Richard J. Aldrich

• University of Warwick

For decades, espionage during the Cold War was often presented as a competition between East and West. The extent to which the Global South constituted the main battleground for this conflict is now being appreciated, together with the way coups and covert regime change represented a continuation of colonialism by other means. Recent revelations ab...

The story of Operation Rubicon provides a ‘missing link’ in the history signals intelligence. It connects the period of the Second World War, dominated by Bletchley Park and Arlington Hall, with the Snowden era. This special section examines signals intelligence in the latter decades of the twentieth century, arguing that the processes of covert in...

We argue that British intelligence was transformed during the eleven years that Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee were in power. This change focused on the relationship between intelligence and Downing Street. Previous premiers were uninterested, naïve and inexperienced in their approach. When Churchill took office all this changed since he not...

The CIA is increasingly symbolic of major controversies in American foreign policy. It also presents the academic researcher with a fascinating paradox – since it is simultaneously secret and yet high-profile. In part, this is due to the CIA's willingness to allow former operatives to write memoirs. We argue that the memoir literature, authored by...

Why did Britain remove the population of an idyllic Indian Ocean archipelago? Why has Britain resisted granting citizenship to the inhabitants of another small island in the mid-Atlantic? Why does Britain still ‘own’ 90 square miles of Cyprus? The answer, we suggest, lies in part with the heritage of Bletchley Park, an obsession with informational...

The study of secrecy and spies remain subjects dominated by Anglo-American experiences. In recent years there has been some effort to refocus the lens of research upon ‘intelligence elsewhere’, including the global South. This is partly because of intense interest in the Arab Spring and ‘managed democracy’, placing a wider range of secret services...

Britain has long taken a firm public line against terrorist ransom, insisting that yielding to terrorist demands only encourages further acts of intimidation and kidnapping. Hitherto, academic research has tended to take these assertions of piety at face value. This article uses a historical approach to show that the British position has shifted ov...

The significance of Edward Snowden’s revelations has been viewed primarily through the prism of threats to citizen privacy. Instead, we argue that the most dramatic change has been a decline of government secrecy, especially around national security. While the ethical aspects of state secrets and ‘whistle-blowing’ have received recent attention, fe...

For generations scholars have defined covert action as plausibly deniable interventions in the affairs of others; the sponsor’s hand is neither apparent nor acknowledged. We challenge this orthodoxy. Turning the spotlight away from covert action and onto plausible deniability itself, we argue that even in its supposed heyday, the concept was deeply...

In the 1990s, judgments in the European Court of Human Rights concerning state surveillance forced many West European countries to introduce new parliamentary bodies and formal systems for accountability. Promising both greater transparency and lawful intelligence, these frameworks were then energetically rolled out to Central and Eastern Europe. A...

Academics working on intelligence failure are famous for their pessimism. This paper is more optimistic and sees strategic culture as helpfully constraining the likely options of our enemies. It suggests that there is a wealth of innovative work here that we might exploit here to assist with strategic estimates and argues that it is puzzling that w...

No abstract is available for this article.

The relationship between secret services and the press is an enduring one. Although the CIA did not seek the kind of salient media profile enjoyed by the FBI, it nevertheless maintained an informal press office from its foundation in 1947. Directors of the CIA and their senior staff devoted significant time to the public profile of the Agency. Thei...

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 oft...

Government Communications Headquarters or ‘GCHQ’ is Britain’s largest intelligence agency. Currently commanding some 6,000 employees, it moved to new premises in Cheltenham in 2003 which for the previous few years constituted the largest building project in Europe and which is known locally as the ‘Doughnut’, GCHQ together with its defensive arm, t...

Richard Aldrich highlights how secret intelligence operates out of neither a social nor an economic vacuum. All too often, purist approaches to the subject modeled on postwar American behavior ignore that fundamental truth, he asserts. Aldrich artfully sheds light on a back door into intelligence by asking about money: “cuts and economies can illum...

This article seeks to discuss two key challenges in the area of cyber-resilience. First, it asks: who owns UK cyber-resilience? Some 80 per cent of the UK's critical national infrastructure is in private hands and the last decade has seen efforts to legislate away some of the problem of resilience by creating legal duties for service providers. Thi...

If one were to choose a few key words to describe the post-war British intelligence community, one of them might well be ‘impecunious’. Scarcity of resource affected the development of intelligence no less than it did British defence policy. Yet while we know much about the political economy of British defence planning, we know almost nothing about...

Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) enjoys two main roles, signals intelligence and communications security. We know a great deal about signals intelligence but far less about the defensive security side of its activities. This article traces the development and growth of Britain’s communications security establishment as an unk...

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 threat...

This essay argues that, since 1989, the CIA has been slow to understand the transformative impact of globalization upon its own activities as an intelligence agency. While the CIA spent considerable time examining global trends as part of its work on generalized strategic analysis, its thinking about how globalization would change its own business...

The world of intelligence has grown exponentially over the last decade. This article suggests that prevailing explanation of this expansion – the spectre of ‘new terrorism’ – reflects serious misunderstandings. Much of the emergency legislation which has extended the power of the state so remarkably was already sitting in the pending trays of offic...

Introduction: The future of UK intelligence and special operations - Volume 35 Issue 4 - RICHARD J. ALDRICH, PHILIP H. J. DAVIES

Since 9/11, intelligence has been viewed as an integral part of a controversial ‘war on terror’. The acrimonious public arguments over subjects such as Iraqi WMD assessments, secret prisons and the interrogation of detainees suggest intense transatlantic discord. Yet improbably, some of those countries that have expressed strident disagreement in p...

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 c...

During the Cold War the UK's principal military role was its commitment to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) through the British Army of the Rhine (BAOR), together with wartime command of NATO's Northern Army Group. The possibility of a surprise attack by the numerically superior Warsaw Pact forces ensured that great importance was atta...

Spying on Science is one of the most impressive studies of Cold War intelligence to have emerged in many years. Although the book's main focus is scientific intelligence, its scope is far wider, offering a reliable and remarkably detailed picture of intelligence activity in Germany prior to the creation of the Berlin Wall in 1961. Maddrell's study...

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...

In 1984, two leading scholars of international history, Christopher Andrew and David Dilks, described intelligence as the ‘missing dimension’ of most international history. They also argued that it should not be so, since persistent research in this area could uncover more reliable documentation than most people thought.1 Almost two decades later,...

Terrorist attacks on the United States, Spain and the United Kingdom have underlined the differing responses of Europe and the United States to the ‘new terrorism’. This article analyses these responses through the prism of historically determined strategic cultures. For the last four years the United States has directed the full resources of a ‘na...

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 c...

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 t...

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 inde...

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...

1. Introduction: intelligence and empire Part I. Before Pearl Harbor, 1937-41: 2. Wing Commander Wigglesworth flies east: the lamentable state of intelligence, 1937-9 3. Insecurity and the fall of Singapore 4. Surprise despite warning: intelligence and the fall of Singapore 5. Conspiracy or confusion? Churchill, Roosevelt and Pearl Harbor 6. 'Imper...

An active debate has developed over the nature of the process of European unification, in particular the extent to which it represented the work of states, as against the work of campaigning organizations, such as the European Movement and its subsidiary organizations.1 The role of publicity and propaganda is an essential component of this subject....

Our present understanding of British intelligence and its relationship to Anglo[hyphen]American cooperation in the postwar period leaves much to be desired. Indeed while it has often been remarked that the twin pillars of Anglo[hyphen]American security cooperation were atomic weapons and intelligence exchange, there remains an alarming disparity in...

The past twenty years have seen the rapid growth of a new branch of international history, the serious academic study of secret services or ‘intelligence history’ with its attendant specialist conferences and journals. Two main causes for this development can be identified. The first was conceptual, namely the increasing recognition that the study...

The Impact of the waldegrave Initiative on Open Government upon British History is examined and placed within the wider framework of changes in Whitehall, which might be interpreted as a shift towards transparency, or alternatively towards more sophisticated ‘information control’. The areas of intelligence history, nuclear history and international...

Stephen Koch, Double Lives: Stalin, Willi Münzenberg and the Seduction of the Intellectuals (London: HarperCollins 1994) Pp.419, 20 illus. biblio. index. £20. ISBN 0–00–255516–6.Jenny Rees, Looking for Mr Nobody: The Secret Life of Gorowny Rees (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1994) Pp.291, 30 illus. biblio. index. £18.99. ISBN 0–297–81430–3.V.E....

It has been fifty years since Thailand's 1942 declaration of war on Britain and the United States. This study examines the accelerating Western struggle with Japan for control over "independent" Thailand, a country at the strategic crossroads of Southeast Asia and recognized as "The Key to the South." On the eve of Pearl Harbor this culminated in a...

Louise Atherton, Top Secret: An Interim Guide to Recent Releases of Intelligence Records at the Public Record Office (London: PRO Publications, 1993). Pp.32. £3.25. ISBN 1 87362073.Louise Atherton, SOE Operations in the Far East: An Introductory Guide to the Newly Released Records of the Special Operations Executive in the Public Record Office (Lon...

‘newspapers, radio stations, magazines, airlines, ships, businesses, and voluntary organizations had been bought, subsidized, penetrated or invented as assets for the cold war’ .1 After 1945, many in Europe and the United States presumed rapid European unification to be a key precondition of stabilisation and reconstruction in postwar Europe. The e...

Daniel F. Calhoun, Hungary and Suez, 1956: An Exploration of Who Makes History (Lanham MD: University Press of America, 1991). Pp.590. $46.50.Peter L. Hahn, The United States, Great Britain and Egypt, 1945–1956 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991). Pp.359. £25.00.Diane B. Kunz, The Economic Diplomacy of the Suez Crisis (Chape...

J. Rusbridger and E. Nave, Betrayal at Pearl Harbour: How Churchill Lured Roosevelt Into War (London: Michael O'Mara, New York: Summit Books, 1991). Pp.303. £15.99; $19.95.

This passage was written on 27 March 1945 by Major Andrew Gilchrist, a Foreign Office official serving with the Special Operations Executive in Thailand. It neatly demonstrates the manner in which the wartime debate within and between the various Allied bureaucracies responsible for Thailand's post war status appeared to be dominated by the circums...