Putting lives in danger? Tinker, tailor, journalist, spy: the use of journalistic cover

The Anglo-American intelligence agencies’ use of journalists as spies or propagandists and the practice of providing intelligence agents in the field with journalistic cover have been a source of controversy for many decades. This paper examines the extent to which these covert practices have taken place and whether they have put journalists’ lives in danger. This paper, drawing on various methodologies, examines a number of cases where the arrest, murder or kidnap of journalists was justified on the grounds that the journalist was a ‘spy’. This has been followed through with research using a range of sources that shows there have been many occasions when the distinction between spies and journalists has been opaque. The paper concludes that widespread use of journalistic cover by spies has put lives in danger but the extent is unquantifiable

’Pentagon Ju-Jitsu' - reshaping the field of propaganda

This article presents qualitative research examining adaptation to global asymmetric threats and a modern media environment of US Government propaganda systems by planners following 9-11, which proceeded largely unhindered by public debate. It draws on interviews with US elite sources including foreign policy, defense and intelligence personnel and documentary sources to explore how dissent was contained. A ‘merging’ of Psychological Operations and Public Affairs has been identified as a point of concern elsewhere and is argued to have facilitated the extension of US hegemony. It will present an account of the struggles between 2005 and 2009 when planners sought to alter ‘foreign’ and ‘domestic’ audience targeting norms that emerged in an old-media system of sovereign states with more stable populations. It focuses on a key example of transformation: the pressing through of internet policy changes for military Psychological Operations and Public Affairs, against resistance. Policies were brought in to coordinate and overcome discordance in foreign-domestic messaging by Psychological Operations and Information Operations personnel. Viewed as operational necessity for Psychological Operations, these resulted in a ‘terf war’ with Public Affairs who constructed a defense using discourses of legitimacy and credibility with domestic audiences. This article will show how concerns raised by Public Affairs were met by the reduction of their planning role, until a culture change and new orthodoxy emerged. Challenges raised by evolving media demand a reappraisal of propaganda governance and governments must allow greater transparency for public debate, legal judgement and independent academic enquiry to occur

From silence to primary definer: The rise of the Intelligence lobby in the public sphere

Until the end of the Cold War the UK intelligence services were not officially acknowledged, and their personnel were banned from entering the public sphere. From 1989 the UK government began to put the intelligence services on a legal footing and to release the identity of the heads of the intelligence agencies. Since then, public engagement by the intelligence agencies has gathered pace. What this article hypothesises is that there is now, in the UK, an effective intelligence lobby of former insiders who engage in the public sphere – using on the record briefings – to counter criticism of the intelligence community and to promote a narrative and vision of what UK intelligence should do, how it is supported and how oversight is conducted. Content analysis and framing models of non-broadcast coverage of intelligence debates, focusing on the 36 months after the Snowden revelations, confirm an active and rolling lobby of current and former intelligence officials. The paper concludes that the extent of the lobby’s interventions in the public sphere is a matter for debate and possible concern

‘Penny-wise…’: Ezra Pound’s Posthumous Legacy to Fascism

The article traces the history of Ezra Pound’s engagement with Fascist politics and its contemporary influence on the far-right in America, Britain and Italy.  It seeks to explore a political legacy of Pound’s, which is sometimes strangely at odds with his poetic legacy but on other occasions, informs and coalesces into the latter.   Keywords: Ezra Pound; Modernism; Fascism