The Intelligence Requirement of International Mediation

This article explores the intelligence requirement of international mediation, a topic that is ignored in both the literature on conflict resolution and the literature on intelligence. A mediator's strategies and tactics ought to be informed by a deep understanding of the parties' internal calculations about the conflict and its resolution. Intelligence is needed to gain this understanding because the parties typically do not reveal their sensitive deliberations to outsiders. United Nations mediation teams should have a monitoring and analysis unit that endeavours to meet this need and reduce the ignorance that commonly afflicts international mediation.     

British signals intelligence and the 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland

Historians for decades have placed Room 40, the First World War British naval signals intelligence organization, at the centre of narratives about the British anticipation of and response to the Easter Rising in Ireland in 1916. A series of crucial decrypts of telegrams between the German embassy in Washington and Berlin, it has been believed, provided significant advance intelligence about the Rising before it took place. This article upends previous accounts by demonstrating that Room 40 possessed far less advance knowledge about the Rising than has been believed, with most of the supposedly key decrypts not being generated until months after the Rising had taken place.     

Intelligence studies: The emergence of the British school

Christopher Andrew and Jeremy Noakes (eds.), Intelligence and International Relations 1900–1945 (Exeter: University of Exeter Publications, 1987), pp.320; £10.00 (paperback).     

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.     

Strategic Horizons: Futures Forecasting and the British Intelligence Community

The article deals with the role and benefit added by the use of horizon scanning in intelligence analysis in the UK. It asserts that horizon scanning as a technique, while not entirely akin to the tradecraft of intelligence analysis, has much to contribute to its success. Specifically, is asserts that a horizon scanning function in the JIO and the Cabinet Office should be made permanent, as bureaucratic tumult in the wake of the 2010 SDSR have left the capability un-staffed, though still established. Within the UK intelligence community, such an organization may have positive roles to play in the processes of challenge, the setting of collection priorities, and overall long-term UK intelligence assessment at the national level.     

Presidential Party,Incumbency, and the Effects of Economic Fluctuations on House Elections, 1916–1996

There is little professional consensusregarding the effect of economic conditionson House Elections. We argue that recentwork still uses the paradigm of Party toorganize their data and tests. Given thatrecent developments in the theory ofcongress emphasize the paradigm ofIncumbency, we investigate the empiricalrelevance of that competing paradigm. Weshow that (1) Incumbency matters in a purePresidential Party Model of HouseElections, (2) Presidential Party mattersin a pure Incumbency Model, (3) Once bothParty and Incumbency are accounted for,economic conditions exert a highlysignificant and temporally stable influenceon House elections, (4) Return Rates aremore affected by economic fluctuations thanare Vote Shares, and (5) Not allPresidential Party incumbents face the samedegree of electoral accountability foreconomic fluctuations.     

British Intelligence and Propaganda during the 'Confrontation', 1963-1966

This study examines the importance of British intelligence and propaganda in the Confrontation with Indonesia. It shows that Britain had access to human and signals intelligence on Indonesia, which influenced British policy and strategy in several ways. In particular, signals intelligence gave London the confidence to launch 'Claret' cross border raids against Indonesia from 1965. The study also reveals that Britain mounted an aggressive propaganda campaign against Indonesia during the Confrontation and especially after an abortive coup attempt in 1965. British propaganda successfully encouraged the army to destroy the Indonesian communist party, remove President Sukarno from power and end the Confrontation.     

British Intelligence and the Mandate of Palestine: Threats to British National Security Immediately After the Second World War

Recently declassified Security Service (MI5) records reveal, for the first time, the full extent of the threat that Zionist terrorism posed to British national security immediately after the Second World War. It is well established within the historical literature that after 1945 Britain faced violent campaigns by Jewish terrorist groups in the Mandate of Palestine. Hitherto unacknowledged in the historiography, however, is the fact that the threat of Zionist terrorism extended from Palestine to Britain itself. This article studies the nature of the threat posed by Zionist terrorism within Britain after 1945, and explores the counter-terrorist measures that MI5 devised to meet it. Overall, as this article shows, MI5's concerns with Zionist terrorism after 1945 offer a striking new interpretation of the history of the early Cold War.     

Between Franks and Butler: British Intelligence Lessons from the Gulf War

Lessons for the intelligence community were publicly identified in a 1983 report by Lord Franks and a 2004 report by Lord Butler. However, little is known of the lessons learned during the 20 years between the two. This article draws upon two newly released, previously classified, documents which examine British intelligence lessons from the 1990–91 Gulf War. It provides a previously untold account of the crisis, exclusively from a British intelligence perspective, and presents new evidence that intersects across many intelligence debates. This article also challenges whether identified lessons remained learned and begins to question the wider learning process within the intelligence community.     

Estimating Ideal Points in the British House of Commons Using Early Day Motions

This article develops a new method for estimating the ideological preferences of members of the British House of Commons. Existing methods produce implausible results due to high levels of party cohesion and strategic voting on the part of opposition parties. To circumvent these problems, this article estimates MP preferences using Early Day Motions (EDMs) as an alternative to roll‐call votes. The Bayesian ideal point model for the decision to sign an EDM takes into account both policy preferences and signing costs. The estimates obtained have greater face validity than previous attempts to measure preferences in the House of Commons, recovering the expected order of parties and of members within parties. The estimates successfully predict voting behavior in the House of Commons. As with other Bayesian ideal point methods, this approach produces natural uncertainty estimates and allows for easy calculation of quantities of interest such as member ranks.     

Party,Constituency, and Representation: Votes on Abortion in the British House of Commons

Public Choice - To whom do British Members of Parliament respond when votingin the House of Commons? Using a series of votes on abortion,the revealed preferences of MPs are estimated. The...     

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.     

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.     

The Motivational Effects of Mission Matching: A Lab‐Experimental Test of a Moderated Mediation Model

Scholarly literature finds positive motivational effects of matching workers and missions. However, the psychological mechanisms behind this matching effect have not been explored. This article develops and tests a moderated mediation model of mission matching in which meaningfulness serves as an intervening mechanism that explains the association between mission matching and effort. It also considers how individual differences in prosocial motivation influence the intervening role of meaningfulness. Using a real‐effort laboratory experiment with monetary incentives, the article shows that matched subjects exert more effort than mismatched subjects, that this effect is mediated by increases in meaningfulness, that prosociality moderates the effect of a match on meaningfulness, and that the indirect effect of a match on effort through increases in meaningfulness varies as a function of prosociality. These results contribute to a more nuanced understanding of mission matching and suggest that matching may be particularly important for certain types of workers.     

Curbing the royal prerogative to use military force: the British House of Commons and the conflicts in Libya and Syria

Abstract

To what extent does political practice under the British Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition (2010–2015) reflect a ‘parliamentary prerogative’? From a formal-institutional point of view one should not expect substantial parliamentary influence in Britain. Yet recent developments suggest the emergence of a new convention. Examining parliamentary debates during the run-up to the votes on Libya and Syria, this contribution shows that the scope and contents of this convention remain contested. Specifically, there is disagreement about the kind of operations that ought to be exempt from the rule, questions of parliamentary procedure that favour the executive and, crucially, the proper timing of substantive votes. Nonetheless, parliament has emerged from the vote on Syria as an informal veto player on decisions regarding war involvement. However, whether MPs will exercise their veto power in prospective cases will depend on the preference distribution in the legislature and the nature of the proposed deployment.