Facing the dictators : Anthony Eden, the Foreign Office and British Intelligence, 1935 – 1945

This article uses the inter-war and wartime career of Anthony Eden, as a vehicle to understand the little understood relationship between secret intelligence, British Foreign Secretaries and the Foreign Office. While secret intelligence is no longer the ‘missing dimension’ it once was in studies of diplomatic and political history, its use by British Foreign Secretaries remains a neglected subject. The article also sheds important new light on the Foreign Office’s wartime use of intelligence, especially diplomatic signals intelligence (SIGINT), a subject often overshadowed by the use of military SIGINT from Bletchley Park, showing the close relationship between intelligence officials and British diplomats in guiding British foreign policy. As Foreign Secretary in the 1930s and 40s, Eden showed himself to be a skilful reader of intelligence reports, using this information as he went about crafting Britain’s policy towards the increasingly bellicose powers of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan

Facing the dictators : Anthony Eden, the Foreign Office and British Intelligence, 1935 – 1945

This article uses the inter-war and wartime career of Anthony Eden, as a vehicle to understand the little understood relationship between secret intelligence, British Foreign Secretaries and the Foreign Office. While secret intelligence is no longer the ‘missing dimension’ it once was in studies of diplomatic and political history, its use by British Foreign Secretaries remains a neglected subject. The article also sheds important new light on the Foreign Office’s wartime use of intelligence, especially diplomatic signals intelligence (SIGINT), a subject often overshadowed by the use of military SIGINT from Bletchley Park, showing the close relationship between intelligence officials and British diplomats in guiding British foreign policy. As Foreign Secretary in the 1930s and 40s, Eden showed himself to be a skilful reader of intelligence reports, using this information as he went about crafting Britain’s policy towards the increasingly bellicose powers of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan

‘Crocodiles in the Corridors’: Security Vetting, Race and Whitehall, 1945–1968

Scouloudi Historical Awards, Institute of Historical Research [grant number 11075935]

Security, scandal and the security commission report, 1981

This research note introduces the December 1981 report of the Security Commission. This report was never released with the main conclusions forming the basis of a statement by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, published in May 1982. But the 1981 report is significant for a number of reasons. It was the first major review of government security since the Radcliffe Report of 1961, resulting in a number of recommendations that changed government vetting for the rest of the 1980s. The report also recommended the avowal of Britain’s foreign intelligence agency – a recommendation that proved especially controversial

Profiles in intelligence: an interview with Tony Comer

Until August 2020, Martin Anthony ‘Tony’ Comer was the first publicly avowed Departmental Historian of the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the UK’s cyber and signals intelligence agency. His career at GCHQ spanned thirty-seven years, both operationally and, from 2009, as the eighth Departmental Historian (‘the best job in GCHQ’, he has previously said), culminating with GCHQ’s centenary in 2019 and publication of the authorised history of the agency, authored by Prof. John Ferris.1 Born in Langley, Greater Manchester, Tony joined GCHQ in October 1983, first, as a linguist and, then, taking a series of operational roles within ‘the department’. Over the years, he has worked on GCHQ support for the armed forces and was the UK representative on the NATO Signals Intelligence committee. The role of Departmental Historian was his first non-operational job, and, from April 2009, one that he gradually developed from a largely in-house function writing the classified history of GCHQ, to a public facing one, telling the story of GCHQ’s work and promoting the study of UK signals intelligence to a wider audience. From April 2009 to August 2020, Tony supported GCHQ’s public engagement activity by communicating with thousands – if not tens of thousands – of people and took a central role in marking the centenary of GCHQ, as well as supporting the work of the Bletchley Park Trust, commemorating the important work of GCHQ’s predecessor, the Government Code & Cipher School (GC&CS), during the Second World War. ‘For a lot of people’, Tony reflected at the end of his career, ‘I am the only member of an intelligence service they will ever meet (or at least know that they have met) – that is a terrific honour’. He was appointed OBE in the 2020 New Year’s Honours for services to International and Intelligence history. Tony continues to write on the history of Sigint and publishes document extracts via https://siginthistorian.blogspot.com/, and has contributed to the Lawfare podcast and Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) Commentary. This is the first major interview with a former UK agency departmental historian, in which he discusses the work of in-house history, intelligence agency transparency and engagement, and provides insights into the Centenary of GCHQ