'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

‘Even had I wanted to...’: intelligence and Special Operations in the Falklands Campaign

Lawrence Freedman has produced a balanced, well-researched and meticulous account of the Falklands Campaign. It combines scholarship with a lightness of touch. Official history can be - and often is - associated with ponderousness. There is no danger of that here, for the two volumes are tightly written and constitute an enjoyable read. Freedman's long-term interest in this campaign means that he has interviewed most of the key participants, even those who died before he undertook this official commission.1 However, official history is also associated with notions of 'screening' and security vetting prior to publication. Where secret service is concerned, official history has sometimes constituted an instrument with which the authorities have sought to 'police the past'. Accordingly this essay sets out to explore just what these volumes can tell us about the treacherous landscape of intelligence and special operations

Transatlantic intelligence and security cooperation

Despite recent advances in transatlantic intelligence and security cooperation, significant problems remain. The bombings in Madrid in March 2004 have demonstrated how terrorists and criminals can continue to exploit the limits of hesitant or partial exchange to dangerous effect. Intelligence and security cooperation remain problematic because of the fundamental tension between an increasingly networked world, which is ideal terrain for the new religious terrorism, and highly compartmentalized national intelligence gathering. If cooperation is to improve, we require a better mutual understanding about the relationship between privacy and security to help us decide what sort of intelligence should be shared. This is a higher priority than building elaborate new structures. While most practical problems of intelligence exchange are ultimately resolvable, the challenge of agreeing what the intelligence means in broad terms is even more problematic. The last section of this article argues that shared NATO intelligence estimates would be difficult to achieve and of doubtful value

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

Global intelligence, co-operation versus accountability: new facets to an old problem

The most important recent change within the realm of intelligence and security services has been the expansion of intelligence co-operation. The growing connectivity between both foreign intelligence services and also domestic security services means that we might speak - not just of growing international co-operation - but perhaps even of global co-operation. This essay considers the complex interplay of intelligence and globalization since 1989. It argues that there is an obvious tension between a developing global style of co-operative activity and the traditional mechanisms of oversight, which have tended to be national. Accordingly, it moves on to discuss the recent efforts by national, regional and international systems of inquiry to examine issues that involve intelligence co-operation. It suggests that while formal committee-type mechanisms have limited purchase, they are not the only options for oversight in a globalized context

Whitehall and the Iraq War: the UK's four Intelligence Enquiries

The UK intelligence community has recently undergone a ‘season of enquiry’ relating to the Iraq War and the ‘War on Terrorism’. This essay discusses each of the four enquiries in turn and argues that while the debate has been intense, much has been missed. The enquiries have largely focused on specific administrative issues, while the media have focused on blame–casting. Although the enquiries have been useful in underlining the extent of genuine ‘intelligence failure’, wider reflections about the nature and direction of UK intelligence have been conspicuously absent. None of the enquiries has dealt with the difficult issue of how intelligence analysis might interface with modern styles of policy–making. More broadly, it is argued that there is a growing mismatch between what intelligence can reasonably achieve and the improbable expectations of politicians and policy-makers

The UK-US intelligence alliance in 1975: economies, evaluations and explanations

Intelligence and defence are often cited as central to the fabric of Anglo-American relations after 1945. However, we still know relatively little about how the Anglo-American intelligence relationship changed during the latter part of the twentieth century. During the 1960s and 1970s the UK continued its long retreat from its world role, driven by recurrent economic crises at home and anti-colonial nationalism abroad. This essay examines UK intelligence in the mid-1970s in the light of recent archival releases pertaining to the Roy Mason Defence Review. This material sheds interesting light on tensions between the military and diplomats in Whitehall over defence intelligence. More importantly, it appears to show that, partly because of the contraction of defence dispositions, UK intelligence activities were called upon to compensate and therefore became relatively more important as a substantive contribution to the alliance

Escaping from American intelligence : culture, ethnocentrism and the Anglosphere

The United States and its closest allies now spend over $100 billion a year on intelligence. Ten years after 9/11, the intelligence machine is certainly bigger - but not necessarily better. American intelligence continues to privilege old-fashioned strategic analysis for policy-makers and exhibits a technocratic approach to asymmetric security threats, epitomized by the accelerated use of drone strikes and data-mining. Distinguished commentators have focused on the panacea of top-down reform, while politicians and practitioners have created entire new agencies. However these prescriptions for change remain conceptually limited because of underlying Anglo-Saxon presumptions about what intelligence is. Although intelligence is a global business, when we talk about intelligence we tend to use a vocabulary that is narrowly derived from the experiences of America and its English-speaking nebula. This article deploys the notion of strategic culture to explain this why this is. It then explores the cases of China and South Africa to suggest how we might begin to rethink our intelligence communities and their tasks. It argues that the road to success is about individuals, attitudes and cultures rather than organizations. Future improvement will depend on our ability to recognize the changing nature of the security environment and to practice the art of ‘intelligence among the people’. While the United States remains the world’s most significant military power, its strategic culture is unsuited to this new terrain and arguably other countries do these things rather better

The 100 billion dollar brain : central intelligence machinery in the UK and the US

The ‘Five Eyes’ alliance, led by the United States, spends close to 100 billion dollars a year on intelligence. This review article argues that western countries are distinguished by their sophisticated approach to the making of intelligence-led national security policy. Political leaders and policy-makers who access this sensitive material are often involved in elaborate systems that constitute part of the core executive and which seek to task and improve the intelligence leviathan. Western intelligence therefore has a ‘central brain’ that devotes considerable energy to both analysis and management. By contrast, in the majority of other states around the world, the orientation of intelligence has often been inward facing, with a high priority given to regime security. Some would suggest that intelligence has been an important component of western power projection, while others would argue that this process has been over-expensive and has under-delivered, not least in the last decade. Either way, the debates about development of the central intelligence machinery that supports western security policies are of the first importance and fortunately this discussion has been advanced by the appearance of several valuable new studies: these are discussed in this review article

Policing the past: official history, secrecy and British intelligence since 1945

This article provides a systematic analysis of post-war government policy towards the history of secret services. It focuses particularly upon the problem of preserving secrecy and argues that official history was an instrument through which government sought to address public pressure for the release information, while also extending a degree of control. It shows how the authorities enjoyed some initial success in cloaking the most significant wartime activities, including signals intelligence and organised strategic deception. However, this secrecy was eventually eroded by ‘insiders’, armed with privileged information and near-immunity from prosecution under the Official Secrets Act. Once the existence of these secret activities had seeped into the public domain, officials were increasingly inclined to deploy official accounts of intelligence successes during the Second World War in order to offset some the more embarrassing debacles of the Cold War. These included the story of treachery by the double-agent Kim Philby which received wide publicity in the late 1960s. The article argues that there is substantial evidence of policy-learning in the matter of official history, explicable in part by the presence of officials who handled similar issues over long periods of time. This was exemplified by Burke Trend, Cabinet Secretary to Prime Ministers Harold Wilson and then Edward Heath. It is suggested that secret services have always enjoyed an adversarial relationship with historical researchers. However, official history, although bringing its own difficulties, offered government a middle way and an opportunity of making a positive response to the problems of policing the past