Historical Amnesia: British and U.S. Intelligence, Past and Present

Many intelligence scandals in the news today seem unprecedented - from Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, to British and U.S. intelligence agencies monitoring activities of their citizens. They seem new largely because, traditionally, intelligence agencies on both sides of the Atlantic were excessively secretive about their past activities: even the names “GCHQ” and “NSA” were airbrushed from declassified records, and thus missing from major historical works and scholarship on on post-war international relations. The resulting secrecy about British and U.S. intelligence has led to misunderstandings and conspiracy theories in societies about them. Newly opened secret records now reveal the long history of many subjects seen in today’s news-cycle: Anglo-American intelligence cooperation, interference by countries in foreign elections, disinformation, and the use and abuse of intelligence by governments. Newly declassified records also add to our understanding of major chapters of international history, like Britain’s post-war end of empire. Without overcoming our historical amnesia disorder about U.S. and British intelligence, citizens, scholars and policy-makers cannot hope to understand the proper context for what secret agencies are doing today

British intelligence and threats to national security, c.1941-1951

This dissertation studies the way that Britain's intelligence services changed priorities from the Second World War to the early Cold War. It stretches from the point when the Soviet Union entered the Second World War as Britain's ally in 1941, to the moment a decade later in 1951, when the Cold War had set in and Moscow was the bitter enemy of the west. Using recently declassified Security Service (MIS) records, it examines how Britain's intelligence services met the massive transition from World War to Cold War. It reveals a variety of subjects previously undocumented in the secondary historical literature, such as MIS's concerns after the Second World War with terrorism emanating from the Middle East. The dissertation is an attempt to rescue intelligence from historical obscurity and place it in its justified position: as a central component in the process of political decision-making in Britain. As well as offering new historical insights, it provides useful lessons for governments and intelligence agencies at the start of the twenty-first century. The dissertation shows that many of the issues facing intelligence agencies at the start of the twenty-first century were, in fact, faced by the British intelligence community half a century ago

MI5 and the Cold War in South-East Asia: Examining the Performance of Security Intelligence Far East (SIFE), 1946-1963

From 1946–1963, MI5 operated a South-East Asian regional headquarters in Singapore: Security Intelligence Far East (SIFE). This article responds to growing interest in theatre-level intelligence organisation and the importance of intelligence to Britain’s Cold War and decolonisation by examining the performance of SIFE. On the organisational level, SIFE was strongest when it remained wedded to its charter functions and closely adhered to the priorities of its principal consumer: the Commissioner-General for South-East Asia. Its assessments were influential in shaping decision-makers’ understandings of key regional developments, although this did not always translate into public policy. Lastly, SIFE enjoyed success in developing lasting liaison relationships to cement British influence, but failed to utilise these to improve its intake of raw intelligence

A Computational Model of the Development of Separate Representations of Facial Identity and Expression in the Primate Visual System

Experimental studies have provided evidence that the visual processing areas of the primate brain represent facial identity and facial expression within different subpopulations of neurons. For example, in non-human primates there is evidence that cells within the inferior temporal gyrus (TE) respond primarily to facial identity, while cells within the superior temporal sulcus (STS) respond to facial expression. More recently, it has been found that the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) of non-human primates contains some cells that respond exclusively to changes in facial identity, while other cells respond exclusively to facial expression. How might the primate visual system develop physically separate representations of facial identity and expression given that the visual system is always exposed to simultaneous combinations of facial identity and expression during learning? In this paper, a biologically plausible neural network model, VisNet, of the ventral visual pathway is trained on a set of carefully-designed cartoon faces with different identities and expressions. The VisNet model architecture is composed of a hierarchical series of four Self-Organising Maps (SOMs), with associative learning in the feedforward synaptic connections between successive layers. During learning, the network develops separate clusters of cells that respond exclusively to either facial identity or facial expression. We interpret the performance of the network in terms of the learning properties of SOMs, which are able to exploit the statistical indendependence between facial identity and expression

British signals intelligence and the 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland

Historians for decades have placed Room 40, the First World War British naval signals intelligence organization, at the centre of narratives about the British anticipation of and response to the Easter Rising in Ireland in 1916. A series of crucial decrypts of telegrams between the German embassy in Washington and Berlin, it has been believed, provided significant advance intelligence about the Rising before it took place. This article upends previous accounts by demonstrating that Room 40 possessed far less advance knowledge about the Rising than has been believed, with most of the supposedly key decrypts not being generated until months after the Rising had taken place

Evaluation of inter-observer variation for computed tomography identification of childhood interstitial lung disease

Computed tomography; Childhood; Interstitial lung diseaseTomografía computarizada; Infancia; Enfermedad pulmonar intersticialTomografia assistida per ordinador; Infància; Malaltia pulmonar intersticialMaking chILD diagnoses on CT is poorly reproducible, even amongst sub-specialists. CT might best improve diagnostic confidence in a multidisciplinary team setting when augmented with clinical, functional and haematological results.Joseph Jacob was supported by Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Career Development Fellowship 209553/Z/17/Z. Andrew Bush is an Emeritus NIHR Senior Investigator and is supported by chILD-EU (FP7, No: 305653) and the European Cooperation in Science and Technology COST A16125. Andre Altmann holds an MRC eMedLab Medical Bioinformatics Career Development Fellowship. This work was supported by the Medical Research Council (grant number MR/L016311/1). Funding information for this article has been deposited with the Crossref Funder Registry

Experimental study of dense pyroclastic density currents using sustained, gas-fluidized granular flows

© 2014, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg. We present the results of laboratory experiments on the behaviour of sustained, dense granular flows in a horizontal flume, in which high-gas pore pressure was maintained throughout the flow duration by continuous injection of gas through the flume base. The flows were fed by a sustained (0.5–30 s) supply of fine (75 ± 15 μm) particles from a hopper; the falling particles impacted an impingement surface at concentrations of ~3 to 45 %, where they densified rapidly to generate horizontally moving, dense granular flows. When the gas supplied through the flume base was below the minimum fluidization velocity of the particles (i.e. aerated flow conditions), three flow phases were identified: (i) an initial dilute spray of particles travelling at 1–2 m s−1, followed by (ii) a dense granular flow travelling at 0.5–1 m s−1, then by (iii) sustained aggradation of the deposit by a prolonged succession of thin flow pulses. The maximum runout of the phase 2 flow was linearly dependent on the initial mass flux, and the frontal velocity had a square-root dependence on mass flux. The frontal propagation speed during phase 3 had a linear relationship with mass flux. The total mass of particles released had no significant control on either flow velocity or runout in any of the phases. High-frequency flow unsteadiness during phase 3 generated deposit architectures with progradational and retrogradational packages and multiple internal erosive contacts. When the gas supplied through the flume base was equal to the minimum fluidization velocity of the particles (i.e. fluidized flow conditions), the flows remained within phase 2 for their entire runout, no deposit formed and the particles ran off the end of the flume. Sustained granular flows differ significantly from instantaneous flows generated by lock-exchange mechanisms, in that the sustained flows generate (by prolonged progressive aggradation) deposits that are much thicker than the flowing layer of particles at any given moment. The experiments offer a first attempt to investigate the physics of the sustained pyroclastic flows that generate thick, voluminous ignimbrites

“Crocodiles in the corridors” : security vetting, race and Whitehall, 1945 – 1968

In July 2018, the UK’s Intelligence & Security Committee issued a report into diversity and inclusion across the intelligence and security community. The picture the report painted was far from satisfactory; in short, Britain’s intelligence agencies did not ‘fully reflect the ethnic make-up of modern Britain’. The report argued that Britain’s spy agencies – MI5, SIS (or MI6) and GCHQ – should improve black, Asian and ethnic minority recruitment, highlighting areas for improvement, especially around the vetting of recruits. This problem stems from the post-war Cold War 'security state' and the development of security-vetting programmes from the 1940s, aiming to protect Whitehall from Soviet spies and 'fellow travellers' to those with so-called 'character defects' - drink, drugs and homosexuality. But this 'security state' also saw the newly emerging multicultural Britain as a major threat. The so-called 'Windrush Generation' of migrants from the Caribbean, and migration from the Indian subcontinent and Africa, forever changed the social complexion of Britain, but posed significant questions for security officials. What was Britishness? With first or second generation migrants entering the civil service, who was a 'UK eye' and what access to secret information should they have? To what extent was discrimination justifiable to protect state secrets, and how should officials respond to new legislation such as the Race Discrimination Act? As this article shows, new entrants to the civil service faced deeply engrained prejudices, and questions over their loyalty to Britain. As late as the 1960s (and beyond), 'coloured' members of the civil service were rejected from secret posts across government, including the Ministry of Defence and intelligence and security services, especially MI5 and GCHQ, with discrimination on ‘security’ grounds justified by the landmark 1968 Race Relations Act, which barred race discrimination for housing and employment elsewhere