Soviet Bloc and Western Bugging of Opponents’ Diplomatic Premises During the Early Cold War

This article examines Soviet Bloc and Western bugging of their opponents’ diplomatic premises in the early Cold War, from 1945 to the late 1960s. It explains the process of audio surveillance, identifies significant cases of bugging and describes the countermeasures taken by Western states. The paper concludes that the Soviet Union was able to gather a considerable amount of intelligence from bugging Western embassies in Moscow during the early Cold War. In particular, bugging enabled the Soviets to break the diplomatic ciphers of the United States, Britain and West Germany.     

Seeing things differently: contrasting narratives of British and German photographic intelligence during the Second World War

This study examines Anglo-American narratives of British and German photographic intelligence (PI) in Europe during the Second World War. According to these narratives, Germany relegated PI to tactical and operational applications; by contrast, Britain performed these same functions but also made strategic use of the discipline. This paper reevaluates how British and German PI actually differed. It further examines whether each side’s successes and failures were within the ‘agency of agencies’ – how much did PI successes and failures directly result from intelligence organizations’ choices and actions? Finally, this paper identifies implications of these narratives for comparative intelligence studies and historiography.     

‘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.     

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.     

Missing revolution: the American intelligence failure in Iraq, 1958

Why were American officials caught by surprise with the military coup and later revolution in Iraq on 14 July 1958? Drawing on American intelligence and diplomatic records as well as multilingual sources, this article argues that the US intelligence failure is the product of two factors: the collection of information from too few and too similar human sources of intelligence in Iraq’s ruling regime, and the unreceptivity of US officials to assessing new information and their unwillingness to update assessments of local Iraqi developments. It revisits America’s intelligence failure in Iraq and suggests important lessons for the study of intelligence.     

Germany and Chongqing: Secret Communication during WWII

The currently accepted narrative regarding WWII in China suggests that Nationalist China and the Third Reich had no diplomatic connections after their official break of diplomatic relations in July 1941. Based on archival material from Germany, China and Taiwan, this article challenges this narrative. As I hope to demonstrate, communications between Germany and China continued well after July 1941 through back channels. From Switzerland, Chinese agents maintained connections with the German party intelligence service (RSHA), and Germany acted as a mediator between China and Japan. It is the role that intelligence personnel played in maintaining this communication channel and their role in clandestine Sino-German relations, which form the foundation of this paper.     

Soviet intelligence and the 1957 Syrian crisis

This article assesses a claim by Khrushchev that warnings from the Soviet intelligence services enabled to him to deter a Turkish invasion of Syria in 1957. The article shows that the United States and Turkey did aim to overthrow the Syrian government, with the Turks massing an invasion force on Syria’s border. Soviet intelligence detected this threat and was able to alert Khrushchev, who took diplomatic and military countermeasures. However, while the Soviet intelligence services did provide advance warning, Khrushchev overestimated the extent to which the United States was committed to a Turkish invasion.     

Crisis management in colonial states: Intelligence and counter-insurgency in Morocco and Syria after the First World War

This article addresses fundamental questions about power in colonial states by analysing the role and performance of intelligence agencies in response to internal rebellion. What was the relationship between intelligence agencies and the coercive instruments of imperial power? How far did intelligence-gathering help to maintain state authority? And what role did intelligence agencies play as architects of colonial state formation? These questions are discussed here with reference to two French overseas dependencies that proved especially turbulent in the 1920s: the Moroccan protectorate and the Syrian mandate. It will be suggested that colonial rule in these locations was so heavily dependent on intelligence-gathering that both could be termed ‘intelligence states’.     

Détente in deep water: the CIA mission to salvage a sunken Soviet submarine and US-USSR relations, 1968–1975

Despite détente, the superpowers continued their Cold War practice of spying on one another throughout the 1970s. Yet intelligence is largely ‘missing’ from the historiography of détente. Why? Based on newly declassified data, ‘Détente in Deep Water’ reveals the geopolitical calculations behind the ‘Glomar response’ and how that legalese operated to limit disclosure of intelligence operations starting with AZORIAN/MATADOR, the CIA-led project to salvage a sunken Soviet submarine using the Hughes Glomar Explorer, a ship ostensibly owned (under a cover story) by industrialist Howard Hughes. Glomar’s diplomatic backstory sheds new light on the historical relationship between intelligence collection and foreign policy.     

British codebreaking and American diplomatic telegrams, 1914–1915

During the First World War, British intelligence solved the United States' diplomatic codes and were reading its diplomatic telegrams transmitted between Washington and US diplomatic outposts throughout Europe. Controversy has emerged over when the British succeeded in solving these codes, with two historians relatively recently having claimed that British intelligence succeeded in doing so from the beginning of the war or soon after. Through a thorough consideration of the available documentation, this piece aims to correct these mistaken claims and to date the completion of the British solving of American codebooks to the middle phase of the war, to between October 1915 and January 1916. It seeks to lay reliable foundations for further work by showing that research into the wartime impact of British signals’ intelligence on Anglo-American relations is necessarily limited to only the middle and later phases of the war.     

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.     

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.     

The Making of Bletchley Park and Signals Intelligence 1939–42

The article argues that signals intelligence was an organizational accomplishment in the sense of requiring a) the establishment of an independent organization and b) that this organization combine cryptanalysis with intelligence analysis, traffic analysis and interception. This was not pre-ordained but the outcome of specific conflicts and decisions at Bletchley Park during the first three years of the Second World War which transformed the Government Code and Cypher School from a cryptanalytical bureau to a fully-fledged signals intelligence agency. Detailed archival evidence is presented in support of this claim.     

Why states have no right to privacy,but may be entitled to secrecy: a non-consequentialist defense of state secrecy

ABSTRACT

Despite an increase in initiatives aimed at enhancing political transparency, democratic states claim the right to withhold information from citizens: classified intelligence and military programs, diplomatic discretion, closed-door political bargaining, and bureaucratic opacity are examples. Can the state’s claim to restrict access to information be justified? In the first part of the essay, I focus on the arguments that defend the state’s claim to restrict access in terms of the state’s right to privacy where the state privacy is presented as a species of group privacy. While I concede that group privacy may be defended, I argue that governments and parliaments are not the kind of groups that may exercise privacy against citizens because of the relation of accountability in which they stand to citizens. In the second part of the essay, I propose an alternative argument to the effect that the scope of openness required in democratic governance is less extensive than traditionally assumed. I focus on the concept of democratic authority and argue that we can understand the practices of classification as an exercise of a special right to secrecy that is implied in the democratic state’s right to rule in a content-independent way.     

Geoffrey Vickers and lessons from the Ministry of Economic Warfare for cold war defence intelligence

Abstract

Geoffrey Vickers is the forgotten man of British intelligence. As the UK’s economic intelligence supremo at the Ministry of Economic Warfare and the Foreign Office between 1941 and 1945, Vickers transformed the craft of economic intelligence in both strategic and operational spheres. In the policy arena he was the driving force behind the economic and industrial planning of civil administration of liberated Europe. Vickers was also an intelligence theorist of the first rank whose legacy survived in his holistic conception of economic intelligence, its centrality to decision-making in peace and war, and the scope and evolution of the Joint Intelligence Bureau and defence intelligence.     

Libra rising: Hitler,astrology and British intelligence, 1940–43 1

During the Second World War Nazi Germany presented British intelligence with two intellectual challenges: to acquire its tactical‘secrets’ and to comprehend the strategic ‘mysteries’ of its commanding elite. The former were hidden, but knowable through the miracles of Ultra. The latter – Hitler's strategic intentions – were by contrast virtually impenetrable. Consequently, between 1940 and 1943 British intelligence used the talents of an astrologer, Louis de Wohl, who claimed – wrongly – that Hitler's strategic plans were astrologically inspired. However, as de Wohl's star began to wane he was talent-spotted by the Special Operations Executive (SOE), which employed him to disseminate black propaganda. He consequently travelled to the United States where, in tandem with British Security Co-ordination, he undermined American confidence in the invincibility of Hitler through astrological prognostications. This article aims to demonstrate that although Britain had unprecedented access to Germany's tactical ‘secrets’, the ‘mysteries’ of Hitler's strategic mind-set remained just that.     

Intelligence and the formulation of policy and strategy in Early Modern Europe: The Spanish Monarchy in the Reign of Charles II (1665–1700)

This article seeks to explore the means whereby the Spanish Monarchy under the last Habsburg, Charles II (1665–1700), contributed to its own survival in the era of Louis XIV by exploring its acquisition and use of intelligence. There was nothing particularly distinctive about Spain's intelligence machinery. Nor was it always effective. Nevertheless, Spain's extensive diplomatic and imperial network facilitated the acquisition of a great deal of information which on occasion was clearly of great importance – for example, in preventing the destruction of Charles II's fleet in the summer of 1693 by that of Louis XIV. In sum, intelligence contributed to the remarkable resilience of the Spanish Monarchy in an age of supposed Spanish decline.     

South Korea's elusive middlepowermanship: regional or global player?

South Korea aspires to a larger regional and global role, fuelled by economic success, and complemented by cultural and diplomatic achievement. However, a gap exists between the rhetoric and reality of its foreign policy. This paper examines Seoul's middle-power activism. It poses questions about the conceptual deficit of ‘middle power’, proffering an operational definition in illuminating the characteristic identity formation of middle powers. It analyses how the Roh Moo-hyun and Lee Myung-bak governments sought to articulate their respective middle-power foreign policy aspirations. Finally, it investigates how domestic political and institutional conditions shape Republic of Korea foreign policy, and identifies policy implications.     

Intelligence collection versus investigation: how the ethos of law enforcement impedes development of a US informational advantage

There is an inherent tension between a law enforcement–driven approach and a requirementsdriven approach to intelligence collection. The US experience, with the development of the Federal Bureau of Investigation(FBI), as the primary intelligence service within the domestic environment, suggests that the tension is nearly insurmountable if an organization starts from a reactive, threat-focused posture. As a law-enforcement agency, which US government decision-makers expect to fulfill an intelligence function, the FBI is triply handicapped by the external strictures of the Department of Justice (DoJ); the Bureau’s own policies – which respond to the DoJ parameters; and the FBI’s organizational culture.     

The August 1924 raid on Stolpce,Poland, and the evolution of Soviet active intelligence

In August 1924, a Soviet-sponsored raid on the Polish town of Stolpce to free two imprisoned communist activists went badly wrong. Though the ruling Politburo had not authorized this raid, the public embarrassment and diplomatic consequences led the Soviet government to overhaul its program of ‘active intelligence’, halting peacetime attacks on neighboring states in favor of quieter preparations for wartime sabotage and diversion under the authority of the Red Army's Intelligence Directorate. At the same time, the Politburo organized stay-behind groups in Soviet border regions to prepare for the possibility of enemy occupation.