Why did the US intelligence services fail so spectacularly to know about the Soviet Union's nuclear capabilities following World War II? As Vince Houghton, historian and curator of the International ...Spy Museum in Washington, DC, shows us, that disastrous failure came just a few years after the Manhattan Project's intelligence team had penetrated the Third Reich and knew every detail of the Nazi 's plan for an atomic bomb. What changed and what went wrong?
Houghton's delightful retelling of this fascinating case of American spy ineffectiveness in the then new field of scientific intelligence provides us with a new look at the early years of the Cold War. During that time, scientific intelligence quickly grew to become a significant portion of the CIA budget as it struggled to contend with the incredible advance in weapons and other scientific discoveries immediately after World War II. As Houghton shows, the abilities of the Soviet Union's scientists, its research facilities and laboratories, and its educational system became a key consideration for the CIA in assessing the threat level of its most potent foe. Sadly, for the CIA scientific intelligence was extremely difficult to do well. For when the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb in 1949, no one in the American intelligence services saw it coming.
In World War I and the Origins of U.S. Military Intelligence, military historian James L. Gilbert provides an authoritative overview of the birth of modern Army intelligence. Following the natural ...division of the intelligence war, which was fought on both the home front and overseas, Gilbert traces the development and use of intelligence and counterintelligence through the eyes of their principal architects: General Dennis E. Nolan and Colonel Ralph Van Deman. Gilbert explores how on the home front, U.S. Army counterintelligence faced both internal and external threats that began with the Army’s growing concerns over the loyalty of resident aliens who were being drafted into the ranks and soon evolved into the rooting out of enemy saboteurs and spies intent on doing great harm to America’s war effort. To achieve their goals, counterintelligence personnel relied upon major strides in the areas of code breaking and detection of secret inks. Overseas, the intelligence effort proved far more extensive in terms of resources and missions, even reaching into nearby neutral countries. Intelligence within the American Expeditionary Forces was heavily indebted to its Allied counterparts who not only provided an organizational blueprint but also veteran instructors and equipment needed to train newly arriving intelligence specialists. Rapid advances by American intelligence were also made possible by the appointment of competent leaders and the recruitment of highly motivated and skilled personnel; likewise, the Army’s decision to assign the bulk of its linguists to support intelligence proved critical. World War I would witness the linkage between intelligence and emerging technologies—from the use of cameras in aircraft to the intercept of enemy radio transmissions. Equally significant was the introduction of new intelligence disciplines—from exploitation of captured equipment to the translation of enemy documents. These and other functions that emerged from World War I would continue to the present to provide military intelligence with the essential tools necessary to support the Army and the nation. World War I and the Origins of U.S. Military Intelligence is ideal not only for students and scholars of military history and World War I, but will also appeal to any reader interested in how modern intelligence operations first evolved.
Bruce Berkowitz and Allan Goodman draw on historical analysis, interviews, and their own professional experience in the intelligence community to provide an evaluation of U.S. strategic intelligence.
This twofold study investigates the character of intelligence knowledge and the social context in which it is produced, using the Swedish Military and Security Directorate (MUST) as a case study.
This article explores the Samba spy scandal to understand Indian counterintelligence and inter-agency intelligence coordination. The scandal publicly emerged in 1979 when dozens of Indian military ...intelligence officers were arrested for being Pakistani spies. The article examines the accused men's confessions of selling information to Pakistan's Field Intelligence Unit and how later they said the admissions were false and provided under torture. Then it describes senior intelligence and military leaders airing their suspicions that the men were innocent as well as a significant statement from a Pakistani spy a decade later. However, a 2014 Supreme Court ruling officially 'stamped' the men spies without any hope for clearing their names. The article analyses primary sources, interviews, news articles and court rulings, concluding that the scandal reveals poor Indian military counterintelligence and a lack of inter-agency cooperation.
Military intelligence (MI) is critical to visions of future war. The analytical methodologies of the War on Terror have reshaped how MI teams are trained and deployed. MI personnel are increasingly ...specialised, with experience and judgement being replaced by rigid adherence to robust data-driven analytical methodologies. While these methods are likely to continue at higher echelons, Jack Watling argues that a large MI presence at the tactical edge will not be practical under the indirect fire threat on the future battlefield. Furthermore, reach-back to higher echelon support will be severely constrained in a contested electromagnetic environment. Tactical echelons will therefore need an expanded organic MI capability, with experienced personnel able to perform a wide range of MI functions.◼
In this account of one of the worst intelligence failures in Americanhistory, James J. Wirtz explains why U.S. forces were surprised by the North Vietnamese Tet Offensive in 1968. Wirtz reconstructs ...the turning point of the Vietnam War in unprecedented detail. Drawing upon Vietcong and recently declassified U.S. sources, he is able to trace the strategy and unfolding of the Tet campaign as well as the U.S. response.
"Rise of the Mavericks traces the beginnings and subsequent development of the U.S. Air Force Security Service. Established in 1948 as part of the emerging U.S. national security apparatus, this ...communications intelligence organization was meant to place the fledgling U.S. Air Force on a competitive footing with its Army and Navy counterparts. As World War II ended and the Cold War began, Air Force leaders understood that an effective cryptologic capability would be crucial for maintaining and enhancing the Air Force as a strategic and decisive component of America's national defense. Successfully deploying air-atomic strategy in the event of a future war would require reliable information on the capabilities, intentions-and potential targets-of an opposing force, in particular the Soviet Union. Communications intelligence would be a critical source of this information, and Air Force leaders were adamant that their service not remain de
The Imperial Security State explores an important but under-explored dimension of British imperialism - its information system and the close links between military knowledge and the maintenance of ...empire. James Hevia's innovative study focuses on route books and military reports produced by the British Indian Army military intelligence between 1880 and 1940. He shows that together these formed a renewable and authoritative archive that was used to train intelligence officers, to inform civilian policy makers and to provide vital information to commanders as they approached the battlefield. The strategic, geographical, political and ethnographical knowledge that was gathered not only framed imperial strategies towards colonized areas to the east but also produced the very object of intervention: Asia itself. Finally, the book addresses the long-term impact of the security regime, revealing how elements of British colonial knowledge have continued to influence contemporary tactics of counterinsurgency in twenty-first-century Iraq and Afghanistan.
