more limited political arena, but precisely as means of discursively limiting of that arena, by selectively excluding particular undesirable or less desirable groups – terror suspects, naturalised citizens – from political life as we know it.     

‘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.     

The roles of foreign aid and education in the war on terror

This paper presents a theoretical framework and some empirical results showing that the level of foreign aid received reduces the supply of terrorist attacks by recipient countries, as does the recipient country’s level of education. Due account is taken of endogeneity problems in producing these results. They suggest that Western democracies, which are the main targets of terrorist attacks, should invest more funds in foreign aid with a special emphasis on supporting education.     

‘Grow your own’: cold war intelligence and history supermarkets

Most of the records of the three British secret services relating to the Cold War remain closed. Nevertheless, the Open Government initiative in the UK and the Clinton Executive Order of 1995 have resulted in some disclosures, often from consumer agencies who were in receipt of intelligence material. There have also been limited releases from other countries. Against that background, this essay considers two questions: First, how far has the study of intelligence affected the broad context of Cold War history during the last decade? And second, how effective have we been in probing the institutional history of secret services during the Cold War? The essay concludes that while some secret services are breaking new ground by recording their own oral history, academic historians have been less than enterprising in their investigations and tend towards a culture of archival dependency.     

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.     

Intelligence and the Media: The Press,Government Secrecy and the ‘Buster’ Crabb Affair

This article explores the official cover up of the mysterious disappearance of naval frogman Lionel Buster Crabb in 1956. Existing histories of the affair have tended to focus on the manner of Crabb's death, advancing a series of plausible and suitably implausible explanations. Using recently declassified sources, this article, in contrast, seeks to use the Crabb affair as a window onto government secrecy and relations between the press and the intelligence services. It is argued that the affair was a climacteric for the intelligence community and its relationship with Fleet Street, rupturing long-standing taboos about secret service work and bringing to the fore a brand of investigative journalist determined to make front-page news of intelligence shortcomings and failure.     

‘A poor thing but our own’: The Joint Intelligence Committee and Ireland, 1965–72

This article explores the role of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) in assessing the development of the Northern Ireland crisis from the mid-1960s until the imposition of direct rule in 1972. It argues that the JIC's very limited engagement with Northern Ireland prior to 1969 contributed significantly to Whitehall's failure to grasp the drift of affairs from the autumn of 1968 onwards. This was due to the JIC's preoccupation with Cold War issues, compounded by reluctance to interfere in the security affairs of the Northern Ireland government. When Northern Ireland became a stock item of JIC business in 1970, the JIC secretariat became heavily involved in efforts to improve the intelligence system in Northern Ireland. The article also raises the question of the JIC's role in establishing the parameters for intelligence and security operations concerning Northern Ireland, including the controversial `Five Techniques' of interrogation, the introduction of internment in 1971, and covert activities in the Republic of Ireland. The article draws mainly on JIC, Prime Minister's Office and Foreign Office records in the National Archives.     

Neoliberalism by other means: the “war on terror” at home and abroad

This paper offers a theoretical framework for understanding both the invasion of Iraq and the “war on terror” in the context of neoliberal globalization. I argue that both the foreign and domestic policy pursued by the Bush administration under the rubric of the war on terror are in fact best understood as strategies for advancing the neoliberal agenda, in large part by seeking to undo gains made by the labor movement during the 1990s. I argue that for this ambitious and aggressive administration, the post‐9/11 atmosphere offers the prospect of permanently restructuring both popular expectations of government and the ability of working people to challenge corporate prerogatives.     

‘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.     

‘The clash of races’ and ‘the Jewish intelligence’: a specifically French form of social antisemitism

The phenomenon of ‘social antisemitism’ is well known. By the beginning of the twentieth century, however, an idiosyncratic variant had emerged in France. Where, elsewhere, social antisemitism tended to be ingrained and unthinking, this French variant was (typically) more theoretical, and its practitioners tended to be among the most prominent authors and thinkers. It stressed the essential cultural differences between the ‘French’ and the ‘Israelites’, and the ‘separateness’ of the Jews within France, and also developed a series of facile generalizations about the essentially inferior nature of the Jewish intellect. Griffiths examines this phenomenon, both for its characteristics and for its widespread existence in French intellectual circles, by taking a specific subject: the reception of Lacretelle’s 1922 novel Silbermann. A wide range of writers and critics—a number of whom had in other circumstances a reputation for liberal values and attitudes, and had been among those who had deplored the excesses of the antisemitic mob during the Dreyfus affair—are found to echo the views put forward by Lacretelle in that novel, and even to elaborate on them. Many of these writers were to adopt a completely different attitude towards the Jews after the Second World War; when the position of the Jews was fully realized, their earlier ‘social antisemitism’ proved less powerful than their human sympathies. But this is not to devalue the importance of the danger posed by social antisemitism, which could provide the basis for far more virulent forms of racism to flourish.     

Filling in the ‘unknowns’: Hypothesis-based intelligence and the Rumsfeld commission

In 2003 the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans employed a hypothesis-based methodology to deliver the now discredited intelligence that justified the Iraq war. The 1976 ‘Team B’, which was also heavily influenced by neoconservatives and used the same methodology, has been recognized as a precedent. There is, however, another precedent, the 1998 Rumsfeld Commission, which challenged CIA predictions on the ballistic missile threat to the US. Lobbied for by many of the same conservatives and neoconservatives, the Commission used the same analytical style as Team B and the OSP. The now discredited intelligence on Iraq was not a ‘failure’ or ‘mistake’, but a method, tried and tested by the right, of challenging the CIA on political grounds.     

Rethinking ‘Five Eyes’ Security Intelligence Collection Policies and Practice Post Snowden

The Edward Snowden leaks challenge policy makers and the public's understanding and perspectives on the role of security intelligence in liberal democratic states. This article explores the challenges confronting security intelligence collection by the ‘Five Eyes’ countries – particularly those most affected by the leaks. We argue that the debate now needs to move beyond simplistic notions of privacy vs. security to a more detailed understanding of the policy and ethical dilemmas confronting policy makers and intelligence agencies. To that end, we provide a schematic framework (methods, context and target) to promote a better understanding of the practical, policy and ethical problems for security intelligence collection emerging post Snowden. The framework is a first step in identifying common principles that could be used develop an ethically informed set of policy guidelines to help decision makers better navigate between citizen's two basic rights: security and privacy.     

‘An important contribution to the allied war effort’: Canadian and North Atlantic intelligence on German POWs, 1940–1945

This article examines inter-allied efforts to collect, categorize and analyse material gathered from the thousands of German prisoners of war (POWs) in their hands during the Second World War. The different information gathered from enemy captives was valuable to British, Canadian and American intelligence services, helping them to evaluate morale of ‘Hitler’s soldiers’, to improve the security of their camp networks and to understand National Socialism ideology. Often viewed as a primarily British-American operation, POW intelligence also involved Canadian authorities. This article argues that Canada, far from being a secondary actor, had a central role within this transatlantic network.     

‘US Intelligence and Vietnam’: The Official Version(s)

Recent declassifications of the official histories of Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency activities in the Vietnam War give historians a sharper outline of the overall American intelligence effort in that conflict and a trove of supporting details. While scholars will have to use the new releases with caution, the histories (when combined with appraisals from the Armed Services) offer glimpses of the scale of the US intelligence program and some of the complications that hindered its effectiveness. Two particular features stand out when these materials are viewed in conjunction: the disconnectedness of the various agencies' and Services' efforts from each other (and from decision makers in Washington); and the difficulties that all of them had in working with America's South Vietnamese allies. The picture emerging is thus one of a congeries of largely independent intelligence campaigns working simultaneously against the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong targets. Intelligence miscues did not lose the Vietnam War for the Americans and South Vietnamese, but it now seems clearer that they made victory less likely.     

James Bond,Ian Fleming and intelligence: breaking down the boundary between the ‘real’ and the ‘imagined’

This article looks to answer the question of why the James Bond novels and films should matter to scholars of intelligence and national security. We argue that Bond is important because, rightly or wrongly, and not without inaccuracy, it has filled a public knowledge vacuum about intelligence agencies and security threats. On another level, this article explores the unexpected yet important interactions between Bond and the actual world of intelligence. We contend that the orthodoxy dictating that Bond and spying are diametric opposites—one is the stuff of fantasy, the other is reality—is problematic, for the worlds of Bond and real intelligence collide, overlap and intermesh in fascinating and significant ways. In short, Bond is important for scholars because he is an international cultural icon that continues to operate at the borders of fiction and reality, framing and constructing not only public perceptions but also to some degree intelligence practices. Core narratives of intelligence among not only the public but also policymakers and intelligence officers are imagined, sustained, deepened, produced and reproduced through and by Bond. We conclude that Bond and intelligence should be thought of as co-constitutive; the series shapes representations and perceptions of intelligence, but it also performs a productive role, influencing the behaviours of intelligence agencies themselves.     

Orientalism and Intelligence Analysis: Deconstructing Anglo-American Notions of the ‘Arab’

Despite revived notions of a ‘cultural divide’ between East and West, Edward's Said's ‘Orientalism’ has received little attention from scholars of intelligence and diplomacy. This article brings to light for the first time a number of recently declassified documents of a different nature to usual assessments produced by Anglo-American analytic bodies: those focussed primarily on the issue of ‘national character’. Using and critiquing Said's thesis of Western ‘Orientalism’ it reveals some critical and enduring conceptualizations articulated by the diplomatic and intelligence community about Arab culture such as the role of Islam, rhetoric, political motivation and notions of ‘honour’. Such a critical approach demonstrates how diplomatic and intelligence history can also be a history of culture, ideas and institutional mentalité.