Philip H. J. Daviesis one of a growing number of British academic scholars of intelligence, but the only academic to approach the subject in terms of political science rather than history. He wrote ...his PhD at the University of Reading on the topic 'Organisational Development of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service 1909-1979', and has published extensively on intelligence and defence issues. After completing his PhD he taught for a year and a half on the University of London external degree programme in Singapore before returning to the UK to lecture at the University of Reading for two years. He was formerly Associate Professor of International and Security Studies at the University of Malaya in Malaysia where he not only conducted his research but provided a range of training and consultancy services to the Malaysian intelligence and foreign services. He is now based at Brunel University, UK
In 1949, Washington and London launched the inaugural Cold War covert action in the Soviet bloc against Albania. Regarded internally as a 'test case', the CIA and MI6 used food and material aid in ...Operation BGFiend/Valuable to subvert Enver Hoxha's regime, supplementing print and radio propaganda. The US, in particular, attempted to weaponise covert aid, inverting the defensive qualities of its overt counterpart. Although Western officials believed in aid's potential at the outset, tactical and geopolitical challenges damaged its reputation as an effective subversive weapon. This had a long-term impact as aid was discarded in later covert action operations.
A map used in five scenes of the first episode of the British TV espionage drama The Sandbaggers is identified as the then-current edition of a US military Operational Navigation Chart (ONC). The ...map's use by the characters, and its geographical and temporal appropriateness for the episode plot are examined.
Igor Gouzenko’s defection might have been the first—and most famous—of the Cold War in Canada, but it was hardly the last. Recently opened after Access to Information Act requests made by the ...Canadian Foreign Intelligence History Project, a number of records cast brighter light on this aspect of Canada’s intelligence history. This article offers an overview of how the Government of Canada established its policy to manage defection and those who defected. It offers a number of possible leads for future research projects, some, but not all, of which, will require the release of further material, whether under the Access to Information Act or a broader declassification framework from the Government of Canada.
Few existing archival records or secondary sources appear to narrate or describe the circumstances, relationships, and activities of "spy wives" during the Second World War. Intelligence historians ...currently find themselves at a turning point, where new approaches to the writing of intelligence history have been called for that transcend the study of operations and policy, while drawing when necessary upon the methodologies of such adjacent disciplines as social history and historical geoinformatics. It is therefore surely appropriate to conduct an examination of the hitherto neglected social phenomenon of female agency in the "spyscape" of wartime British and German covert operations. Through an examination of case studies of individual wives of intelligence operatives, constructed on the basis of information gathered from scattered primary and secondary sources, it is possible to assemble and analyse a wide, highly differentiated range of gender relationships at the intersection of the manifest and secret worlds.
This article explores the intersections between propaganda, intelligence and covert action through the experience of Britain's Regional Information Office (RIO) in Singapore. RIO defined its ...functions as 'propaganda intelligence': the generation of intelligence to guide propaganda output and analysis of enemy propaganda to feed into the broader intelligence picture of communist intentions. This highlights the interdependency of intelligence and propaganda. RIO worked closely with MI5 and MI6 in developing intelligence on communist China and North Vietnam. Evaluating the position of RIO within Britain's regional intelligence network also reveals some of the complexities of the late-imperial intelligence system. It illuminates the changing status of different intelligence activities and the growth of a particular intelligence culture, providing insight into how Britain engaged with the clandestine Cold War in South-East Asia.
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 1940s, 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.
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.
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