Human-cyber Nexus: the parallels between ‘illegal’ intelligence operations and advanced persistent threats

‘Illegals’ are extensively trained individuals dispatched abroad under false identities with no observable links to their operating country. Technology has made possible a new kind of ‘virtual illegal,’ one that extends beyond the operating country’s borders without putting a human at risk. When this is done in a targeted manner by a sophisticated attacker it is called an Advanced Persistent Threat (APT). This article draws from historical illegals cases to identify parallels in the preparation, insertion, and control of malware by APTs. Ultimately, the methods for countering the two parallel phenomena can also be similar, despite their physical differences.     

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.     

Allied economic intelligence and strategy during the ‘Phoney War’

This article examines the efforts of French and British intelligence services to assess the German economy before and during the opening stage of World War II. The French and British, attached to a long‐war strategy based on the assumption time worked in their favour, looked to economic intelligence to indicate whether this was in fact the case. Yet for a variety of reasons clear and consistent assessments were impossible. Rather than accept uncertainty, the French and British chose to impose certainty by assuming the worst, a decision which contributed to the abandonment of a long‐war strategy as the Allies began to search for some way to win a short war.     

Shadowing ‘the exceptional’ behind the ‘ordinary’: mapping a network of intelligence laundering

ABSTRACT

Under the imperative of ‘prevention’, the process of information production for investigatory purposes forms a crossover between intelligence gathering and law enforcement. Digital surveillance programmes collect personal data prior to any probable cause of suspicion, whereas law enforcement activities are concerned with collecting evidence of crimes after the event. When future looking preventative approaches to the prosecution of crimes are forced into the linear, temporal narrative by which criminal investigations unfold, a tension emerges. The article demonstrates the ultimate incompatibility between ‘out of the ordinary’ intelligence activities and ‘ordinary’ criminal investigations by unearthing the procedural character behind evidence laundering.     

‘The importance of being honest’: Switzerland,neutrality and the problems of intelligence collection and liaison

This paper seeks to contribute to a number of debates that have attracted scholarly attention over the last few years. Firstly, by examining the experiences of the Swiss foreign intelligence service, the paper takes issue with what one scholar has dubbed ‘intelligence history snobbery’; a process that has privileged the study of the major powers and overlooked the contribution made to the secret world by the intelligence agencies of small states. Secondly, the paper explores the extent to which a state's engagement in the secret world is affected by its preconceived ideas over its place and standing in the international community. It asks whether the behaviour of a neutral foreign intelligence service is likely to differ from that of any other ‘small’ state, and whether neutrals can be both honest brokers in international affairs, and earnest players in the field of secret intelligence. The final section of the paper looks at the impact of the end of the Cold War and the emerging ‘global war on terror’ on the shape of the Swiss intelligence community.     

‘Every Hungarian of any value to intelligence’: Tibor Eckhardt,John Grombach,and the Pond

Abstract

Tibor Eckhardt, a Hungarian émigré, was a key player in American intelligence operations regarding Hungary during World War II and the early Cold War. He worked closely with a secretive American intelligence organization headed by John Grombach, an American intelligence officer who was a vehement opponent of the CIA. Though Eckhardt and Grombach shared concerns about the CIA, they were also forced to cooperate with it. Eckhardt’s endeavors and those of the many Hungarians whose intelligence work he coordinated were ultimately futile. Hence, they were representative of the efforts of freedom-loving Hungarians to liberate their country during the Cold War.     

‘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.     

‘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.     

Fusing algorithms and analysts: open-source intelligence in the age of ‘Big Data’

In the age of ‘Big Data’, the potential value of open-source information for intelligence-related purposes is widely recognised. Of late, progress in this space has increasingly become associated with software that can expand our ability to gather, filter, interrelate and manipulate data through automated processes. The trend towards automation is both innovative and necessary. However, techno-centric efforts to replace human analysts with finely crafted algorithms across the board, from collection to synthesis and analysis of information, risk limiting the potential of OSINT rather than increasing its scope and impact. Effective OSINT systems must be carefully designed to facilitate complementarity, exploit the strengths, and mitigate the weaknesses of both human analysts and software solutions, obtaining the best contribution from both. Drawing on insights from the field of cognitive engineering, this article considers at a conceptual level how this might be achieved.     

‘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.     

Evaluating intelligence oversight committees: The UK Intelligence and Security Committee and the ‘war on terror’

After a brief introduction giving a short history of legislative oversight, a number of criteria by which committees can be evaluated are enumerated, including their mandate, membership, resources and access to information. The development of parliamentary oversight in the UK culminating in the creation of the Intelligence and Security Committee in 1994 is outlined. Its performance between 2001 and 2006 is described and assessed. It is concluded that, while it has made some appropriate criticisms of the agencies, it can be faulted in that both the style and substance of its reports are essentially managerialist and have paid inadequate attention to questions of human rights and the need for public education.     

Inventing the ‘axis of evil’: the myth and reality of us intelligence and policy-making after 9/11

George W. Bush has claimed that the latest intelligence estimates single out Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as an ‘axis of evil’ fomenting terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. However, the intelligence itself demonstrates that this concept has been largely manufactured and the CIA bypassed in favor of a pre-existing political consensus among right-wing Republicans. In reality, the ‘axis’ serves to perpetuate an American ‘preponderance of power’. It justifies specific policies which had already been decided before Bush came to power and which now have popular acceptance through their association with the successful war on terrorism.     

The creation of ‘real’ spaces: regions and regionalism in the New South Africa

The culmination of a protracted struggle for liberation was crystallised in the debate over a new regional dispensation for South Africa. The aim of this paper is to examine the creation of the new regional geography of South Africa. The nascent regional dispensation was defined at a particular moment and it is the contention of this paper that the creation of the ‘geographical moment’ was not entirely conjunctural, but rather was the product of the different political parties’ understanding of space. The paper attempts to analyse the dynamics of the different political parties’ conceptualisation of the spatial and in so doing provides an explanation of the proposals for a new regional geography for South Africa. This position is derived from a realist theoretical argument which seeks to understand the stratification of reality by attempting to uncover structures and mechanisms responsible for the constitution of a particular historical event. The theory is illustrated by considering the process and the outcome of the new regional geography of South Africa as embodied in the nine‐region map produced by the Commission for the Demarcation/Delimitation of Regions. This paper reveals that the spatial philosophy of the major political parties was based on an incomplete relational concept of space, which contributed to the marginalisation of civil society, and to the artificiality of the process in the regional debate.     

Theorizing identity: beyond the ‘us’ and ‘them’ dichotomy

ABSTRACT

Yuval-Davis discusses three interconnected questions relating to identity. She first examines whether and in what ways the notion of identity should be theorized, on the one hand, and empirically researched, on the other, focusing on the opposing views of Stuart Hall and Robin Williams. She then examines the contested question of what is identity, positioning it in relation to notions of belonging and the politics of belonging, and in relation to several influential schools of thought, especially those that construct identity as a mode of narrative, as a mode of performativity or as a dialogical practice. Her third interrelated question concerns the boundaries of identity and the relationship between self and non-self. She explores both social psychological and psychoanalytical approaches to that question, and deals with questions such as reflexivity, identifications and forced identities. The last part of the article explores several types of relationships between self and non-self, such as: ‘me’ and ‘us’; ‘me/us’ and ‘them’; ‘me’ and other ‘others’; ‘me’ and the transversal ‘us/them’. Yuval-Davis's basic argument here is that dichotomous notions of identity and difference, when theorizing boundaries of individual and collective identities, are more misleading than explanatory.     

‘A reach greater than the grasp’: Israeli intelligence and the conflict in south Lebanon 1990–2000

This article examines the way in which intelligence was used by Israel in its war against Hizb'allah in south Lebanon. By using ideas drawn from the literature on strategic culture, it argues that in trying to replicate methods used in countering Palestinian insurgents, Israel's intelligence agencies failed to appreciate fully the finite political aims of Hizb'allah's guerrilla struggle. As such, the paucity in Israel's collective intelligence effort allowed operatives of Hizb'allah's military wing, al-Muqawama, to score notable intelligence triumphs over Israel, triumphs that did much force the IDF into a unilateral withdrawal from south Lebanon in May 2000.