Calling the tune? the CIA,the British left and the Cold War, 1945–1960

During the early Cold War period the United States Government covertly engaged in a variety of attempts to influence the politics of the British left. American ‘labor diplomats’ strove to fortify anti-communist elements in the trade unions; left-wing literary intellectuals were the target of the CIA's campaign in the ‘Cultural Cold War’; Labour Party politicians became involved in CIA-sponsored ventures designed to promote greater European and Atlantic unity. However, it would be a mistake to conclude that the US ‘called the tune’ of the British left. Such a verdict overlooks internal problems in the American campaign and underestimates the complexity — and ingenuity — of the British response.     

Collision in Manchuria: rescue,intelligence, and the Cold War in Asia,August–September 1945

The Japanese decision to surrender on 15 August 1945 created an extraordinary and unique situation in the Chinese province of Manchuria. Within hours of the Japanese surrender, a number of special American intelligence teams parachuted into Manchuria to gain information on the POW’s and Soviet intentions for postwar Asia. This paper will examine on what occurred when Soviet and American military personnel met in Manchuria. Both sides had very different goals and aims for the end of war. For the small American force assigned to locate and identify Allied POW’s, their mission exemplified the already strained relations between the United States and the Soviet Union. For nearly every instance of cordial and joyous meetings between the two sides there were equally difficult confrontations and misunderstandings. These encounters offered a preview into the coming Cold War in Asia.     

Voice of America and Iran, 1949–1953: US liberal developmentalism,propaganda and the Cold War

The administration of President Harry S. Truman used Voice of America radio to promote Iranian ‘liberal developmentalism’. Radio propaganda joined economic assistance, military aid, and other information programs to promote Western‐style capitalism and to repel Communist appeals in Iran. But President Dwight D. Eisenhower abandoned Truman's gradualist Iran policy in favor of covert action, a seemingly more expedient solution to perceived Iranian political instability. The US‐British engineered coup in 1953 to overthrow the nationalistic Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq revealed the shallowness of US commitments to liberal reform in Iran and highlighted Americans' willingness to undermine Iranian sovereignty in order to preserve US security interests in the Middle East.     

Protecting secrets: British diplomatic cipher machines in the early Cold War, 1945–1970

This article examines how effectively Britain secured its diplomatic communications against hostile decryption during the early Cold War. It shows that between 1945 and 1970 the Foreign Office and the Commonwealth Relations Office introduced and operated four advanced cipher machines, Typex, Rockex, Noreen and Alvis, which produced very strong ciphers. However, Britain did suffer physical compromises of Rockex through Soviet espionage and an attack on the British embassy in Beijing. Rockex was also vulnerable to technical surveillance of its acoustic and Tempest emissions, and the Soviets exploited this to read the encrypted communications of the British embassy in Moscow.     

Spies and Scientologists: ASIO and a controversial minority religion in Cold War Australia, 1956–83

Among all the controversial New Religious Movements to emerge since the Second World War, the Church of Scientology has arguably been subject to more scrutiny by domestic and international intelligence agencies than any other non-Islamic alternative religious group. While owing to the nature of intelligence gathering scholarly accounts of this have often been one-dimensional and brief, the situation in Australia resulting from the Archives Act 1983 has meant that historians of both intelligence agencies and new religions now have access to a significant amount of documentation illustrating the interactions between the Church of Scientology and the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) for the period from 1956 to 1983. This period witnessed vacillating fortunes for the Church of Scientology which saw it become the subject of legislative bans in three Australian state jurisdictions during the late 1960s, as well as it launching a high profile, but ultimately unsuccessful, legal case against ASIO in 1979. While never considered a serious security risk by ASIO, the Church of Scientology played a minor role in a number of important events in the history of ASIO particularly during the 1970s, including participating in a wider activist campaign which sought to curtail ASIO’s operations during this period and making submissions to the first Royal Commission into the Australian Intelligence Services under Justice Robert Marsden Hope.     

Cold War counter-terrorism: the evolution of international counter-terrorism in the RCMP Security Service, 1972–1984

This piece provides a detailed case study of the evolution of counter-terrorism within a specific domestic security agency of a liberal-democratic state in the context of the Cold War. It does so by examining the creation of a counter-terrorism unit within Canada’s Royal Canadian Mounted Police Security Service and how it responded to international terrorism. This occurred in between major terrorist attacks in Canada in 1970 and 1985 and included a growing focus on counter-terrorism even as counter-subversion remained a top priority within a still dominant Cold War domestic security framework. Ultimately, the article, based on thousands of pages of previously secret documents, argues that the Security Service could conceive of in a broader strategic sense the threat of terrorism but found it more challenging, for a variety of reasons, including the dominance of the Cold War and the difficulties around infiltrating ethnic communities, to collect intelligence.     

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.     

The Royal Navy,Intelligence and the Spanish Civil War: Lessons in Air Power, 1936–39

This article discusses the Royal Navy (RN)—Royal Air Force (RAF) feud concerning the use of air power in the round through an investigation of each service's appreciations of the lessons being learned about air power during the Spanish Civil War. It reveals that despite such bodies as the Joint Intelligence Committee existing, for the processing of operational and strategic intelligence, there was very little that was joint about the way air power lessons were being used to inform RN and RAF interwar preparations for future conflict. Not only were the RN and RAF rivals, which dragged out the process and skewed the results so that they became useless for planning, but in that non-joint age each service could use the results for its own separate purposes and avoid any synergy among the services for operational and strategic effectiveness.     

‘Gross inefficiency and criminal negligence’: the Services Reconnaissance Department in Timor in 1943–45 and the Darwin war crimes trials in 1946

The post-World War II Australian military war crimes trials of Japanese from 1945–51 have been criticised for using a rule of evidence considerably relaxed from the ordinary requirements of a criminal trial, one that did not require witnesses to give evidence in person. Circumstantial evidence suggests that, in relation to a trial held in Darwin in March 1946 for war crimes committed in Timor, the secretive Special Operations Australia, otherwise known as the Services Reconnaissance Department (SRD), took advantage of the rule. This article argues that the SRD did not allow their members to give evidence in person in an attempt to control and limit the dissemination of information about their operational and security failures in Timor from 1943–45. The SRD operation was adjudged by its own official historian as displaying ‘gross inefficiency and criminal negligence’. While the SRD’s failures were known to select personnel at the time, access restrictions to archival records in the post-war period, including the war crimes trials, meant that the extent of its failures and how it appeared to manage knowledge of them has not been widely known.     

‘It takes a Russian to beat a Russian’: the National Union of Labor Solidarists,nationalism, and human intelligence operations in the Cold War

This article reconstructs the CIA’s exploitation of the Natsional’no Trudovoi Soyuz, a right-wing Russian nationalist organization, as a part of ‘rollback’ and ‘stay-behind’ covert operations against the Soviet Union during the 1950s. Operations such as these relied on the notion that far-right nationalism presented a potent counter to international communism. The article explores postwar ties between American intelligence and the NTS in a shared effort to ‘roll back’ the borders of communism. It likewise discusses the ability of Soviet counterintelligence to intercept, penetrate, and sabotage nationalist networks and their operations backed by Western governments.     

ASEAN and regional governance after the Cold War: from regional order to regional community?

Abstract

This paper first reviews and critiques the dominant realist and constructivist accounts of ASEAN, which have enjoyed much prominence in The Pacific Review since the journal's founding in 1988. ASEAN behaviour and outcomes cannot be fitted into neat theoretical categories that emphasize either material or ideational variables in explanation. Instead, ASEAN displays complexities in behaviour that are the product of the contingent interaction between the material (power, territory, wealth) and the ideational (norms, ideas, identity) as member states actively seek to manage domestic order as well as regional order within and beyond ASEAN. In all of this, state interests and identities remain paramount, which means that the long-standing ASEAN norms of sovereignty/non-interference remain central to regional governance. Under these conditions, and despite the Charter's newly articulated political norms of democratization, human rights, and the rule of law, the prospects seem doubtful for building a people-centred ASEAN Community in which regional governance displays inclusiveness, seeking to address the interests and needs of the region's ordinary people as opposed to what its elites deem appropriate. The final portion of the paper explores what a critical approach to studying ASEAN might reveal. In particular, the paper attempts to identify whether there may be any political spaces opening up within existing structures and practices from which progressive change could emerge, even if slowly, particularly in the area of human rights and social justice, key elements in building an inclusive, ASEAN Community.     

Counter-Subversion in Early Cold War Britain: The Official Committee on Communism (Home), the Information Research Department,and ‘State-Private Networks’

This article applies the concepts of ‘transnationalism’ and ‘state-private networks’ to early Cold War Britain to analyze the aims and methods of governmental and non-governmental counter-subversion and propaganda in the ‘Cultural Cold War’. Using recently declassified and underutilized files, the article explores the roles of the Official Committee on Communism (Home) and, more particularly, the Foreign Office Information Research Department. The Attlee and Churchill administrations of the late 1940s and early 1950s increasingly perceived the primary non-military threat of communism to Britain as part of Soviet-inspired transnational subversion of western European societies. This created a growing impetus for a symmetrical, transnational response through both domestic and foreign clandestine ‘indoctrination’ campaigns operating via influential non-state British institutions. Despite constitutional concerns still relevant today, in 1951 ministers endorsed the domestic component of this response as a fully-fledged strategy that would encourage greater state intervention in British society in the Cold War struggle for both liberty and security.     

International Cooperation and Bureaucratic In-fighting: American and British Economic Intelligence Sharing and the Strategic Bombing of Germany, 1939–41

The pursuit of intelligence on the German economy by the United States Army Air Corps prior to 1942 revealed great gaps in US knowledge of the German economy. This encouraged joint efforts with British Intelligence. The Air Corps exploited sources creatively to find German industrial targets. Its specialized needs persuaded it to try to establish an Air Corps intelligence gathering section. The Air Corps clashed with the Army over access to economic data. Its need for economic intelligence merged with its political goal of making strategic bombing its primary mission. Intelligence gathering efforts ultimately translated into the creation of air warfare strategy.     

‘Where the state feared to tread’: Britain,Britons, covert action and the Yemen Civil War, 1962–64

The Egyptian-inspired revolution that overthrew the Imamate in Yemen in September 1962 presented British policy makers with a series of acute dilemmas. While the defence of Aden was regarded by the Chiefs of Staff as central to the protection of British interests in the Middle East, the means by which this was to be achieved exposed deep cleavages among policy-makers chastened by the experience of Suez. While officials in Whitehall condoned a series of official covert operations along the Federation border with Yemen they remained strictly controlled and defensive in nature. By contrast, a group of influential Conservative MPs, having already engaged in what might be termed para-diplomacy that effectively stymied British recognition of the new regime in Sana'a , looked to extend British clandestine activity to include direct aid to, and training of, the Royalist Forces deep inside Yemen itself. With the initial support of key Middle Eastern potentates, a private mercenary organization emerged that, while enjoying the tacit encouragement of some in Whitehall, acted above and beyond the control of London in support of what they considered to be Britain's interest, an interest which, despite the huge political and diplomatic risks involved, came to enlist the help of Israel. At a time when much academic attention has been focused on the rise of the private military organization, the debates over their efficacy, both political and moral, as a tool of foreign policy can be traced to events in the mountains and deserts of the Yemen over four decades ago.