Suchergebnisse

In early 2019, the British government declassified a tranche of Information Research Department files. Among them is a candid and concise overview of British thinking about covert propaganda, complete with a list of examples of British forgery operations. This short piece transcribes the briefing note and provides an introduction. The document sheds new light on UK covert action, but also talks to ongoing scholarly debates in Intelligence Studies and International Relations more broadly. In early 2019, the British government declassified a tranche of Information Research Department (IRD) files. Among them is a candid and concise overview of British thinking about covert propaganda, complete with a list of examples of British forgery operations. 1 It sheds new light on UK covert action, but also talks to ongoing scholarly debates in Intelligence Studies and International Relations more broadly. The IRD was created inside the Foreign Office in early 1948 to counter Soviet propaganda. Established under terms of the so-called Secret Vote, it expanded quickly and confidentially served a range of 'clients' from friendly governments and trade-union leaders, to Radio Free Europe and counter-subversion partners in the Middle East. Throughout much of its existence, and especially during its first two decades, the IRD focused on international communism. After the Suez Canal crisis in 1956, it gained a mandate to counter Arab nationalism, and, by the 1960s its activities extended to other hostile targets, including President Sukarno's Indonesian regime. David Owen, the Labour Foreign Secretary, closed the IRD down in 1977. 2 The IRD engaged in unattributable propaganda. Generally speaking, it distributed material, often based on sanitised intelligence, into foreign media outlets through trusted contacts. The recently declassified files (FCO 168) cover policy and operational detail. In doing so, they provide a more holistic understanding of IRD and British propaganda; the existing files, FO 1110 and FCO 95, declassified in ...

© 2021 The Author(s). For much of the 20th Century, intelligence and security was a taboo subject for Parliamentarians. While Labour backbenchers had suspicions of the secret state, there was a long-held bipartisan consensus that debates on intelligence were 'dangerous and bad'. Yet by the 1970s, new disclosures on the activities of foreign intelligence and domestic surveillance eroded this consensus with the Labour Party willing to push for greater accountability and oversight of the UK's intelligence agencies. This article looks at how, through the campaign to reform intelligence oversight, Labour pushed for changes reflected in later legislation. It also explores Labour's attitudes to intelligence.

Kim Philby, the so-called Third Man in the Cambridge spy ring, was the Cold War's most infamous traitor, a Soviet spy at the heart of British intelligence. Philby joined Britain's secret service MI6 during the war and went on to head the section tasked with rooting out Russian spies before becoming the service's chief liaison officer with the CIA. He betrayed hundreds of British and US agents to the Russians and compromised numerous operations inside the Soviet Union. Tim Milne was Philby's closest and oldest friend. They studied at Westminster School together and when Philby joined MI6 he imm

" 2019 The Author(s). 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.

An early task of any new Prime Minister is to familiarise themselves with the UK's intelligence agencies – the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS/MI6), Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and the Security Service (MI5). Yet, for all the interest they may have …

This book tells the story of NATO's secret anti-communist stay-behind armies that had been set up by the CIA and MI6 after World War Two in all countries of Western Europe and in some countries became tragically linked to right-wing terrorism.