Operation Rubicon: Germany as an intelligence 'Great Power'?

Operation Rubicon was probably one of the most successful intelligence operations of our time. Recent press revelations detail this secret partnership between the German Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) and the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), focused on the purchase and control of Crypto AG. Supported by German technical giants like Siemens, the company sold and produced compromised cypher machines. This article challenges the idea that the dominant sigint powers were within the anglosphere during the Cold War. Instead suggesting Rubicon evidences that the centre of gravity for intelligence lay ‘elsewhere’. It also explores the complex ethical implications of Germany’s involvement in Rubicon

Scotland the brave? US strategic policy in Scotland 1953-1974

During the Cold War, American strategic policy was exercised and implemented on a worldwide basis; decisions taken by Presidents and their advisers were eventually implemented at some other location. Scotland was one of these other locations and this research project will examine the implementation of the US strategic doctrine and its eventual delivery in Scotland. The research covers the following four questions. Why were the Americans present in Scotland during this period in such strength? What were they doing there? How did this change over time? How does this study of policy implementation help us to understand the American motives? The research is split into six separate chapters. The first chapter sets the scene and poses the research questions noted above. The purpose of the remaining chapters is to examine activities that had a physical presence in Scotland and interrogate the research sources to find answers to the contextual questions. Chapter Two examines how the US established and maintained an intelligence gathering system at Edzell and Thurso, apparently regardless of any larger strategic imperatives. Chapter Three deals with the creation of the US Polaris submarine base at Holy Loch, the most high profile base in the UK. Chapter Four, anti-submarine warfare (ASW) strategy addresses the strategic importance of the Scottish base at Thurso for this purpose. Chapter Five concentrates on the communications, navigation and logistics tasks carried out by the US forces in the UK, and especially in Scotland. The final chapter draws the systematic study together along with the conclusions reached in each chapter to the research questions

Espionage in British Popular Culture of the 20th Century: Gender, Moral Ambiguity and the Inextricability of Fact and Fiction.

This analysis of cultural representations of British intelligence between 1945 and 1999 explores three intertwined themes: constructions of gender identities; the representation of morality and moral dilemmas; and the relationship between fact and fiction. Cultural representations of spies are a particularly rich source of analysis of the three themes given the character of the profession, which has captured the public imagination, but about which information in the public domain is erratic and selective. The primary source base includes 89 British novels and 53 films (both cinema and television), cartoons and newspaper articles. A formalist approach to these sources is complemented by cultural materialism in order to work closely with the texts while emphasising the importance of the political and social contexts in which these sources were produced and consumed. The thesis is divided into two parts. The first identifies contrasting typologies of masculinities and femininities in popular representations. The spectrums of masculinity depend upon bisecting axes: the maverick/organisation spectrum is determined by the spy's role in and relationship to the organisation; the peacock/chameleon spectrum is determined by visibility and tradecraft and is more responsive to social change than the former category. Women fall on a singular spectrum ranging from Angel to Patriot to Whore. While these three categories are remarkably consistent over time, by the end of the period under investigation the new category of the Professional emerges who blends the three. The second section is thematic and maps these gender constructions on to two dominant themes of popular representations of espionage: betrayal and moral complexity. Part two explores the cultural circuit between the public and fictional representation of spies and the implicit and explicit explorations of gender identities thus generated in a period marked by major public scandals in the espionage world. The thesis concludes that although this is a genre which is little constrained by public knowledge of the world it depicts, it is nonetheless heavily constrained by societal norms and deeply revealing of gender roles, particularly masculine ones

Comics and Conflict: War and Patriotically Themed Comics in American Cultural History From World War Ii Through the Iraq War

Illustration has been an integral part of human history. Particularly before the advent of media such as photography, film, television, and now the Internet, illustrations in all their variety have been the primary visual way to convey history. The comic book, which emerged in its modern form in the 1930s, was another form of visual entertainment that gave readers, especially children, a form of escape. As World War II began, however, comic books became an integral part of war propaganda as well providing information and education for both children and adults. This dissertation looks at how specific comic books of the war genre have been used to display patriotism, adventure through war stories, and eventually to tell of the horrors of combat--from World War II through the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan in the first decade of the twenty-first century. This dissertation also examines how war- and patriotically-themed comics evolved from soldier-drawn reflections of society, eventually developing along with the broader comic book medium into a mirror of American society during times of conflict. These comic books generally reflected patriotic fervor, but sometimes they advanced a specific cause. As war comic books evolved along with American society, many also served as a form of protest against United States foreign and military policy. During the country\u27s most recent wars, however, patriotism has made a comeback, at the same time that the grim realties of combat are depicted more realistically than ever before

Good Order and Discipline: The Politics of Exclusion in the American Military

How do systemic and ideational factors shape the composition and effectiveness of the American military? From the American Revolution to the present, the American military has regularly established informal and formal discriminatory military personnel policies that have limited the availability of its military manpower, diminished its ability to fill critical and undermanned military occupations, harmed unit cohesion, reduced retention of vital talent, and made it difficult for individual service members to be the best they could be at their jobs. I contribute to the debate within security studies literature concerning the formation of military doctrine by including a focus on military personnel policies with an extensive focus on the American military’s historical treatment of African American men, gay men and lesbians, women, and transgender individuals. Existing literature suggests that national security is an area of state behavior where we should least expect ideational variables to trump systemic ones, and where states are least likely to make national security decisions that act against a state’s material self-interest. This dissertation demonstrates the United States has frequently done so and placed the enforcement of prejudicial ideas and beliefs about certain groups of individuals above national security. In a mixed-methods research study, I exhaustively review existing literature on the relationship between race, sexual orientation, gender, and transgender identity with military service, conducted archival research from the Congressional Record and various Department of Defense records, and conducted forty-five semi-structured personal interviews with civilian and military elites as well as individual military service members. My findings demonstrate that discriminatory military personal policies are entirely ideational in origin and are neither a function of systemic pressures nor military necessity and are both harmful to military effectiveness and antithetical to national security. The lengthy historical content across discriminatory military personnel policies shaped by prejudicial ideas and beliefs about race, sexual orientation, gender, and transgender identity also strongly demonstrates that elites’ justifications for these policies are strikingly similar across time and the harmful effects of individual policies are not isolated events