Putting culture into the Cold War: the Cultural Relations Department (CRD) and British Covert Information Warfare

In 1943 the British Foreign Office created an obscure outfit called the Cultural Relations Department (CRD), to manage the growing organization of intellectual, cultural, social and artistic contacts designed to promote Allied goodwill. It became clear early on that the Soviet Union was already well-organized in this field, with many seemingly independent international organizations claiming to represent ‘world opinion’ yet operating as fronts for Moscow's foreign policy objectives. In the three years before 1948, when the more widely-known Information Research Department began its operations, CRD was the cutting edge of Britain's informational Cold War, focused very much upon the twin issues of culture and organized youth. This essay will examine this little-explored organization by focusing upon these twin issues and its neglected records in FO 924 in the Public Record Office, London.     

‘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.     

‘A Profoundly Disruptive Force’: The CIA,Historiography and the Perils of Globalization

This essay argues that, since 1989, the CIA has been slow to understand the transformative impact of globalization upon its own activities as an intelligence agency. While the CIA spent considerable time examining global trends as part of its work on generalized strategic analysis, its thinking about how globalization would change its own business was less prescient. This problem is explained in terms of the way in which debates over the CIA have been framed historiographically. While intelligence studies as a subject has been successfully integrated into mainstream international history, it has failed to make the same connections with international relations. As a result, those debating how intelligence might change have tended to focus quite narrowly on matters of bureaucratic organization and have taken only limited interest in global politics. This is stark contrast to those working on the subject of terrorism and counter-terrorism, who have engaged in wider debates about world affairs. This needs to change, since the perils of globalization remain the over-arching challenge for the CIA over the next ten years.     

the Trauma Risk Management approach to post-traumatic stress disorder in the British military: masculinity,biopolitics and depoliticisation

This paper discusses the political implications of the British military’s Trauma Risk Management (TRiM) approach to personnel suffering from combat-related mental debilities such as post-traumatic stress disorder. Drawing on narratives that emerged from qualitative interviews with trained TRiM practitioners and military welfare workers, I tease out some of the assumptions and beliefs about mental health and mental illness that underpin this mental health intervention programme. I explore TRiM as a biopolitical strategy targeted towards the construction of a particular conceptualisation of mental wellness and militarised masculine personhood. As a biopolitical strategy, I argue that TRiM plays an important role in the construction of ideas around mental well-being and mental frailty that best enable the operation of military power in the contemporary British context. I discuss the narrative of transformation in militarised models of masculinity that emerge from discussions of TRiM, and highlight the important political function that this plays in enabling and legitimating militarism. Finally, I draw attention to the ways in which the focus on individual and cultural factors, rather than war as the primary cause of difficulties for servicemen experiencing psychological distress, functions to neutralise the potential trouble that could be instigated for the British military by the bodies of servicemen psychologically damaged by their experiences of conflict.