Christopher R. Moran and Christopher J. Murphy

INTELLIGENCE STUDIES IN BRITAIN
AND THE US
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In memory of M. R. D. Foot (1919–2012), SOE Historian
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IN T E L L IGE N C E S T U DI E S I N
BR IT A IN A N D T H E U S
Historiography since 1945
Edited by Christopher R. Moran and

Christopher J. Murphy
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© editorial matter and organisation Christopher R. Moran and
Christopher J. Murphy, 2013
© the chapters their several authors, 2013
Edinburgh University Press Ltd

22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF
www.euppublishing.com
Typeset in 10.5/13 Minion by

Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and
printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7486 4627 2 (hardback)

ISBN 978 0 7486 7756 6 (webready PDF)
ISBN 978 0 7486 7758 0 (epub)
ISBN 978 0 7486 7757 3 (Amazon ebook)
The right of the contributors to be identified as authors of this work has

been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act
1988.
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CONTENTS
The Editors vii

The Contributors viii
List of Figures xiii
Preface by Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones xv
Acknowledgements xix
Introduction: Intelligence Studies Now and Then 1

Christopher R. Moran and Christopher J. Murphy
PART I AMERICAN INTELLIGENCE HISTORIOGRAPHY

1 CIA History as a Cold War Battleground: The Forgotten First Wave
of Agency Narratives 19
Richard J. Aldrich
2 The Culture of Funding Culture: The CIA and the Congress for
Cultural Freedom 47
Eric Pullin
3 ‘Real Substance, Not Just Symbolism’? The CIA and the
Representation of Covert Operations in the Foreign Relations of the
United States Series 65
Matthew Jones and Paul McGarr
4 Bonum Ex Malo: The Value of Legacy of Ashes in Teaching CIA
History 90
Nicholas Dujmovic
5 Narrating Covert Action: The CIA, Historiography and the Cold War 111
Kaeten Mistry
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vi Intelligence Studies in Britain and the US
6 FBI Historiography: From Leader to Organisation 129

Melissa Graves
7 Reconceiving Realism: Intelligence Historians and the Fact/Fiction
Dichotomy 146
Simon Willmetts
8 The Reality is Stranger than Fiction: Anglo-American Intelligence
Cooperation from World War II through the Cold War 172
Frederick P. Hitz
PART II BRITISH INTELLIGENCE HISTORIOGRAPHY

9 A Plain Tale of Pundits, Players and Professionals: The
Historiography of the Great Game 183
Robert Johnson
10 No Cloaks, No Daggers: The Historiography of British Military
Intelligence 202
Jim Beach
11 The Study of Interrogation: A Focus on Torture, But What About the
Intelligence? 222
Samantha Newbery
12 Whitehall, Intelligence and Official History: Editing SOE in France 236
13 A Tale of Torture? Alexander Scotland, The London Cage and Post-
War British Secrecy 251
Daniel W. B. Lomas
14 1968 – ‘A Year to Remember’ for the Study of British Intelligence? 263
Adam D. M. Svendsen
15 Their Trade is Treachery: A Retrospective 281
Chapman Pincher
16 Intelligence and ‘Official History’ 289
Christopher Baxter and Keith Jeffery
Index 304
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THE EDITORS
Christopher R. Moran is an Assistant Professor of US National Security in the

Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick.
He is also a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow. Previously, he was a Research
Assistant on the AHRC-funded project ‘Landscapes of Secrecy: The CIA and
the Contested Record of US Foreign Policy’. In 2011, he was a Kluge Fellow
at the Library of Congress. He is the author of Classified: Secrecy and the State
in Modern Britain (2012) and has published articles in International History
Review, Journal of Cold War Studies and Intelligence and National Security.
Christopher J. Murphy is a Lecturer in Intelligence in the School of Humanities,

Languages and Social Sciences at the University of Salford and Programme
Leader for the MA in Intelligence and Security Studies. He is the author of
Security and Special Operations: SOE and MI5 during the Second World War
(2006) and has published articles in Public Policy and Administration, Journal of
Contemporary History and The Historical Journal.
vii
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THE CONTRIBUTORS
Richard J. Aldrich is Director of the Institute of Advanced Study at the

University of Warwick and is the author of several books, including The Hidden
Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence (2001) and GCHQ:
The Uncensored Story of Britain’s Most Secret Intelligence Agency (2010). He has
spent time in Canberra and Ottawa as a Leverhulme Fellow, while working on a
study of the impact of globalisation upon intelligence services. Since September
2008, he has been leading a project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research
Council, entitled: ‘Landscapes of Secrecy: The Central Intelligence Agency and
the Contested Record of US Foreign Policy’.
Christopher Baxter is an Honorary Lecturer in Intelligence History at Queen’s

University, Belfast. He is the author of The Great Power Struggle in East Asia,
1944–50 (2009) and co-editor of Diplomats at War: British and Commonwealth
Diplomacy in Wartime (2008).
Jim Beach is Senior Lecturer in Twentieth Century History at the University of

Northampton. He has published a number of articles on British military history
during the First World War. He is Secretary of the Army Records Society and
has edited The Military Papers of Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Cuthbert Headlam,
1910–1942.
Nicholas Dujmovic is a member of the CIA History Staff. He joined the CIA in
1990 as an analyst and later served as a speech writer for the Director of Central
Intelligence, editor of the President’s Daily Brief and a manager of analysts.
He received his PhD in 1996 from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy
at Tufts University. His unclassified work on Agency operations and culture
has appeared in the Journal of Military History, Studies in Intelligence and
Intelligence and National Security. In 2004, Yale University published his collec-
tion of quotations on intelligence and espionage, The Literary Spy.
viii
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The Contributors ix
Melissa Graves serves as project coordinator and instructor at the University

of Mississippi’s (UM) Center for Intelligence and Security Studies. She helped
design and implement the Days of Intrigue – a realistic practical exercise con-
ducted yearly at UM, involving participation from numerous intelligence agen-
cies. She is also co-author of the textbook Introduction to Intelligence Studies
(2012). She is presently pursuing a PhD in history. Ms Graves has been admitted
to the Bars of Texas and Washington.
Frederick P. Hitz is an Adjunct Professor at the Frank Batten School of

Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia. He is also a Senior
Fellow at the University of Virginia’s Center for National Security Law and an
adjunct Professor at the University of Virginia, School of Law. From 1998 to
2006, he was a lecturer at the Woodrow Wilson School of Princeton University
and, from 1999 to 2000, he held the Weinberg/Goldman Sachs Professorship
of International Affairs. From 1967 to 1998, he served extensively in the CIA
in the Clandestine Service, as Legislative Counsel to the Director of Central
Intelligence and as Deputy Director for Europe in the Directorate of Operations.
He was appointed the first statutory Inspector General of the CIA by President
George H. W. Bush and served in that capacity from 1990 to 1998, when he
retired. He was awarded the Distinguished Intelligence Medal in 1998 and
received a Resolution of Commendation from the US Senate upon the fifth
anniversary of his tenure as Inspector General in 1995. Among the many
investigations he led at the CIA was the Aldrich Ames betrayal. He has written
extensively about espionage and intelligence issues, including The Great Game:
The Myth and Reality of Espionage (2004) and Why Spy? Espionage in an Era
of Uncertainty (2008). He is a graduate of Harvard Law School and Princeton
University.
Keith Jeffery is Professor of British History at Queen’s University, Belfast, and a

Member of the Royal Irish Academy. Among his books are Ireland and the Great
War (2000), The GPO and the Easter Rising (2006), Field Marshal Sir Henry
Wilson: A Political Soldier (2008) and MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence
Service 1909–1949 (2011).
Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones took his history PhD at Cambridge University. He is

an Emeritus Professor of history at the University of Edinburgh and honorary
president of the Scottish Association for the Study of America. His publications
are evenly divided between American history and the history of intelligence. They
include The CIA and American Democracy (1989) and The FBI: A History (2007).
His next books will be The American Left: Its Impact on Politics and Society Since
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x Intelligence Studies in Britain and the US
1900 (Edinburgh University Press) and In Spies We Trust: The Story of Western
Intelligence.
Robert Johnson is the Director of the Oxford Changing Character of War

Programme at the University of Oxford. His primary research interests are in
the history of conflicts of the Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan, including
the interactions between strategy, intelligence and conventional operations,
war by proxy, insurgency and counter-insurgency. He has published a number
of relevant books and articles and is the author of Spying for Empire: The Great
Game in Central and South Asia (2006) and The Afghan Way of War: How and
Why They Fight (2011).
Matthew Jones is Professor of Modern History at the University of Nottingham.

He is the author of Britain, the United States, and the Mediterranean War,
1942–44 (1996), Conflict and Confrontation in South East Asia, 1961–1965:
Britain, the United States, Indonesia and the Creation of Malaysia (2002) and,
most recently, After Hiroshima: The United States, Race and Nuclear Weapons in
Asia, 1945–1965 (2010).
Daniel W. B. Lomas is a PhD student at the University of Salford. His doctorate

explores the relationship between Clement Attlee, the Labour Government and
the British intelligence community, 1945–51.
Paul McGarr is Advanced Research Fellow in the Department of American and

Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham. He is the author of several
articles and essays on Anglo-American political and cultural exchange with
post-independent South Asia. He will shortly publish his first book, Britain,
the United States and the Cold War in South Asia, 1947–1965. He is currently
researching and writing on the Central Intelligence Agency’s role in shaping offi-
cial narratives of American foreign policy, as part of a wider AHRC-sponsored
project, entitled ‘Landscapes of Secrecy: The Central Intelligence Agency and the
Contested Record of US Foreign Policy, 1947–2001’.
Kaeten Mistry is Lecturer in American History at the University of East

Anglia. He specialises in US foreign relations, the international history of
the Cold War, and intelligence studies. He has held faculty positions at
the University of Warwick and University College Dublin and has studied
at the University of Birmingham, the University of California, Los Angeles, and
the University of Padua. He has been Visiting Fellow at New York University,
University of Bologna and University of Oxford. His book Waging Political
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The Contributors xi
Warfare: The United States, Italy and the Origins of Cold War is forthcoming. He
has published articles in journals, including Diplomatic History and Cold War
History, and has guest-edited a special issue of Intelligence and National Security.
Samantha Newbery is Lecturer in Contemporary Intelligence Studies in the

University of Salford’s Politics and Contemporary History Directorate. She
holds a PhD from Trinity College, Dublin. Dr Newbery’s main research interest
is intelligence ethics, specifically the use of controversial interrogation tech-
niques to collect intelligence for counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism.
She has published work on this subject in Intelligence and National Security
and Irish Studies in International Affairs. Her forthcoming monograph –
Interrogation, Intelligence and Security: The Origins and Effects of Controversial
British Techniques, 1964–2003 – addresses the examples of Aden (1964–7),
Northern Ireland (1971–8) and Iraq (2003).
Chapman Pincher is a renowned investigative journalist and writer of espionage

books. His original professional intention was to pursue an academic career, spe-
cialising in botanical genetics at King’s College, London. (Before taking his BSc
Hons degree, he published two original papers on plant genetics, winning him
the Carter Gold Medal.) The Second World War intruded, and, in 1940, he joined
a tank regiment, being commissioned in 1941. Posted to the Military College of
Science (now Royal), he completed the Advanced Class in Ammunition and
Explosives and spent the rest of the war developing rocket weapons. In 1946, he
was appointed Defence and Scientific Editor of the Daily Express, being named
Journalist of the Year in 1964 and Reporter of the Decade in 1966. Retiring from
Fleet Street in 1979, he has since concentrated on intelligence affairs, publishing the
watershed book Their Trade is Treachery in 1981. This has been followed by Too
Secret Too Long (1984) and four others, culminating in the large volume Treachery,
of which the latest updated edition appeared in 2012. He is an Hon DLitt Newcastle
University, Life Fellow of King’s College London (1979) and an Academician of the
Russian Academy for Defence, Security and Internal Affairs (2005).
Eric Pullin is Assistant Professor of History at Carthage College. He has pub-

lished articles on Indo-US relations during World War II and the Cold War
in Diplomatic History and Intelligence and National Security. He is currently
writing a book on the ideological struggle between the Soviet Union, the United
States and India.
Adam D. M. Svendsen (PhD, Warwick) is an intelligence and defence strate-

gist, educator and researcher, formerly based in the Centre for Military Studies
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xii Intelligence Studies in Britain and the US
(CMS), Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

He has been a Visiting Scholar at CPASS, Georgetown University, and has
worked at Chatham House and IISS, London. He has also trained at various
European defence colleges, lectured at the Royal Danish Defence College (FAK)
and has multi-sector award-winning media and communication experience. He
is the author of several publications, including Intelligence Cooperation and the
War on Terror (2010) Understanding the Globalization of Intelligence (2012),
and The Professionalization of Intelligence Cooperation (also 2012).
Simon Willmetts is a Lecturer in American History and Culture at the University

of Hull. He completed his PhD in late 2011 at the University of Warwick. His
thesis, which explored the relationship between the CIA and Hollywood, is cur-
rently being prepared as a monograph. He is the author of numerous articles and
book chapters, including a piece in the Journal of American Studies.
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FIGURES
Figure 1 British spy Eddie Chapman with an opium pipe in one hand
and a horse pistol in the other 5
Figure 2 Chapman Pincher with the Queen Mother and former

Secretary of State for War John Profumo 6
Figure 3 Cambridge historian Christopher Andrew with his book, The

Defence of the Realm 10
Figure 4 CIA Director Allen Dulles poses for cameras in Washington,

DC on 24 January 1953 20
Figure 5 CIA Director Robert Gates poses with Russian President Boris
Yeltsin, 16 October 1992 71
Figure 6 Tim Weiner accepting the National Book Award for non-
fiction for Legacy of Ashes, 14 November 2007 91
Figure 7 Philip Agee, the most famous whistle-blower in CIA history,

holding his controversial publication On the Run 120
Figure 8 FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover enjoying the company of Holly

Spring of Ballerina, a boxer-dog champion 130
Figure 9 Actress Sissy Spacek waves to the crowd as actor Kevin

Costner and Director Oliver Stone arrive for the world screening of
JFK on 17 December 1991 163
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xiv Intelligence Studies in Britain and the US
Figure 10 Spy novelist John le Carré boards a Pan Am flight to Rome

at Kennedy International Airport 175
Figure 11 Cartoon of English writer Rudyard Kipling writing in an

Indian bush watched by a lion and a snake 184
Figure 12 Professor Keith Jeffery at the launch of MI6: The History

of the Secret Intelligence Service, 1909–1949 296
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PREFACE
Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones
Secret intelligence had always been an element in statecraft, but in the twentieth
century, it acquired an altogether new standing as an ingredient in the security
arrangements of nations that tired of ‘total warfare’. This applied to the Soviet
Union, with its tens of millions of casualties in World War II, and equally to
democratic countries, with their memories of Galipoli and Paeschendale. In
fact, special factors applied in the case of the democratic nations, with their
increasingly universal voting rights. Enfranchised male citizens – who supplied
the infantry, yet could make or break the governments that sent them to the
front – displayed a fondness for their arms and legs and for life in general. The
arrival of the female voter only intensified the aversion to militarism and to body
bags. War was no longer acceptable as a reflexive recourse in times of diplomatic
crisis. The search for alternative methods yielded initiatives ranging from United
Nations mediations to nuclear deterrence. The century’s commitment to secret
intelligence stemmed from the same source.
To be sure, secret intelligence is an ingredient in military success. It can help
to make war more precise and more decisive. But for those very reasons, it can
also make war less bloody, especially for the civilians so often caught up as ‘col-
lateral’ casualties. Furthermore, it can yield information that anticipates, and
helps to prevent, conflict. We are only too painfully aware that things do not
always work out like this. There have been intelligence blunders with terrible
consequences. The preference for more subtle means, nevertheless, remains.
You have only to follow the dollar to appreciate the point – the United States
intelligence community’s budget for 2009 was US$80 billion.
Naturally, such a major phenomenon has attracted extensive study. Marjorie
W. Cline’s Teaching Intelligence in the mid-1980s (1985) was a thorough survey
of college and university courses across the US, which revealed how they had
become pervasive. A 2003 survey by Aberystwyth University’s Paul Maddrell
established that the teaching of intelligence was expanding in the United
Kingdom, too. Off-campus, an appetite for books and articles in the intelligence
xv
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xvi Intelligence Studies in Britain and the US
field encouraged a growth in the literature. Intelligence studies developed into

a distinctive genre, and its practitioners acquired a professional identity of their
own.
Intelligence studies faced a number of perils. Some of these were common
to any fast-growing discipline. Those who have witnessed the expansion of, say,
labour history or American Studies will recognise the pitfalls. Aspiring scholars,
characterised more by opportunism than by ability, jump on the bandwagon,
hoping for an easy ride. Able scholars in more established fields take a snooty,
stand-offish approach to the new discipline. By refusing to engage in or offer
competition, they ensure that the ride can, indeed, be too easy, with mediocrity
as the natural result. Another common danger is hubris. It feeds on a feeling of
being unappreciated and results in an exaggeration of the importance of one’s
newly discovered topic. The proposition that intelligence is a missing dimension
of diplomatic history can degenerate into the conviction that it is the missing
dimension.
Other perils inhere in the particular nature of the field. Secrecy has not
resulted in a dearth of information, but too often it suppresses key information.
The absence of key information can give rise to speculation and thus to damag-
ing myths. In turn, this has occasioned official efforts to set the record straight.
However, official efforts can be tainted with an official agenda. The temptation
to whitewash affects the chroniclers of more than one type of government activ-
ity. But the opportunity to misinform is greater in the field of secret intelligence
studies, where, in the interest of ‘national security’, information is withheld from
relatively objective scholars and only made available to chosen insiders.
Special mention might here be made of the American curse of the revolving
door. This is the process by which scholars depart academia to join an intelligence
agency, later rejoining the academic community to impart their insights based
on practical experience. On the one hand, the advantages are plain. Bright-eyed
professors entering the clandestine profession import the latest expertise from
the academic world. Returning to the campuses with knowing looks, they are
able to bring down to earth some of the more fanciful academic theories. On the
other hand, there are disadvantages. Scholars in the intelligence community can
‘go native’, re-emerging in academia as propagandists. They may not have been
the best scholars in the first place. Top scholars publish regularly and do not take
kindly to the interruptions and controls involved in secret government service.
Nor do they relish the contempt in which they are often held, once having
dabbled in ‘dirty espionage’.
To be sure, intelligence veterans have made thoughtful and successful teach-
ers. But teaching and scholarship in the intelligence field is, to too great an
extent, blighted by the presence of pensioners who are not only biased in favour
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Preface xvii
of officialdom, but also second-rate intellectually. Speaking anonymously (as

such individuals do in the UK), the former head of a major intelligence agency
recently told me that such problems do not exist in Britain. But it would be rash
to assert that British intelligence writing has always been free of official odour.
Awareness of problems such as these has given rise to a new and special
branch of the intelligence studies profession. This is the study of intelligence
studies. British initiatives are important here, and they tend to look beyond
British shores. Perhaps this compensates for the lack of British official enquires
into how other nations conduct their intelligence affairs (in contrast, there have
been several American official enquiries into British intelligence). For an initial
example, one can turn to the activities of Aberystwyth University’s Centre for
Intelligence and International Security Studies. One outcome of the Centre’s
work was a book edited by R. Gerald Hughes et al., Exploring Intelligence
Archives (2008). It is testimony to the strength of the profession that this
appeared as the forty-fifth title in the Studies in Intelligence book series, edited
by Richard J. Aldrich and Christopher Andrew. Hughes’ compilation provided
scholarly commentaries on a series of intelligence documents from around the
world. On one level, it was instructive about certain episodes in intelligence
history. But on another level, it taught the reader how to study not just the docu-
ments, but also the interpreters of the documents.
The book that you are about to read is a second example of a work that shows
how important it is, before embarking on a study of intelligence itself, to study
the study of intelligence. A sophisticated primer for those engaged in the field,
it stems from another British research initiative in intelligence studies. This is
the jointly run project by the Universities of Warwick and Nottingham, entitled
‘Landscapes of Secrecy: The CIA and the Contested Record of US Foreign Policy,
1947–2001’. One of the book’s two young editors, Christopher Moran, was asso-
ciated with that project, and the other, Christopher Murphy, teaches at Salford
University – a centre of excellence in intelligence studies.
In a preface of this kind, it is common to ‘plug’ the pages that follow and to
urge the reader to plough through the text for worthy reasons. The task is not
difficult in light of a cast of characters that includes Salvador Allende, George
Blake, Fidel Castro, Winston Churchill, Mansfield Cumming, Allen Dulles,
Richard Helms, Christopher Hitchens, Patrice Lumumba, Compton Mackenzie,
Norman Mailer, Kim Philby, Stella Rimington, William Stephenson, George
Tenet, Margaret Thatcher and Alfred Zimmerman.
Notable, too, is the quality of the contributors. Fred Hitz, for example, was a
hard-hitting Inspector General of the CIA in the 1990s. His report on the cir-
cumstances surrounding the treason of Richard Ames ranks with the incisive cri-
tique of the Bay of Pigs fiasco by his illustrious predecessor, Lyman Kirkpatrick.
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xviii Intelligence Studies in Britain and the US
Amongst the academic contributors, Richard J. Aldrich has few peers in the field
of intelligence history. Just as promising is the clutch of younger contributors,
from whom we shall hear a great deal in the future.
The book is a thoughtful dissection of a wide variety of sources, ranging
from works of history and official reports through memoirs, movies, novels and
exposés. The historiographical prism is revolved in a way that provides a plural-
ity of perspectives. Space is allotted both to critical works and to critiques of the
critics: Nicholas Dujmovic of the CIA’s History Staff offers a self-aware defence
of what official historians set out to do, while Keith Jeffery – the authorised
historian of the MI6 – supplies a general vindication of the writing of official
intelligence history.
To accommodate their ambitious methodologies, the editors have restricted
themselves to American and British themes. There is ample consolation here.
For although the KGB has been influential in the past, and the rise of China,
Brazil and the European Union point to a different future, the Anglo-American
dimension has been the dominant feature of intelligence history over the last
century. It makes this book a landmark study.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Many debts of gratitude have been accumulated over the course of bringing this
volume to print. We are grateful to the Arts & Humanities Research Council
(AHRC) for providing the financial support that set in motion a great deal of the
chapters in this collection. Specifically, we would like to thank the AHRC for sup-
porting the project ‘Landscapes of Secrecy: The Central Intelligence Agency and
the Contested Record of US Foreign Policy 1947–2001’, administered jointly by
the Universities of Warwick and Nottingham. Additional income was provided
by the Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence at the University of Manchester, for
which we are also extremely grateful. The Centre also supported the ‘European
Security, Terrorism and Intelligence’ conference at the University of Salford
in January 2009, which included a panel on intelligence historiography, from
which this project originated. We should like to give special thanks to the team
at Edinburgh University Press. We are especially indebted to Nicola Ramsey, as
Senior Commissioning Editor, for seeing the intellectual merit of this project.
Moreover, this book would not exist without the literary midwifery of Assistant
Editors Jenny Daly and Michelle Houston, who, from start to finish, have been
unfailingly kind and helpful. Finally, we should like to thank our contributors
for their patience, cooperation and good cheer in meeting tight deadlines – it is
they who make this volume.
xix
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MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd xx 21/02/2013 08:23
Introduction
INTELLIGENCE STUDIES NOW AND THEN
Christopher R. Moran and Christopher J. Murphy
In both the United States and the United Kingdom, the field of intelligence
studies represents one of the fastest growing subsets of international history,
political science and strategic studies. This dynamism is evidenced not only by the
vast volume of publications that are generated, but by the existence of dedicated
departments and centres, specialist degree programmes, conferences and profes-
sional associations. In the US, intelligence is taught at a host of top universities,
typically in the form of advanced option courses and special subjects. Beyond
this, there are institutes specifically designed to prepare students for entry-level
positions in the intelligence community, including the Center for Intelligence
and Security Studies at the University of Mississippi and the Mercyhurst College
Institute for Intelligence Studies. A similar landscape exists in the UK, with
centres at Brunel, Buckingham and Aberystwyth flanked by undergraduate and
postgraduate teaching in intelligence at numerous major academic institutions,
with the study of intelligence at Masters’ level at the University of Salford fast
approaching its 25th anniversary year. The flourishing of intelligence studies is
also reflected in the considerable group of content-specific journals. Founded in
1984, Intelligence and National Security is recognised as the most pre-eminent
journal, but it is accompanied by Studies in Intelligence, the International Journal
of Intelligence and Counterintelligence and the Journal of Intelligence History,
the latter which was relaunched along new lines in 2012. A further illustration
of the maturity of this field is the increasing willingness of funding bodies to
support research in this area. In 2008, for example, the universities of Warwick
and Nottingham received over £550,000 from the Arts and Humanities Research
Council (AHRC) to study the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In short, the
study of intelligence is booming.
Needless to say, intelligence studies as we know it today was not born over-
night. Rather, it has evolved from humble beginnings over the course of several
decades, constantly jostling for space and recognition among a myriad of other
academic traditions. This collection, which features some sixteen specialist
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2 Intelligence Studies in Britain and the US
contributions by leading experts from a variety of professional paths, seeks to

narrate and interpret the development of intelligence studies as an academic
discipline in both the US and the UK. Specifically, it is concerned with histori-
ography and aims to review some of the literatures, schools and tributaries of
research that have contributed to this rapidly expanding area of enquiry.
Scholars of intelligence seldom pause to reflect upon the historiography of
their chosen subject. For some time, the field has been characterised by a desire
for discovery, with discussion of the existing literature framed, to a significant
extent, by the discussion of absence. To this point, intelligence studies has
tended to take its lead from Christopher Andrew and David Dilks’ famous
clarion call in 1984 for intelligence to no longer be the ‘missing dimension’ of
modern history and international relations.1 No doubt there are certainly areas
where such absences continue; but in our eagerness to move from the eradica-
tion of one ‘missing dimension’ to the next, we have failed to take stock and to
acknowledge the considerable body of work that has accumulated – the end
product of these labours. As a result, the study of intelligence historiography is
itself a ‘missing dimension’.
The fact that we have arrived at this position is perhaps unsurprising. The
past two decades have seen an explosion of academic writing on intelligence,
fuelled, to a large degree, by the unprecedented declassification of official mate-
rials that followed the end of the Cold War. With new archives to examine,
intelligence scholars have made hay while the sun shines (so to speak), with
good reason. Today, intelligence studies is hallmarked by a Rankean hunger for
new documentation and an interpretative focus on the use (and abuse) of intel-
ligence by state actors. Certainly, by the standards of other fields and disciplines,
historiographical self-reflection has taken a backseat. A sizeable literature exists
pertaining to the question of ‘what is intelligence?’, and it is refreshing to see a
increasing body of work devoted to research methodology, specifically consider-
ing the dangers of hard-line empiricism.2 However, as intelligence studies shifts
away, as a field of study, from a period of archival ‘first contact’, it is important
to reflect upon the evolution of the secondary literature to this point.
Scholarly neglect of intelligence historiography is explainable, but not justi-
fied. Mapping the history of intelligence history could not be more important or
more urgent. A greater appreciation of how writers of intelligence themselves,
over time, have approached, understood and recorded intelligence history dem-
onstrates the important role of the intelligence scholar in garnering knowledge
about the past and, thus, helps to dispel possible cynicism concerning the utility
of the enterprise. While intelligence history has proved incredibly popular
with the public at large, it has been relatively marginalised within the academic
profession, often criticised for being prone to sensationalism and uncritical
MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd 2 21/02/2013 08:23

Introduction 3
scholarship. According to John Ferris – a noted intelligence authority – the

critique most commonly made about intelligence history is that it suffers from
‘Bloomsbury syndrome’, focusing on anecdote, instead of analysis.3 By being
reflexive about the state of the literature, intelligence studies can achieve new
levels of academic respectability.
Greater knowledge of historiography will assist with the disciplinary iden-
tification of intelligence studies within the humanities and social sciences.
Intelligence studies have long existed in a labile lattice of relationships with
kindred disciplines, such as international relations, and subdisciplines, such as
diplomatic or military history. Accordingly, its borders are difficult to deter-
mine. Unless there is a noted shift from doing intelligence studies to reflecting
upon precisely how it is done and has been done in the past, there is a danger
that the field will lose cohesion and direction. Intelligence scholars clearly need
to pursue their own specific research agendas, but they also need to think about
how this fits into the broader agenda or ‘project’ of intelligence studies. In order
to continue to flourish, intelligence studies needs to recognise its historiographi-
cal traditions and start to think longer and harder about its future trajectory.
This can only be achieved through gaining knowledge of the story of intelligence
historiography. At all costs, intelligence studies must avoid marking time,
being too intractably wedded to its original foci, conventional interpretations
and Rankean exegesis. It cannot afford to lag behind methodological advances
achieved in other areas. Once again, an engagement with historiography can
help, for it encourages scholars to reconsider important questions about truth,
evidence and method. In turn, this can breed dissatisfaction with approaches
that appear intellectually shop-worn and drive innovation.
* * *
The essays contained in this collection are intended to provide a wide-angled
view of the past formulation and emerging patterns of intelligence studies. As a
collective, they advance three important and interrelated arguments:
(1) Secrecy has never stopped people from writing about intelligence.
Intelligence is an instrument of statecraft that governments have traditionally
tried to shield from public scrutiny. Secrecy is justified as a necessary measure, in
order to guarantee operational security, techniques of collection and the safety
of human sources. The US is rightly lauded for its constitutional commitment
to openness, but it is worth remembering that even George Washington – the
nation’s first President and public symbol of the triumph of democratic values
over kingly despotism – was firmly convinced of the need for secrecy in the
realm of intelligence. During the War of Independence, he wrote:
MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd 3 21/02/2013 08:23

The necessity of procuring good Intelligence is apparent & need not be further
urged – All that remains for me to add is, that you keep the whole matter as secret
as possible. For upon Secrecy, Success depends in Most Enterprizes.4
In their dedication to secrecy, Western secret services, for much of the twentieth
century, reflexively hoarded their records and suppressed public debate where
possible, making the task of writing about intelligence extremely difficult. In the
UK, it was even the practice for intelligence never to be mentioned in Parliament
– the country’s supreme legislative body.
In spite of this, intelligence historiography has a long lineage. Almost from
the establishment of professional intelligence services, there have been veter-
ans who have cleverly sidestepped and, in some cases, plainly ignored official
restrictions placed upon them, so as to write about their careers.5 Adopting a
position of ‘publish and be damned’, memoir writers have typically relied on
the assumption that most sensible governments will not risk public scraps or
costly legal battles to suppress the publication of works. Generally speaking, this
has been the case; only in a handful of high profile instances have authors been
frogmarched off to court by vexed secret agencies.
The motivation for spies to write books is not uniform. In retirement, often
with a modest income, some have turned to publishing, in order to pad out
their bank balances. In 1953, for example, the infamous MI5 wartime spy Eddie
Chapman published an autobiography largely out of financial necessity, having
run up huge debts by living well beyond his means in London’s West End (see
Figure 1).6 Some veterans have felt badly treated by their former employer
and, therefore, have had no compunctions about breaking their secrecy agree-
ment. Peter Wright, for example –author of the groundbreaking publication
Spycatcher – was motivated, to a large extent, by the fact that MI5 had not taken
seriously his belief that the Service had been penetrated by Russian spies and, to
add insult to injury, had denied him a full pension. In the US, in particular, there
is a rich tradition of whistle-blowing by ‘persons of conscience’. In 1977, for
example, CIA analyst Frank Snepp published, without approval, Decent Interval,
exposing Agency blunders in the run-up to the disastrous US evacuation of
South Vietnam.7 Snepp ranks as one of the few memoirists who have felt the full
legal fury of the official machine. After publication, he was hit with a government
lawsuit, which he duly lost, requiring him to surrender every ‘ill-gotten’ cent he
had made from the book’s publication. According to Bernard Porter – a leading
imperial historian – some retired spies simply want to boast about their achieve-
ments. ‘It must be galling’, Porter suggested, ‘to have saved the world, and have
no-one know about it’.8
Memoir writers are not the only group who have overcome secrecy to write
about intelligence. From as far back as the early Cold War period, journalists
MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd 4 21/02/2013 08:23

Introduction 5
Figure 1 British spy Eddie Chapman with an opium pipe in one hand and a horse
pistol in the other (Press Association, PA.10662703)
have been publishing stories about secret services, aided by disclosures from
friends in high places.9 A number of journalists have gone on to enjoy lucra-
tive second careers as bestselling writers on espionage – most famously, David
Wise in the US and Chapman Pincher in the UK (see Figure 2). Self-declared
MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd 5 21/02/2013 08:23

Figure 2 Chapman Pincher (left) with the Queen Mother and former Secretary of
State for War John Profumo (Courtesy of Chapman Pincher)
‘exposé-merchants’ have long been a thorn in the side of governments. Pincher’s

sleuthing of the secret state even prompted Harold Macmillan – then Prime
Minister – to ask in private: ‘Can nothing be done to suppress or get rid of
Chapman Pincher?’10 However, stopping these individuals proved difficult.
Most covered their tracks and did not keep incriminating evidence. In the UK,
at least, there was a basic reluctance among officials to stir up too much contro-
versy, knowing that that the likely source of the leak was a person of status and,
thus, too important to be embarrassed.
(2) The ‘real world’ of intelligence impacts intelligence historiography and vice
versa.
The writing of intelligence history has always been closely linked with con-
temporary, real-world events. For example, in the period between the end of
the Second World War and creation of the CIA in September 1947, there was
an outpouring of reminiscences by former members of the wartime Office of
Strategic Services (OSS). Many of these veterans had, in fact, been encouraged to
write by fabled OSS Chief General William J. Donovan, who had hoped that by
disclosing stories of bravery and tales of derring-do, sceptical politicians would
recognise the need for a permanent, centralised intelligence agency. Donovan’s
campaign paid off, when President Harry Truman signed the National Security
Act of 1947, which established the CIA.
The first ‘explosion’ of serious academic writing on intelligence occurred in
the late 1970s, largely as a result of developments in the real world of espionage.
In the UK, scholars were given strong reasons to study intelligence when, in
1974, Whitehall finally bowed to the inevitable disclosure of the ‘Ultra Secret’.
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Introduction 7
For three decades, it had been the policy of successive British governments
not to reveal the success of code-breakers at Bletchley Park, fearing that dis-
closure of any kind would undermine the peacetime work of the Government
Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). As a result, thirty years of scholarship
on the Second World War was lacking in a crucial respect. When the decision
was taken to ‘open up’ about Ultra, historical revisionism became the order
of the day, as scholars sought to understand how prior knowledge of Hitler’s
intentions had helped the Allies win the war. The objective was not simply to
insert intelligence into the history of the Second World War, but to reconfigure
the way in which that history was written. In the US, serious academic interest
in intelligence was roused by the much-publicised ‘season of enquiry’ into the
American intelligence community. Academics were forced to stand up and take
notice as revelations emerged, both in the newspapers and in congressional
hearings, linking the CIA with a string of illegal domestic operations.
The second explosion of academic interest in intelligence occurred in the
1990s, again, largely as a corollary of changes in the real spy world. During this
period, intelligence services in the West responded to the conclusion of the
Cold War and the decline of direct threats to national security by embracing a
degree of openness. In both the US and the UK, there was a move, on the part
of the intelligence services, to become more visible and to do more in terms of
outreach, explaining the role played by modern intelligence communities to
the world outside. The old Cold War mentality that there could be no middle
ground between absolute secrecy and absolute disclosure was replaced by a new
attitude of common sense, predicated on the idea that it was necessary to have
stronger safeguards around fewer secrets.
As a result of this shift, the 1990s became the era of declassification, provid-
ing a major stimulus to intelligence studies. In the US, a significant milestone
was reached in April 1995, when President Bill Clinton signed Executive Order
12958, which ruled that all classified documents older than twenty-five years
would automatically become declassified, save certain exemptions on security
grounds. By 2007, the CIA had declassified over ten million pages of material,
stored on a massive electronic search and retrieval system, known as CREST, at
the National Archives at College Park in Maryland.11 In the UK, a similar mile-
stone was achieved with the 1993 Waldegrave Initiative on Open Government.
To date, this landmark scheme has resulted in the declassification of over 200,000
highly sensitive files, including many files that had been originally exempt from
the normal thirty-year embargo on public records.
It has also been the case that intelligence historiography has influenced
the real world of intelligence. It is far from being a ‘passive’ body of work; in
some cases, it has formed an integral part of the ‘story’ of the very subject of
MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd 7 21/02/2013 08:23

study itself. In the early years of her premiership, Margaret Thatcher was twice
required to respond in the House of Commons to accusations made by intelli-
gence books. On 16 November 1979, she was forced, by the publication ten days
earlier of Andrew Boyle’s Climate of Treason, to confirm that Anthony Blunt – a
former MI5 officer and then Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures – had been a Soviet
spy.12 This brought a fifteen-year cover-up to an end, which had seen Blunt
confess to his crimes in 1964, in all probability expecting to be tried for treason,
only to be granted immunity from prosecution, in return for revealing to MI5 all
he knew about the Soviets. Two years later, the Prime Minister once again found
herself in the House making a statement in relation to a spy book. Published in
1981, Chapman Pincher’s Their Trade is Treachery had made the sensational
allegation that Sir Roger Hollis – a former Director General of MI5 – had, in fact,
been a Soviet agent. Hotly disputed, even to this day, this allegation prompted
Thatcher to admit to Parliament that Hollis had been investigated some years
earlier and cleared of any wrong-doing.13
Later in the decade, another book, Spycatcher, would have far-reaching conse-
quences for the real world of intelligence. Written by Peter Wright – an eccentric
former MI5 officer – Spycatcher repeated the charge concerning Hollis and
also alleged that MI5 had conspired to discredit Labour Prime Minister Harold
Wilson.14 Rather than let the book sink without a trace, the British government
foolishly attempted to block its publication and was sucked into a protracted and
hugely embarrassing vortex of litigation, which ultimately ensured that the book
enjoyed the widest possible circulation. The low point came in an Australian
court room in late 1986, when Sir Robert Armstrong – the Cabinet Secretary
– was forced to concede, under cross-examination by a brash young Sydney
lawyer, that, in his earlier testimony, he had been ‘economical with the truth’.15
This, coupled with other farcical moments (including the surreal instance where
Armstrong refused to confirm or deny that MI5 existed), brought ridicule upon
the government’s case. The government’s hopeless mishandling of Wright’s
book helped to convince officials in London that change was necessary, namely,
that it was outdated and ludicrous to maintain the bipartisan taboo about intelli-
gence. This paved the way for MI5 to be placed on a statutory footing for the first
time in 1989. Moreover, Spycatcher led to the introduction of stricter procedures
in MI5, as well as greater professionalisation and the removal of swashbuckling
amateurs.
(3) Governments are moving from a strategy of ‘policing the past’ to ‘writing the
record’.
In recent years, there have been a number of scholarly publications showing
the behind-the-scenes dealings of the state censor, revealing the negotia-
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Introduction 9
tions that take place between censor and author, concerning what should and
should not be disclosed.16 Taken together, these works paint a picture of the
state ‘policing the past’ by micro-managing publications, in order to protect
national security and avoid embarrassment. Some of the chapters in this col-
lection are supportive of this thesis, giving historical examples of where secret
services have done everything in their power to suppress or redact intelligence
books. Others, however, hint at a more progressive strategy of ‘writing the
record’. By the early twenty-first century, there is strong evidence to suggest
that intelligence communities, on both sides of the Atlantic, are becoming more
interested in shaping their own history. Abandoning the old rigid approach
of hindering intelligence historiography, secret organisations are now flexibly
working to enrich intelligence historiography, albeit on their own terms. The
lesson that seems to have been learned is that it is too dangerous to leave intel-
ligence history to private authors, since ‘outsiders’ make mistakes and, worst
of all, often have axes to grind. Hence, it has become increasingly common for
secret services to release their own historical works, in order to set the record
straight.
The most obvious monuments to this strategy are the authorised histo-
ries of MI5 and SIS, published in 2009 and 2010, respectively, as part of the
centenary celebrations of the two agencies (see Figure 3).17 The CIA, while
declining to follow its ‘cousins’ and sponsor an official history, has neverthe-
less been extremely proactive in trying to promote its history. It maintains a
public website – www.cia.gov – which provides links to streams of declassified
documents, as well as hundreds of unclassified and declassified articles from
its journal Studies in Intelligence. Visitors to the website can also find his-
torical monographs on subjects such as the CIA’s relationship with Congress;
Archangel (the CIA’s A-12 Reconnaissance Aircraft); and CORONA (America’s
first satellite programme).18 Moreover, the CIA has its own History Staff, with a
clear public outreach mission.19 CIA Staff Historians can increasingly be found
providing presentations for the purposes of think tanks, university seminars and
academic conferences.
Recent concerted attempts by secret services to influence public perceptions
build on a string of ad hoc, one-off historiographical ventures, which were
carried out during the Cold War. In 1963, for example, the CIA secretly assisted
fabled former Director Allen Dulles with the production of his primer on espio-
nage, The Craft of Intelligence, even ‘ghosting’ large parts of the text. The book,
which made no mention of covert action, focusing exclusively on the far less
contentious issue of intelligence analysis, was seen by CIA officials as a valuable
public relations tool to offset some of the damage caused by the botched Bay
of Pigs landings in 1961.20 In the early 1960s, British intelligence also sought
MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd 9 21/02/2013 08:23

Figure 3 Cambridge historian Christopher Andrew with his book, The Defence of
the Realm (Press Association, PA. 7891135)
to ‘write the record’ by agreeing to an official history of the Special Operations

Executive (SOE) in France, eventually completed by (the late) M. R. D. Foot in
1966. The book had been conceived in Whitehall as a political weapon designed
to counter biased Soviet and American histories of wartime Resistance, which
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Introduction 11
had ignored the British contribution.21 In 1979, the British went a step further,
publishing the first volume of Harry Hinsley’s widely acclaimed five-volume
official history of British intelligence in the Second World War. Commissioned
a decade earlier, with strong support from the then Cabinet Secretary, Sir Burke
Trend, Hinsley’s history was designed, at least in part, to rehabilitate the reputa-
tion of British intelligence after damaging disclosures about upper-class moles,
including Kim Philby, who, from a safe haven in Moscow in 1968, had published
a devastating memoir, which trumpeted his treachery and excoriated the British
establishment.22
* * *
This collection is divided into two parts, each comprised of eight chapters.
Whereas the first part deals largely with historiography pertaining to American
secret services, the second part focuses on British intelligence literature. In
Chapter 1, Richard J. Aldrich illuminates the important role of activist writing
by leftist journalists in the shaping of the early public profile of the CIA. Building
on an in-depth case study of The Cloak and Dollar War (1953) – the first history
of the Agency, written by a British Marxist, Gordon Stewart – Aldrich argues
that the CIA exercised a peculiar fascination for a generation of activists over
some two decades. Like Aldrich and many of the other contributors in this
part, Eric Pullin is concerned with the development of CIA historiography,
in this case, the literature that examines the CIA’s covert sponsorship of the
Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). In a broad, yet meaningful, sweep of
the extant literature, Pullin demonstrates how writers have had to overcome
‘routine obstructionism’ by the CIA, which has peremptorily refused to release
documents on many aspects of its Cold War ‘hearts and minds’ campaigns.
Pleasingly, argues Pullin, writers have refused to be held hostage to the fragmen-
tary records that have surfaced; rather, they have found information elsewhere.
In Chapter 3, Matthew Jones and Paul McGarr also explore the issue of declassi-
fication, as they chart the battles that have been fought over the incorporation of
CIA activity within the State Department’s long-established documentary series,
Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS). According to Jones and McGarr,
the CIA’s part in the ‘declassification wars’ that have plagued the FRUS series
provides fascinating insights into the CIA’s motivation for protecting its equity
in the contested landscape of US foreign policy.
In Chapter 4, CIA Staff Historian Nicholas Dujmovic considers the lasting
impact of Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes (2007) – the most recently published
one-volume history of the CIA. Dujmovic forensically takes the book apart,
exposing not only the many factual inaccuracies, but Weiner’s judicious selec-
tion of source material. In a provocative central thesis, Dujmovic proposes that
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the book should be taught to students of intelligence, if only to reveal to them

how history can be twisted or ‘spun’ by authorial agenda. The next essay consid-
ers the evolution of historiography on CIA covert action. In his analysis of a
myriad of books on the subject, Kaeten Mistry contends that historiographical
controversies about covert action have framed the larger debate on US foreign
policy and American power. In Chapter 6, Melissa Graves surveys the defin-
ing debates in the historiography of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
Graves begins with the observation that books about the FBI were, for a long
time, little more than sycophantic biographies of J. Edgar Hoover – the first and
longest-serving Director of the Bureau. Some works, Graves reveals, were spon-
sored by Hoover himself, who was keen to promote the comic-strip image of a
well-oiled machine, peopled by G-Men gunning down gangsters and thwarting
communists with the latest scientific techniques.
The next two chapters shift attention to the popular culture of intelligence. In
Chapter 7, Simon Willmetts discusses the place of culture as both an object of
study and an interpretive framework. In a bid to break the divide between spy
fiction and the academic study of intelligence, he contends that scholars of intel-
ligence should engage more with postmodern philosophers of history, such as
Fredric Jameson and Hayden White, as well as literary turns and cultural theory.
In Chapter 8, Frederick P. Hitz – a former Inspector General of the CIA and
Chief of European Operations – draws upon his inside knowledge of Anglo-US
intelligence, in order to compare a number of real espionage cases with fictional
spies, who have been created by the likes of John le Carré. In doing so, he shows
that spy fact is invariably stranger than spy fiction.
Robert Johnson kicks off Part 2 with an overview of the literature on ‘The
Great Game’ – the struggle for supremacy between Britain and Tsarist Russia
in Central Asia, which was immortalised by Rudyard Kipling in his novel Kim.
Specifically, he tours the literature that conceptualises The Great Game as an
intelligence contest, carried out by brave and heroic clandestine agents, rather
than just a symptom of geostrategy and great power politics. In Chapter 10, Jim
Beach provides an authoritative survey of the historiography of British military
intelligence. Military intelligence history, Beach notes, sits at the intersection
between military history and intelligence studies; in view of this, there is no
formal grouping of military intelligence historians and no universal adherence
to an explicit and exclusive intellectual programme. The next essay, by Samantha
Newbery, covers the historiography of interrogation and intelligence-gathering.
Newbery shows that the current literature is divided into three main areas. First,
there are works that consider whether interrogation techniques can ever be
justified. Second, there are works that ponder the effectiveness of interrogation.
And third, there is a body of scholarship concentrating on torture. According
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Introduction 13
to Newbery, the study of interrogation for intelligence purposes has a broad

intellectual base, with inputs from political scientists, lawyers, psychologists and
moral philosophers.
The next four chapters all examine and reflect upon seminal spy books. In
Chapter 12, Christopher Murphy draws on new archival evidence to expose
Whitehall’s ‘vetting’ of M. R. D. Foot’s classic official history, SOE in France
(1966). Murphy reveals that, in the months leading up to the eventual publica-
tion of the book in April 1966, the authorities screened the text from every
possible angle, making particular efforts to ensure that the history did not offend
the French, especially President Charles de Gaulle, who had the power to veto
Britain’s application to join the Common Market. Daniel Lomas provides similar
insights into official attitudes towards disclosure with a richly researched chapter
on the genesis of The London Cage – the 1957 memoir of Lieutenant Colonel
Alexander Scotland. During the Second World War, Scotland had headed the
section of the War Office that was responsible for interrogating enemy prison-
ers of war, known colloquially as the ‘London Cage’. Submitted for censorship
in 1954, his memoir was published after a three-year delay, and only after all
the incriminating material, including suggestions of torture, had been deleted.
In Chapter 14, Adam Svendsen proposes that 1968 was a ‘Year to Remember’
for the study of British intelligence, owing to the publication of a number of
landmark spy memoirs, including Donald McLachlan’s Room 39 and Kenneth
Strong’s Intelligence at the Top. Such works, Svendsen argues, were symbolic of
a new era of liberalisation in Whitehall concerning intelligence history. In the
penultimate chapter, legendary investigative journalist and spy writer Chapman
Pincher explores the origins and legacy of his most famous work, Their Trade
is Treachery (1981), which publicised, for the first time, the allegation that Sir
Roger Hollis – a former Director General of MI5 – had been a Soviet spy.
In the final chapter, Christopher Baxter and Keith Jeffery offer a timely look at
the commissioning and writing of official histories of intelligence. As discussed
earlier, in 2009 and 2010, MI5 and SIS boldly celebrated their centenary with
authorised accounts, with Jeffery penning the volume on the SIS. Certain cynics
have suggested that governments should not be writing their own history, while
other detractors bemoan the fact that the authors in question are allowed to
inspect documents that the rest of the academic community may not see for
generations, if at all.23 Baxter and Jeffery consider these issues and explore the
type of access that official historians are given.
Overall, this collection represents an original investigation of the moods and
trends in intelligence studies, throughout its phases of development. It is hoped
that readers will both widen and deepen their interest in intelligence historiog-
raphy, which, in turn, should help to inform and enliven current debates in the
MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd 13 21/02/2013 08:23

field. The time has come to think about what it means to be a scholar of intel-
ligence today.
Notes
1 Christopher Andrew and David Dilks (eds), The Missing Dimension: Governments
and Intelligence Communities in the Twentieth Century (Basingstoke: Macmillan,
1984); Oliver Hoare (ed.), ‘British Intelligence in the Twentieth Century: A Missing
Dimension?’, Intelligence and National Security, Special Issue 17(1), 2000; Calder
Walton and Christopher Andrew, ‘Still the Missing Dimension: British Intelligence
and the Historiography of British Decolonisation’, in Patrick Major and Christopher
Moran (eds), Spooked: Britain, Empire and Intelligence since 1945 (Cambridge:
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009); Hilary Footitt, ‘Another Missing Dimension?
Foreign Languages in World War II Intelligence’, Intelligence and National Security,
25(3), 2010, pp. 271–89; Philip H. J. Davies, ‘The Missing Dimension’s Missing
Dimension’, Public Policy and Administration, 25(1), 2010, pp. 5–9.
2 Michael Warner, ‘Wanted: A Definition of “Intelligence” ’, Studies in Intelligence,
46(2), 2002; Arthur S. Hulnick, ‘What’s Wrong with the Intelligence Cycle?’,
Intelligence and National Security, 21(6), December 2006, pp. 959–79; Loch Johnson,
‘Preface to a Theory of Strategic Intelligence’, International Journal of Intelligence and
Counterintelligence, 16(4), 2003, pp. 638–63; Loch Johnson, ‘Bricks and Mortar for a
Theory of Intelligence’, Comparative Strategy, 22(1), 2003, pp. 1–28; Wesley K. Wark,
‘The Study of Intelligence: Past, Present, Future?’, Intelligence and National Security,
8(3), July 1993, pp. 1–13; Richard J. Aldrich, ‘Did Waldegrave Work? The Impact of
Open Government Upon British History’, Twentieth Century British History, 9(1),
1998, pp. 111–26; Richard J. Aldrich, ‘“Grow your own”: Cold War Intelligence
and History Supermarkets’, Intelligence and National Security, 17(1), Spring 2002,
pp. 135–52; Len Scott and Peter Jackson, ‘The Study of Intelligence in Theory and
Practice’, Intelligence and National Security, 19(2), Summer 2004, pp. 139–69;
Michael Goodman, ‘Studying and Teaching About Intelligence: The Approach in
the United Kingdom’, Studies in Intelligence, 50(2), 2006; Len Scott, ‘Sources and
Methods in the Study of Intelligence: A British View’, Intelligence and National
Security, 22(2), April 2007, pp. 185–205; Richard C. Thurlow, ‘The Historiography
and Source Materials in the Study of Internal Security in Modern Britain (1885–
1956)’, History Compass, 6(1), January 2008, pp. 147–71; R. Gerald Hughes and Len
Scott, ‘“Knowledge is Never too Dear”: Exploring Intelligence Archives’, in R. Gerald
Hughes, Peter Jackson and Len Scott (eds), Exploring Intelligence Archives: Enquiries
into the Secret State (London: Routledge, 2008).
3 John Ferris, Intelligence and Strategy: Selected Essays (London: Routledge, 2005), p.
101.
4 Cited in Christopher Andrew, For the President’s Eyes Only: Secret Intelligence and
the American Presidency from Washington to Bush (New York, NY: HarperCollins,
1995), p. 8.
5 See Christopher Moran, Classified: Secrecy and the State in Modern Britain
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
6 Eddie Chapman, The Eddie Chapman Story (New York, NY: Messner, 1953).
MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd 14 21/02/2013 08:23

Introduction 15
7 See Frank Snepp, Irreparable Harm: A Firsthand Account of How One Agent Took on
the CIA in an Epic Battle over Free Speech (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas,
1999).
8 Bernard Porter, ‘Secrets from the Edge’, Intelligence and National Security, 9(4), 1994,
p. 763.
9 Christopher Moran, ‘Intelligence and the Media: The Buster Crabb Affair, Secrecy
and the Press’, Intelligence and National Security, 26(5), 2011, pp. 676–700.
10 H. Macmillan to D. Sandys, 4 May 1959, TNA PREM 11/2800.
11 ‘Over 10 Million Pages of CIA Declassified Records Available’, available at: https://www.
cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/2007-featured-story-archive/
over-10-million-pages-of-cia-declassified-records-available.html.
12 HC Deb, 21 November 1979, Hansard, vol. 974, cc402–520.
13 HC Stmnt: [Security] (Roger Hollis), 26 March 1981, Hansard HC [1/1079-85],
available at: http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104603.
14 Peter Wright (with Paul Greengrass), Spycatcher (Melbourne: Heinemann, 1987).
15 Malcolm Turnbull, The Spycatcher Trial (London: Heinemann, 1988), p. 75.
16 Richard J. Aldrich, ‘Policing the Past: Official History, Secrecy and British Intelligence
since 1945’, English Historical Review, 119, September 2004, pp. 922–53; Nicholas
Wilkinson, Secrecy and the Media: The Official History of the United Kingdom’s
D-Notice System (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009); Christopher Moran and Simon
Willmetts, ‘Secrecy, Censorship and Beltway Books: Understanding the Work of
the CIA’s Publications Review Board’, International Journal of Intelligence and
Counterintelligence, 24(2), 2011, pp. 239–52.
17 Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorised History of MI5
(London: Allen Lane, 2009); Keith Jeffery, MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence
Service (London: Bloomsbury, 2010).
18 Available at: https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-
publications/books-and-monographs/index.html.
19 Nicholas Dujmovic, ‘Getting CIA History Right: The Informal Partnership between
Agency Historians and Outside Scholars’, Intelligence and National Security, 26(2–3),
2011, pp. 228–45.
20 See Christopher Moran, ‘The Last Assignment: David Atlee Phillips and the Birth of
CIA Public Relations’, International History Review (forthcoming 2013).
21 Christopher J. Murphy, ‘The Origins of SOE in France’, Historical Journal, 46, 2003,
pp. 936–52.
22 Kim Philby, My Silent War: Autobiography of a Spy (London: MacGibbon & Kee,
1968).
23 See, for example, David Walker, ‘Just How Intelligent?’, Guardian Education, 18
February 2003, p. 15; Anthony Glees, ‘Can the Spooks be Spooked?’, Times Higher
Education, 17 June 2005, pp. 16–17.
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MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd 16 21/02/2013 08:23
PART I
AMERICAN INTELLIGENCE
HISTORIOGRAPHY
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MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd 18 21/02/2013 08:23
Chapter 1
CIA HISTORY AS A COLD WAR BATTLEGROUND:

THE FORGOTTEN FIRST WAVE OF AGENCY
NARRATIVES
Richard J. Aldrich
Where does the history of the history of intelligence begin? As a self-conscious

academic subject, intelligence history is widely understood to have started in the
1980s. In Britain, Christopher Andrew and David Dilks proclaimed a deliber-
ate manifesto for intelligence historians in 1984, urging scholars to explore the
‘missing dimension’. Broadly contemporaneous with this, the American histo-
rian Richard Immerman asserted that it was important to incorporate covert
action into any sophisticated understanding of foreign policy. The mid-1980s
also saw the creation of the journal Intelligence and National Security, edited by
Christopher Andrew and Michael Handel.1 Since that time, we have enjoyed an
increasingly rich and complex series of studies in the field of intelligence history,
both official and unofficial. By far, the greatest volume of writing has focused on
the history of the CIA.2
Even in the early 1980s, there was already a rich book literature on the CIA.
This was the result of more than twenty years of exposure by investigative jour-
nalists and, latterly, disgruntled former officers. This ‘vernacular’ history of the
CIA is often thought to begin in early 1960.3 Although the analytical role of the
CIA had received some press attention in the 1950s, its more secret activities
were spotlighted by the shoot-down of a U-2 spy-plane, which was piloted by
Gary Powers in May 1960.4 This trend towards exposure was reinforced by the
ill-fated Bay of Pigs operation intended to topple Castro in April 1961, which
highlighted covert action. These dramatic events ‘lifted the lid’ on the CIA,
encouraging journalists to be more aggressive in their writings about American
intelligence and prompting them to probe the murky subject of covert action.
Certainly, the first extended accounts of CIA activities to be written by American
journalists, such as Andrew Tully, David Wise and Thomas Ross, were triggered
by these events.5
The failed invasion of Cuba also hurt Allen Dulles personally. For more than
a decade, Dulles had enjoyed the mystique of being America’s spymaster among
Washington’s cognoscenti. Now, he had departed under a cloud. In April 1962,
19
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Figure 4 CIA Director Allen Dulles poses for cameras in Washington, DC on

24 January 1953 (Press Association, PA.4932615)
a year after the invasion, two of America’s most prominent Latin American
correspondents – Tad Szulc of the New York Times and Karl E. Meyer of the
Washington Post – published an account of the Bay of Pigs, which pinned the
blame for the Bay of Pigs squarely on Allen Dulles and the CIA. Meanwhile,
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CIA History as a Cold War Battleground 21
they exonerated John F. Kennedy and the White House. Szulc had, in fact, been
extensively briefed by Arthur Schlesinger Jr and the Kennedy White House. The
CIA complained that their descriptions of American intelligence were more
acerbic than those to be found in the Soviet Press.6
The gloves were off, and this encouraged the CIA to put its own narrative
into the public domain, beginning with Allen Dulles’s Craft of Intelligence in
1963 (see Figure 4). In fact, this book was partly ghost written by a team of CIA
officials, who were working under the direction of Howard Roman.7 Over the
next decade, there was a gradual increase of revelatory publications, beginning
as a trickle in the early 1960s, but becoming a flood by the early 1970s. These
accounts initially consisted of works by investigative reporters, inquiries by
congressional committees and a growing corpus of memoirs, the latter of which
were penned by disaffected officials. The CIA also enjoyed growing cultural
representation in both films and fictions.8 In short, the early 1960s represented
a period of exposure in which American journalists appeared to write the first
draft of Agency history; to which, the CIA began to respond, with its first experi-
ment in counter-narrative.
The works of pioneering American journalists, such as Andrew Tully, David
Wise and Thomas Ross, in the early 1960s are rightly regarded as the first main-
stream popular ‘histories’ of the CIA. Yet, these were not, in fact, the first books
produced on the CIA. The Agency enjoyed an even earlier pre-historiography
of propagandistic works, which were inspired by the Soviet bloc. In 1964, when
David Wise and Thomas Ross published their controversial book on the CIA,
entitled Invisible Government, there was already a decade of world literature on
the Agency. Between 1953 and 1964, approximately twenty books with a strong
CIA focus were published, and most of these were produced outside the United
States. During the 1950s, American journalists may have exercised self-restraint
in their coverage of the CIA, avoiding operational detail and averting their eyes
from covert action. However, this created a vacuum, which foreign writers and
non-American publishers were more than happy to fill.
Some of these foreign studies of the CIA were enterprising activities by
independent journalists. However, the vast majority were themselves Cold War
polemics, penned by writers working for the Soviet Bloc or by communistic
fellow travellers in the West. The extent to which the intelligence services were
engaged in a cultural Cold War during the 1950s and 1960s is widely under-
stood.9 However, we have not yet appreciated the extent to which these intel-
ligence services were themselves increasingly drawn into a competitive process
of narrative and counter-narrative. Communist parties around the world vied
with each other to produce propagandistic works on CIA misdemeanours,
which – they claimed – symbolised American foreign policy in general. Moscow
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was especially keen to spotlight the CIA’s activities in the Third World as symp-
tomatic of neo-imperialism. In other words, the first wave of CIA history was
itself part of the Cold War struggle and constituted a propaganda battleground.10
In short, this essay asserts that the origin of CIA historiography lies within
the dynamics of the Cold War conflict itself. Despite a professed commitment
to the clandestine, the spies of both East and West were themselves the first to
begin lifting the veil of secrecy around their own work. It is difficult to detect
who fired the first ‘shot’ in the evolving battle of self-narration by the intel-
ligence services. One candidate may well be the 1948 memoir of the Soviet
Glavnoye Razvedovatel’noye Upravlenie (GRU) cypher clerk, Igor Gouzenko,
who defected in Canada, shortly after the end of the Second World War.11
Alexander Foote’s memoir of his work as a member of the fabled Red Orchestra,
which was published in 1949, is another strong contender. This latter work was
effectively ghostwritten by the British authorities and was certainly read and
cleared by Sir Stewart Menzies – then Chief of the SIS – prior to publication. The
KGB, the Stasi, MI5, MI6, IRD and the CIA all sponsored book-length manu-
scripts concerning each other in this remarkable battle of the books.12
The forgotten first wave of Moscow-inspired writing on the CIA is as obscure
as it is mysterious. Beginning in 1953, this essay seeks to explore five writers who
were particularly important in its genesis: Gordon Stewart, Julius Mader, Bob
Edwards, Carl Marzani and Joachim Joesten. While their work is different, they
cross reference each other regularly, and their quarry is the same – effectively,
they hunt as a pack.13 Although much of this first wave of writing was clearly
inspired by Moscow and its satellites, its impact on public opinion outside the
Eastern Bloc appears to have been limited. However, by the mid-1960s, the
picture was changing, as mainstream authors began to draw on this material.
The CIA’s negative public profile was damaging its relations with the developing
regions, notably South Asia and South America. Perhaps unconsciously, these
works had also begun to tap into America’s boundless appetite for conspiracy
theories. Langley was now aware that it was a target, and the complex relation-
ship between secrecy, public profile and reputation was looming ever larger
during the meetings that the Director of the CIA held each morning with his
senior staff.
THE CLOAK AND DOLLAR WAR

The first book on the CIA appeared in 1953. Entitled The Cloak and Dollar War,
it offered reprise of the CIA’s covert action programme in Europe, including its
propaganda operations and its failed attempts to roll back communism in coun-
tries such as Poland and Hungary. Substantial space was devoted to justifying
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the show trials of Western agents uncovered in Eastern Europe during 1951 and
1952. Produced in Britain as a political tract by a far-Left publishing company,
its tone was propagandistic and shrill. Although it now appears to be a slender
text, to write any sort of a book about the CIA, a mere six years after the Agency
was created, was, nevertheless, a remarkable achievement. Moreover, some of
the detail that it provided on the CIA’s operations in the East was compelling
and, in places, wholly accurate. It covers not only the work of the CIA in Poland
and Hungary, but also the growing architecture of US Cold War operations,
including Truman’s Psychological Strategy Board.14
Its author, Gordon Neil Stewart, spotlights the remarkable openness of
the CIA’s Cold War fighting campaign in the early 1950s. Stewart was then
employed by the Hungarian News and Information Service and, although it is
clear that the book was driven by a certain degree of inside knowledge, much of
the detail – and, indeed, particularly its more compelling sections – are drawn
directly from a close reading of the international press. Stewart used explicit
references to respected Western media outlets and well-known journalists to
great effect, in order to substantiate his story. For example, he quoted James
Reston of the New York Times, giving details of the CIA’s ‘mushroom growth’
under Walter Bedell Smith, including its budget and its twenty-two buildings
in central Washington.15 In his chapter on ‘The Department of Dirty Tricks’, he
quotes New York Times correspondent C. L. Sulzeberger’s report of 9 April 1951,
in which he asserted:
Operational political warfare against puppet regimes in Soviet satellite states has
now started . . . Leaflets have been scattered over Albania and Bulgaria. Special
underground radio stations apparently are being erected to encourage opposi-
tion elements . . . A number of parachuted agents have landed in the (Albanian)
mountains.16
In his chapter ‘West Berlin – Spy Centre’, Stewart used the British press to
substantiate the charge that the CIA was helping to create a new German intel-
ligence service with links to ‘neo-fascist organisations’. He quoted Sefton Delmer
of the London Daily Express (and former Political Warfare Executive [PWE]
Operative), who noted:
For the time being the ex-Nazi graduates of the allied re-education camp again
are on their best behaviour . . . The secret Intelligence organisation run by Major-
General Gehlen, former head of Hitler’s Soviet intelligence section, is an expel in
point. General Gelen’s organisation is receiving $3 ½ million a year (about £11/4
million) from its American sponsors, a sum they are able to multiply into many
times its dollar value by skilful market operations . . .17
Stewart’s book was published by Lawrence & Wishart – a company that special-
ised in Leftist books and Marxist political tracts. Indeed, Lawrence & Wishart
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was almost an arm of the Communist Party of Great Britain and was closely
networked with groups of pro-Soviet figures moving between London and the
continent.
Gordon Neil Stewart was a colourful character. Born on 25 June 1912 to a
wealthy family in Melbourne, who owned substantial amounts of land in the
Bathurst district of New South Wales, he was the great-grandson of Major-
General William Stewart, who had been Lieutenant Governor of New South
Wales in the 1820s. Stewart enjoyed a rather episodic education at The Scots
College in Sydney, on account of the fact that his parents were great travellers.
However, he soon developed a love of books, as a result of long summer holidays
spent reading in the library of his uncle’s residence – the vast forty-bedroomed
Abercrombie House in Bathurst. Stewart’s predominant educational and cul-
tural influence was inter-war France. In his late teens, Stewart oscillated between
Paris, where his father was working, and London, where other members of his
family were living. He began to move in literary and artistic circles, attending an
English language school in Paris, before studying at the Sorbonne. In his twen-
ties, he moved permanently to London, where he worked as a journalist and
writer of popular history. 18
Stewart served as an artillery officer in the Far East during the Second World
War, before returning to a career in writing and journalism. By the late 1940s,
he was working for the Hungarian News and Information Services in London19
and, by 1952, had become its London Director.20 Hungary was engaged in a
vigorous propaganda war with the West. The British Council had recently been
‘ejected’ from Hungary, accompanied by ‘allegations of espionage’ relating to
its employees during a wave of increasingly bitter show-trials, some of which
involved Noel Field. Similar episodes were in train within Albania, Rumania and
Russia, although the British Council was still working in Czechoslovakia, Poland
and Bulgaria.21
Stewart was also becoming interested in American espionage. In 1952, he
published an article in World News and Views called ‘Washington – World Spy
Centre’.22 This magazine was the weekly equivalent of the Daily Worker – the
newspaper of the British Communist Party.23 What Stewart had discovered was
that Washington’s secret spy centre was, in fact, an open secret. As we have seen,
a great deal of his material was culled by simply going to the British Library and
carefully perusing the New York Times and the Washington Post. Most American
journalists were cautious about mentioning intelligence in the 1950s, but the
material was there, if you knew where to look. This research was mingled with
Soviet Bloc news material on liberation activities. Yet, while Stewart’s book on
the CIA was remarkable for 1953, it failed to cause a splash. The print run seems
to have been respectable, and, yet, it attracted no mainstream press discussion
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or reviews and was noticed primarily by like-minded individuals, who regularly

purchased Left-wing tracts.24
Lawrence & Wishart – the publishing company who published the book –
had long-standing connections with Soviet espionage, which stretched back
into the 1930s. The first Director of Wishart Books, Douglas Garman, had lived
in Leningrad in the 1930s. He joined the Communist Party of Great Britain
in 1934, but resigned to become a secret member in 1935. Garman was the
Director of Wishart Books from 1935. In 1936, Wishart books merged with
Martin Lawrence Books – the Communist Party’s official publisher. In the late
1930s, the manager at Martin Lawrence was Douglas Parsons. Parsons joined
the Communist Party in 1923. In the 1930s, he was also employed by the Daily
Worker. In 1938, MI5 decided to give Lawrence & Wishart concerted attention,
because of a dawning realisation that it ‘has employed and been directed for
many years by Communists and persons suspected of espionage’.25
MI5’s interest in Lawrence & Wishart had been sparked by the famous
1938 Woolwich Arsenal case. This saw Percy Glading – a leading member of
the Communist Party of Great Britain – convicted of military espionage for
the Soviets. Thereafter, MI5 applied to the Home Office with the request to
tap the two telephones in the offices of Lawrence & Wishart, noting that it
had become increasingly clear that these premises were used for ‘illegal and
conspiratorial activities’. Five of the six Directors were active members of the
Communist Party, and two were closely associated with soviet military espio-
nage. The key figure under surveillance was Douglas Parsons, who was believed
to have been the courier for Percy Glading and had regular contact with Soviet
military intelligence operatives working out of Moscow’s London embassy.
In 1956, MI5 were still working with the Metropolitan Special Branch to keep
Lawrence & Wishart under surveillance.26
During the early 1950s, Stewart was himself under MI5 surveillance.27 In
conducting his work for the Hungarians, Stewart also worked under the aliases
Gordon Anderson and John Weston. He decided to leave Britain and return
to Australia in June 1955, and MI5 handed his case to the Australian Security
Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), who tailed him assiduously, literally from
the moment he stepped off the gangplank on arrival in Sydney. Thereafter,
Stewart became the editor of Friendship – the magazine of the Australian–Soviet
Friendship Society, and worked in Sydney as a labour journalist, largely cover-
ing the mining and construction industry. He was still attending meetings of the
Bondi Beach branch of the Communist Party of Australia in 1969. However, his
interest had now drifted away from espionage towards anthologies of Australian
writings on the supernatural.
In 1983, he retired to the family seat of Bathurst.28 In old age, he was
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fascinated by revelations about the cultural Cold War. A friend brought him a
recent copy of The New Yorker. This contained a long article, which was appar-
ently ‘very well researched’, showing how the US Government ‘had almost all
the prominent writers spied on and under police surveillance’. He noted that
even Edmund Wilson, who had studied Marxism in order to refute it, had a
dossier with the FBI. Stewart pondered: ‘I wonder how much literary spying is
done here?’29 But by this stage, it was the Reagan era, and Stewart regularly joked
with his friend, Jack Beasley, that: ‘The great thing about modern literature is
the writers don’t have dossiers with ASIO – they are all good conservatives!’30
He was especially fascinated to learn that Ronald Reagan had once informed on
his actor colleagues. Stewart had now begun his own memoirs, which might well
have contained their own revelations, but with the Cold War over and the Soviet
Union dissolved, he was agonising over how to deal with communism without
appearing ‘patronising’. The memoirs were still incomplete when he died on 15
February 1999.31
ALLEN DULLES AS SPYMASTER

During the late 1950s, the target of Eastern Bloc writing about the CIA shifted.
The new focus was predominantly personal attacks on Allen Dulles – America’s
emblematic spy-chief. Allen Dulles had served in the Office of Strategic Services
(OSS) as the head of the Berne station during the Second World War, and
post-war, he had acted as a consultant on the structure of the early CIA in
1948. In 1953, he succeeded Walter Bedell Smith as the Director of Central
Intelligence, having served as his deputy for the previous two years. Although
the CIA had enjoyed a public relations effort since its inception in 1947, there
was a step change with the advent of Allen Dulles. From his elegant house in the
Georgetown district of Washington, Dulles sought to charm the press, inviting
trusted journalists to his dinner table for ‘off the record’ briefings. Although con-
certed efforts were made to keep the CIA’s covert action programmes out of the
public eye, Dulles was comfortable about general press coverage of the CIA as
an intelligence machine and provided the press with exclusive interviews in the
CIA headquarters building as early as 1954.32 Adopting a wistful air, he enjoyed
being photographed in the DCI’s office against a map of the world, on which the
Eastern Bloc was adorned with marker pins. In short, Dulles relished being the
public face of American espionage. His wartime role as head of the OSS station
in Berne was widely known, and Dulles himself had already published a book
entitled Germany’s Underground.33
All this provided Moscow with a target of opportunity. As Paul Maddrell has
demonstrated, perhaps the most interesting example of Eastern Bloc writers
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on intelligence during the 1950s is Julius Mader. In 1959, he penned a study of

Dulles and the CIA entitled Allen’s Gangster’s in Action. This book was expanded
and re-issued in 1961.34 Like Gordon Stewart’s work, this study contained a great
deal of factually accurate material, but, at the same time, it was also deliberately
propagandistic and selective. Indeed, Mader’s book on Dulles draws largely
on Gordon Stewart’s earlier study.35 As Maddrell demonstrates, Mader was
working closely with the authorities and was regarded as on ‘special duty’ with
the Stasi or Ministry of State Security from 1958, while simultaneously working
for the East German publisher DieWirtschaft. 36
Mader’s real name was Thomas Bergner, and he was born in 1928 in the
Czech village of Radejč ín. His family was Sudeten German, and they were for-
cibly moved to the Soviet Zone of Germany in 1945. However, this offered him
the opportunity to study political science and law at the Universities of Berlin
and Jena, the Institute of Internal Trade in Leipzig and the German Academy for
Political and Legal Science in Potsdam-Babelsberg. Mader wrote many books on
espionage, and his main focus was West Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service,
the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), and its sister agency, the West German
Security Service or BfV. However, the CIA and its British sister service – the
SIS – were always present, because of their sponsorship and tutelage of Bonn’s
new security agencies.
Mader’s approach reflected his primary audience – the population of East
Germany. The central argument in all of his work – on both the BND and the
CIA – was hidden Nazis and the collaboration with neo-fascists. Mader dwelled
at length on the wartime credentials of the first head of the BND – Reinhard
Gehlen – claiming that he was a Nazi war criminal. The distasteful idea of
Nazi associations was also deployed in his treatment of Dulles, focusing on his
wartime efforts with the OSS to search for an early peace and ‘secret surrender’ of
some of Germany’s forces in northern Italy through mediation in Switzerland.37
In other words, Mader drew on themes already present in the writings of Dulles,
albeit placing a malignant interpretation upon them. Thereafter, he spent a great
deal of time researching the issue of Nazi gold.38
Some of Mader’s discussion of the CIA focused on intelligence analysis. He
argued that the CIA’s Office of National Estimates was ‘the greatest falsifier in
the world’, distorting its picture of global events and, therefore, warping US
foreign policy. He also suggested that intrusions by spy-planes amounted to
provocative activity by the CIA, which endangered peace. However, like Gordon
Stewart, his main charge was to suggest that the CIA, SIS and BND were all
engaged in ‘Cold War fighting’, which was dangerous and amounted to war-
mongering. The primary audience for Maders’ work was the Eastern Bloc, and
its purpose was to alert the populations of the Soviet empire to be on watch for
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Western subversion, meanwhile, extending a useful legitimacy to the activities

of the Eastern Bloc security services. Accordingly, like Stewart, Mader dwells at
length on the radio broadcasting of units, such as Radio Free Europe, and the
campaigns of leaflet propaganda. He documents the contact between Western
intelligence and émigré organisations, including the Ukrainians, who were
undoubtedly fighting a terroristic campaign inside the Soviet borderlands in the
1950s.39
Perhaps his most serious charge was the interplay of the CIA and the US
Army Counter-Intelligence Corps with Germans of an unsavoury Nazi past.
Mader’s personal attacks on Dulles also seek to cast up a pro-Nazi theme within
the secret surrender negotiations, designed to knock out the German war effort
in north Italy. Here, he employed a range of dubious ‘documents’, which seem
to have been provided by the Soviets. Mader alleged that, during the Second
World War, Dulles was pro-German, friendly to fascism and anti-Semitic. He
added that Dulles owed primary allegiance to rich and powerful private com-
mercial interests. The explicit assumption was that this new CIA was the servant
of big business and corporate greed was a key theme in Mader’s writing.40 While
his writings were highly propagandistic, few of his claims can be shown to be
entirely untrue.
In 1961, Moscow appears to have sponsored an attempt to replay Mader’s
themes for Western audiences. Their chosen vehicle was the British Member
of Parliament Bob Edwards, who had fought alongside George Orwell in the
Spanish Civil War and had subsequently written the introduction to Homage
to Catatonia. A long-serving member of the Chemical Workers Union, he
had visited Moscow on their behalf as early as 1927 and, by 1947, had become
Secretary of the Union. Transferring from the Independent Labour Party to
mainstream Labour, he served as MP for Bilston (1955–74) and later as MP
for Wolverhampton south-east from 1974 to 1987. Edwards was prominent in
Europe, and, by 1966, he had become Vice Chairman of the Western European
Union Defence committee. He was a frequent commentator on German issues
and accused both Britain and the United States of conspiring to divide Europe,
insisting that the German leader Adenauer was essentially a Hitler in Atlanticist
clothing.41
Christopher Andrew’s recent studies of Soviet espionage describe Bob
Edwards as a veteran KGB agent and an enthusiastic participant in Soviet-
influenced operations. In 1980, Moscow decided to award him the Order of
People’s Friendship – their third highest decoration. His KGB case officer,
Leonid Zaitsev, was allowed to take this medal to a meeting with him in Brussels
in order to show it to him, although it was kept on file in Moscow.42 Edwards
was an active part of the European Movement – ironically, an organisation
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which was heavily subsidised by the CIA.43 One of his key tasks during the
1950s appears to have been to keep an eye on American efforts to support East
European exile groups in Western Europe through the various components of
the European Movement.44 As a veteran Europeanist, he was well connected in
European security circles and ideally placed to report to Moscow on the politics
of West European defence. Harold Wilson consulted him on the composition
of UK delegations to the Council of Europe, while the Secretary General of the
North Atlantic Council regularly asked his advice on administrative appoint-
ments within his organisation.45
In 1961, Edwards co-authored, with Kenneth Dunne, a short study of Dulles,
entitled Portrait of a Master Spy. Edwards claimed that this book was ‘the first
exposure of the CIA’.46 But soon afterwards, the CIA learned that the book was
not written Edwards and Dunne at all, but merely fronted by them. The original
text was researched in Moscow by Vasilli Sitnikov – a senior KGB officer – and
only given a final polish in the UK before printing.47 Sitnikov was a career
political-action officer and had served in Berlin and Vienna in the 1950s, before
rising to the position of Deputy Head of Department D (Deception). The major-
ity of his work was handling KGB contacts with Western newspapers, and one
of his most important tasks was reputed to have been overseeing the placement
of Kim Philby’s memoirs.48 The CIA’s response to the KGB’s campaign was
to expose it. Allen Dulles chose to discuss the Master Spy book in a TV round
table on 29 March 1964, which was chaired by Hanson W. Baldwin – the New
York Times defence correspondent.49 Waving a copy of the offending book
directly at the camera, Dulles publicly identified KGB officer Sitnikov as the real
author. Dulles was joined on the chat show by Peter Deryabin – a Soviet intel-
ligence officer, who had defected a few years earlier. Deryabin recalled serving
alongside Sitnikov in his KGB Vienna residency in the 1950s. Dulles added: ‘He
has a whole dossier on me, I’ve read some things here about myself that even
I didn’t know’.50 Although Edwards had been publicly ‘outed’ by Dulles as a
Soviet stooge, he continued to play the role of a dogged anti-CIA investigator.
On 21 July 1964, only a few months after the Dulles riposte, Edwards questioned
Duncan Sandys – the Colonial Secretary in the House of Commons – about
CIA operations in British Guiana. In a heated exchange, Sandys openly asked if
Edwards was accusing the CIA of conducting killings in that territory.51
Unsurprisingly, Master Spy replayed many of the ideas explored by Stewart
and Mader. However, a new aspect of the narrative was the idea that US intel-
ligence was spying on its own allies. It spotlighted the recent testimony of Martin
and Mitchell – two recent defectors from America’s code-breaking service, the
National Security Agency (NSA). The defectors had related how NSA deciphered
the telegrams of more than forty countries, including NATO allies Turkey,
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Italy and France. They also discussed the deliberate sale of American cipher
machines, so as to compromise the communications of allies. Edwards and
Dunne were perhaps the first to point to the possibility of CIA espionage inside
Britain. They stated that, in Britain alone, there were some 4,000 American
officials and service personnel, and they openly speculated as to what their real
intentions were. They noted that academic commentators had critiqued the
CIA for failing to assess the impact of de Gaulle on France’s position in NATO.
Edwards and Dunne concluded that the CIA was busy collecting intelligence on
Western Europe and, indeed, within Britain. The wider theme that emerged was
clearly American neo-imperialism.52 Inevitably, the book also dwelled on ‘the
famous negotiations that took place in Switzerland’. They insisted that Dulles
had compromised British agents and was seeking to turn Hitler against Russia
by concluding a separate peace.53
Like Stewart’s 1953 tract on Cold War fighting, the text, which was produced
under the names of Edwards and Dunne, presents a puzzle. If Moscow wished
to use its agents of influence to write anti-CIA literature, why issue it through
obscure Leftist publishers, whose footprint was marginal, at best? The chosen
outlet was Housmans’ – a small, independent, radical publisher, whose traction
was modest. The initial publication seems to have reached only readers of far-
Left literature and was not widely reviewed. However, their work was re-issued
in Spanish and widely circulated in Latin America. It was issued in an expanded
edition, with an essay on Challe and the CIA by Claude Krief, an article on the
CIA and ‘Operation 40’ in Cuba by Drew Pearson and an essay on the CIA and
Guatemala by Gregorio Selser.54 More importantly, Master Spy was reproduced,
with only limited changes, as an American magazine article by Fred J. Cook.
Later authors, including Carl Marzani and Joachim Joesten, drew on the book in
their own writings on the CIA.
Master Spy exploited the first American academic literature on intelligence. It
picked up and amplified concerns being voiced by mainstream American aca-
demics, such as Harry Howe Ransom. In the 1950s, Ransom was a professor of
Political Science at Michigan State College. In 1959, he published a path-break-
ing academic analysis of the US national intelligence structure, entitled Central
Intelligence and National Security. In 1970, a second edition appeared as The
Intelligence Establishment. Its main focus was intelligence analysis and national
estimates, and many officials regarded this as a sober and reliable account of
the US intelligence system. Master Spy cited Ransom, in order to buttress the
claims that the CIA had its own secretive foreign policy. Ransom had voiced
his own concerns at the idea of a shadow state department, which spent large
sums on ‘undercover political intrigue’. Observers, Ransom continued, ‘often
get the impression that CIA agents, and the Intelligence operatives of other
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Government agencies, are in uncoordinated fashion in every dark alley, behind

every bush’.55 In April 1961, this emerging theme – an undercover element to
foreign policy, which was a public menace – was given new life by the advent
of the Bay of Pigs.56 Moreover, the visible and high profile failure of the Cuban
escapade also allowed pro-Soviet writers to intensify their focus on Dulles.57
CARL MARZANI AND THE BAY OF PIGS

Carl Marzani was an extraordinary figure. Over a career that spanned half
a century, he rubbed shoulders with Bill Donovan, Dick Helms, Arthur
Schlesinger, John Ford and Walt Rostow. An Italian–American immigrant, he
pursued several careers over his lifetime, as an intelligence officer, diplomat,
writer, editor and publisher. Having served in the wartime OSS, it is now clear
that he was also an operative for the KGB. In 1947, he was prosecuted for
concealing his Communist Party membership and sentenced to three years in
prison after a trial that reached the American Supreme Court. From the 1950s
onwards, he used his Left-orientated publishing companies as a vehicle for
Moscow’s information operations, and, indeed, his enterprises were kept afloat
by sizeable Soviet financial subsidies.
In the early summer of 1961, Marzani joined with Robert Light to rush out
the first book on the CIA and the Bay of Pigs, entitled Cuba vs. the CIA. Like
Gordon Stewart’s contribution, this was little more than a pamphlet, since it
was a mere seventy-two pages. Nevertheless, books with the term ‘CIA’ in the
title were not commonplace in 1961. Marzani and Light consciously replayed
the familiar themes that were favoured by previous pro-Soviet writers. They
traced the career of Dulles and claimed to publish: ‘for the first time in the US we
believe – a Hitler SS document covering Dulles’ meeting with a Nazi representa-
tive in 1943’. They explained that they were ‘indebted’ to Bob Edwards – a British
MP – and his book Portrait of a Master Spy, for ‘many of the facts on Allen
Dulles’.58
The main focus of the book was a detailed dissection of the decision-making
process behind the Bay of Pigs, and, for this, they fingered the CIA. Like Stewart,
they used the writings of mainstream American news outlets to substantiate
their claims, quoting Newsweek on what it called the ‘astounding ineptitude’ of
Allen Dulles.59 They also attacked the American press for censorship, pointing
out that the Latin American press had been reporting on CIA training camps,
which had been preparing for the operation for the best part of a year. Everyone
in the world seemed to have had advanced warning of the Cuban invasion,
except for the American public. The question no one was asking, they insisted,
was why US involvement in the invasion came as a surprise to Americans:
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That it should have been a shock to the reading public is a black mark against
American newspapers. Few stories have been more grossly mishandled and the
public rarely has been lied to more wilfully [sic]. The story was there for all to see
but the editors chose to wear blinkers. While the CIA operation was an open secret
in Florida and throughout Latin America, U.S. publications pretended that the
invasion preparations and the training camps were being handled by exiles.60
They were quite correct. The efforts of Tad Szulc – the top Latin American cor-
respondent at The New York Times – to write a report on the Bay of Pigs a mere
week before the event had caused a mixture of elation and anguish amongst the
paper’s editors. The extent to which Szulc’s original story was ‘suppressed’ is still
hotly debated, but there can be no doubt that references to the CIA were stripped
away from the version that eventually appeared. Other outlets pulled their cov-
erage altogether, at the request of the White House.61
Marzani and Light’s book was also one of the first to list the CIA’s major
covert action operations. They discussed the coup against the Mossadegh
government in Iran in 1953 and the overthrow of the Arbenz government in
Guatemala in 1954. They insisted that the CIA had helped Nasser to power in
Egypt and cited a British press report, which stated that the CIA had ‘disposed of
Patrice Lumumba’ in the Congo. They also made assertions relating to the CIA’s
activities in Laos, Algeria and Burma. They insisted that CIA policy was influ-
enced by the secret police in countries aboard and also by exile communities,
both of which were rabidly anti-communist and lacking in balance.62 Marzani
and Light were advancing a wider proposition, arguing that the CIA was a pro-
ponent of Cold War fighting, insisting that it was a destabilising influence in the
international system and an enemy of peace. They asserted: ‘Perhaps the most
important consequence of the failure of the Cuban invasion is that for the first
time the American people have had a glimpse of the sinister influence of the CIA
in foreign policy’.63
What Marzani did not reveal was his personal Cuban story. In September
1960, Marzani had visited Europe and the Soviet Union. In January 1961, he
returned to New York and began working on a Spanish-language edition of his
book on the Cold War, to be published in Havana. The Cuban delegation at the
United Nations arranged for him to visit Havana in February, in order to do the
final checking on the proofs. Staying at the Havana Hilton, he met up with an
old friend, Eddie Boorstein – an economist who had served alongside Marzani
in the Research and Analysis Division of OSS during the war. Like Marzani,
Boorstein was Leftist and was now on the staff of Che Guevara and was the head
of the Cuban National Bank. He also met up with his old friend and fellow KGB
agent Cedric Belfrage, who had served alongside the OSS in British Security
Coordination in New York during the war.
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Belfrage introduced him to Colonel Jacob Arbenz – the President of Guatemala

– who explained the details of how he had been overthrown by the CIA in 1954.
Meanwhile, Eddie Boorstein arranged for him to meet Che Guevara. Marzani
had been formally invited to discuss economic policy with Che Guevara, but
they never got around to the proposed subject:
My OSS buddy, Eddie Boorstein has ushered me into Che’s office. Che, at his desk,
waved his cigar in greeting. Without preamble, Che said in Spanish: ‘Will their [sic]
be an invasion?’ I said ‘Yes,’ and he said, ‘When?’ I said, ‘Tomorrow evening . . .
a week . . . a month . . . as soon as Kennedy gives the word’ ‘That’s what we think,
too’ he said.
This exchange took place precisely six weeks before the Bay of Pigs occurred.
They then proceeded to discuss military details and the likely size of the invasion.
Marzani hazarded a guess that the Americans would put in two divisions with
airpower, adding that the force of Cuban exiles trained by the CIA in Guatemala
was just a ‘fig leaf’. Che, who loved discussing military affairs, was supremely
confident that they would be defeated.64
During the last days of his visit to Cuba, Marzani had discussions with
Rodriquez, one of Castro’s more influential aides. Marzani, always a fan of
détente, argued for a rapprochement between Cuba and the Kennedy admin-
istration, suggesting that, on his return, he should contact Arthur Schlesinger
– one of Kennedy’s close aides – in order to see what could be done. Marzani had
offered advice to Schlesinger during the Kennedy campaign, relating to how to
reach voters on the Left. He had also known Schlesinger in the OSS, and, while
there was not exactly amity, there was courtesy and a trusted line of communi-
cation into the White House. He returned to New York on 10 February 1961,
ready to begin his ‘small operation’. However, extreme turbulence in his private
life delayed him in his efforts.65 He wrote to Schlesinger in late March, briefly
setting out his ideas, and, on the first day of April, Schlesinger responded that
he was aware of the arguments for rapprochement, but was not convinced.66 In
November 1961, in the wake of the failed invasion, Marzani told Walt Rostow,
another friend and former OSS comrade, that he felt a strong sense of guilt about
not making the effort to go and see Schlesinger personally, although he thought
that such an intervention would probably have made no difference.67
Carl Marzani felt at home with Che and Castro, because, for the last twenty
years, he had also been a committed international revolutionary. Although
Marzani was born in Rome in 1912, his family had immigrated to the United
States in 1924, settling in Pennsylvania. Marzani was an outstanding student and
won a scholarship that took him to Williams College. Here, he studied alongside
Dick Helms – a future CIA chief – with whom he regularly reconnected with
at various points throughout his life, including during his time in the OSS. He
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graduated in 1935, and, a year later, Williams College informed him that he had
won a Moody Fellowship, taking him to Oxford University. En route to Oxford
in 1936, he immersed himself in Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution. He
arrived to find European socialism convulsed by the Spanish Civil War. Marzani
suspended his studies at Oxford to join the Durruti Column – the main anar-
chist group in Spain. Influenced by events in Spain, Marzani and his new wife,
Edith, both joined the British Communist Party.
Returning to New York in the summer of 1939, he was greeted by his profes-
sors at Williams College, ‘like returning Marco Polo’. Marzani told them: ‘I had
been very impressed by the Communists in Spain, had found at Oxford that
Marxism was a satisfying philosophy, and had joined the British Communist
party. I was awaiting transfer to the American party’.68 In the late summer of
1939, many Leftists had been repulsed by Stalin’s decision to sign the Nazi–
Soviet Pact, but Marzani praised its pragmatism. Indeed, he joined the American
Communist party on 25 August 1939 – the day of the Nazi–Soviet Pact – and
left on 23 August 1941. It seems likely – though by no means certain – that he
was recruited as a KGB agent during this period. Accordingly, he attempted to
keep his membership of the American Communist Party secret, joining under
the alias of Tony Wales and deliberately seeking US Government service in late
1941.69
‘The Soviet Union was invaded on June 22, 1941’, recalls Marzani. ‘A com-
rade’s phone call gave us the news; Edith and I were at section headquarters
by five o’clock [in the morning] . . . we got coffee and Danish at an all-night
deli’.70 Marzani’s opportunity to join the American government service came
a few months later, with the advent of Pearl Harbor. His wife, Edith, also a
lifelong communist, thought it ‘foolhardy’ to seek work in Washington, given
his salience with the FBI, both as Tony Wales and Carl Marzani, but he pressed
ahead, regardless. As a trained economist, he headed for the newly formed
Board of Economic Warfare. He soon found himself in front of Hu Barton, who
worked in the Economic Division of the Research and Analysis branch of a new
organisation called the Coordinator of Information, led by General William J.
Donovan. The head of the Economics Division, James Phiney Baxter II, and,
indeed, his assistant, were both from Williams College and recalled Marzani’s
Oxford fellowship. In short, Marzani was in on the ground floor of America’s
newest intelligence organisation and was soon promoted. In 1942, this organi-
sation was renamed the Office of Strategic Services or the OSS.71 There were
numerous Leftists in the new OSS. Marzani was open about his Marxism, but
insisted that he had broken with the Communist Party. For most of his OSS col-
leagues, many of whom were academic economists and social scientists of Left
persuasion, this was enough.72
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For the next three years, Marzani served alongside Donovan’s core staff in the
headquarters of the Office of Strategic Services. In 1943, Marzani was ‘drafted’,
but this was a mere technicality, since he was sent back to his old job in the OSS
as soon as he had completed basic military training. At the end of the war, the
OSS was broken up. The Research and Analysis Branch in which he worked was
relocated to the state department. So Marzani found himself among the diplo-
mats, serving as the Deputy Chief of the Presentation Division of the Office of
Intelligence. Despite Marzani’s honourable service in the OSS, his past member-
ship in the Communist Party led to an eleven-count indictment in January 1947
on charges of fraud. Specifically, he was charged with receiving his government
pay, while concealing pre-war membership in the Communist Party. On 22 June
1947, Carl Marzani was convicted in a federal court in Washington. The Appeals
Court threw out nine counts, and the Supreme Court granted Marzani a rare
rehearing. The Supreme Court was split four–four on the last two counts, and so
Marzani served thirty-two months of a thirty-six month sentence.73
In prison, Marzani began his first book, We Can Be Friends: The Origins of the
Cold War (1952), asserting that Truman started the Cold War. In 1950, Marzani
tried to smuggle the manuscript of his book out of prison, but was caught and
sentenced to seven months of solitary confinement. After his release from prison
in 1951, Marzani worked for the United Electrical Workers, as editor of one of
their magazines. In 1954, he joined with Angus Cameron – a radical editor – to
run the Liberty Book Club. The publishing venture became Marzani & Munsell,
which also operated the Prometheus Book Club. Titles included Marzani’s auto-
biographical novel, The Survivor, published in 1958, concerning his prosecution
and time in prison.74 David Caute considers The Survivor to be ‘the best and one
of the most important novels of the Cold War, albeit Marzani remains a divisive
figure’.75
Marzani’s main value to Moscow was his publishing activities. Given the
codename ‘NORD’, Marzani was admired by his KGB handlers as someone
with great energy and who was visibly ‘devoted’ to his ideological cause.76 Oleg
Kalugin – a KGB officer working under the cover of a Moscow radio reporter
in New York – recalled that he had close ties to the Soviet government and the
KGB. Moscow encouraged his Liberty Book Club and its more commercial
sister company, the Prometheus Book Club. Together, they had produced
many progressive books, which were mostly distributed to some 8,000 club
members. The model was clearly borrowed from the Left book club in Britain.
Christopher Andrew notes that in the spring of 1960, Moscow sanctioned a
secret subvention of 15,000 dollars – more than double the subsidy suggested by
KGB officers in New York residency. A year later, the CPSU Central Committee
approved another 55,000 dollars for the next two years, in order to allow
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Marzani to develop new publications, and he was also given yet more money
for publicity purposes.77 Oleg Kalugin, in his memoir, Spymaster, recalls that,
by the early 1960s, the receptions at his offices enjoyed an element of Cold War
farce. His parties were ‘filled with a motley assortment of Communists, liber-
als, and KGB spooks – all of them watched, undoubtedly, by FBI informers in
attendance’.78
Ironically, some American Communist Party members considered him to be
a deep penetration agent for the CIA: ‘important enough to warrant the elabo-
rate cover of trial and jail’. Marzani recalled that, in the mid-1950s, a member
of the American Communist Party, Dan Rubin, came to see him at his office at
the Liberty Book Cub to ask if he would join a Committee in Aid of Smith Act
Families. Marzani agreed, but Rubin’s demeanour had been so hostile that he
said, ‘You don’t like me much, do you?’ Rubin admitted that he didn’t. Marzani
probed a little. ‘In fact, you think I am a CIA agent’. Rubin looked him squarely
in the eye and said, ‘That’s right’.79
Marzani did, indeed, have friends in the CIA. In the 1960s, Marzani again
rubbed shoulders with Dick Helms – Deputy Director and then Director of the
CIA – through the Williams College alumni network. He regarded Helms as
‘a decent ‘liberal’ man, of high intelligence, vitiated by pragmatism’. Marzani
recalled hearing Helms speak at a Williams College alumni gathering in 1961,
telling everyone that ‘they could trust the CIA because they were all “honorable
men” (i.e. Williams men) and his classmates nodding in full delighted agree-
ment because they were titillated by having one of their own running the CIA’.
Marzani added, in retrospect: ‘At the same time they were contacting the Mafia
to kill Casto . . .’80
Marzani later drew on these ‘off the record’ presentations by Dick Helms to
Williams College alumni in a book written in 1966. Never published, it was enti-
tled A Text for President X. Essentially an appeal for détente, it was a prescription
for ending the Cold War, opening with an account of Helms’ speech to Williams
College alumni and the discussions that followed. Marzani wrote to Helms,
asking for permission to discuss the speech in his book. Helms replied, asking
Marzani not to refer to him, explaining that: ‘The Agency and I have had enough
special attention here of late, and I feel it might quite sticky for me to have you
make reference to me’. It was a courteous exchange. Helms thanked Marzani
for asking for his permission and wished him luck with the project.81 Arthur
Schlesinger did not like the manuscript of the book either and chided Marzani
for suggesting that Kennedy was planning a second attempt at invading Cuba in
1962, prior to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Schlesinger insisted that whatever con-
tingency planning was going on in the Pentagon, this was not happening in the
White House.82 The book never appeared, and Marzani seems to have become
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distracted by his private life, for, in 1966, he remarried, this time to Charlotte
Pomerantz – a children’s book writer.
In December 1968, his publishing company, Marzani & Munsell, was destroyed
in a mysterious fire.83 Marzani reduced his publishing activities and went on to
purchase, renovate and rent out four brownstones in Manhattan, in which he
had his own apartment. In the 1970s, Marzani abandoned his long-standing
association with Moscow for environmentalism, writing a well-regarded book
entitled The Wounded Earth. With this publication, he anticipated the move of
many on the far Left towards single-issue campaign causes in the 1980s. This
was followed by The Promise of Eurocommunism – a book in which he which
advocated European Communist Parties distancing themselves from Moscow.84
As late as 1979, Marzani kept up his Washington intelligence contacts and was
corresponding with friends about the minutiae of the intelligence debacle over
Iran, recent CIA analyses of China and changes to the analytical mechanisms
around DCI Stansfield Turner.85 In the late 1980s, as his health declined, he
concentrated on a multi-volume autobiography. He died on 11 December 1994.
JOACHIM JOESTEN AND THE JFK ASSASSINATION

Carl Marzani was also an important figure, as a publisher of books on intelli-
gence. In 1964, Marzani’s company published a book by Joachim Joesten, called
Oswald: Assassin or Fall-Guy? This was the first time the accusation that the CIA
had been involved in the JFK assassination had appeared in print in a book in
the United States. Joesten argued that the assassination was a plot by Right-wing
racists, pointing the finger at the CIA, the FBI and the oil tycoon H. L. Hunt, who
had created a rather strange organisation called the International Committee
for the Defence of Christian Culture. Joesten’s book had previously appeared in
Britain with the Merlin Press – a small publishing house that specialised in Left-
wing literature. The extent to which anti-CIA literature often appeared in Britain
before being published in America is striking.
Joesten argued that the extreme Right had been alarmed by a range of
Kennedy’s policies, which they considered to amount to the appeasement of
Moscow, including the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty and his cuts in arms budgets.
He insisted that Oswald was an FBI agent provocateur, complete with a CIA
background. Considered expendable, he argued that Oswald was killed after the
event by Jack Ruby, so as to cover any tracks. A press release for his book set out
his thesis succinctly:
My investigation also brought out, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Oswald never
was a genuine Communist. His ‘Marxism’ was nothing but a pose, his propaganda
for Castro a sham, his ‘defection’ to Russia a flimsy cover for an intelligence
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assignment, which he bungled. Oswald went to the Soviet Union as an agent for
the C.I.A., was found out and neutralised at Minsk where he worked practically
as a slave labourer. Upon his return to this country, he became a stool pigeon and
agent provocateur for the F.B.I. on whose instructions he set up a phony ‘fair Play
for Cuba Committee’ in New Orleans. At the same time he was being trained for
another intelligence missions, this time to Cuba, which he botched again.86
This double failure as a secret agent, he claimed, made Oswald ‘expendable’ in

the eyes of his employers. Accordingly, when various intelligence officers joined
the conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy, they arranged for Oswald to
be sacrificed as the most convenient scapegoat. His book developed themes
which were to repeatedly resurface in KGB Soviet active measures for decades.
Appearing in the same month as the Warren Report, it was initially overshad-
owed by the official findings, so Marzani went on to produce a second publica-
tion, entitled Gaps in the Warren Report.87
Joesten’s book appeared on 15 June 1964, and Marzani wrote to a friend,
explaining that he had been working ‘head over heels’ to produce Joesten’s book
on Oswald, adding that they had got it out ‘in five week from manuscript to
bookstore which is quite an achievement’. He noted that although Joesten’s con-
troversial book had been ‘getting the silent treatment from the press’, there was
considerable radio interest, and the author had made it onto several Saturday
night chat shows.88 Although Marzani was an ardent propagandist for Moscow,
in this case, he seems to have believed in his own material. Obsessed with stories
concerning the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Repository, he had driven
his office staff mad by repeatedly running up and down the flights of stairs at
Marzani & Munsell, stopwatch in hand, to see what was possible.89 He told his
close friend Cedric Belfrage that, within two or three months of the JFK assas-
sination, he had come to believe that it was ‘a conspiracy’ and that it was it was
‘politically motivated’.90
Oswald: Assassin or Fall Guy? was, nevertheless, an orchestrated KGB
creation. Oleg Kalugin recalls Moscow’s horror at the fact that Oswald had
been a low-level defector (and disillusioned returnee), and so KGB officers were
ordered to do everything possible to dispel the notion that the Soviet Union
was involved in the assassination. ‘We were told’, he continued, ‘to put forward
the line that Oswald could have been “involved in a conspiracy with American
reactionaries displeased with the president’s recent efforts to improve relations
with Russia” ’.91 In the 1990s, Vasily Mitrokhin – a KGB archivist – succeeded
in smuggling thousands of KGB documents out of Moscow. These documents
show that Joesten visited Dallas after the assassination and then went to Europe.
A few months later, his book was published by the Merlin Press in Britain and
was then republished by Marzani. The first American reviewer of this book,
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Victor Perlo, was also revealed as an undercover KGB operative.92 Joesten went
on to produce four additional, lesser-known books on the assassination, includ-
ing one that alleged the involvement of Lyndon B. Johnson.93
As with previous KGB books, it was a matter of getting ideas into circula-
tion, which then resurfaced elsewhere. Joesten’s first book was dedicated to an
American radical lawyer and Civil Rights activist, Mark Lane. In 1966, Lane
published the bestseller Rush to Judgment, also alleging that Kennedy was killed
by Right-wing American conspiracy. Lane was a more talented writer than
Joesten; indeed, his book topped The New York Times bestseller lists.94 Lane was
not a KGB agent, but was merely a conspiracy theorist; however, he had drawn
on some of Joesten’s material. With the conspiracy now fixed in the public mind,
these books were followed by similar books by the investigator Jim Garrison,
which also claimed a CIA-related conspiracy. Garrison first wrote A Heritage of
Stone in 1970 and eventually published On the Trail of the Assassins in 1988.95
Garrison’s books helped to inspire the controversial Oliver Stone movie, JFK.
While the KGB undoubtedly contributed to the wild mythology that surrounds
the JFK assassination, it is hard to resist the conclusion that they were simply
lucky in tapping into the uniquely American obsession with conspiracy theories.
It is unlikely that Moscow understood what the American essayist and com-
mentator H. L. Mencken once called ‘the virulence of the national appetite for
bogus revelation’.96
Joesten’s own background remains obscure, as is the precise nature of his
associations with Marzani. However, the texture of his publications suggests
that he had been working with Moscow for more than a decade. For example,
in 1958, he published a book in Germany concerning the CIA, entitled How
the American Secret Service Works, which followed in the same footsteps as
similar books by Gordon Stewart, Julius Mader and Bob Edwards.97 Born in
Cologne in 1907, he studied first at several German universities, before moving
to the universities of Nancy and Madrid. A member of the Communist Party
in Germany, the rise of Hitler prompted him to leave for Scandinavia. In 1938,
Victor Gollancz published his first book, in which he predicted the invasion
of Denmark by Hitler, which subsequently occurred twelve months later.
Joesten then fled the German armies via Sweden, Russia, Japan, Costa Rica
and, finally, the United States. Arriving in New York in the spring of 1941, he
found work as an Assistant Editor for Newsweek magazine. In 1944, he resigned,
in order to become a full-time writer. He produced some twenty popular
works on war, crime, terrorism and espionage, including The Luciano Story
(1954), The Red Hand (1962) and Spies and Spy Techniques since World War II
(1963).
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CONCLUSION
In September 1965, CIA Director Admiral Raborn wrote to Clark Clifford to
express his concern about the growing Soviet campaign of disinformation. He
explained that the KGB had set up its disinformation department in 1959, which
now numbered approximately forty staff. One of its primary objectives was to
‘neutralise’ the CIA and disrupt its intelligence-sharing relationship with other
Western agencies. The KGB’s foremost theme was the assertion that the ‘CIA is
an instrument of American imperialism’ and was ‘racist’. He noted that one of its
favourite techniques was to use quotes and citations from reputable American
publications, often taken out of context. The flood of anti-CIA books and pam-
phlets appearing throughout south-east Asia, Africa and the Near East, he noted,
‘reflect substantial budgets for this activity’.98 Covert action was undermining
the efforts of American diplomats to make friends in the developing world – the
most fluid of the Cold War’s battlegrounds.99
‘Our active measures knew no bounds’, recalls Oleg Kalugin, adding, ‘we
went after everybody’. He explains that, when the UN Secretary General, Dag
Hammerskjold, was killed in a plane crash, he and his fellow officers ‘did every-
thing we could to fuel the rumours that the CIA was behind it’.100 However,
the CIA’s biggest reputational problem was not Soviet propaganda, but its own
covert action disasters. Above all, it was the Bay of Pigs which prompted a tidal
wave of hostile writing on the CIA by mainstream independent American jour-
nalists. These writers then acted as a transmission belt, often drawing uncritically
on previous Moscow-inspired books and pamphlets. In 1962, Andrew Tully – an
American crime reporter – wrote the first independent full-length book on the
CIA. Tully was by no means Leftist and, indeed, was greatly admired by J. Edgar
Hoover and the FBI. Yet, Tully repeatedly drew on the Master Spy book of Bob
Edwards for his treatment of Dulles and the Swiss surrender talks.101 He also
echoed the frequent Soviet charge that the CIA ‘had seized the broad responsibly
for making policy that had belonged to the State Department’.102 In the coming
decades, the provocations offered by obscure Moscow-inspired political tracts
would be overtaken by the work of mainstream investigative journalists, and,
later, by the memoirs of disaffected CIA officers.
The forgotten first wave of CIA ‘history’, therefore, presents some puzzles. How
influential were these works? And did any of them contribute to the early stirrings
of Cold War revisionism? Some of these Moscow-inspired books, notably those
by Gordon Stewart and Julius Mader, are well-researched and, for their time, con-
stituted revelatory texts. Yet, even the more substantial works in this first wave
achieved limited circulation in the West. (The question of the impact of such
books in the global South remains to be explored). Given that there was clearly
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public appetite for non-fiction spy writing throughout the post-war period, why
did the Soviets and their Western nebulae not secure better circulation for their
product? Distributed through Left book clubs and bought in bulk by affiliated
union organisations, these texts were largely preaching to the already converted.
Overall, one has to conclude that their impact was probably limited. Soviet active
measures had a menacing profile, but, in this realm, they lacked the services of
that most important of all field operatives – a good literary agent.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank Matthew Jones, Katrina Lee Koo, Paul McGarr, Kaeten
Mistry, Christopher Moran and Simon Willmetts for their comments, discus-
sion and assistance, all of which contributed to this chapter. Any errors remain
the responsibility of the author. The support of the AHRC ‘Landscapes of
Secrecy’ project (RES–451–26–0480) based at the Universities of Warwick and
Nottingham is gratefully acknowledged.
Notes
1 C. M. Andrew and D. Dilks, Government and Intelligence Communities in the
Twentieth Century, (London: Macmillan, 1984); R. H. Immerman, ‘Guatemala as
Cold War History’, Political Science Quarterly, 95(4), 1980–1981, pp. 629–53.
2 A title search of Hathi Trust Digital Library reveals some 818 books with ‘CIA’ in the
title, compared to 274 for FBI and 122 for KGB. MI5 and MI6 score ten and three,
respectively.
3 Discussion of the historiography of the CIA is surprisingly limited, but see
R. Jeffreys-Jones, ‘The Historiography of the CIA’, Historical Journal, 23(2), 1980,
pp. 489–96; John Ferris, ‘Coming in from the Cold War: The Historiography of
American Intelligence, 1945-1990’, Diplomatic History, 19(1), 1995, pp. 87–115.
4 The surprising amount of press attention given to the CIA before 1960 is docu-
mented in D. M. Barrett, The CIA and Congress: The Untold Story from Truman to
Kennedy (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2006).
5 A. Tully, CIA: The Inside Story (New York, NY: Crest Books, 1962); D. Wise and
T. B. Ross, The U-2 Affair (New York, NY: Random House, 1962); D. Wise and T. B.
Ross, The Invisible Government (New York, NY: Random House, 1964).
6 T. Szulc and K. Meyer, The Cuban Invasion: The Chronicle of a Disaster (New York,
NY: Praeger, 1962).
7 C. Moran, Classified: Secrecy and the State in Modern Britain (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 315.
8 S. D. Willmetts, ‘Quiet Americans: The CIA in Early Cold War Culture’, Journal of
American Studies, forthcoming.
9 See, for example, F. S. Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of
Arts and Letters (New York, NY: The New Press, 1999).
MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd 41 21/02/2013 08:23

10 Other books discuss the CIA prior to 1953. For example, L. Natarajan, American
Shadow Over India (Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1952) devotes many pages to
the CIA in discussing the triangular relationship between India, Communist China
and Tibet. I am indebted to Paul McGarr for drawing this to my attention.
11 I. Gouzenko, This was My Choice (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1948). Canada’s
Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and External Affairs were already
discussing a worldwide publishing deal in 1946. See M. Kristmanson, Plateaus of
Freedom: Nationality, Culture, and State Security in Canada, 1940–1960 (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2002), p. 273, n. 67.
12 A. Foote, A Handbook for Spies (London: Museum Press, 1949). The full story is
given in KV 2/1615 and KV2/1616, TNA.
13 It attempts to build on the work of Christopher Andrew and Paul Maddrell, who
have already written eloquently on this subject.
14 Gordon Stewart, The Cloak and Dollar War (London: Lawrence & Wishart,
1953).
15 Gordon Stewart, The Cloak and Dollar War, p. 19.
16 Gordon Stewart, The Cloak and Dollar War, p. 28.
17 Gordon Stewart, The Cloak and Dollar War, p .50.
18 P. H. Johnson, Important to Me: Personalia (London: Macmillan, 1974), p. 81.
19 In 1950, he published Journey to Hungary 1950 (London: Hungarian News and
Information Service, 1950).
20 Memo to ASIO Regional Director, ‘Gordon Stewart: Applicant for permit to enter
Papua New Guinea’, 22 April 1974, ASIO file, ‘Stewart, Gordon Neil’, Volume 1,
5/43/22, A6119/4961, National Archives of Australia.
21 Johnstone to Jowett, 15 March 1950, Brice No. 34, FO 924/838, TNA and minute by
Dove 12 May 1950, ibid.
22 G. Stewart, ‘Washington: World Spy Centre’, World News and Views, 45, pp.
536–7.
23 A. Croft, A Weapon in the Struggle: Cultural History of the British Communist Party
(London: Pluto Press, 1998), p. 157.
24 See, for example, the copy in the papers of Richard Albert Etheridge (1909–1985),
trade unionist and communist, MSS.202/5/53, Modern Records Centre, Warwick
University.
25 PF.40756, ‘Patricia Jesse Garman, formerly Miles, Ayriss and Hardy’, KV 2/2348,
TNA.
26 VGR to Maxwell (HO), 4 May 1938, KV2/2327, TNA. See, also, the Memo to
Commander Special Branch, ‘Lawrence & Wishart Ltd’, by A. Russell (MI5), 20
April 1956, SF.455/15/F.1.A/AR, KV 6/89, TNA.
27 SLO Australia to DG ASIO, 6 December 1955, ASIO file, ‘Stewart, Gordon
Neil’, Volume 1, 5/43/22, A6119/4961, National Archives of Australia. Also, B.1
Surveillance Report, ‘Neil Stewart’, 27 June 1955, ibid.
28 Memo to ASIO Regional Director, ‘Gordon Stewart: Applicant for Permit to Enter
Papua New Guinea’, 22 April 1974, ASIO file, ‘Stewart, Gordon Neil’, Volume 1,
5/43/22, A6119/4961, National Archives of Australia.
29 Stewart to Beasley, 8 January 1988, Beasley papers, National Library of Australia,
ibid. I am indebted to Katrina Lee Koo of ANU for inspecting these papers on my
behalf.
MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd 42 21/02/2013 08:23

30 Stewart to Beasley, 19 August 1989, ibid.

31 He also blamed ‘CIA sponsored American Abstract expressionism’ for infecting
Australian modern art with mediocrity; Stewart to Beasley, 8 May 1992.
32 Typically, the CIA intervened to persuade the New York Times to remove its cover-
age of the coup in Guatemala in 1954.
33 A. W. Dulles, Germany’s Underground (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1947). See, also,
Zoltan Peterecz, ‘Sparrow Mission: A US Intelligence Failure during World War II’,
Intelligence and National Security, 27(2), 2012, pp. 241–60.
34 J. Mader, Allens Gangster in Aktion [Allen’s Gangster in Action] (Berlin: Kongress
Verlag, 1959).
35 Mader, Allens Gangster in Aktion, pp. 112, 115.
36 P. Maddrell, ‘What we have discovered about the Cold War is what we already
knew: Julius Mader and the Western Secret Services During the Cold War’, Cold
War History, 5(2), 2005, pp. 235–58.
37 One of the first references to secret surrender appeared in John Chamberlain: ‘OSS:
The cloak-and-dagger boys of “Wild Bill” Donovan Office of Strategic Services
waged a successful secret war behind enemy lines and have demonstrated the need
for a coordinated intelligence office for the US’. See Life, 19 November 1945, p. 128.
38 Maddrell, ‘What we have discovered’, pp. 235–44.
39 Maddrell, ‘What we have discovered’, pp. 235–44.
40 Mader’s book on Dulles was widely reviewed by Soviet newspapers and magazines;
see, for example, Soviet Aviation, 19 August 1960, p. 5.
41 S. Berger and N. LaPorte, Friendly Enemies: Britain and the GDR, 1949–1990
(Oxford: Berghan Books, 2010), pp. 61–3.
42 C. M. Andrew, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (London:
Penguin, 2009).
43 Minutes of a meeting of the Executive of the UK Committee of the European
Movement, 21 July 1954, File European Unity, Box 3, Robert Edwards papers,
Peoples History Museum, Manchester.
44 S. Dorril, MI6: Fifty Years of Secret Operations (London: Fourth Estate, 2000), pp.
446–8. The first person to associate Edwards with a Soviet-sponsored propaganda
campaign against the CIA was S. Steven, Splinter Factor (London: Hodder &
Stoughton, 1974), p. 235.
45 Wilson (PM) to Edwards, 25 April 1970, File: European Unity, Box 3, Robert
Edwards’ papers, Peoples History Museum, Manchester; Deshornes to Edwards, 16
July 1970, File: Defence, ibid.
46 ‘Bob Edwards MP – Resume’, no date, File: autobiography, Box 5, ibid.
47 Raborn (DCI) to Clark Clifford, 20 September 1965, enclosing CIA memo. ‘The
Soviet and Communist Bloc Defamation Campaign’, September 1965, 2002/09/03:
CIA- RDP80B01676R000500010047-7, CREST, NARA.
48 H. Romerstein and E. Breindel, The Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage
and America’s Traitors (New York, NY: Regnery, 2000), p. 422; R. S. Staar, Public
Diplomacy: USA versus USSR (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1986), pp.
48, 61.
49 Dulles and Baldwin were old friends, having co-chaired the armaments group of
the Council on Foreign Relations’ Studies of American Interests in the War and the
Peace.
MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd 43 21/02/2013 08:23

50 Raborn (DCI) to Clark Clifford, 20 September 1965, enclosing CIA memo. ‘The
51 Alden to Edwards, 5 March 1982, discussing his exchange of 21 July 1964, File:
Research Enquiries, Box 2, Robert Edwards papers, Peoples History Museum,
Manchester.
52 The previous year, Edwards had reproduced a pamphlet entitled ‘America – Ally or
Master?’, by Bob Edwards, pp. 20, DDC/5/268, Record of the Union of Democratic
Control, University of Hull Archives.
53 L. Hajek, ‘Target: CIA’, Studies in Intelligence, 6(1), 1962, pp. 29–56.
54 Bob Edwards, M. P. Dunne and Kenneth Dunne, Study of a Master Spy (London:
Housmans, 1961), p. 79. An expanded edition was published in Spanish as Allen
Dulles: Espía Maestro (Buenos Aires: Palestra, 1961), p. 159.
55 L. K. Johnson, ‘Harry Howe Ransom and American Intelligence Studies’, Intelligence
and National Security, 22(3), 2007, pp. 402–28.
56 Edwards and Dunne published their book on Dulles in early May 1961, so they
were unable to address Bay of Pigs, which had occurred two weeks before. William
Hetherington (Company Secretary, Housmans) to author, 11 October 2011.
57 Hayek, see, also, Leslie D. Weir, ‘Soviet Publicists Talk about US Intelligence’,
Studies in Intelligence, 4(3), 1960, pp. 19–26.
58 Light and Marzani, Cuba vs. the CIA, p. 3.
59 Light and Marzani, Cuba vs. the CIA, p. 8
60 Light and Marzani, Cuba vs. the CIA, pp. 38–9.
61 Divergent accounts appear in Woody Klein, The Inside Stories of Modern Political
Scandals: How Investigative Reporters have Changed the Course of American History
(Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2010), pp. 22–38; W. Joseph Campbell, Getting It
Wrong: Ten of the Greatest Misreported Stories in American Journalism (Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press, 2010), pp. 80–110.
62 Light and Marzani, Cuba vs. the CIA, pp. 7–11.
63 Light and Marzani, Cuba vs. the CIA, p. 6.
64 C. Marzani, The Education of a Reluctant Radical: Reconstruction (New York, NY:
Topical Books, 2001), Book 5, pp. 53–8.
65 C. Marzani, The Education of a Reluctant Radical: Reconstruction, pp. 53–8.
66 Schlesinger to Marzani, 1 April 1961, Box 20, Marzani papers, Tam.154, Tamiment
Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, New York
University.
67 Marzani to Rostow, 1 November 1961, Box 20, ibid.
68 C. Marzani, The Education of a Reluctant Radical: From Pentagon to Penitentiary
(New York, NY: Topical Books, 1995), Book 4, p. 10.
69 Marzani, Pentagon to Penitentiary, pp. 3–4.
72 At least six individuals within the OSS were handing material to the Soviets: J. E.
Haynes and H. Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 220–2. It seems likely that Marzani was one of
these individuals, but it is by no means certain. See, also, H. B. Peake, ‘OSS and the
Venona Decrypts’, Intelligence and National Security, 12(3), 1997, pp. 14–34.
MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd 44 21/02/2013 08:23


74 C. Marzani, The Survivor (New York, NY: Cameron Association, 1958).
75 D. Caute, Politics and the Novel during the Cold War (New York, NY: Transaction,
2009), p. 230.
76 Others suggest that his codename was ‘Kollega’; see Romerstein and Breindel, The
Venona Secrets, p. 295.
77 C. Andrew and V. Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and
the Secret History of the KGB (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1999), pp. 226–7.
78 O. Kalugin, The First Directorate: My 32 Years in Intelligence and Espionage Against
the West (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), pp. 45–7.
80 Marzani to Michelson, 20 January 1979, Box 17, Marzani papers, Tam.154,
Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, Elmer Holmes Bobst Library,
New York University.
81 Helms to Marzani, 9 May 1966, Box 19, ibid.
82 Schlesinger to Marzani, 4 August 1966, Box 19, ibid.
83 Marzani to Curtis, 13 Jan 1969, ibid.
84 Marzani believed the CIA to be behind the assassination of the Italian Prime
Minister, Aldo Moro, who tried to bring Eurocommunists into government in
Rome, Reconstruction, pp. 96–8.
85 Michelson to Marzani, 24 April 1979, Box 19, Marzani papers, Tam.154, Tamiment
University.
86 Press release related to the book: ‘The Joesten Report: The Truth about the
Assassination of President John F. Kennedy’, 00002443 Box 8, Folder 7, JFK
Collection, City of Dallas archives.
87 J. Joesten, Gaps in the Warren Report (New York, NY: Marzani & Munsell, 1965);
Marzani, Reconstruction, pp. 85–6.
88 Marzani to Joe Murray, 18 June 1964, Box 20, Marzani papers, Tam.154, Tamiment
University.
89 Marzani, Reconstruction, pp. 85.
90 Marzani to Belfrage, 3 May 1966, Box 19, Marzani papers, Tam.154, Tamiment
University.
91 Kalugin, Spymaster, p. 58.
92 Andrew and Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive, p. 229.
93 Other books by Joesten on the subject included Marina Oswald (London: Peter
Dawnay, 1967); Oswald: The Truth (London: Peter Dawnay, 1967); The Garrison
Inquiry – Truth and Consequences (London: Peter Dawnay, 1967); How Kennedy
was Killed: The Full Appalling Story (London: Peter Dawnay, 1968); The Dark Side
of Lyndon Baines Johnson (London: Peter Dawnay, 1968).
94 M. Lane, Rush to Judgment (New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966).
95 J. Garrison, A Heritage of Stone (New York, NY: Putnam, 1970); J. Garrison, On the
Trail of the Assassins (New York, NY: Sheriden Square, 1988).
96 M. Holland, ‘After Thirty Years: Making Sense of the Assassination’, Reviews in
American History, 22(2), 1994, pp. 191–5.
MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd 45 21/02/2013 08:23

97 J. Joesten, Wie American Geheimdienst Arbeitet (München: Isar Verlag, 1958),

p. 190.
98 Raborn (DCI) to Clark Clifford, 20 September 1965, enclosing CIA memo, ‘The
99 As early as 1962, the CIA’s in-house journal ran an essay that identified Moscow’s
policy of encouraging propagandistic and selective accounts of CIA history, but this
did not really capture the scale or importance of the developing battle over public
profile and reputation; see Hayek, ‘Target CIA’.
100 Kalugin, Spymaster, p. 53.
101 Tully, CIA, pp. 40, 159.
102 Tully, CIA, pp. 257–9.
MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd 46 21/02/2013 08:23

Chapter 2
THE CULTURE OF FUNDING CULTURE: THE CIA

AND THE CONGRESS FOR CULTURAL FREEDOM
Eric Pullin
The Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) was the largest and longest of the
covert operations run by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Lasting from
1950 until 1967, the purpose of the CCF was to promote an international
anti-communist consciousness among intellectual liberals and non-communist
Leftists. The CCF established organisations throughout the non-communist
world, sponsoring concerts, art exhibits and scholarly lectures to promote anti-
communist activism among intellectuals and artists. From 1966 to 1967, The
New York Times and Ramparts – a New Left magazine that offered criticism of
politics and culture – exposed the ‘secret’ that the CIA had covertly funded the
CCF since its establishment in 1950. Within months of breaking this scandal, the
CCF could not withstand the blow to its reputation and ceased functioning as an
effective organisation.
The circuitous and exciting story of the relations between the CIA and the
CCF has been discussed in detail by a relatively small number of historians,
which are discussed below. These historians have been limited in their ability to
explore the topic fully, because the CIA’s documents regarding covert funding
of the CCF remain closed. The CIA’s history of pathological secrecy is ‘old hat’,
but its routine obstructionism continues to rankle historians. Despite changing
its mind in May 2012, in September 2011, the CIA decreed:
that declassification reviews would now cost requesters up to $72 per hour, even
if no information is found or released. To even submit a request – again, even if no
documents are released – the public must now agree to pay a minimum of $15.1
Nevertheless, the historians considered in this chapter have initiated a penetrat-

ing discussion, not only concerning the connections between the US Intelligence
Agency and free intellectual activity, but also relating to the nature of the Cold
War, particularly its cultural theatre.
In assessing this connection, historians have divided historiographical con-
siderations into three main categories: first, the question of how to judge the
47
MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd 47 21/02/2013 08:23

CIA–CCF collaboration (condemnation, celebration or something else?); second,

the reasons why the CIA and the CCF chose to collaborate with one another; and
finally, the degree to which the CIA controlled or influenced the activities of the
CCF’s intellectuals. Despite lively and substantive disagreements, it appears that
these historians’ work maintains a high degree of interdependence. Even as one
historian challenges the conclusions of another, there is genuine acknowledge-
ment that previous historical work has proved indispensable for moving the
study of the CIA’s largest covert operation forwards.
It might reasonably be argued that Christopher Lasch’s article, ‘The Cultural
Cold War: A Short History of the Congress for Cultural Freedom’, initiated the
historiography of the relationship between the CIA and the CCF.2 Lasch’s article
– a slightly different version of which originally appeared in Nation magazine
(the oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the United States that
describes itself as ‘the flagship of the Left’) – offered not only a historical survey
of the CCF, but also formed part of the contemporary controversy during
the late 1960s in the wake of revelations that the CIA had secretly funded the
CCF since its inception. The revelations sparked a heated debate, which was
subsequently waged in the press over the next two decades, concerning the
autonomy of the CCF and the role of CIA in funding culture. Lasch’s article
was, in part, a response to prominent liberals, who either minimised the role of
the CIA in cultural affairs or even tried to justify it.3 For instance, John Kenneth
Galbraith, George F. Kennan, Robert Oppenheimer and Arthur Schlesinger Jr
all attempted to explain their involvement with the CCF in light of the revela-
tions. They did not deny connections to the CIA, but simply insisted that the
CIA had never compromised the CCF’s intellectual independence. Others, such
as Melvin Lasky, Stephen Spender and Irving Kristol – the latter who had edited
the CCF’s literary journal, Encounter, in the United Kingdom – co-wrote a
similar defence.4 In contrast to the almost apologetic tone of these participants,
Tom Braden – Director of the CIA’s International Operations Division (IOD)
during the 1950s and, later, a journalist – actually celebrated the Agency’s covert
funding of international cultural activities in two confrontational pieces – ‘I’m
Glad the CIA is “Immoral” ’ and ‘What’s Wrong with the CIA?’.5 Lasch’s article,
which established the condemnatory tone on the subject of the CCF’s involve-
ment with the CIA, characterised much of the Left’s press commentary through-
out the 1970s and 1980s, as well as some later historical writing.
Lasch denounced CCF intellectuals, who had ‘lent themselves to purposes
having nothing to do with the values they professed’.6 He reviled their collabora-
tion with the CIA as a corruption of free intellectual discourse, little different
from that of doctrinaire communists. The intellectuals’ claim – that, ‘in the
present crisis [the Cold War], a moral man could not remain neutral from the
MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd 48 21/02/2013 08:23

The Culture of Funding Culture 49
struggle of competing ideologies’ – betrayed their intellectual bankruptcy.7

According to Lasch, the CCF’s members engaged in a self-negating project,
which, despite loud protestations on behalf of intellectual freedom, revealed
their lack of intellectual independence. They ‘confuse[d] intellectual values with
the interests of the intellectual class, just as they confused freedom with the
national interests of the United States’.8 Thus, the refusal of the CCF’s intellectu-
als to admit the possibility of neutrality exposed their service to the state.
Frances Stonor Saunders’ Who Paid the Piper? extends Lasch’s moral cri-
tique by marshalling an enormous amount of evidence, which identifies where,
when and to whom the CIA provided funds. Although admitting the story
is incomplete, because obtaining CIA documents proved nearly impossible,
Saunders draws upon multi-archival sources, ranging from the papers of the
International Association for Cultural Freedom at the University of Chicago, to
US Government and private archives, to numerous personal interviews.9 Who
Paid the Piper? aims to discredit the myth of the “ ‘blank cheque” line of defence’
that allowed CCF intellectuals to disingenuously claim that CIA support had
no effect upon their writing or opinions. On the contrary, Saunders believes
intellectuals were ‘animated by the dictates of American policy-makers rather
than by independent standards of their own . . .’10 In an interview with historian
Scott Lucas, Saunders emphasised the point, by stating that the CCF’s intel-
lectuals viewed culture as a ‘Trojan horse’, which ‘secretly carried [a] political
agenda’.11 Saunders, though reluctant to condemn unwitting intellectuals, has
little sympathy for witting intellectuals, who believed that ‘the ends justified the
means, even if they included lying (directly, or by omission) to one’s colleagues;
ethics were subject to politics’.12
Saunders describes her work as a ‘corrective’ to Peter Coleman’s The Liberal
Conspiracy,13 which she dismisses as ‘official history’.14 Although certainly
an interested partisan (Coleman served for over twenty years as editor of the
Australian CCF journal, Quadrant), his work should not be so easily cast aside.
In Coleman’s view:
cloak-and-dagger questions of who paid whom, how, and for what are in fact less
important than the astonishing story . . . of the idealistic, courageous, and far-
sighted men and women of the Congress for Cultural Freedom who fought in this
war of ideas – with its attendant suffering and atrocities – against Stalinism and its
successors.15
For Coleman, the Cold War was neither a ‘false construct’, nor an excuse to
impose pax Americana (as Saunders repeatedly asserts); rather, it was an existen-
tial crisis. Neither were intellectuals dupes of the state. Coleman admits ‘doubt’
about the integrity and autonomy of the organisation and offers several critical
assessments of the relationship between the CIA and the CCF, but he believes
MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd 49 21/02/2013 08:23

assessments such as those of Lasch and Saunders obscure the ‘real’ threat to
intellectual freedom posed by the Soviets, especially in the late 1940s and early
1950s. Asserting that the goals and purposes of the CCF outweighed the risks of
CIA involvement, he proposes that there would have been danger if the CIA had
not funded the CCF. Indeed, the danger for Coleman ‘was not the immorality
of covert funding’, but the difficulty of keeping secrets in democracies such as
the United States. Rather than cynically view the CCF as a tool for imposing
pax Americana, Coleman believed that ‘it was America’s principal attempt to
win over the world’s intellectuals to the liberal democratic cause’.16 Coleman
subsequently amplified this contention:
It is unfair that it [the CIA] should be so bitterly condemned for its failures, and
should then go unpraised when it does something constructive and sensible. And
the Congress [for Cultural Freedom] would itself have been remiss if it had failed
to take money which came to it from good intent and wholly without strings or
conditions.17
This celebratory view is not shared by Giles Scott-Smith, who, neverthe-
less, avoids the condemnatory approach of Lasch and Saunders. Yet, neither
is Scott-Smith’s view of CIA-funded intellectuals a middle approach; instead,
he regards morality as beside the point. Scott-Smith grants that intellectuals
acted as ‘cultural personnel’ in the service of the state, but contends ‘that there
was a more complex process of ideological alignment going on between key
elites in the political, economic and cultural realms, and on an international
scale’.18 Scott-Smith sidesteps making ‘a moral argument against the hypoc-
risy of those involved’, because it ‘reduce[s] the Congress to being simply
another CIA front’.19 While the CIA certainly provided money and influenced
the organisation’s direction, ‘the ideas [advocated by CCF intellectuals] were
already common among the intellectual community both in the US and Europe
before their stabilisation and institutionalisation’.20 Scott-Smith places the CIA’s
support of the CCF as part of a larger ‘battle between contesting hegemonies
over the post-war world . . .’21
* * *
Historians of the relationship between the CIA and the CCF differ as to why the
CIA decided to fund the CCF. According to Saunders, the answer is simple and
direct. She describes the CIA as a collection of ‘Park Avenue cowboys’ and ‘pala-
dins of democracy’, whose ‘job it was to establish and then justify the post-war
pax Americana’. Saunders argues that the CCF became, almost at its inception,
part of the ‘CIA’s “Propaganda Assets Inventory” ’.22 The close involvement of
the CIA in the CCF was evidenced by the activities of Frank Wisner – head of
the Office of Policy Coordination – which conducted the CIA’s covert opera-
MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd 50 21/02/2013 08:23

tions. After the CIA funded the CCF’s first conference at Berlin in 1950, Wisner
dictated the removal of Melvin J. Lasky from the CCF leadership. According
to Saunders, the nickname ‘Wisner’s Wurlitzer’ serves to indicate ‘how these
“assets” were expected to perform: at the push of a button, Wisner could play
any tune he wished to hear’.23 Apparently, the CIA began to play even more
loudly with the creation of Tom Braden’s IOD, which formalised the CIA’s
connection to the CCF, thus making the CCF ‘answerable’ to the CIA. The IOD
relished the connection to the CCF and the non-communist Left:
not to destroy or even dominate, but rather to maintain a discreet proximity to and
monitor the thinking of such groups . . . and in extremis, to exercise a final veto on
their publicity and possibly their actions, if they ever got too ‘radical’.24
The CIA did not conceive of the CCF as an intelligence-gathering organisation,

but simply as a body devoted to pressuring the intellectual elite, who, in turn,
influenced Europe’s political decision-makers.25
Coleman offers a somewhat more complex and counter-intuitive argument
as to why the CIA decided upon a programme of covert funding. The decision
occurred at the same time as a ‘quiet revolution’ – in the phrasing of Arthur
Schlesinger Jr. – occurred in the State Department. Under the influence of such
figures as George F. Kennan, Charles ‘Chip’ Bohlen and Isaiah Berlin, the State
Department decided to support the previously marginalised non-communist
Left, but, for domestic political reasons, could not openly exploit this strategy,
which fell to the CIA. Though ironic, Coleman regards this strategy as unsur-
prising. As support, he cites Braden’s justification that: ‘in much of Europe in the
1950s, socialist people who called themselves “left” . . . were the only people who
gave a damn about fighting Communism’.26 Precisely because the organisation
was composed primarily of liberals and the non-communist Left, ‘it was also
necessary to keep the arrangement secret, since otherwise European intellectuals
would refuse to cooperate with the Congress’.27 Hugh Wilford lends support,
though not uncritically, to this argument. He offers that: ‘it would therefore be
on the terrain of the European left that the battle for “hearts and minds” would
be at its most intense; and anti-communist leftists were potentially Washington’s
most valuable allies in this fight’. Moreover, the strategy ‘was not simply a case
of the American intelligence service “using” a left wing intellectual’.28 Often,
the reverse occurred, as the non-communist Left attempted to impose its views
upon the CIA.29
Other historians have taken a more systemic approach to explain the CIA’s
interest in intellectuals. Scott Lucas’ book, Freedom’s Crusade, argues that: ‘the
United States, just like the Soviet system, with which it contended for so long,
has an “ideology” ’.30 Though not as rigid as Marxism–Leninism, American
MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd 51 21/02/2013 08:23

ideology works to justify and organise political, economic and cultural activity.
This view presents the Cold War as ‘a clash of cultures and ideologies’.31 Thus,
while CIA interest in the CCF resulted from the dictates of American ideology,
the regnant Cold War ideology of the United States was not foisted upon popu-
lations. Lucas observes that the US Government promoted ideology by cooper-
ating with an elaborate network of ‘state–private’ organisations (for example,
National Committee for Free Europe, Committee for Free Asia and MIT’s
Center for International Studies). Although the CIA might have provided sig-
nificant funding to these private organisations, the ‘impetus’ came from private
individuals, ‘with their own interests in ensuring the triumph of freedom’.32
Giles Scott-Smith also takes a systemic view, but argues against Lucas’ ‘ideol-
ogy’ thesis. Despite recognising value in examining the state–private network,
he contends that the ideological approach contains reductionist elements.
According to Scott-Smith, it has the ‘tendency to collapse all activities into this
framework of interpretation, so that every cultural event, philosophical declara-
tion and musical interlude becomes defined solely by its Cold War ideological
context’. Scott-Smith, though respectful of the force of American ideology in the
Cold War, does not regard ideology as monolithic. On the contrary, he argues
that: ‘in the ideological struggle, different traditions, motives and methods
worked in parallel, in combination, sometimes even in opposition’.33
In The Politics of Apolitical Culture, Scott-Smith frames his discussion of the
collaboration between the CIA and the CCF in terms of Antonio Gramsci’s
concept of ‘hegemony’ – the notion that society’s dominant classes have formed
and disseminated a prevailing culture that appears to be shared by all classes
in a society. Whereas Lucas considers state–private networks in terms of cohe-
sion and goals, Scott-Smith attempts to explore causes. American hegemony
in Western Europe was comparable to Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe,
except that the American form had to be maintained by persuasion, rather than
coercion. Employing the Gramscian notion that political and civil society were
connected by the alliance and coordination of political, economic and cultural
groups, Scott-Smith assesses ‘culture as a complex set of norms in the domain
of ideas, and how such norms are solidified through the influence of specific
networks operating in the interests of a ruling group in the economy’.34 Thus,
for Scott-Smith, the reasons why the CIA funded the CCF and why the CCF
accepted CIA funding are indistinguishable. Both the CIA and CCF were, from
their very beginnings, institutions created and shaped by the political demands
of the Cold War.35
Unfortunately, fleshing out this relationship is complicated, because the
CIA’s image ‘always brings with it the whiff of conspiracy’.36 This ‘whiff’
obscures the intimate role of the CIA as a component of the state. Indeed, ‘the
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importance of the CIA is exactly that its personnel were able to operate on a large
scale with a separate mandate, yet its hierarchy was always in touch with the
workings of democratic government and legitimacy’.37 In pursuit of hegemonic
goals, the CIA collaborated with ‘a transnational network of elite groups and
institutions in political and civil society in order to solidify any social-ideological
consensus’.38 During the late 1940s and early 1950s, the CIA took an increasingly
autonomous, and somewhat ironic, approach to achieving US hegemony in
Europe. Scott-Smith observes that, ‘while US foreign policy (and general public
opinion) was ostensibly moving against all positions on the political left, the
CIA began to employ a strategy of undermining communist organisations and
support by promoting more moderate leftist social democratic movements’.39
Although the process did not run smoothly, the CIA believed that ‘Atlanticism
[that is developing close connections between the United States and Europe]
needed to be institutionalised not only economically, politically and militarily,
but also socially, culturally and intellectually’.40 The CIA considered the CCF as
a covert operation and attempted to use it to organise European intellectual life
‘around the concept of Atlantic unity’.41 However, the CIA could only foster a
common US–European Atlantic culture, ‘because of its connection to already
existing concerns among the European intellectual community about the future
of intellectual-cultural freedom in the post-war world’.42 In other words, the CIA
could not have even attempted to work with intellectuals unless the intellectuals
of the CCF already shared Atlanticist goals.
In order to understand why the CIA looked to support intellectual and
cultural groups during the Cold War, Volker Berghahn’s America and the
Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe takes a less consciously theoretical, yet no less
sophisticated, approach than Scott-Smith’s work. In order to make the CIA’s
funding of the CCF ‘comprehensible’, Berghahn examines the ‘U.S. govern-
ment and the funding of culture’, and also, though not using this phrasing, the
US culture of funding.43 He explains that US agencies were deeply involved in
the physical, political, economic and cultural reconstruction of Europe during
the post-war years. The United States devoted significant effort to rebuilding a
devastated Europe for its own sake, but saw containing Soviet expansion as the
primary motivation for restructuring the continent. Several overt initiatives (for
example, the Marshall Plan and NATO) and covert operations (for example, the
subsidisation by the US High Commission for Germany of journals such as Die
Neue Zeitung and Der Monat) funnelled millions of US dollars into fostering
democracy and capitalism in Europe. Early in the Cold War, the United States
established a pattern of investing in ‘contain[ing] the spread of leftist radicalism
. . . to foster the idea of an “Atlantic community of nations” in its fight against
“totalitarianism” in both its Stalinist and fascist guises’.44 More to the point,
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cultural covert activities in Europe began well before the CIA’s decision to
fund the CCF. However, the Americanising aspects of these efforts generated
significant ‘cultural resistance’ among Europeans. Such activities necessitated
building alliances with Europe’s non-communist Left and its liberals, but the
cost-conscious US Congress looked negatively at funding programmes devoted
to encouraging these groups. Thus, opposition from the Left, abroad, and the
Right, at home, necessitated secrecy.45
What were the alternatives to CIA funding? Although not explicitly address-
ing the subject, Lasch would not have thought the question important. He
equated ‘foundations’, such as the Ford Foundation (multi-billion dollar charita-
ble organisation that funded international cultural and economic development),
with the ‘state’, describing both ‘modern bureaucracies’ as ‘money spending
agencies’ that manipulated ‘professionalised intellectuals’. Moreover, Lasch did
not take seriously the intellectual integrity of the CCF’s members, because, as
mentioned above, they confused their own values with the interests of the state.
Thus, they made no meaningful or independent choices.46 Saunders grants her
subjects slightly more autonomy. In evaluating the motivations of intellectuals’
collaboration with the CIA, Saunders asks whether they were ‘suckers or hypo-
crites?’47 Her short answer is hypocrites. Saunders concedes that:
not all of them were ‘witting’ in the sense that they were active participants in the
deception. But they all knew, and had known for some time. And if they didn’t,
they were, said their critics, cultivatedly, and culpably ignorant.48
As for seeking funds from large philanthropic organisations, she regards the
Ford Foundation as part of the problem, as just another front, effectively no
different than the Fairfield Foundation, created by Julius Fleischman as a CIA
front or ‘dummy’ organisation. ‘At times’, she argues, ‘it seemed as if the Ford
Foundation was simply an extension of the government in the area of cultural
propaganda’.49 For Saunders, the fact that the CCF even sought out the Ford
or Rockefeller Foundations indicates the reach of the CIA, because the CIA
had agents moving in and out of all of these organisations. Although the CCF
received $7 million (the equivalent of over $52 million in 2012) from the
Ford Foundation by the early 1960s, she does not seriously regard the Ford
Foundation as a legitimate funding alternative for the CCF.50
According to Coleman, the ‘major fault’ of secret funding ‘was less in the
initial CIA funding – the early post-war years were an “emergency” – than in
allowing it to continue until 1966’.51 Coleman suspects that it would have been
a relatively easy matter for the CCF to obtain private funding, from, say, the
Rockefeller Foundation, after the initial ‘emergency’. Lucas and Scott-Smith,
though, counter this statement, arguing that this was never a meaningful option.
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Lucas notes that the Ford Foundation was ‘wary’ of receiving political direction
from the US Government, and Scott-Smith describes the major foundations as
being ‘never more than bit player[s] in Congress funding’.52 Coleman thinks it
reasonable that the CCF turned to the CIA. After the initial CIA-funded confer-
ence in Berlin, the CCF had no reliable source of funds, because neither the State
Department nor the US Congress would fund the CCF. Only the CIA proved a
viable funding source, but the CCF wanted ‘to keep the arrangement secret, since
otherwise European intellectuals would refuse to cooperate with the Congress’.53
The CIA indirectly provided funds to the CCF, through ‘actual foundations
or ones created for the purpose’ – that is, ‘dummy’ organisations, such as the
Fairfield Foundation. Despite efforts to conceal the money connection, the
‘covert’ relationship between the CCF and the CIA seemed to be an open secret
around the world. Indeed, Coleman comments that British and French intellec-
tuals often nettled CCF officials about being tools of the American government.
Margery Sabin observes that, ‘the origin of American money was less shrouded
in secrecy in India than in America, where the mystery of who-knew-what-when
about the CIA sponsorship is still being disputed’. Thus, as Coleman shows, ‘the
attempt at cover was hardly successful’. ‘Whatever the rumors or allegations’,
asserts Coleman, ‘they were in the early 1950s of secondary importance to the
Congress intellectuals, who had been desperately calling for a greater American
commitment if European freedom were to survive’. His apologia notwithstand-
ing, Coleman concedes that ‘if it had not been possible to find other sources
of funds, it could be said in hindsight that it would have been better to have
reduced the Congress’s range of activities’.54
Although many intellectuals would have preferred the CCF be funded openly
by the State Department, Berghahn offers that they had little choice. He explains
that, having successfully participated in World War II against Nazi totalitarian-
ism, they saw nothing nefarious in the cooperation between government and
private organisations in the fight against communist totalitarianism. On the
contrary, they ‘viewed the Cold War against the Soviet Union that followed in
1945 as a comprehensive conflict that justified the continued application of the
principles of close cooperation that had guided the hot war against Hitler’.55
Nevertheless, intellectuals loathed covert funding. Michael Josselson –
Administrative Secretary of the CCF – initially hoping that support would
come from the AFL–CIO, reluctantly accepted CIA money, because he ‘received
assurances that there would be no interference by the agency with any activity’
and that ‘no attempt [would] ever be made to use the new organization for any
intelligence or penetration purposes’.56 Josselson basically trusted the CIA, but
realised that public exposure of the connection with the CIA could damage the
CCF’s credibility, as well as the personal reputations of the intellectuals involved
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in the organisation. Thus, he continuously, yet unsuccessfully, sought an income

that would free the CCF from its dependence upon the CIA.57 Obtaining
alternative funding sources proved increasingly difficult throughout the 1950s.
The Ford Foundation provided some grants to the CCF, but believed that ‘the
covert CIA connection constantly put its worldwide prestige in jeopardy’.58 The
more the CCF became dependent upon the CIA, the less the Ford Foundation
wanted anything to do with the CCF. In 1962, the Ford Foundation examined
the CCF’s annual budget of $1.8 million and found that $1.4 million came from
‘government sources’.59 In the early 1960s, efforts to attract institutions, such
as the Rockefeller Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Sloan
Foundation (multi-million dollar private international philanthropic organi-
sations, established and operated by members of the Rockefeller and Sloan
families), foundered for similar reasons. Ironically, these foundations refused
to make significant grants to the CCF, ‘without heavy Ford participation’. Thus,
it seemed that CIA funding was a vicious circle, from which the CCF could not
escape.60
* * *
Perhaps the most troubling issue related to the CIA’s covert funding of the CCF
is that of influence. Historians differ not only as to the nature of CIA influence
over the CCF, but also as to the extent of CIA control. With the CIA paying the
CCF’s bills, many have wondered what the CIA’s return on investment was.
Lucas, Scott-Smith and Berghahn offer indirect analyses of the CIA’s influence
over the CCF. As discussed above, these historians believe that the context in
which the CIA and CCF entered into collaboration helps to explain the nature
and extent of the CIA’s influence. Lucas’ Freedom’s War is relatively indiffer-
ent as to whether or not the CIA controlled the CCF, but it does argue that the
CIA’s covert activities undoubtedly contributed to the ‘drive for ideological
consensus’.61 Scott-Smith argues that ‘the boundary between state and civil
society becomes more blurred as the liberal idea of an independent social sphere
becomes indefensible’.62 In essence, his point is not that the CIA exerted influ-
ence as an arm of the state over the private CCF. Rather, he contends that the
two acted in cooperation to mobilise cultural opinions on behalf of the state’s
hegemonic goals. Although Berghahn delves deeply into the origins of the CCF
and its relationship with the CIA, his goal is to explore the networks established
by Atlanticists during the Cold War. Unconcerned with the issue of influence,
he asks the broader question relating to ‘how far the entire culture war effort
was a success or failure’.63 He concludes that, despite enormous power, the
CIA’s covert support of the CCF ironically contributed to the European anti-
Americanism that it tried to combat.
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Interestingly, Lasch did not accuse the US Government of dictating edito-

rial policy to the CCF. Instead, he questioned whether the CCF’s intellectuals
‘criticized the American government or any aspect of the officially sanctioned
order’.64 So assimilated and internalised were the opinions of editors of CCF
organs, such as the British CCF journal Encounter, that there was no need for the
CIA to dictate editorial policy. The editors self-censored and did so in a way that
masked any connection to the US Government. Although many CCF intellectu-
als protested that they had never been pressured by the CIA, Lasch countered
that, even if true, this did not ‘prove their independence from the official point
of view’.65 When the revelations exposed the CIA’s funding of the CCF, the intel-
lectuals ‘continued to protest their innocence, as if innocence, in the narrow and
technical sense, were the real issue in the matter’.66 Few positions exposed the
CCF’s absorption of official perspectives as much as its strong stand against non-
alignment. When India demanded its right to pursue independent policies in the
Cold War, the CCF lamely chastised ‘the immorality of neutralism’.67 Instead of
considering that non-alignment might represent free thought, the intellectuals
condemned non-alignment as a form of fellow travelling or cowardice.
Although sympathetic to Lasch’s assessment, Saunders does not feel that it
goes far enough in considering the CIA’s means of control. As the title to the
British edition (Who Paid the Piper?) suggests, Saunders contends that the CIA
maintained tremendous influence over the CCF and did so primarily through
the means of funding. In the early 1950s, the CIA paid for the first conference in
Berlin and later boosted its ‘slush fund’ by diverting $200,000 to the CCF from
the Marshall Plan. Above all, ‘dummy’ organisations, such as the Miami District
Fund, the Hoblitzelle Foundation and, of course, the Fairfield Foundation,
provided significant ‘grants’ to the CCF. She further points out that the CCF
received increasing amounts from the CIA in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
However, she concedes that Josselson constantly worried about CIA funding as
the CCF’s ‘Achilles’ heel’ and that he devoted significant energies to freeing the
CCF from financial dependence upon the CIA.68 Though sensitive to Josselson’s
anxiety, Saunders contends that his exertions only emphasised the CIA’s influ-
ence over the CCF. The signal example used by Saunders to illustrate the CIA’s
‘Wurlitzer’ was the quashing of an article by Dwight Macdonald concerning US
conduct in the Korean War for Encounter (Fall 1958).69 ‘By axing the Macdonald
article . . .’, Saunders asserts, ‘the credibility of the claim that CIA support came
without strings attached was jeopardized’.70
Unsurprisingly, Coleman’s argument is quite different. He claims that the CIA
exerted a deleterious influence on the CCF, not by shaping or controlling its opin-
ions, but by moving the CCF to the Left. According to Coleman, the CCF con-
tinued cleaving to the non-communist Left even after the Soviets withdrew from
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the culture war in the mid 1950s, because of the CIA’s ‘misjudgement that this
was where the leadership of the intellectual community remained’.71 He argues
that such an approach might have been appropriate in the early 1950s, but it no
longer worked in the 1960s. As for covert funding, Coleman regards it as a viable
short-term approach, because, as mentioned above, the means of funding mat-
tered less than the end goals. Nonetheless, over the long-term, the CCF, under the
patronage of the CIA, remained fixed in Left thinking, until its demise in the late
1960s. Although moving, and keeping, the CCF to the Left appears to be the CIA’s
most important influence on the organisation, Coleman, in any case, favourably
assesses the work of the CCF and laments its demise: ‘In contributing in so bril-
liant and timely a way to this public awareness throughout the world in a period
of great danger, the Congress for Cultural Freedom was a historic success’.72
Hugh Wilford’s work occasionally echoes that of Coleman, but lacks his
admiration for the CCF. Rather than hold a brief either for or against the CCF,
Wilford sets his task as determining the degree to which the CIA exerted influ-
ence over cultural affairs. As such, his two critical books – The CIA, The British
Left and the Cold War: Calling the Tune? and The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the
CIA Played America – both directly challenge Saunders’s ‘tacit suggestion
that the Agency called the tune of those intellectuals who received its secret
patronage’.73 Although genuinely impressed by her thorough research, Wilford
contends that her ‘portrayal of the Agency’s cultural influence’ needs revision.74
Above all, he argues that ‘the implied claim in the British title of Saunders’s
book, Who Paid the Piper? – that America’s Cold War spy establishment called
the tune of western intellectual life is problematic in several respects’. He agrees
that Saunders has correctly identified some examples of CIA influence (for
example, the removal of Lasky from CCF leadership and the editorial intru-
sions at Encounter – indeed, he confirms Saunders in describing Encounter ‘as
very much a joint Anglo-American intelligence operation’), but believes her
narrow focus on such episodes leaves a distorted picture of CIA influence. He
argues that the CIA actually had a difficult time accounting for its investment
in culture. Above all, ‘the CIA could not always predict or control the actions of
the musicians, writers, and artists, it secretly patronized’.75 Neither was the CIA
able to ‘dictate’ how cultural elites would react to the ‘cultural blandishments’
promoted by the CIA.76 For instance, several British intellectuals of the CCF
obstructed and hampered the American Cold War effort in a number of ways.
They were quarrelsome (arguing incessantly amongst themselves and with the
CCF’s leaders); they often defined culture at odds with the CIA; and they ignored
the wishes of their benefactors. Yet, there was little that the CIA could do, other
than complain behind closed doors, because secrecy prevented the Agency from
exposing the intellectuals’ non-compliance.77
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Wilford’s description of the CIA’s attempts at controlling intellectuals evokes

the image of herding cats. Despite confirming Saunders’ appraisal that many
intellectuals were, in fact, witting, Wilford believes that the same evidence that
indicates their knowledge of covert funding also indicates their distaste for it.
They knew of it, but they did not like it. This basic fact mattered a great deal.
Whatever intellectuals ‘knew or did not know about the CIA’s hand in their
affairs, it did not prevent them from treating the organisation as if it were a
genuine, privately run committee, indeed, as if it were their own’.78 Moreover,
the risks to the CIA’s covert operations in cultural spheres were significant,
because of ‘literary intellectuals’ notorious unpredictability and fierce sense of
independence’.79 Passionate disputes among the CCF’s intellectuals and the
organisation’s leadership in Paris show further difficulties in managing an inter-
national covert operation. In particular, ex-communist intellectuals thought
‘they had a much better understanding of the Cold War enemy than the U.S.
government’ and often defiantly made that point to their paymasters.80 Even
money itself was a risk for CIA officials, as they often fumed in impotent rage as
‘intellectuals had a habit of appropriating CCF subsidies for their own private
purposes, which was to become a chronic problem in the United States’s cultural
Cold War effort’.81
The few studies that have considered the CCF’s activities in specific countries
tend to confirm Wilford’s arguments about the CIA’s limited ability to call the
tune. Ingeborg Philipsen’s study of Denmark describes the Danish CCF as a
contentious group that could not be ‘characterized by internal unity. From
the start there were disagreements among the intellectuals about its aims and
purposes’. Moreover, the CCF in Denmark was ‘not . . . one big propaganda
machine controlling everything’. The Danish CCF ‘played out of tune, they
played a different tune – or they refused to play at all’. Tity de Vries, comparing
the Dutch CCF as ineffectual in relation to the affiliates in Britain, France or
Germany, sees the affiliate in the Netherlands as a fairly lacklustre organisation,
which had little connection to international intellectuals. Dutch intellectuals
held an ambivalent perception of American culture and society and tended to
be politically apathetic. For de Vries, uniquely Dutch considerations had ‘more
influence on the intellectuals’ position concerning the CCF than the Cold War
policy of the Dutch government or their individual political positions’. In addi-
tion, my own work and that of Margery Sabin draw similar conclusions about
the activities of the CCF in India. Sabin argues that, in order to understand the
attraction of Indian intellectuals to the CCF, one has to attend to the factional
struggles within Indian politics after independence. ‘It was not love of America’,
she asserts, that attracted these figures to the Indian Congress for Cultural
Freedom (ICCF), but ‘a hope that they could use rather than be used by their
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new sponsors’. My work contends that Indian intellectuals ‘certainly received

CIA money, yet they disagreed vehemently with US foreign policy’, and they
used ‘the ICCF as a vehicle for promoting their own domestic opposition to the
Nehru government’. Indeed, ‘they routinely ran the organization according to
concerns having very little to do with the dictates of American foreign policy’.82
In many ways, Wilford (along with several other authors who focus on spe-
cific countries) shows the ineffectiveness of the CIA at the precise moment – the
late 1940s and 1950s – when the agency was at the height of its power. Wilford’s
work suggests that the cultural Cold War was a collaborative exercise, in which
the CIA cooperated with – not dictated to – international partners in the private
sphere. The ‘cultural war’ waged by the CIA and its intellectual collaborators
often appears as a multifarious and irregular affair, in which minor actors
frequently wielded unanticipated power. Although recognising the significant
role played by the CIA in the cultural Cold War, Wilford suggests that intel-
lectuals acted with more independence and less hypocrisy than is argued by
Lasch and Saunders. In this regard, many of Coleman’s arguments resonate with
Wilford, but, it bears repeating, Wilford has no stake either in rehabilitating or
condemning the CCF. He intimates that, despite her formidable archival work,
Saunders’ interpretative conclusions actually obscure the actual influence that
the CIA possessed over the CCF. Wilford’s work suggests that a sober assess-
ment of CIA influence necessitates looking past celebratory or condemnatory
appraisals.
* * *
Together, the historians discussed in this chapter have developed a rich
and diverse assessment of the relationship between the CIA and the CCF.
Unfortunately, they have done so, despite conducting painstaking multi-archi-
val work, without the benefit of CIA documents. Therefore, their engaging
disagreements, valuable interpretations and conclusions must remain contin-
gent. Indeed, the CIA’s retention of documents, many which are now over a
half-century old, prevents historians from exploring the degree to which the
CIA coordinated its CCF operations with other international covert activities.
Berghahn and Wilford convincingly demonstrate the limits of the CIA’s power
to influence intellectuals, but inspection of the CIA’s records will enable histo-
rians to assess whether or not the CIA believed it earned a good return on its
investment in intellectuals. Historians still need to know what the CIA expected
culture to accomplish. Indeed, did the CIA regard itself as trying to impose the
pax Americana described by Saunders? Or was its approach to culture more
complex? Moreover, documents can address questions as to how much the
international covert operation with the CCF actually cost. In the event that
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the documents remain closed, perhaps the best avenue for continued research
on the subject of the CIA’s involvement with the CCF is transnational history.
Historians must continue to have an expansive notion of the cultural Cold
War. Scholars would be wise to follow Berghahn’s integrative approach, which
examines the CIA’s ‘cultural war’ as part of a broader ‘culture’ of international
‘cultural conflict’. It is absolutely imperative to examine the Soviet side of the
equation, especially during the 1940s and 1950s. Nevertheless, the historians dis-
cussed in this chapter have prompted a valuable debate about the cultural Cold
War. Lasch, Saunders and Coleman carried the arguments of the cultural Cold
War into historiography, though they have all provided valuable foundational
work. Although Scott-Smith, Lucas and Wilford have moved beyond mere
debate, their theoretical affinity with one another is by no means clear. If Lucas
focuses upon goals and Scott-Smith upon causes, then Wilford concentrates
upon results. Despite disagreements over emphasis, Scott-Smith and Lucas both
assert that the CIA’s Cold War was a negotiated process. Scott-Smith respects
Lucas’ recognition of the state–private network as a vehicle for promoting ideol-
ogy, but ultimately regards the ideological approach as reductionist. Meanwhile,
Berghahn’s discussion of historical context establishes that there needed to be
a US culture of funding before the US Government could fund culture. The
current discussion of the relationship between the CIA and the CCF appears to
have moved beyond condemnatory and celebratory approaches, but, until the
CIA becomes more forthcoming, our conclusions about the cultural Cold War
must remain provisional.
Notes
1 Nate Jones, ‘The CIA’s Covert Operation Against Declassification Review and
Obama’s Open Government’, Unredacted: The National Security Archive, Unedited
and Uncensored, available at: http://nsarchive.wordpress.com/2012/02/10/the-cias-
covert-operation-against-declassification-review-and-obamas-open-government/;
Nate Jones, ‘CIA Stops Charging Declassification Fees . . . For Now. White House and
Congressional Intervention Still Needed’, Unredacted: The National Security Archive,
Unedited and Uncensored, available at: http://nsarchive.wordpress.com/2012/05/29/
cia-stops-charging-mdr-fees-for-now-white-house-and-congressional-intervention-
still-needed/.
2 Christopher Lasch, ‘The Cultural Cold War: A Short History of the Congress for
Cultural Freedom’, in Barton J. Bernstein (ed.), Towards a New Past: Dissenting
Essays in American History (New York, NY: Vintage Books: 1967), pp. 322–59. The
article first appeared as ‘The Cultural Cold War’, The Nation, 11 September 1967, pp.
198–212. Citations refer to the book.
3 Irwin Unger, ‘Book Reviews: Towards a New Past: Dissenting Essays in American
History’, Journal of American History, 55(2), September 1968, p. 369. Unger described
MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd 61 21/02/2013 08:23

the article as ‘little more than red baiting in reverse’. David Donald, ‘Review Note:
Towards a New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History’, American Historical
Review, 74(2), December 1968, pp. 532–3. Here, Donald mocked Lasch’s as the ‘voice
of outraged youth’.
4 Stephen Spender, Melvin J. Lasky, and Irving Kristol, ‘Letter’, New York Times, 10
May 1966, p. 44.
5 Thomas W. Braden, ‘I’m Glad the CIA is “Immoral” ’, The Saturday Evening Post, 20
May 1967, pp. 10–14; Thomas W. Braden, ‘What’s Wrong with the CIA?’, Saturday
Review, 5 April 1975, pp. 14–18.
6 Lasch, ‘The Cultural Cold War’, p. 325.
9 Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War
(London: Granta Books, 1999). This book was published in the United States as The
Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York, NY: The
New Press, 1999). Some will certainly regard Saunders’s conclusions as strident, but
most will agree that she has performed a valuable service, in terms of crafting a broad
and detailed narrative of the activities of the CCF.
10 Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, pp. 4, 6.
11 W. Scott Lucas, ‘Revealing the Parameters of Public Opinion: An Interview with
Frances Stonor Saunders’, in Giles Scott-Smith and Hans Krabbendam (eds), The
Cultural Cold War in Western Europe 1945–1960 (London and Portland, OR: Frank
Cass, 2003), pp. 19, 26; Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold
War, p. 415; Scott Lucas, ‘Introduction: Negotiating Freedom’, in Helen LaVille and
Hugh Wilford (eds), The US Government, Citizen Groups and the Cold War (London
and New York, NY: Routledge, 2006), pp. 3–4. Lucas regards Who Paid the Piper? as
‘part of a continuing response to a Cold War history that presents itself as official,
triumphal or definitive’.
12 Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, p. 415.
13 Peter Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the
Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe (New York, NY: The Free Press, 1989).
14 Lucas, ‘Interview’, p. 30; Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played
America (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 279,
note 11. Wilford describes The Liberal Conspiracy as ‘a semi-official account, which
nonetheless remains useful’.
15 Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy, pp. xiii, 246.
16 Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy, pp. xi, 246–7. See, also, Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones,
The CIA and American Democracy (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
1989), p. 87. Coleman argues along lines similar to Jeffeys-Jones – in the wake of the
funding revelations, the CIA was the ‘victim of an excess of democracy’.
17 Peter Coleman, ‘Supporting the Indispensable’, New Criterion, 18(1), September
1999, p. 63.
18 Giles Scott-Smith, The Politics of Apolitical Culture: The Congress for Cultural
Freedom, the CIA and Post-War American Hegemony (London and New York, NY:
Routledge, 2002), p. 3.
19 Scott-Smith, The Politics of Apolitical Culture, p. 84.
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22 Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, pp. 35, 37
23 Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? p. 85.
24 Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? p. 98 [emphasis original].
25 Hugh Wilford, The CIA, The British Left and the Cold War: Calling the Tune?
(London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2003), p. 105. Wilford agrees that Wisner
removed Lasky from CCF leadership, but argues that Lasky’s removal indicates the
difficulties, not the power, of CIA attempts to manage cultural activities.
26 Coleman, ‘Supporting the Indispensable’, pp. 46–7.
27 Coleman, ‘Supporting the Indispensable’, p. 220.
28 Wilford, The CIA, The British Left and the Cold War, p. 88.
30 Scott Lucas, Freedom’s Crusade: The American Crusade against the Soviet Union
(New York, NY: New York University Press, 1999), p. 2.
31 Though not focusing upon the CIA–CCF relationship, Lucas explores the context of
state–private relationships. Elke van Cassel, ‘The Reporter Magazine (1949–1968),
The US Government and the Cold War’, in Helen LaVille and Hugh Wilford (eds),
The US Government, Citizen Groups and the Cold War (London and New York, NY:
Routledge, 2006), p. 118.
32 Van Cassel, ‘The Reporter Magazine (1949–1968), The US Government and the Cold
War’, p. 135. This emphasises the ‘connections’ between the private ventures and the
US intelligence community in promoting American ideology.
33 Giles Scott-Smith, ‘Building a Community around the Pax Americana: The US
Government and Exchange Programmes during the 1950s’, in Helen LaVille and
Hugh Wilford (eds), The US Government, Citizen Groups and the Cold War (London
and New York, NY: Routledge, 2006), pp. 85–6.
43 Volker R. Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe: Shepard
Stone between Philanthropy, Academy, and Diplomacy (Princeton, NJ and Oxford:
Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 112.
44 Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe, p. 112.
46 Lasch, ‘The Cultural Cold War’, pp. 328, 346.
51 Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy, p. 244.
52 Lucas, Freedom’s Crusade, p. 108; Scott-Smith, The Politics of Apolitical Culture,
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p. 123. Neither narrative continues past the mid-1950s or gives extended discussion
of foundation activities.
54 Margery Sabin, Dissenters and Mavericks: Writings about India in English, 1765–2000
(New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 143; Coleman, ‘Supporting the
Indispensable’, pp. 48–9, 221.
55 Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe, p. 174
56 Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe, pp. 219–20.
59 Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe, pp. 233–5.
61 Lucas, Freedom’s Crusade, p. 282.
63 Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe, pp. xviii, 284–95.
68 Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?, pp. 91, 106–7, 125–7, 341.
69 Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?, pp. 320, 322.
70 Lucas, ‘Interview’, pp. 22–3.
72 Coleman, ‘Supporting the Indispensable’, pp. 246–7.
73 Wilford, The CIA, The British Left and the Cold War, pp. 2, 263.
74 Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer, p. 9.
75 Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer, pp. 113–14.
79 Wilford, The CIA, The British Left and the Cold War, pp. 103, 109, 114.
80 Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer, pp. 91, 97.
81 Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer, pp. 84–5, 114.
82 Ingeborg Philipsen, ‘Out of Tune: The Congress for Cultural Freedom in Denmark
1953–1960’, in Giles Scott-Smith and Hans Krabbendam (eds), The Cultural Cold
War in Western Europe 1945–1960 (London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2003),
pp. 237, 250; Tity de Vries, ‘The Absent Dutch: Dutch Intellectuals and the Congress
for Cultural Freedom’, in Giles Scott-Smith and Hans Krabbendam (eds), The
Cultural Cold War in Western Europe 1945–1960 (London and Portland, OR: Frank
Cass, 2003), p. 265; Sabin, Dissenters and Mavericks, p. 143; Eric Pullin, ‘“Money
Does Not Make Any Difference to the Opinions That We Hold”: India, the CIA, and
the Congress for Cultural Freedom, 1951–58’, Intelligence and National Security,
26(2–3), April–June 2011, p. 379.
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Chapter 3
‘REAL SUBSTANCE, NOT JUST SYMBOLISM’? THE

CIA AND THE REPRESENTATION OF COVERT
OPERATIONS IN THE FOREIGN RELATIONS OF THE
UNITED STATES SERIES
Matthew Jones and Paul McGarr
In March 1967, the Harvard economist and former US Ambassador to India,

John Kenneth Galbraith, noted wryly in the pages of The Washington Post that
recent events had confirmed the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to be ‘a
secret agency . . . with an excellent instinct for headlines’.1 A month earlier, to
the horror of senior CIA officials, the American west coast magazine Ramparts
had disclosed the Agency’s long-standing financial connection to a number of
international educational and cultural organisations. In a series of damning
exposes covered simultaneously in The New York Times, details of covert CIA
operations conducted in the United States, Europe and Asia were laid bare.2
Ever since the blanket press exposure given to CIA indiscretions in the wake
of the Ramparts revelations, and the international media circus that developed
in the early 1970s around Congressional probes into the American intelligence
community, the CIA has fought to keep much of its remaining operational
and institutional history secret. Nonetheless, the Agency’s association with the
surveillance of political groups inside the United States during the Johnson and
Nixon administrations (Operation CHAOS), links to the global narcotics trade
and, following the events of 11 September 2001, controversial role in prosecut-
ing the United States’ ‘War on Terror’ have served as particularly toxic forms
of public diplomacy.3 Until relatively recently, the Agency’s most prominent
adversaries in the battle for control of CIA history have been former intelli-
gence officers turned memoirists, journalists and historians. Over the past two
decades, however, the CIA has come under increasing pressure to open up its
archives from a new and, in many respects, much more formidable body inside
the United States Government.
65
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THE CIA AND OFFICIAL INTELLIGENCE NARRATIVES

On 28 October 1991, the US Congress passed the Foreign Relations Authorization
Act (PL 102–138). This legally mandated the State Department’s Office of the
Historian to ensure that its flagship publication, The Foreign Relations of the
United States series (widely known as FRUS), provided a ‘thorough, accurate and
reliable’ documentary account of US foreign policy, not more than thirty years
after the fact.4 Given the central role that post-war American presidents assigned
to the CIA in the pursuit of US foreign policy objectives, the 1991 Act carried
far-reaching implications for the CIA’s ability to retain control over its organi-
sational history, wider public image and (some within the Agency have argued)
operational effectiveness. During the presidency of John F. Kennedy, a total of
163 covert actions were formally approved between early 1961 and late 1963 by
the ‘Special Group’ and ‘303 Committee’ – the executive bodies established to
review clandestine operations. Under the Johnson administration, a further 142
covert actions were sanctioned by the executive up to February 1967. The 1976
Final Report of the Church Committee, however, estimated that of several thou-
sand operations undertaken by the CIA since 1961, only 14 per cent were put
forward for formal presidential approval.5 The prospect of the US Government
publishing official accounts of CIA Cold War interventions in Iran, Guatemala,
Cuba, the Congo, Indonesia, Japan and elsewhere deeply troubled many in the
CIA. Indeed, efforts undertaken by the State Department’s Historian’s Office
since the early 1990s to incorporate ever greater amounts of CIA documentation
into the FRUS series have provoked feelings of consternation, outrage and, on
occasions, panic inside the Agency’s Langley headquarters. In early 2001, one
former member of the CIA’s covert action arm – the Directorate of Operations
(or, as it is now known, the National Clandestine Service) – publicly articulated
the fear that:
the CIA is in danger of losing control of its own declassification process to the
nongovernmental academic community. It is increasingly apparent that the FRUS
series is being written for, and according to, criteria and standards of the domestic
US academic community.6
Such a troubling development, it was contended, threatened to have ‘serious,
cumulative, and long term deleterious effects on the Agency . . .’7
The CIA has demonstrated a willingness to endorse official representations
of some of the less controversial aspects of its past in the FRUS series. Most
notably, two FRUS volumes – The Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment,
1945–1950 (1996) and The Intelligence Community, 1950–1955 (2007) – have
comprehensively documented the origins, organisation and growth of the CIA
in the decade after 1945.8 The latter volume, in particular, although published by
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‘Real Substance, Not Just Symbolism’? 67
the Department of State, was compiled and edited by Michael Warner – then a
member of CIA’s History Staff – and can be seen as a high-water mark in col-
laboration between the Office of the Historian and the Agency. More generally,
however, the CIA has actively resisted attempts, from both inside and outside
government, to document its covert Cold War operations. In part, the Agency’s
response, to what it invariably perceived to be wholly unwarranted and irrespon-
sible pressure from the State Department to open up its archives, can be attrib-
uted to a natural and ingrained (some have argued excessively so) institutional
culture of secrecy.9 Intelligence services are, after all, extremely vulnerable if they
do not keep many of their activities hidden from view. Equally, the Clandestine
Service retains a genuine and deeply held conviction that, by publicising the less
savoury aspects of CIA history, the State Department’s historians risk sabotaging
important liaison relationships with foreign intelligence services and imperil-
ling American lives. In the words of one CIA officer, moves towards greater
transparency threatened to ‘increase [the] counterintelligence and/or terrorist
activity directed against [the] real or imagined CIA presence [abroad], making
the C[landestine] S[ervice]’s job more difficult and risky, and occasionally life-
threatening’.10 The CIA, he added, ‘need[ed] to drive the “openness train”, not
ride in the caboose, if a major wreck was to be avoided’.11
‘PLAYING GAMES WITH HISTORY’: THE CIA AND THE FRUS

SERIES
Back in the early 1980s, the threat – operational and otherwise – posed by the
State Department’s attempts to examine the CIA’s past barely registered with
senior Agency officials. In 1983, State Department historians failed to persuade
the CIA to sanction the inclusion of documents detailing the Agency’s role
in the 1954 coup that ousted Guatemala’s democratically elected president,
Jacobo Arbenz Guzman.12 Special operations or ‘covert actions’ have always
been notoriously difficult to keep hidden. Unlike the gathering of intelligence,
which is largely passive, such activity is often ‘noisy’, intrinsically insecure
and can require the recruitment of large numbers of people from unchecked
backgrounds. The 1954 Guatemalan episode is a case in point. In 1982, The New
York Times reporter, Stephen Kinzer, in partnership with the political com-
mentator, Stephen Schlesinger, brought the CIA intervention in Guatemala to
public prominence with the publication of Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the
American Coup in Guatemala. Kinzer successfully utilised the methodologi-
cal toolkit of investigative journalism to roll back the frontiers of state secrecy
in much the same way as his contemporaries, such as Bob Woodard, Carl
Bernstein and Seymour Hersh.13 Notably, Bitter Fruit drew extensively upon
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witness statements from former State Department officials and CIA officers
to reveal that the Eisenhower administration, which feared that Guatemala’s
Left-leaning government would provide the Soviets with a ‘beachhead in the
Western hemisphere’,14 had ordered Langley to remove Guzman from power
in an operation that was codenamed PBSUCESS. A more authoritative study of
the CIA’s complicity in Guzman’s demise arrived later the same year, from the
historian Richard Immerman. Immerman’s meticulously researched book, The
CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention, mined new US archival
sources obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and utilised interviews
conducted with some of PBSUCCESS’ central protagonists.15
Once the CIA’s intervention in Guatemala had become the subject of public
debate, historians within the State Department argued that by whitewashing the
CIA’s role in the 1954 coup, the FRUS series would face ridicule. The credibility
of an official history that had been inaugurated back in 1861 during the presi-
dency of Abraham Lincoln, and which was lauded the world over as the ‘gold
standard’ of foreign relations documentary collections, was at stake. Stephen
Kane – the editor responsible for compiling the FRUS volume on Guatemala
– complained to David Trask – the State Department’s senior historian – that
by continuing to airbrush the CIA out of official US history and ‘permitting
silence to substitute for substance’, the FRUS series’ ‘reputation as a credible and
objective official documentary publication will not endure’.16 Fifteen of Kane’s
colleagues in the Historians Office felt likewise. In a formal letter to Trask, his
staff urged that the CIA’s veto on the representation of intelligence activity in the
Guatemala volume be challenged and, failing that, a disclaimer be inserted into
its preface, thereby explaining the omission. In the absence of either, Trask was
encouraged to suspend the volumes’ publication.17 Trask’s discomfort increased
when Betty Unterberger – a Professor of History at Texas A&M University and
Chair of the State Department’s Historical Advisory Committee – got wind of
the CIA’s plans to conceal its role in Washington’s official history of US–Latin
American relations. Echoing Kane’s earlier warning, Unterberger demanded
that Trask avoid sending a:
signal to the CIA that if it defers a decision [to release documentation for] long
enough, the H[istorians] O[ffice] will [demur] . . . thereby encouraging the CIA to
employ the same tactics of inaction in other cases with, of course, disastrous results
for future Foreign Relations volumes (emphasis added).
For good measure, Unterberger added that she had felt obliged to share her
concerns regarding the CIA’s attitude towards the FRUS series with prominent
senators and Congressmen.18
In the heightened Cold War climate of the early 1980s, however, and with
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the Agency enjoying somewhat of a renaissance under the Reagan administra-

tion, few senior State Department officials or American legislators felt inclined
to champion the case for greater transparency on the part of the CIA. The
zeitgeist in Washington was firmly against the disclosure of CIA misdeeds of
the type that had emerged from the Church and Pike Committees in the mid-
1970s and which had all but crippled the Agency. Prior to entering the Oval
Office in January 1981, Ronald Reagan had publicly championed the CIA. In
1975, he took a sympathetic view of Langley’s transgressions when serving as
a member of the Rockefeller Commission, which his Republican predecessor,
Gerald Ford, had established to investigate internal CIA reports detailing illegal
or inappropriate Agency activities – the so-called ‘family jewels’.19 On entering
the White House, Reagan adopted a light-touch approach to CIA oversight and
promised to ‘unleash the CIA’ in an effort to counter what he characterised as an
aggressive and relentless bid by the Soviet Union to expand its ‘evil empire’.20 In
August 1982, Reagan made his administration’s position on the declassification
of government documentation abundantly clear by issuing an executive order
that removed the requirement for federal agencies to systematically review their
records for public release. The economic and social libertarianism that defined
Reagan’s political outlook did not extend to open government, which the new
President viewed as an anathema to executive authority, in general, and the
work of the intelligence services, in particular.21 Unsurprisingly, in 1983, when
the Foreign Relations volume covering US–Latin American relations in the early
1950s was published, it contained no reference to the CIA or the Agency’s inter-
vention in domestic Guatemalan politics.
Following the Guatemalan episode, questions surrounding CIA representa-
tion in the Foreign Relations series lay dormant for nearly a decade. It was
not until 15 February 1990 that the issue was once again thrown into sharp
relief, when the then Chair of the State Department’s Advisory Committee
on Historical Diplomatic Documentation (or, as it is more widely known,
Historical Advisory Committee), Warren Cohen – a distinguished professor
from the University of Michigan – tendered his resignation to the Secretary of
State, James Baker. Rationalising his decision in the op-ed pages of The New
York Times, Cohen lamented that he had felt compelled to stand down from his
post on the Historical Advisory Committee, as he could no longer guarantee
the integrity of the FRUS series. The State Department, Cohen charged, was
guilty of ‘playing games with history’.22 Cohen’s ire centred on a FRUS volume
documenting US relations with Iran between 1951 and 1954, which had been
published the previous year. In common with its Guatemalan predecessor, the
Iran volume omitted reference to the CIA’s long-established role in an Anglo-
American covert operation, that, in August 1953, had contributed to the removal
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of Iran’s Prime Minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, in a coup d’état. Dwight

Eisenhower – America’s President at the time of the coup – had hinted at his
administration’s involvement in the downfall of Mosaddegh, whose decision to
nationalise the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company had alienated poli-
cymakers in London and Washington, in a ghostwritten memoir, Mandate for
Change, published in 1963. In subsequent years, David Wise and Thomas Ross’
book, The Invisible Government, which appeared in 1964; Senate Intelligence
Committee hearings in 1976; and Kermit Roosevelt’s self-serving account of his
role as the CIA’s man on the spot, Countercoup: The Struggle for Control of Iran,
published in 1979 all fleshed out the detail of America’s part in the events of
1953.23 The Iran FRUS volume, Warren Cohen trumpeted loudly, was simply ‘a
fraud, a gross distortion of American activity [in Iran]’.24
Disquiet over the CIA’s exclusion from the FRUS volume on Guatemala
in 1983 had generated few ripples outside the Historians Office and the ivory
towers of academia. In marked contrast, Cohen’s resignation in 1990 over the
Iran volume provoked a public outcry. Here, serendipity played its part. The
appearance of the FRUS volume on Iran in 1989 dovetailed neatly with the
end of the Cold War. As the Berlin Wall tumbled, and the Soviet hegemony in
Eastern Europe fractured, the political climate in Washington shifted fleetingly
in favour of open government and greater public accountability. Rallying to
Cohen’s side, The New York Times, Washington Post and a host of other leading
American newspapers noted that whilst post-communist Russia had opened up
its archives to Western scholars and released documents confirming Moscow’s
culpability for the liquidation of Polish army officers in the Katyn Forest in 1940,
the State Department continued to publish misleading and fictitious accounts
of US foreign policy. Moreover, Congressmen from across the American politi-
cal spectrum, including Claiborne Pell – the Democratic Party’s Chairman of
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee – Jesse Helms – its senior Republican
Party member – and David Boren – Chair of the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence – all endorsed Cohen’s call for the passage of primary legislation
obliging the FRUS series to uphold strict standards of historical accuracy.25
The subsequent passage of the Foreign Relations Authorization Act in 1991
raised hopes amongst advocates of open government that, moving forward,
the State Department would be able to circumvent resistance from the CIA
and other federal government agencies, such as the Departments of Defense
and Energy, to publish ‘thorough, accurate, reliable’ and timely documentary
records of US foreign policy.26 Encouragingly, the 1991 Act furnished a recon-
stituted Historical Advisory Committee staffed by nine senior US academics,
with a mandate from Congress to police the production of future FRUS volumes.
Warren Kimball – the combative diplomatic historian from Rutgers University,
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who replaced Cohen as Chair of the Historical Advisory Committee – reacted to

the passage of the 1991 Act with cautious optimism. ‘This is not “Open sesame!” ’,
Kimball noted in October that year, ‘Considerations of privacy and national
security still pertain . . . [but] this legislation is a step in the right direction’.27
EMBRACING ‘OPENNESS’
Back in Langley, signs emerged that senior CIA officials were willing to listen to
calls from legislators, academics and the US media, in order to shed a Cold War
mentality, predicated on extreme secrecy, and open up the Agency’s archives to
greater public scrutiny. In February 1992, the Director of Central Intelligence,
Robert Gates, addressed the Oklahoma Press Association in Tulsa on the subject
of ‘CIA Openness’ (see Figure 5). Conceding that many would view the title of
his address as ‘oxymoronic, like bureaucratic efficiency or jumbo shrimp’, Gates
Figure 5 CIA Director Robert Gates (far left) poses with Russian President
Boris Yeltsin, 16 October 1992 (Press Association, PA.8676941)
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boldly promised, ‘a real shift on the CIA’s part toward greater openness and a
sense of public responsibility’.28 In the short-term, this translated to a commit-
ment on the part of the CIA to accelerate the declassification of Agency records
covering the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the Guatemalan coup
in 1954, the abortive Bay of Pigs operation in Cuba in 1961 and the Cuban Missile
Crisis in 1962. Moreover, Gates announced that CIA staff would become more
accessible to the media, links would be forged between the CIA and American
universities and the creation of a new Centre for the Study of Intelligence would
drive forwards the CIA’s declassification effort.29
Gates’ initiative was received with a good measure of cynicism. Asked for his
impressions of the Oklahoma speech, Senator Alan Cranston – a Democrat from
California – responded that he had ‘seen too many [CIA] documents classified
that shouldn’t be’. ‘I’d like to talk with Gates’, Cranston announced, ‘and spur
him on to explore what further can be done’.30 Much of the substance behind the
Agency’s declassification drive came from recommendations put forward by a
CIA ‘Openness Task Force’, which Gates had established shortly after becoming
DCI in November 1991. As a consequence, the credibility of Gates’ commitment
to a more open and accountable CIA suffered from an early and self-inflicted
blow, when the Task Force’s report was labelled as confidential and withheld
from public view. ‘It was an internal document’, an unfortunate CIA spokesman
struggled to explain to guffawing journalists, ‘portions of which were classified’.31
False starts aside, in the first half of the 1990s, Gates’ successors at the CIA con-
tinued to evidence willingness in theory, if not always in practice, to endorse the
mantra of ‘openness’. In 1993, DCI R. James Woolsey publicly acknowledged the
Agency’s role in eleven covert operations undertaken between the late 1940s and
early 1960s in countries such as Italy, Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia, British Guiana
and Laos. A commitment by Woolsey to initiate declassification reviews of the
CIA’s archives appeared to offer up the prospect of a genuine breakthrough,
both in the Agency’s culture of secrecy and the representation of intelligence
operations in future FRUS volumes. Cautiously applauding Woolsey’s stance,
Mel Leffler – a diplomatic historian from the University of Virginia – spoke for
many academics when he observed: ‘All of us who research the cold war think its
[sic] great. If the C.I.A. really is opening this material up, that’s real substance,
not just symbolism’.32
In more tangible terms, many FRUS volumes published after 1991 did evi-
dence the fruits of closer collaboration between the CIA, the State Department’s
Historians Office and its Historical Advisory Committee. Significantly, the
FRUS series broke new ground in the mid-1990s with volumes on Vietnam that,
for the first time, officially acknowledged US Government policy deliberations
about major covert operations.33 In May 1997, the CIA released 1,400 pages of
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documents relating to the Guatemalan coup of 1954, along with its own 116-
page in-house history of the operation. Moreover, a retrospective FRUS volume
on Guatemala followed in 2003, effectively rectifying ‘the incomplete history
of US relations with Guatemala’, which the State Department had published
in 1983.34 Other FRUS volumes, however, continued to be plagued by disputes
between the Historians Office and the CIA, largely over the declassification of
Agency records.
In 1992, the State Department and CIA clashed over the release of documents
detailing the provision of covert funding for Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party
during the Kennedy administration. A total of 13.5 per cent of the documents
the Historians Office had selected for publication in the FRUS volume on Japan
(from 1961 to 1963) were denied classification by the CIA. In response, when the
volume finally went to press in 1996, its preface included a disclaimer from
the Historical Advisory Committee, baldy stating that, in its view, the volume
did not constitute a ‘thorough, accurate, and reliable documentary record of
major United States foreign policy decisions’.35 Similar problems plagued the
FRUS volume on the American Republics, from 1961 to 1963. The CIA initially
refused to declassify documents implicating the Agency in plots to oust British
Guiana’s leader, Cheddi Jagan.36 In this instance, however, the HAC proved
more successful in overturning the CIA’s decision, with the result that a major-
ity of the denied documents, albeit heavily redacted, eventually made it into
the volume. Further declassification issues plagued FRUS volumes dealing with
Lyndon Johnson’s administration. In one instance, the CIA’s objection to the
FRUS volume on Greece (from 1964 to 1968), which exposed Agency plans
to funnel covert payments to Right-wing Greek politicians in 1965 and 1967,
halted the volume’s release after 750 copies had already rolled off government
presses.37
INDONESIA AND THE OFFICIAL ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF CIA

COVERT ACTION
However, perhaps one of the best places to see the problems and issues gener-
ated by the interactions between the CIA and the FRUS series over the repre-
sentation of covert action is in the various volumes produced on US relations
with Indonesia by the Historian’s Office. Indonesia was a ripe field for outside
intervention in the Cold War years. Having achieved independence from the
Dutch in 1949, the early Indonesian republic was beset by instability, economic
difficulties and regional tensions. Parliamentary democracy and the institutions
that supported it were fragile, a multi-party political system struggled to form
stable coalition governments and the influence of the Army and the centralising
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tendencies of the administrative bureaucracy of the new state soon fostered

tensions between the Outer Island provinces of this huge archipelago and Java.
The country was also home to a growing Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) –
the largest in Asia outside the People’s Republic of China – whose emerging elec-
toral strength on Java was beginning to attract anxious attention in Washington
from the early 1950s onwards. Indeed, American policymakers were ever more
inclined to see Indonesia, with its large and disparate population, its abundant
natural resources, including oil, tin and rubber, and its position astride impor-
tant sea lines of communication, as the most strategically significant state in the
region, whose loss to communism would be a major defeat for the US in the Cold
War with the Soviet Bloc.
Indonesian foreign policy had, moreover, struck out on an independent,
non-aligned path, hosting the Bandung Conference in 1955, courting friendly
relations with the Soviet Union and voicing its support for the continuance
of anti-colonial struggles against America’s European NATO allies (not least
the Dutch, who retained a presence in Indonesia’s backyard in the contested
territory of Western New Guinea). Under the unpredictable and flamboyant
leadership of President Sukarno, who began to assert his own leadership cre-
dentials as the political parties floundered in the mid-1950s, US officials feared
that communist strength within Indonesia would eventually allow the PKI to
take complete control. In this volatile setting, there seemed to be great scope
for external intervention and, therefore, during the 1950s and 1960s, it is hardly
surprising to find that American policymakers were ready, on occasions, to turn
to the CIA, not only for intelligence information and analysis on the constella-
tion of political forces swirling around Sukarno, but for its capacity to engage in
various forms of covert action, which might help to counteract PKI influence on
the domestic political scene.38
With this kind of backdrop, US relations with Indonesia were always likely
to be a thorny topic for the FRUS series to tackle. Another relevant issue was
that ever since the eventual ousting from power of Sukarno by the Indonesian
Army from 1965 to 1966, the US Government had maintained close relations
with the repressive and corrupt regime led by his hard-line anti-communist suc-
cessor, General Suharto. During the 1990s, as the FRUS series began to publish
its Indonesia volumes, the country itself was going through social and political
changes, which could have had an impact on US interests and general relations
with the West. Indeed, following the Asian financial crisis, Suharto was forced
to step down as president in May 1998, and his regime began to be subject to
greater critical scrutiny within Indonesia after 2000, leading to prolonged (and
ultimately unsuccessful) efforts to lay corruption and human rights violations
charges against the former president. Several nervous US officials may well have
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thought that this was an inopportune time to rake over the recent past, where
American involvement in internal Indonesian affairs was so pronounced.
Until the 1990s, despite all the attention given to other CIA interventions,
in Iran, Guatemala and Chile, for example, relatively little had emerged in the
public domain about the nature of CIA involvement in Indonesia. Of steadily
growing interest, however, was the Agency’s role in the Outer Island rebel-
lion of 1958 – an episode that, for a time, appeared to threaten to break up the
Indonesian republic entirely.39 By the mid-1950s, it was clear that US concern
with the rising power of the PKI, and frustration with Indonesian policies
of non-alignment, had spilled over into outright antipathy toward Sukarno
himself. To the Eisenhower administration, Sukarno was seen as ‘playing the
Communist game’,40 with his bids for PKI support and his attempts to counter-
balance the Army’s domestic political influence. In late 1957, when dissatisfac-
tion with Javanese dominance of the Indonesian federation and concerns over
the rise of PKI influence led to declarations of autonomy from regional military
commanders in the Outer Islands of Sumatra and Sulawesi, Washington decided
to extend covert support to these factions. In February 1958, regional defiance
became full-blown rebellion, with the establishment of a new provisional gov-
ernment on Sumatra; the CIA moved to provide arms, ammunition and even air
support for the rebels, as the US Government seemed intent on bringing about
Sukarno’s downfall and breaking up centralised control of the islands. By the
spring of 1958, however, the central government forces had managed to quell the
regional risings, and the Indonesian Army leaders, alarmed by the further boost
given to communist popularity by the PKI’s opposition to the rebellion, quietly
began to solicit aid from the United States. Eisenhower and Dulles quickly
switched horses and authorised assistance to the Indonesian Army, while aid to
the remaining rebels was curtailed. Sukarno’s rule was now tolerated, precisely
because he seemed more ready to see the PKI curbed by the Army, while the
electoral process and parliamentary system were steadily sidelined.
The Outer Island rebellion was a topic which had not yet received sustained
attention from historians or interested commentators (as many of the crucial
records remained closed), and the compilers of the FRUS volumes on Indonesia,
dealing with the latter portion of the Eisenhower administration, were bound
to provide new material and findings that would help shape views of this con-
troversial episode in US foreign policy. In the aftermath of the furore that had
greeted the publication of the FRUS volumes on Iran and Guatemala, moreover,
there would inevitably be extra attention paid to how subsequent volumes in the
series would deal with another important covert operation (and one which the
Agency, in 1993, had formally acknowledged). With the credibility of the FRUS
series increasingly on the line, it would be very hard to overlook or completely
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deny CIA involvement in the events of 1958, even though this contradicted
the official US position of ‘neutrality’ towards the rebellion. Indeed, at the time
of the rebellion, the US authorities had been much embarrassed when a CIA
contract pilot, Allen Pope, had been shot down and captured by Indonesian
forces when conducting a bombing run over Ambon in May 1958 – this at the
very time when John Foster Dulles – the US Secretary of State – was claim-
ing non-involvement in the fighting. Pope had been put on trial in December
1959. Sentenced to death, he kept to his cover story of being merely a soldier of
fortune in the pay of the rebels. However, the subject received further publicity
in early 1962, when Pope was finally released, following Robert Kennedy’s visit
to Indonesia and after personal appeals from Pope’s wife to President Sukarno.
A further issue from the mid-1960s, that was beginning to receive more
coverage by the early 1990s and that was looming for the FRUS series, was the
possible complicity of the United States in the destruction of the PKI and the
large-scale massacres of those suspected of Left-wing sympathies, which was
overseen and, in some cases, carried out by the Indonesian Army after the failed
coup of October 1965. The CIA had always vigorously maintained that it had
played no role in the events that led up to the coup and its bloody aftermath, and
that this was an entirely indigenous, Indonesian affair. Nevertheless, drawing
attention to CIA activity, particularly its ties to the Army, was likely to revive
discussion of its role in this controversial area of recent Indonesian history.
The build-up to the 1958 Outer Island Rebellion had featured in volume XXII
of the subseries for 1955 to 1957, which covered South East Asia as a whole, and
was published in 1989, before the storm over the Iran and Guatemala volumes
had broken. These were, though, still very early days of cooperation between
the Historians Office and the CIA over access to historical records. The editor
of the volume, Harriet D. Schwar, had been given very limited access to some
CIA documents when preparing her volume, but the collection that she pro-
duced contained significant redactions, when discussing the CIA’s part in policy
deliberations and the decision to open channels to the rebels, with some docu-
ments retained in their entirety.41 There was also very little to indicate how the
reporting of the CIA on the internal situation –which had often been at variance
to the US Ambassador to Jakarta – contributed to policy debates in Washington
or when and why crucial decisions on covert action were taken by the admin-
istration, including the efforts they made to solicit the support of allies, such as
Britain and Australia. In fact, far more material on the latter subject was already
being released in the UK and Australia, allowing researchers to piece together
some of the story from non-US sources.42 Nevertheless, Schwar’s volume did
provide broad clues for the general trajectory of US policy toward Indonesia,
even if the CIA was more conspicuous by its absence.43
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By the time that the Historians Office came to publish volume XVII of the
1958 to 1960 subseries – which was focused exclusively on Indonesia – in
October 1994, the series as a whole was still adjusting to the changes occa-
sioned by the reverberations of Warren Cohen’s resignation from the State
Department’s Historical Advisory Committee, only four years previously. The
Outer Island rebellion of 1958 formed the centrepiece of the new volume. The
documents had actually been compiled by the eminent historian of US relations
with Indonesia and US foreign policy more generally, Robert J. McMahon,
who had completed his task while working at the Historians Office many years
previously, in 1981. The fact that the volume had taken about fourteen years
to appear indicated the difficulties that it had presented for the declassification
process. It also attracted attention because, unlike earlier volumes on Iran and
Guatemala, it formerly acknowledged the CIA’s role in the rebellion or, as The
New York Times put it, previous FRUS volumes had ‘been written as though the
CIA did not exist’.44 ‘For the first time since the Foreign Relations volumes on
Vietnam for 1963 were published’, the volume’s preface proclaimed, ‘the U.S.
Government has acknowledged the existence of and policy deliberations about a
major covert operation. In this respect, volume XVII is a transitional volume on
the road to a fuller release of information of important intelligence operations’.45
Nevertheless, McMahon later criticised the heavily excised version published
by the Historians Office, which was quite different from the volume that he had
worked on, as it ‘obscures, omits, and deletes from the official record nearly as
much as it reveals’.46 Even with his security clearances as a State Department
historian, McMahon stressed that he did not have full access to the entire US
Government documentary record. McMahon had been allowed a one-day visit
to Langley, where he took notes on a sanitised internal history of CIA involve-
ment in the rebellion, but none of the editorial comments that he wrote, which
were based on this insight, found their way into the published volume. ‘I was not
allowed to see any complete documents of the sort that scholars would find most
useful’, McMahon later wrote, ‘not any cable traffic between the CIA station
in Jakarta and headquarters . . . not any internal memos to Director of Central
Intelligence Allen Dulles, not any records of meetings’.47 He was particularly
concerned that influential CIA reporting on the internal Indonesian political
scene was never available to him. Throughout his work on the volume, in fact,
McMahon had the sense that he was not seeing the full record, even of high-level
State Department meetings involving John Foster Dulles, for example, where
the covert operation was discussed. Some of the documents reproduced in the
volume were ‘sanitised’ to such an extent that they lost almost all meaning.48
Moreover, his attempts to signal, through the device of editorial notes, the
apparent absence of records of meetings involving Dulles – which he knew, from
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unclassified appointment books, had, in fact, taken place – were even removed
from the final published volume.49
In its preface, the 1958 to 1960 volume also featured a statistical indicator of
the effects of the declassification process, the reader being informed that this
review process had resulted in a decision to withhold 1.7 per cent of the docu-
ments that were originally selected for publication.50 Such statistics contributed
to the reassuring impression that relatively little had been held back. However,
they took no account of the relative importance of the material that was being
retained. Just the withholding of a very small portion of a document could prove
crucial to appreciating its significance or even render it incomprehensible or
misleading. McMahon confessed to being unsure as to what the 1.7 per cent
figure referred to. Was it 1.7 per cent of the total number of documents selected
in the editorial process were denied in full? And did it include the editorial notes
that were omitted?51 More recent FRUS volumes have, in fact, discontinued
the practice of citing the percentage of text denied declassification. Finally,
McMahon decried the removal of the material in the volume that covered US
liaison with other states in its conduct of the Indonesian operation.52
The Indonesia section of volume XXIII of the 1961 to 1963 subseries, also
published in 1994, had relatively few excisions from documents that referred, in
some way, to CIA participation in the 1958 rebellion. Moreover, the volume’s
editor, Edward C. Keefer, did have access to CIA documents when carrying
out his work of compilation in 1990 to 1991, marking a distinct difference
from McMahon’s experience of ten years previously.53 What perhaps did not
fully emerge, despite this, was the degree of CIA scepticism over the wisdom of
attempting to court Sukarno – as the Kennedy administration was then trying
to do – when the Agency had no confidence in his basic desire or capacity to
move against the PKI (though a full version of a very important March 1961
memorandum from Richard Bissell – the CIA’s Deputy Director for Plans –
which called Sukarno’s regime ‘essentially unacceptable’ was reproduced).54 At
this time, the CIA’s preference was to continue to cultivate its own contacts in
the Indonesian military and security apparatus, in preparation for the time when
an eventual ‘showdown’ with communist influence in Indonesian society finally
occurred, but no material on this track of policy appeared.
However, probably the most controversial aspect in the story of the FRUS
series and coverage of US relations with Indonesia was its handling of the period
covered by the Johnson administration and, in particular, the events surround-
ing the suppression of the PKI, following the failed coup attempt of October 1965
and the large-scale massacres that followed in many parts of the archipelago.55 It
had long been a staple of critics of US foreign policy that Washington had some
foreknowledge of the coup, that he might even have provoked it, in the hopes
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of triggering the Army’s backlash against the PKI, and that he was complicit in
the mass killings that followed. Contentious areas which might be expected to be
included in the volume included CIA knowledge of – and perhaps its satisfaction
with – the extent of the massacres carried out in late 1965 and early 1966, pay-
ments to some of the groups involved in anti-PKI action and the covert supply
of certain forms of aid, such as communications equipment to anti-communist
Army leaders.56 Furthermore, one of the most explosive accusations to surface
against American officials in the period after the coup was the story that lists of
alleged PKI members, supporters and sympathisers had been provided by the
Embassy in Jakarta to the Indonesian authorities. In May 1990, the Washington
Post had published a piece by Kathy Kadane, based on a detailed interview
with an ex-Embassy officer, Robert J. Martens, along with others, which were
conducted with named retired State Department and CIA officials, which made
the allegation that US officials had systematically compiled lists of communists
‘from the top echelons down to village cadres’,57 and then, with the approval of
the then US ambassador, Marshall Green, passed the thousands of names to the
Indonesian authorities. Embassy officers later checked those killed or captured
off their lists.58 Martens wrote to the Post soon after, in order to confirm that he
had, indeed, passed over names of senior PKI figures, but that these were simply
based on widely available information in the Indonesian communist press and
were not those of ‘rank and file’ members of the party. Maintaining that he had
taken this action on his own initiative, Martens argued that none of the informa-
tion was derived from ‘classified’ or secret sources and that the Post’s article had
been wrong in picturing him as leading a group at the Embassy which had been
busy compiling the lists for two years prior to the coup or that the names had
been handed over with the Ambassador’s approval.59 The following month, The
New York Times published a follow-up piece, which carried denials from CIA
figures that classified sources had been used in compiling the lists or that they
had any involvement with Martens’ activities, while also asserting that there was
little Agency involvement in Indonesian affairs immediately before, during or in
the aftermath of the coup attempt.60 Many hoped that publication of the relevant
FRUS volume would help to clarify the extent and nature of US involvement.
Featuring material on Malaysia and the Philippines alongside that on
Indonesia, and edited by Keefer, once again, volume XXVI of the 1964 to 1968
subseries was delivered for printing by the Historians Office in the summer of
2001, and advance copies were sent for distribution to several US Government
Printing Office bookstores. However, it would seem that these were despatched
before the final approval for the release of the volume had been given from the
CIA, even though a final declassification review had been completed in 2000.
Despite efforts to recall all of the volumes initially distributed, this horse had
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already well and truly bolted. A copy was soon obtained by the National Security
Archive (NSA) – a non-profit organisation based at George Washington
University’s Gelman Library that, since 1985, has championed improved public
access to US Government records – and was posted on the NSA’s website at the
end of July 2001.61 The appearance of the volume on the Internet meant that
further steps undertaken to limit the damage were largely redundant. From its
front matter, it was made clear that the volume had created several problems for
the CIA, in that some of the documents selected for inclusion would effectively
acknowledge the conduct of a covert operation.62 In 1997, a special high-level
panel was formed, composed of representatives from the NSC, State Department
and CIA, with the task of adjudicating on the declassification issues that this
raised. The panel considered six documents selected for inclusion in the volume:
three were denied declassification in full and three were released with excisions.
The latter three contained material relating to the controversial funding of
civilian militia groups, who were targeting alleged PKI, or Left-wing, sympathis-
ers. The high-level panel and the CIA apparently decided, in August 1998, to
officially acknowledge this covert intervention in Indonesian affairs. The denials
and excisions were made on the grounds that the disclosure of the intelligence
sources or methods that they would reveal would ‘clearly and demonstrably’
damage US national security interests.63 However, from the attempts made to
block the release of the volume when it had already reached proof stage, it would
seem that last minute doubts arose, despite these previous efforts at ‘sanitisa-
tion’. According to The New York Times report on the affair, a CIA spokesman
had said there was a decision to delay publication, so as ‘to avoid roiling rela-
tions at a time of political turmoil in Indonesia’, more specifically, as Sukarno’s
daughter, Megawati Sukarnoputri, took over the presidency; therefore, the ship-
ment of the volume had been ‘accidental’.64
The areas of the inadvertently released volume that captured the most atten-
tion were obviously those relating to the mass killings that followed the failed
coup attempt of 1 October 1965, where the Army, with support from civilian
militias, attempted to expunge all traces of the PKI from Indonesian society.
Estimates of the numbers killed in the massacres, which took place primarily
on Java, in northern Sumatra and on Bali, are often cited as up to 500,000. The
FRUS volume’s documents confirmed that Embassy personnel were very much
aware that large-scale killings were underway. An editorial note dealing with the
Embassy’s knowledge of the extent of the purges cited an airgram to Washington
from April 1966, which included the admission that: ‘We frankly do not know
whether the real figure is closer to 100,000 or 1,000,000 but believe it wiser to err
on the side of the lower estimates, especially when questioned by the press’.65 The
volume also cited an article published in 1970 in the CIA’s classified publication,
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Studies in Intelligence, which contained the Agency’s own estimates that around
105,000 ‘communists’ were killed in the months following the coup.66 This
would, however, appear to be underplaying the extent of the killings; the FRUS
volume reproduced a State Department paper from June 1966, which had been
sent to President Johnson, putting the figure of those killed between October
1965 and March 1966 as ‘perhaps as many as 300,000’.67
By citing from various telegrams despatched from the Embassy, the FRUS
volume also confirmed that lists of leading PKI figures, as well as officials in a
number of other Left-wing groups, had, indeed, been provided to the Indonesian
Government in December 1965 and were being used by the security forces, who
seemed to lack such basic information. The new documents tended to back-up,
however, the rebuttal that Martens had delivered to the original press reports
from 1990, in terms of the length of the lists and the circumstances in which
they were compiled.68 A further document in the FRUS volume revealed that
in December 1965, the Ambassador, Marshall Green, confirmed his agreement
to a scheme to provide funding to an army-coordinated, but civilian-staffed,
‘action group’ or movement, the Kap-Gestapu, which was ‘still carrying burden
of current repressive efforts targeted against PKI, particularly in Central Java’.69
The CIA’s attitude to what Green described as a ‘black bag operation’ was not
recorded in the volume, a memorandum on the scheme from the then Chief of
the CIA’s Far East Division in the Directorate of Operations, William E. Colby,
to the State Department Assistant Secretary for Far Eastern Affairs, William
P. Bundy, having been denied declassification in the pre-publication review
process. Documentation in the volume also made clear that communications
equipment had been supplied by the US to the Indonesian Army; it was this kind
of logistical support that critics of US policy have seen as aiding and abetting the
massacres that took place, by facilitating communications between army units
carrying out the anti-PKI sweeps and attacks.70
Yet, despite the acknowledgement of the assistance offered to the military
during the course of the massacres, and the tacit approval that was given to
destroy the PKI, whatever their human cost, the volume also served to dispel
some earlier theories, regarding CIA involvement in the October 1965 coup and
its aftermath. For example, there was nothing in the documentary evidence to
show that the Agency had foreknowledge of the coup or had played any role in
its instigation in the hope of provoking the military crackdown that followed.
Just as many former officials had maintained, the FRUS volume showed that
Washington had been taken completely by surprise by the events of October
1965. Far from orchestrating the actions of the Indonesian Army in moving
rapidly against the PKI, US officials had trouble keeping up with the shifting
internal scene and wondered if the PKI might even seize the chance of domestic
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upheaval to make a bid for power.71 To that extent, the volume served a correc-
tive purpose, that could even be construed as working to the Agency’s benefit:
the writings on US involvement in Indonesia that had appeared since the 1960s –
in common with Indonesian rumour and conjecture – had tended to picture the
CIA’s hidden hand as operating behind the scenes on many significant occasions
in the country’s recent past.72
Therefore, the handling of the declassification process for the volume by the
high-level panel from 1997 to 1998 raises some pertinent questions. Despite its
reluctance to disclose the full details of operations, what explains the Agency’s
initial decision to acknowledge its role in Indonesia during this period? Was
there a greater readiness from the Agency to recognise its past history? Was
there a sense that enough time had elapsed since the events in question to make
the effects of documentary releases negligible? Could the release of documents
help to absolve the Agency of blame for instigating the events from 1965 to
1966? Or was the decision prompted by an accumulation of outside pressures
and arguments, rather than strictly Agency-centred considerations, so that some
Agency sceptics may well have come to regard the whole episode as illustrating
the perils of cooperating with the Historians’ Office and opening up the past at
all? The subsequent record of the declassification process for other instances of
CIA covert action in the FRUS series, including retrospective volumes on Iran
and the Congo, was not auspicious, and this may have been a result of such chas-
tening experiences as the Indonesia volume, covering the events of 1965 to 1966.
CONCLUSION: INCHING TOWARDS GREATER TRANSPARENCY

The picture that emerges of the State Department’s on-going effort to accurately
reflect the CIA’s centrality to contemporary American foreign policymaking
within the Foreign Relations of the United States series, vividly illustrated in
the FRUS volumes covering Indonesia, is one of qualified, uneven and often
painfully slow progress. In 2009, just three FRUS volumes were published. In
2010 and 2011, respectively, six and seven volumes were released. Meanwhile,
nineteen completed FRUS volumes remain embargoed by the State Department,
pending completion of declassification reviews. When judged against the stand-
ards of accuracy and timeliness mandated by Congress and, equally significantly,
when set against the CIA’s own rhetoric on openness, the FRUS series continues
to disappoint. Nevertheless, since 1990, the series has undeniably come a long
way in its efforts to document the impact of the CIA’s principal Cold War covert
operations on US foreign policymaking. However, many historians, media com-
mentators and State Department officials persist in the belief that, in this specific
area, the FRUS series could, and should, go much further.
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It is, perhaps, sobering to conclude with one final observation. It is now over
two decades since Warren Cohen’s resignation from the State Department’s
Historical Advisory Committee focused public attention on CIA representation
in the Foreign Relations of the United States series. Yet, a retrospective FRUS
volume correcting the omissions that discredited the 1989 work on Iran has yet
to be published. Such a volume exists. Between 2002 and 2003, it was researched,
compiled and edited by James Van Hook – a specially appointed ‘joint historian’,
whose parallel reporting lines into the State Department and CIA and possession
of enhanced security clearances were expected to help expedite the publication
of contentious FRUS volumes containing a significant covert action element.73
Today, however, with the Islamic Republic of Iran’s nuclear ambition, peaceful
or otherwise, poisoning relations between Washington and Teheran, the FRUS
retrospective volume on Iran remains gathering dust on a Foggy Bottom book-
shelf, part of the growing backlog of FRUS volumes awaiting declassification
clearance. The struggles over declassification that have been witnessed, over the
record of US relations with Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia and elsewhere through
the FRUS series, illustrate the formidable on-going challenges in compiling an
‘official’ documentary collection with a strong intelligence component. Since
1990, entrenched bureaucratic interests in Washington, and concerns sur-
rounding the potential for historical skeletons in the CIA’s archives to under-
mine contemporary transnational intelligence partnerships and diplomatic
relations, have all too frequently impeded, stalled or completely frustrated the
publication of important volumes in the Foreign Relations of the United States
series.
Notes
1 John Kenneth Galbraith, ‘CIA Needs a Tug on its Purse Strings’, The Washington
Post, 12 March 1967, B1.
2 On the Ramparts furore, see, in particular, Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer:
How the CIA Played America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007);
Peter Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and
the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe (New York, NY: The Free Press, 1989);
Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, The CIA and American Democracy (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1989); Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA
and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta, 1999); Giles Scott-Smith, The Politics
of Apolitical Culture: The Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA and post-war
American Hegemony (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2002).
3 See, for example, Athan Theoharis (ed.), The Central Intelligence Agency: Security
Under Scrutiny (London: Greenwood, 2006); Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St
Clair, White Out: CIA, Drugs and the Press (London: Verso, 1997); Mark Mazetti,
‘C.I.A. Destroyed 2 Tapes Showing Interrogations’, The New York Times, 7 December
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2007, A1; Jose A. Rodriguez Jr, Hard Measures: How Aggressive CIA Actions After
9/11 Saved American Lives (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2012).
4 ‘Title IV – Foreign Relations of the United States Historical Series’, SEC. 198. Public
Law 102–38, 28 October 1991, available at: http://www.fas.org/sgp/advisory/state/
pl102138.html. See, also, George Bush, ‘Statement on Signing the Foreign Relations
Authorization Act, Fiscal Years 1992 and 1993’, 28 October 1991, available at: http://
www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=20152#ixzz1jzz0b100.
5 Covert actions deemed to be of low risk, a low potential for exposure, little politi-
cal sensitivity and below a nominal cost threshold of $25,000 were not generally
referred for Executive approval. Senator Frank Church, Final Report of the Select
Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities,
United States Senate, Book I, Foreign and Military Intelligence (Washington, DC:
Government Printing Office, 1976), pp. 56–7. See, also, William M. Leary (ed.), The
Central Intelligence Agency: History and Documents (Tuscaloosa, AL: The University
of Alabama Press, 1984), p. 63.
6 N. Richard Kinsman, ‘Openness and the Future of Clandestine Service’, Studies in
Intelligence, Winter–Spring (10), 2001, p. 56.
7 N. Richard Kinsman, ‘Openness and the Future of Clandestine Service’, p. 59.
8 C. Thomas Thorne Jr and David S. Patterson (eds), Foreign Relations of the United
States (hereafter FRUS), The Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment, 1945–1950
(Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1996); Douglas Keane and Michael
Warner (eds), FRUS, The Intelligence Community, 1950–1955 (Washington, DC:
Government Printing Office, 2007).
9 See, for example, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Secrecy (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1998); Kate Doyle, ‘The End of Secrecy’, in Craig Eisendrath (ed.), National
Insecurity: U.S. Intelligence after the Cold War (Philadelphia, PN: Temple University
Press, 2000), pp. 101–4.
10 Doyle, ‘The End of Secrecy’, pp. 101–4.
11 N. Richard Kinsman, ‘Openness and the Future of Clandestine Service’, pp. 55–6.
12 N. Stephen Kane and William F. Sanford Jr (eds), FRUS, 1952–1954, Volume IV,
American Republics (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1983). See,
also, Ian Black, ‘Tightened Rules Keep Nation’s Secrets Too Long, Historians Say’,
The Washington Post, 10 September 1983, A3; Roger Dingman’s review of Foreign
Relations of the United States, 1952–1954, Vol. XII: East Asia and the Pacific, Part
2, Carl N. Raether and Harriet D. Schwar (eds), The Pacific Historical Review, 58(1),
February 1989, pp. 134–6.
13 Woodward and Bernstein garnered global attention in the early 1970s when, as
investigative reporters on The Washington Post, they broke the Watergate story,
which ultimately led to the downfall of Richard Nixon’s administration. See Bob
Woodward, All the President’s Men (London: Secker & Warburg, 1974). In 1969,
Seymour Hersh rose to international prominence after revealing details of US mili-
tary involvement in the massacre of civilians in the South Vietnamese village of My
Lai. Amongst his other notable ‘scoops’, Hersh subsequently published details of
‘Project Azorian’ – a CIA operation to recover a sunken Soviet submarine from the
depths of the Pacific Ocean.
14 Nick Cullather, Secret History: The CIA’s Classified Account of its Operations in
Guatemala, 1952–1954 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 17.
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15 Stephen Kinser and Stephen Schlesinger, Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American
Coup in Guatemala (London: Sinclair Brown, 1982); Richard H. Immerman, The CIA
in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention (Austin, TX: University of Texas
Press, 1982). See, also, Nick Cullather, Secret History: The CIA’s classified account of
its operations in Guatemala, 1952–1954 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press,
1999); Piero Gleijeses, Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United
States, 1944–1954 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); Jim Handy,
Revolution in the Countryside: Rural Conflict and Agrarian Reform in Guatemala
1944–54 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).
16 Stephen Kane to David Trask, ‘“Fast Track” publication of Foreign Relations,
1952–1954, IV (“The American Republics”)’, 18 March 1981, Folder Stdepthistorical
comm2r, Betty Miller Unterberger Papers, Cushing Library, Texas A&M University,
College Station, Texas (hereafter BMUP).
17 ‘The Undersigned Historians’ to Mr Trask, 20 March 1981, Folder Stdepthistorical
comm2, BMUP.
18 Betty Miller Unterberger to David Trask, 10 April 1981, Folder Stdepthistorical
comm2, BMUP.
19 See ‘The CIA’s Family Jewels’, The National Security Archive, available at: http://
www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB222/index.htm.
20 Richard Immerman, ‘A Brief History of the CIA’, in Athan Theoharis, Richard
Immerman, Loch Johnson, Kathryn Olmsted and John Prados (eds), The Central
Intelligence Agency: Security Under Scrutiny (Understanding Our Government)
(London: Greenwood Press, 2006), pp. 57–8.
21 In the United Kingdom, Reagan’s ideological ally and personal confidante, the
British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, shared the US President’s fascination
with the work of intelligence services and retained a similar faith in their opera-
tional utility. Thatcher’s conviction that Britain’s intelligence agencies performed
an invaluable national security function in countering communist subversion,
inside and outside the UK, ensured that, on her watch, the British intelligence
community was largely insulated from public scrutiny and benefitted from an
increase in budgets and resources. Revealingly, in the 1980s, Thatcher presided
over a lengthy, expensive and ultimately futile campaign to prevent the publica-
tion of the memoirs of a former British intelligence officer, Peter Wright, in what
came to be known as the ‘Spycatcher’ affair. See Christopher Andrew, The Defence
of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (London: Allen Lane, 2009), pp. 670,
682.
22 Warren I. Cohen, ‘At the State Dept., Historygate’, The New York Times, 8 May 1990,
A29.
23 Dwight D. Eisenhower, Mandate for Change, 1953–1956: The White House Years,
A Personal Account (New York, NY: Doubleday, 1963); David Wise and Thomas
B. Ross, The Invisible Government (New York, NY: Random House, 1964); Kermit
Roosevelt, Countercoup: The Struggle for Iran (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1979).
For additional insights into British and American complicity in the 1953 coup, see
Mostafa Elm, Oil, Power and Principle: Iran’s Oil Nationalization and Its Aftermath
(Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1994); Mark Gasiorowski and Malcolm
Byrne (eds), Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup in Iran (Syracuse, NY:
Syracuse University Press, 2004); Mary Ann Heiss, Empire and Nationhood: The
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United States, Great Britain, and Iranian Oil, 1950–1954 (New York, NY: Columbia
University Press, 1997).
24 Warren I. Cohen, ‘At the State Dept., Historygate’, The New York Times, 8 May 1990,
A29.
25 Al Kamen, ‘30 Years and Out; Historians and Civil Libertarians Hail Victory Over
Bureaucracy’, The Washington Post, 31 October 1991, A19; Warren F. Kimball, ‘To
Shed More Light on Foreign Policy’, The New York Times, 9 October 1991, A24.
26 Public law 102–138, Foreign Relations Authorization Act, Fiscal Years 1992 and 1993,
28 October 1991, available at: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/L?d102:./list/
bd/d102pl.lst:138(Public_Laws).
27 Warren F. Kimball ‘To Shed More Light on Foreign Policy’, The New York Times, 9
October 1991, A24.
28 Tim Weiner, ‘Files and Whispers: The CIA Opens Its Safe’, New York Times, 29
August 1993, E2.
29 George Lardner, ‘Gates Acts to Promote CIA Openness: Agency to Cooperate in
Declassifying JFK Files, Within Limits, He Says’, The Washington Post, 22 February
1992, A4.
30 Elaine Sciolin, ‘C.I.A. Director Announces Plan For More Access to Agency Files’,
The New York Times, 22 February 1992, p. 9.
31 George Lardner, ‘Gates Acts to Promote CIA Openness: Agency to Cooperate in
Declassifying JFK Files, Within Limits, He Says’, The Washington Post, 22 February
1992, A4.
32 Tim Weiner, ‘Files and Whispers: The CIA Opens Its Safe’, The New York Times, 29
August 1993, E2.
33 Edward C. Keefer and Louis J. Smith (eds), FRUS, 1961–1963, Volume III, Vietnam
January–August 1963 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1991); Edward
C. Keefer (ed.), FRUS, 1961–1963, Volume IV, Vietnam August–December 1963
(Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1991).
34 Office of the Historian, Bureau of Public Affairs, State Department, ‘Press Release on
Guatemala Retrospective FRUS Volume’, 15 May 2003, available at: http://www.state.
gov/r/pa/ho/frus/ike/guat/20806.htm; Susan Holly (ed.), FRUS, 1952–1954, Volume
IV, Guatemala (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2003).
35 William Z. Slany, The Historian, Preface to FRUS, 1961–1963, Volume XXII,
North East Asia (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1996). See, also,
Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic Documentation to the United States
Department of State Annual Report to Warren Christopher, Secretary of State,
10 May 1996, available at: http://www.fas.org/sgp/advisory/state/hac95.html; Tim
Weiner, ‘C.I.A Spent Millions to Support Japanese Right in the 50s and 60s’, The
New York Times, 9 October 1994, p. 1; World News Briefs, ‘C.I.A Blocks Release of
Documents on Japan’, The New York Times, 15 February 1995, A11.
36 Edward C. Keefer, Harriet Dashiell Schwar and W. Taylor Fain III (eds), FRUS, 1961–
1963, Volume XII, American Republics (Washington, DC: Government Printing
Office, 1996).
37 James E. Miller, FRUS, 1964–1968, Volume XVI, Cyprus, Greece, Turkey (Washington,
DC: Government Printing Office, 2000); The Advisory Committee on Historical
Diplomatic Documentation, Minutes, 21–22 March 1996, available at: http://www.
state.gov/r/pa/ho/adcom/mtgnts/11709.htm; see, also, Alexis Papakhelas, ‘The CIA’s
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Secret Files on Greece’, To Vima (Athens), 12 August 2001, A6–7; George Lardner,
‘History of U.S.–Greek Ties Blocked: CIA Opposes Disclosure of Proposed Covert
Actions in ’60s’, The Washington Post, 17 August 2001, A15.
38 For some background on US–Indonesian relations, see Robert J. McMahon, The
Limits of Empire: The United States and Southeast Asia since World War Two
(New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1999); Paul F. Gardner, Shared Hopes,
Separate Fears: Fifty Years of U.S.–Indonesian Relations (Boulder, CO: Westview
Press, 1997); Andrew Roadnight, U.S. Policy towards Indonesia in the Truman and
Eisenhower Years (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).
39 For the 1958 Outer Island Rebellion, see Audrey R. Kahin and George McT. Kahin,
Subversion as Foreign Policy: The Secret Eisenhower and Dulles Debacle in Indonesia
(New York, NY: New Press, 1995); Kenneth Conboy and James Morrison, Feet to
the Fire: CIA Covert Operations in Indonesia, 1957–1958 (Annapolis, MD: Naval
Institute Press, 1999); Matthew Jones, ‘“Maximum Disavowable Aid”: Britain, the
United States, and the Indonesian Rebellion, 1957–58,’ English Historical Review,
114, November 1999, pp. 1179–216; Robert J. McMahon, ‘“The Point of No Return”:
The Eisenhower Administration and Indonesia, 1953–1960’, in Kathryn C. Statler
and Andrew L. Johns (eds), The Eisenhower Administration, the Third World, and
the Globalization of the Cold War (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), pp.
75–99.
40 Record of 333rd MTG of National Security Council, 1August 1957, NSC series, Box
9, Ann Whitman File, Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas.
41 See, for example, Robert J. McMahon, Harriet D. Schwar and Louis J. Smith (eds),
Foreign Relations of the United States, 1955–1957, Volume XXII: Southeast Asia
(Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1989), Document 240, Memorandum
of Discussion at 33rd Meeting of the NSC, 1 August 1957, 400-2; Document 247,
Message from Assistant Secretary for Far Eastern Affairs (Robertson) to Ambassador
in Indonesia (Allison), 16 August 1957, pp. 411–2; Document 262, report prepared
by the Ad Hoc Interdepartmental Committee on Indonesia for the NSC, 3 September
1957, pp. 436–40.
42 See Jones, ‘“Maximum Disavowable Aid” ’; Brian Toohey and William Pinwill, Oyster:
The Story of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (Melbourne: Heinemann, 1989).
43 On Schwar’s limited access to CIA documents, see Robert J. McMahon, ‘Indonesia,
1958: Documenting and Interpreting a Covert Operation’, unpublished paper for
the Society for the Historians of American Foreign Relations Annual Conference,
University of Colorado, 22 June 1996, p. 10.
44 See Article reproduced from Los Angeles Times, ‘Official History Details Covert CIA
Role in Indonesia’, Washington Post, 30 October 1994, A11.
45 Robert J. McMahon (ed.), Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958–1960, Volume
XVII: Indonesia (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1994), preface,
p. viii.
46 McMahon, ‘Indonesia, 1958’, p. 4.
47 McMahon, ‘Indonesia, 1958’, pp. 10–11.
48 See, for example, McMahon, FRUS, 1958–1960, XVII, Document 64, Memorandum
of telephone conversation between Secretary of State Dulles and Director of Central
Intelligence Dulles, 17 April 1958, p. 114.
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50 McMahon, FRUS, 1958–1960, XVII, preface, p. vii.

52 McMahon, ‘Indonesia, 1958’, pp. 21–2. See, for example, McMahon, FRUS,
1958–1960, XVII, Document 107, Memorandum of conversation, 22 May 1958,
pp. 191–3.
53 Edward C. Keefer (ed.), Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, Volume
XXIII: Southeast Asia (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1994), preface,
pp. viii–x.
54 Keefer, FRUS, 1961–1963, XXIII, Document 155, Memorandum from the Deputy
Director for Plans, CIA (Bissell) to the President’s Special Assistant for National
Security Affairs (Bundy), 27 March 1961, pp. 328–33.
55 On this phase of US relations with Indonesia in general, see Bradley R. Simpson,
Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and U.S.–Indonesian Relations,
1960–1968 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008).
56 For the accusation that the US played a leading role in events, see Peter Dale Scott,
‘The US and the Overthrow of Sukarno, 1965–1967’, Pacific Affairs, 58(2), 1985, pp.
239–64. For a more tempered approach, which still emphasises that the Johnson
administration encouraged the Indonesian Army to act against the PKI, see Frederick
P. Bunnell, ‘American “Low Posture” Toward Indonesia in the Months Leading up
to the 1965 “Coup” ’, Indonesia, 50, October 1990, pp. 29–60. See, also, the analysis
offered in Geoffrey Robinson, The Dark Side of Paradise: Political Violence in Bali
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), pp. 282–6.
57 Kathy Kadane, ‘U.S. Officials’ Lists Aided Indonesian Bloodbath in ’60s’, Washington
Post, 21 May 1990, A5.
58 Kadane, ‘U.S. Officials’ Lists Aided Indonesian Bloodbath in ’60s’, A5.
59 Robert J. Martens, ‘Indonesia’s Fight Against Communism, 1965’, Washington Post,
2 June 1990, A18.
60 Michael Wines, ‘C.I.A. Tie Asserted in Indonesia Purge: Officials Deny That There
Was a U.S. Plan to Provide Targets’, The New York Times, 12 July 1990, A13.
61 Under its Executive Director, Tom Blanton, the National Security Archive has led
efforts in the United States to check state secrecy and declassify federal government
documents. Over the last three decades, the Archive has submitted 40,000 Freedom
of Information (FOI) requests to 200 US government agencies, filed 47 FOI lawsuits
and sponsored collaborative research projects with journalists and scholars across
the globe. The NSA’s work has resulted in the declassification of important records
on CIA covert operations, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War and, most
recently, the interventions of Western forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. Of late, bodies
such as the Federation of American Scientists and its Project on Government Secrecy
have made increasingly effective use of FOI legislation and techniques of investigative
journalism pioneered by the NSA to contest the frontier’s official secrecy.
62 The Agency’s previous sensitivity to accounts of their role in events was reflected, for
example, in attempts to vet and ‘sanitise’ the recollections of former CIA officers; for
this, see Ralph McGehee, Deadly Deceits: My 25 Years in the CIA (New York, NY:
Sheridan Square, 1983), pp. 57–8.
63 Edward C. Keefer, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, Volume XXVI:
Indonesia; Malaysia-Singapore; Philippines (Washington, DC: Government Printing
Office, 2001), preface, p. vii.
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64 James Risen, ‘Official History Describes U.S. Policy in Indonesia in the 60’s’, The New
York Times, 28 July 2001, A3.
65 Keefer, FRUS, 1964–1968, XXVI, Document 162, Editorial note, pp. 338–40.
66 Keefer, FRUS, 1964–1968, pp. 338–40. The article in question (which has now been
declassified) was Richard Cabot Howland, ‘Lessons of the 30th September Coup’,
Studies in Intelligence, 14, Fall 1970, pp. 13–28.
67 See the evidence and discussion in Simpson, Economists, pp. 192–3; see Keefer,
FRUS, 1964–1968, XXVI, Document 210, Memorandum from the President’s Special
Assistant (Rostow) to President Johnson, with state department paper attached, 8
June 1966, pp. 434–40.
68 Keefer, FRUS, 1964–1968, XXVI, Document 185, editorial note, pp. 386–7.
69 Keefer, FRUS, 1964–1968, XXVI, Document 179, telegram from the Embassy in
Indonesia to the Department of State, 2 December 1965, pp. 379–80.
70 Keefer, FRUS, 1964–1968, XXVI, Document 211, memorandum prepared for the 303
Committee, 17 June 1966, pp. 440–3; see Simpson, Economists, pp. 184–8.
71 Other scholars have stressed that US officials preferred, in fact, to keep some dis-
tance from events in Indonesia, not least to avoid accusations that the Army was
too closely aligned with Washington. For such perspectives, see H. W. Brands, ‘The
Limits of Manipulation: How the United States Didn’t Topple Sukarno’, Journal of
American History, 76(3), December 1989, pp. 785–808; H. W. Brands, The Wages
of Globalism: Lyndon Johnson and the Limits of American Power (New York, NY:
Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 155–82; Kai Bird, The Color of Truth: McGeorge
and William Bundy: Brothers in Arms (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1998),
pp. 351–2. For a conventional account from the US Ambassador at that time, see
Marshall Green, Indonesia: Crisis and Transformation, 1965–1968 (Washington, DC:
Compass Press, 1990).
72 For a defence of US policy that seeks to distance the Agency from events, compiled
by the ex-CIA station chief in Jakarta in 1965, see B. Hugh Tovar, ‘The Indonesian
Crisis of 1965–1966: A Retrospective’, International Journal of Intelligence and
Counterintelligence, 7(3), 1994, pp. 313–38.
73 State Department Advisory Committee of Historical Diplomatic Documentation,
‘Retrospective Foreign Relations Volumes’, Minutes of the Advisory Committee on
Historical Diplomatic Documentation, 22–23 July 2002, available at: http://www.
state.gov/r/pa/ho/adcom/mtgnts/12172.htm. See, also, State Department Advisory
Committee of Historical Diplomatic Documentation, Minutes of the The Advisory
Committee on Historical Diplomatic Documentation, 2–3 December 2002, avail-
able at: http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/adcom/mtgnts/18004.htm; State Department
Advisory Committee of Historical Diplomatic Documentation, Minutes of the The
Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic Documentation, 24–25 February 2003,
available at: http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/adcom/mtgnts/17931.htm.
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Chapter 4
BONUM EX MALO: THE VALUE OF LEGACY OF

ASHES IN TEACHING CIA HISTORY
Nicholas Dujmovic*
In June 2007, Doubleday – a popular imprint of the Random House publishing

empire – published The New York Times journalist Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes,
portentously subtitled The History of the CIA.1 It is no exaggeration to describe
the appearance of this book as a seminal event in US intelligence historiography,
though perhaps not in the way that Mr Weiner intended (see Figure 6).
Historians and other scholars of intelligence will recall that the initial lauda-
tory reviews of Legacy of Ashes – many of which were written by journalists like
Weiner – were followed several months later by decidedly critical reviews
written either by academic specialists in intelligence or by career intelligence
officers, including a few, like myself, who have a foot in both worlds. My review
of Weiner’s book in the Fall 2007 issue of Studies in Intelligence2 – the CIA’s in-
house journal, whose unclassified issues have a dedicated following among the
cognoscenti of intelligence – was an early critical treatment and, thereby, became
somewhat notorious, but it was by no means alone in asserting that Weiner had
written a biased work of flawed scholarship.3 Without addressing my substantial
objections regarding the book’s many factual inaccuracies and its unremittingly
negative perspective brought about by a tendentious use of sources, Weiner
simply dismissed my review as ‘a malicious attack’ that began ‘a poison-pen
campaign’ taken up by others against his book.4 Weiner has suggested, ad
hominem, that all his critics are either motivated by partisanship toward CIA or
are ‘competitors’ with ‘axes to grind’.5
I have addressed the matter of whether a CIA Staff Historian can be objec-
tive elsewhere,6 but let’s momentarily assume, for the sake of argument, that
my review of Legacy of Ashes was biased simply as a function of my employ-
ment – that the axe that I’m grinding has no substantive or scholarly basis.
* Nicholas Dujmovic is a CIA Staff Historian. This essay is a reflection of his personal views
and does not represent the views of CIA or the US Government, nor should any part be
construed as an official release of information or endorsement. It has been reviewed to
prevent the disclosure of classified material.
90
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The Value of Legacy of Ashes in Teaching CIA History 91
Figure 6 Tim Weiner accepting the National Book Award for non-fiction for
Legacy of Ashes, 14 November 2007 (Press Association, PA.53442341)
Let’s assume further that the negative assessments of the book by other career
intelligence officers – former CIA Terrorism Specialist Paul Pillar, former
British MI6 Director Sir Richard Dearlove and former CIA Deputy Director
John McLaughlin among them7 – were also exclusively reflective of subjective
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professional interest. Even so, Weiner’s response would still do a grave injustice
to those eminent and independent scholars who reviewed his work and also
found it gravely flawed: Christopher Andrew of Cambridge University, Loch
Johnson of the University of Georgia, Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones of the University of
Edinburgh, R. Gerald Hughes of Aberystwyth University, unaffiliated scholars
Jeffrey Richelson and Stephen R. Weissman and many others.8 To consider
Richelson and Jeffrey-Jones – two long-standing critics of CIA – as unprofes-
sional scholars or, worse, shills for the Agency is to be seriously divorced from
reality.
THE IMPACT OF LEGACY OF ASHES

And yet, Legacy of Ashes cannot be ignored. As I predicted in my Studies review,
the intelligence profession and intelligence studies alike will have to deal with
this book for years to come. Because Legacy of Ashes ostensibly fills a void in the
scholarship – the lack of a one-volume, putatively comprehensive and reason-
ably up-to-date history of the CIA – the book, I thought correctly at the time,
would have persistent influence, like it or not.9 In particular, it could be expected
to show up in reading lists for college courses in intelligence, given the burgeon-
ing demand for intelligence education since the terrorist attacks of 11 September
2001. In the United States, there are currently more than 100 civilian academic
institutions offering in excess of 840 courses dealing with the study of intel-
ligence – roughly triple the number that existed before 9/11.10 Many of those
courses, it could safely be presumed, would take an historical approach or at
least would use historical episodes to illuminate the strange world of intelligence.
Sometimes it is not so wonderful to be right. Legacy of Ashes has indeed made
its mark in the teaching of intelligence. Internet searches conducted in late 2011
show the book listed as required reading in the syllabi for seventeen courses
offered by US colleges and universities (and one in Canada). For the purposes of
comparison, identical searches were conducted for what is the prime alternative
to Legacy of Ashes, Christopher Andrew’s bestselling For the President’s Eyes
Only11 – a highly praised book that, though dated (1995), has never gone out
of print. Many still consider it the most readable, insightful, well-researched
basic history text on US intelligence.12 Quantitatively, these searches found
that Andrew’s book was used (i.e. required reading) in courses taught after the
publication of Legacy of Ashes in 2007 just as often as Legacy of Ashes itself was
assigned as required reading. Qualitatively, the courses using either book, num-
bering about three dozen, cover a variety of topics and are not always primarily
concerned with intelligence, but often deal more generally with national secu-
rity, US history and the like.
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These courses compose less than five per cent of the more than 800 intel-
ligence courses reportedly being taught, so, presumably, there are many more
courses using either book that I did not uncover. My findings, such as they
are, are listed in the following table. They suggest that Weiner’s book is used
in courses taught from a greater range of disciplines, including journalism, US
foreign policy, US history, US national security policy and organisational theory,
whereas Andrew’s book seems to be used more specifically in courses focused on
intelligence.
Required Reading by Institution: Legacy of Ashes versus

For the President’s Eyes Only.13
Colleges and universities that use either book in courses that deal primarily with
intelligence are listed in boldface type. All of these are courses taught after 2007.
Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes Christopher Andrew, For the President’s
Eyes Only
Cal State Dominguez Hills University of Amsterdam (US intelligence)
(US intelligence) Boston University (US intelligence)
Central Oklahoma (intelligence) Cambridge University (history)
Dalhousie (US intelligence history) John Cabot (US intelligence history)
Emory (US history) Georgetown (US intelligence)
John Cabot (US foreign policy) University of Maryland (intelligence)
George Mason (government) University of Maryland (US intelligence
Georgetown (journalism) history)
Georgia Tech (US intelligence) University of Nebraska – Lincoln (history)
Harvard (terrorism) State University of New York (history)
University of Maryland (US history) Ohio State (US intelligence)
University of California Merced (US history) Ohio University (intelligence history)
North Georgia State (organisational theory) University of Ottawa (intelligence)
Pitzer College (US foreign policy) Pittsburgh (US intelligence history)
University of San Diego (US intelligence) Sierra Nevada (intelligence)
University of Utah (national security policy) University of Southern California
Wake Forest (intelligence) (intelligence)
Williams College (US intelligence history) University of Texas (US intelligence)
University of Virginia (intelligence law)
Though one might be tempted to proclaim that the data indicates that
Andrew’s text is considered by academia as the more serious book, none of this
is the stuff from which conclusions are drawn. Yet, it seems inarguable that the
impact of Legacy of Ashes has been significant, though probably less than Mr
Weiner hoped and certainly more than his critics would like. But, like it or not,
the book is a fact to be dealt with; my colleagues and I on the CIA History Staff
often field questions about it from new CIA employees, mid-career CIA officers
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seeking more knowledge about their Agency’s history, older CIA officers or
retirees teaching intelligence and outside academics, who consult with CIA Staff
Historians on the subject of CIA history. Their questions often amount to: ‘Is
CIA really as bad, inept and clueless as Weiner says?’
‘CONTENDING PERSPECTIVES’ WITH LEGACY OF ASHES

After my review came out, a colleague challenged me to find a positive use for
Legacy of Ashes, as did a former senior CIA official, now teaching intelligence
at an elite private college (and who uses Weiner’s book as the primary text in
his course). After resisting the idea (I would rather spend my time bringing
to light true and previously unknown CIA history, and I had no interest in re-
reading Legacy of Ashes), I finally relented and was eventually inspired by these
challenges.
I now propose consideration of a radical idea – the greatest value of Tim
Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes would be as the centrepiece of a US intelligence course,
paired with other works that present different views than Weiner’s. There is a
virtue to teaching from a text with which one profoundly disagrees, as I can
attest from personal experience – it forces a honing of one’s own arguments.
Using Weiner in a course on CIA history would also illuminate what is always a
central, though often unmentioned, element in intelligence studies – namely, the
issue of intelligence historiography, with its attendant epistemological questions
and issues of perspective. In other words, there is quite a broad range of views,
not only on intelligence, but also on what intelligence history tells us about its
efficacy. The teacher of a course using Legacy of Ashes as its backbone, sup-
plemented by other, one might say, competing materials, would be able to give
students a good sense of the debate on the CIA and its history and even allow
them to participate in that debate.
What would such a course look like? If we posit a CIA history seminar
covering the period from Presidents Truman through Reagan, using Legacy
of Ashes as the main text, the most obvious and simple pairing for it would
be Christopher Andrew’s aforementioned For the President’s Eyes Only, using
Andrew’s eight chapters (approximately 350 pages) covering these eight admin-
istrations against the forty-three chapters (435 pages) that compose Weiner’s
treatment of the same material.14 It is a straightforward matter to produce a
syllabus from just these two books; dual and duelling histories that differ mark-
edly in tone, approach and interpretation and yet have a common organisational
principle: intelligence by US presidential administration. It would be a lively
course, to be sure, and it would probably be well-subscribed, especially with a
title like ‘Contending Perspectives on CIA History, from Truman to Reagan’.15
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(For those teachers who happen to agree with Weiner, simply make Andrew the
foil, as the conventional, establishment historian, and Weiner the resolution, as
the bold and iconoclastic investigative journalist.)
In the proposed course segments that follow, major differences in historical
presentation – mostly interpretive, but some of fact – are offered by presiden-
tial administration, with suggestions for class discussion or individual student
papers. Space constraints prevent adequate explanations of the referenced
operations, events and personalities, so some knowledge of these things on the
part of the reader is necessarily assumed. Supplementary material will also be
proposed to deal with specific shortcomings in Legacy of Ashes, as identified by
Weiner’s critics; these can be used either for additional reading – although it is
recognised that the reading load for this course is already quite heavy, at least
for undergraduates – for targeted research for papers or for the instructor’s
preparation.
WEINER VERSUS ANDREW ON TRUMAN AND THE EARLY CIA

From the beginning of our proposed course, the contrasting perspectives on the
circumstances of the creation of CIA and its early years under President Harry
Truman would be jarring and might even be usefully head-spinning for students.
Weiner sees the creation of the CIA as the work of former spies of the wartime
Office of Strategic Services, who were overly fearful of the USSR and managed
to put one over on an ignorant Harry Truman, who wanted nothing more from
intelligence than a classified newspaper.16 The development of the CIA’s covert
action capability and mission, which Legacy of Ashes portrays as illegal and unac-
countable in both its process and execution, was effectively an end run around the
president, who was not fully aware of the evils of the monster that he had created.
Andrew, however, portrays a Truman who, although initially ignorant about
intelligence, came to accept its value as a Cold War instrument of statecraft.17
This Truman accepted the need to spy on the USSR and to conduct covert
action, which became a pillar of national policy. His approval of the expansion
of peacetime covert operations was a significant and deliberate development.
Andrew also emphasises the danger of Soviet espionage in the US during this
period. Students might well be asked: which interpretation seems more persua-
sive and why?
Supplemental materials tending to show Truman’s knowledge of, and
involvement in, covert action policy would include a collection of declassified
documents edited by CIA historian Michael Warner, as well as the exhaustive
documentation contained in the relevant Foreign Relations of the United States
(FRUS) volume.18
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EISENHOWER’S CIA:
UNCONTROLLED VERSUS RESPONSIVE INSTRUMENT
The themes of the two books continue to clash, regarding the CIA during
the Eisenhower years, particularly on the issue of covert action oversight and
control, the efficacy of intelligence collection on the USSR and the quality of its
analysis.
Weiner’s chapters on the Eisenhower administration treat the CIA during this
period as a dysfunctional, out-of-control agency in every respect.19 According to
Weiner, the Agency had no real achievements; indeed, scant attention is given
to the Popov spy case, the Berlin Tunnel operation and the development of the
U-2 spy-plane. Ignorance about the USSR continued to dominate the CIA’s
analysis, which kept hyping the Soviet threat, while the Agency kept Eisenhower
in the dark about its shortcomings. Covert action remained anti-democratic
and uncontrolled. The tragic crushing of the Hungarian Revolution occurred
through irresponsible overreaching on the CIA’s part. Eisenhower left office
considering the CIA an abject failure – a ‘legacy of ashes’ for his successor.
Andrew sees US intelligence under Eisenhower, including the CIA, in a very
different light.20 Ike, whose military career and wartime leadership made him
very knowledgeable about intelligence, maintained, as President, a controlling
hand over the CIA. Covert action was central to his Cold War strategy, and he
considered regime change operations in Iran and Guatemala to be great achieve-
ments. He was more enthusiastic for lethal operations than the CIA. Eisenhower
was well aware of CIA shortcomings, particularly in collection on the Soviet
Union, and he pushed CIA programmes, such as the U-2 spy-plane and the
CORONA imagery satellite. The U-2 was one of the great successes of the Cold
War, helping to dispel myths of Soviet strategic superiority. Other important
CIA successes were the Popov case and the Berlin Tunnel, both of which yielded
important intelligence in indicating that the USSR was not planning an immi-
nent military invasion of Western Europe.
At this point – still early on in the course – the students of ‘Contending
Perspectives’ might well be wondering whether they were reading histories of
two CIAs in alternative universes. Obviously, this is a golden opportunity for
classroom discussion of historiography, in order to demonstrate how historical
interpretations can differ so widely, even when many, if not most, of the facts
are not in dispute. The contrast in styles is also worth pointing out: Weiner’s
short chapters and quick treatment of issues – he typically stays on a subject for
a page and a half – is more characteristic of his journalist profession, while the
historian, Andrew, expounds at length and in greater depth on events, trends
and individuals.
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Supplemental materials: an interesting exercise in using primary source docu-

ments can be had by having students compare what Weiner says is Eisenhower’s
labelling the CIA as a ‘legacy of ashes’ with the actual National Security Council
minutes in FRUS, which indicate to other scholars that Ike was actually dissatis-
fied with the state of military intelligence and was affirming the CIA’s central
role.21 Philip Taubman’s Secret Empire and Jeff Richelson’s Wizards of Langley
are well-regarded histories that demonstrate the CIA’s development and use of
the U-2 and satellite imagery systems as stunning successes. The CIA has also
released a declassified history of the U-2 programme and a collection of declassi-
fied documents on the pioneering CORONA imagery satellite. On the CIA and
Hungary, see Ross Johnson’s recent book, which presents a narrative at odds
with that in Legacy of Ashes.22
KENNEDY AND THE CIA: A CRUCIAL DIFFERENCE

The alternative universes actually converge somewhat in treating the CIA under
President John F. Kennedy, but also illumine how the contrasting styles matter,
in terms of substance. Both books, of course, recount the Bay of Pigs fiasco and
the Cuban missile crisis, and the narratives thereof are not incompatible; in fact,
Weiner’s treatment benefits from new information.23 Legacy of Ashes, predict-
ably (and, many would say, justly), lays the entire fault for the Bay of Pigs failure
at the CIA’s feet, portraying Kennedy as set-up and virtually ambushed by the
CIA. Andrew, in his Kennedy chapter, gives the CIA the lion’s share of the blame
for the Bay of Pigs – particularly for not consulting with its own analysts in plan-
ning the operation – but Kennedy is not let off the hook completely, because he
failed to focus on the operation, agreed with the groupthink of his advisers, held
unrealistic expectations and allowed it to go forward.24 On the Cuban missile
crisis, both authors rightly credit CIA Director John McCone for predicting
the Soviets would emplace offensive missiles in Cuba, and Weiner describes
McCone’s central role in the resolution of the crisis. Weiner focuses on the CIA’s
alleged gross inaccuracies regarding Soviet strategic strength, while Andrew
describes how CIA programmes brought down national estimates to realistic
figures. The most significant and telling gap, however, regards how each author
handles the matter of Oleg Penkovsky – the Soviet military intelligence officer,
who was spying for the CIA and Britain’s MI6.
Andrew considers Penkovsky ‘probably the most important Western agent’25
of the Cold War, because his information helped Kennedy both to resolve
the missile crisis and to maintain a tough posture on Berlin. In five full pages,
Andrew describes Penkovsky’s contribution to US understandings of the con-
struction of missile sites, their capabilities, the status and shortcomings of the
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Soviet military, the bluster and lack of resolve behind Khrushchev’s pronounce-
ments.26 CIA’s handling of Penkovsky’s intelligence, as well as Kennedy’s per-
sonal interest in it, are detailed.
Weiner calls Penkovsky a ‘secret hero’,27 but, instead of five pages, devotes
just seven spare sentences to him, mentioning that he provided the US with
(unspecified) technical manuals and emphasising twice that he was caught and
executed by the KGB. Weiner has this tendency – it is an observable recurring
pattern – of minimising CIA successes in terms of sparse text, by moving discus-
sion to a footnote, by asserting that it didn’t matter or by claiming the success
(e.g. the U-2) masked a greater failure (CIA’s inability to penetrate the Soviet
Politburo). The Penkovsky case is just one example of Weiner’s tendentiously
negative approach to CIA history. Historians, by all means, should document
and judge CIA failures, but balance, where some credit is due, is only fair.
Supplemental materials: on Penkovsky, the definitive work is Schecter and
Deriabin’s award-winning The Spy Who Saved the World.28 Another potential
student paper might compare Weiner’s indictment of intelligence analysis on
Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) strength in the early 1960s
with what the CIA and other agencies were actually estimating; there are big
differences.29
LYNDON JOHNSON AND VIETNAM:

THE CIA’S GLASS IS HALF . . . WHAT?
The CIA’s performance, with regard to the Vietnam conflict, dominates, natu-
rally, both books’ treatments of intelligence during Lyndon B. Johnson’s (LBJ)
administration. In this, and in other secondary themes, the contrasting assess-
ments are astonishing.
Weiner continues to hammer his theme of CIA incompetence and its practice
of lying to presidents.30 He begins by laying on the CIA the responsibility for
America’s sending combat troops to Vietnam, because the Agency failed to act
‘central’ enough in refuting the faulty intelligence surrounding the Tonkin Gulf
incident, in which a US Navy vessel allegedly came under attack by the North
Vietnamese. He lambastes the CIA’s lack of understanding of Vietnam, which
caused the Agency to lose the ‘intelligence war’ against the North Vietnamese
and contributed, therefore, to America’s losing the overall war. The CIA, Weiner
asserts, continually told LBJ and his administration what it wanted to hear – a
‘corruption of intelligence’ to suit political sensibilities. George Carver – the
senior CIA official on Vietnam – is characterised as ‘an optimist’ on Vietnam
and a ‘constant bearer of glad tidings’ for the White House. The Tet offensive
of early 1968, of course, is mentioned only as another CIA failure and, as such,
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a major factor in Johnson’s decision to seek an end to the war and to announce
that he would not run for re-election: ‘No strategy could survive the failure of
intelligence in Vietnam’.31
Andrew’s view is very different, beginning with the CIA’s role, regarding the
Tonkin Gulf incident.32 LBJ did not invite CIA Director McCone to consider the
evidence that US destroyers were attacked by North Vietnamese forces, but, even
so, McCone directly expressed his scepticism to LBJ. CIA scepticism, in fact, is
the major theme here. The CIA was consistently sceptical about US military
assessments of progress during the war and, although the CIA frequently com-
promised its views under pressure, ultimately was ‘proved right’ as the ‘bearer
of bad tidings’.33 McCone resigned in frustration, because LBJ didn’t want
to hear his warnings about US involvement in Vietnam; McCone was ‘more
clearsighted’34 than LBJ, because McCone didn’t underestimate the enemy.
The Agency ‘understood Vietnam better’ than either the White House or the
Defense Department and argued that victory, though not impossible, would be
a long, hard slog.35 America’s errors regarding Vietnam were due less to lack of
intelligence, than a failure of policymakers to heed CIA warnings. Tet, although
predicted by a CIA analyst, was nonetheless an institutional intelligence failure,
but the CIA used the experience to bolster its arguments that the US military’s
Order of Battle (OOB) estimates were wrong and refused, thereafter, to compro-
mise. George Carver also appears in a different guise here; it was his pessimistic
briefing to LBJ in March 1968 that led to the President’s throwing in the towel.
Andrew also describes important events that, for some reason, do not appear
in Weiner’s book. The OOB controversy within the CIA centred on a precocious
analyst named Sam Adams, and Andrews devotes four pages to this complex
and illuminating story of personal determination fighting bureaucratic reali-
ties.36 Moreover, Andrew cites as a ‘major success’ the CIA’s deployment of the
A-12 OXCART aircraft as an intelligence collection platform of significance.
Neither Sam Adams nor the A-12 is mentioned in Legacy of Ashes.
Supplemental materials: on Vietnam, an overarching and positive view of the
CIA’s contribution from a senior US military figure is General Bruce Palmer’s
The 25-Year War; also recommended is the account by former CIA analyst
George W. Allen, as well as the series of declassified internal histories by former
CIA operations officer Thomas Ahern. The CIA’s dispute with US military
figures for enemy strength is illuminated by many declassified estimates of the
period. The A-12 and its significance are covered in a recent monograph by the
CIA’s chief historian.37
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NIXON’S CIA: BELEAGUERED AGENCY OR ENABLER?

In their treatments of US intelligence under President Richard Nixon, both
accounts start with the single most salient fact of that history – that Nixon deeply
distrusted the CIA, believing it had leaked erroneous ‘missile gap’ intelligence
to the Kennedy campaign in 1960, which the Democrats used to browbeat the
Eisenhower administration (and Vice-President Nixon) on national security
grounds, thereby costing Nixon that close election. The essential difference in
interpretation that follows, however, concerns whether the CIA performed
adequately, despite continual animosity from the Nixon administration, which
is Andrew’s view, or whether CIA, in effect, allowed itself to become an enabler
of Nixon’s conspiratorial, secretive and suspicious personality, which is the
portrait that Weiner paints.
Weiner recounts that Nixon, like Johnson, ordered the CIA to conduct
domestic spying to identify the alleged foreign sources of domestic dissent about
his policies and that CIA was too willing to comply: ‘The record records no hesi-
tation’38 on the part of Director Helms.39 Weiner says Nixon ‘rightly criticized’
the CIA for underestimating Soviet strategic forces in the 1960s40 – though this
is inconsistent with Weiner’s earlier chapters, where the CIA is exaggerating
the same threat, during the same period – but then the Agency succumbed to
Nixon’s wishes and started overestimating. The CIA, in Weiner’s account, is an
agency continually ‘tailoring its work to fit’ White House policies.41 Meanwhile,
its lack of knowledge of the world made the USSR, North Vietnam and North
Korea, in each case, ‘terra incognita’ for the CIA. The CIA’s inexcusable failures
included missing the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the 1974 coup in Cyprus.
Weiner suggests that the murder of CIA officer Richard Welch in Athens was
the result of CIA malfeasance. (It happened during the Ford administration, but
Weiner shoehorns it into the Nixon era.) The CIA’s bungling failure to sway the
Chilean presidential election in 1970 led to Nixon’s decision to spark a military
coup against Salvador Allende. Weiner acknowledges that the CIA had no direct
role in the Watergate break-in (although he emphasises the involvement of
former CIA officers) and that the CIA refused to join in the cover-up, leading to
Nixon’s replacement of Helms with James Schlesinger, who commenced mass
firings and commissioned the list of past CIA misdeeds – the infamous ‘Family
Jewels’.
Andrew covers fewer intelligence issues of the Nixon presidency, but he treats
the major ones in greater depth and with more sympathy for the CIA.42 Students
will note the completely different portrait of Helms, in particular, who is treated
less as a caricature and more as a person – a CIA Director, who was unflappable
even when being slighted and who continued to give unwelcome intelligence to
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a hostile president, who wanted intelligence to confirm his convictions. Nixon

was unhappy that the CIA failed to find an international communist conspiracy
behind domestic student protestors. He was livid over the CIA’s assessment that
the Soviets’ SS-9 missile did not have multiple independently targeted re-entry
vehicles (MIRVs), which undermined his administration’s policy statements.
The CIA refused to change its assessments on the SS-9, despite pressure from the
White House and Defense Department; it continued to disagree over Vietnam
with the State Department and the military; and it refused Nixon’s order to place
the President’s brother under surveillance (Nixon had the Secret Service do it).
Helms was no lapdog, in Andrew’s account, and so his refusal to get the CIA
involved in the Watergate cover-up – which ‘made it unsustainable’43 – was an
example of consistency, rather than an anomaly.
Andrew does not ignore CIA shortcomings during this period, but provides
much-needed context: the failure to warn of events like the 1973 Mideast War
was shared throughout the intelligence and policy communities and, in one case
(Cambodia), warnings were hampered by the White House’s refusal to open
CIA post. Nixon’s desperation in trying to get the CIA to encourage a coup
against Allende in Chile was due to his administration’s dithering – despite the
CIA’s warnings – over approving covert political action that might have obvi-
ated the perceived need simply to ‘do something’ too late. As Andrew points out,
the CIA was very sceptical about the prospects for success of a coup, because it
understood Chile better than the White House did. Andrew’s narrative indicates
that this was a difficult period for the CIA.
Supplemental materials: Kristian Gustafson’s Hostile Intent (2007) is the best
new scholarship regarding CIA activities in Chile and emphasises CIA scepti-
cism about the difficult tasks that it was assigned by the White House.44 Students
looking for a fuller treatment of Helms should explore Thomas Powers’ dated
but classic work, The Man Who Kept the Secrets, as well as the recently declas-
sified internal history of Helms’ directorship and, of course, the man’s own
memoir, A Look Over My Shoulder.45
THE FORD INTERREGNUM

The CIA and intelligence during the short presidency of Gerald Ford is the
subject of brief treatments by both authors, which contrast especially on the sub-
jects of the Glomar Explorer, the media revelations regarding the ‘Family Jewels’,
the ensuing Rockefeller Commission on CIA activities and the subsequent
congressional investigations, the end of US involvement in Vietnam and the ‘B
Team’ exercise on the Soviet strategic posture.
Many of the differences are easily reconcilable, but the respective emphases in
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the narratives are interesting and may provoke classroom discussion. In Andrew’s
account, Ford is knowledgeable about the CIA, from his eight years overseeing its
appropriations in Congress;46 Weiner’s narrative says Ford never knew much
about the CIA, even with this experience.47 Andrew has Ford blindsided by the
failure of Director Colby to apprise the White House about the ‘Family Jewels’ – a
procedural error – while, in Weiner’s book, Ford is ‘blindsided’ by the revelations
themselves. Andrew emphasises Ford’s efforts to protect the CIA, particularly its
ability to collect intelligence and conduct covert action; Weiner chooses to focus
on Director Colby’s estrangement from Ford and Ford’s lack of trust in the CIA.
Both authors acknowledge Colby’s successor, George H. W. Bush, as a political
choice, but while Andrew relates Bush’s success to raising morale, improving the
CIA’s image and seeing the President on a weekly basis, Weiner belittles Bush’s
tenure – ‘CIA was Skull and Bones with a billion-dollar budget’ – and claims
that he accomplished little. Moreover, Weiner mocks a laudatory note that Bush
wrote to the CIA workforce when he left.
Other differences are more telling. Regarding the Glomar Explorer opera-
tion – the daring CIA attempt to raise a sunken Soviet submarine from the
Pacific Ocean floor – Andrew calls it an ‘unprecedented’ operation that ‘yielded
valuable intelligence’ on Soviet submarines, even though most of the sub fell
back to the seabed during the recovery. Weiner simply dismisses the affair as
another CIA failure, because ‘the sub broke in two’.48 Andrew soberly recounts
how conservative critics of the CIA’s alleged underestimating of Soviet military
strength and intentions led to the ‘B Team’ exercise, after which the CIA did not
fundamentally change its views. Weiner refers to ‘howling right wingers’,49 who
rewrote the CIA’s estimates and concludes that the Agency allowed its analysis
to be ‘corrupted’ for political reasons. These would be interesting paper topics.
Andrew says that the CIA, in early 1975, was more pessimistic than ever about
Vietnam, but, even so, the speed of the South’s collapse in April was a surprise,
including to the North Vietnamese. Weiner’s text emphasises the CIA’s late
warning, the evacuation of CIA personnel and the Agency’s inability to rescue
South Vietnamese who had worked with it. Weiner does not treat the Mayaquez
incident at all, which is a curious omission, since Andrew recounts it as a military
intelligence failure, with Director Colby as head of the intelligence community.
Weiner’s treatment of the various bodies investigating the CIA – the
Rockefeller Commission and the Church and Pike Committees – is thin.
Rockefeller was a whitewash, while the congressional investigations had the effect
of limiting covert action and espionage. Andrew has, by far, the more thoughtful
narrative, in which the Rockefeller Commission is revelatory, the congressional
committees have their own political agendas (including Senator Frank Church’s
presidential ambitions), the Ford White House successfully pushes back on
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some congressional oversteps and Ford himself regains the initiative, while the
committees’ backpedal. Andrew relates that the Church committee ultimately
issued ‘no sweeping condemnation’ of the CIA, but, instead, acknowledged its
‘important contributions’ to US security and ‘generally’ performed ‘with dedica-
tion and distinction’.50 Frank Church’s comment that the CIA might have been
a ‘rogue elephant on a rampage’51 was wrong – the Pike committee was accurate
when it said that the CIA had been ‘utterly responsive’ to US presidents52 – but
Church never recanted his statement publicly. Weiner, by contrast, suggests that
the statement was not untrue, but rather that Church, by making it, absolved ‘the
presidents who had driven the elephant’.53
Supplemental materials: the released ‘Family Jewels’ is widely available on
the Internet. On the resulting investigations, Kathryn Olmsted’s Challenging
the Secret Government is a sober treatment. The significance of the Glomar
Explorer is established by Polmar and White’s recent and comprehensive Project
AZORIAN.54
CARTER AND THE CIA:

NATIONAL DISGRACE OR NECESSARY INSTRUMENT?
In both books, the treatment of the CIA and intelligence under President Jimmy
Carter begins with Carter’s publicly expressed disdain for the CIA and its alleg-
edly immoral ways. Andrew relates how in the presidential campaign, Carter
described the CIA as one of the ‘three national disgraces’ foisted on America by
Republican leadership55 – the other two were Watergate and Vietnam – while
Weiner admits that Carter took a ‘hard swipe’ at the CIA while campaigning, but
emphasises his mastery of details during his intelligence briefings (in contrast, as
is made clear later, to his successor).56
Consistent with their respective treatments of previous administrations,
Weiner tends to wholly ascribe to the CIA the intelligence failures of the Carter
era and to suggest that any good work on the CIA’s part was accidental. Andrew
does not shy away from detailing the CIA’s shortcomings, but, likewise, he
documents significant achievements and, with regard to big failures, spreads the
blame around the intelligence and policy communities.
Weiner’s CIA under Carter continues to be something of a disgrace and so
hidebound that Carter’s CIA Director, Admiral Stansfield Turner, found it ‘a
hard vessel to handle’.57 Carter disdained the quality of the daily CIA reporting,
as well as the longer-term assessments, and events proved him right. The CIA was
not only wrong on Iran – ignorant of both the Shah’s troubles and the strength
of the Islamists – but it suppressed contrary reporting, got too comfortable in its
relations with the Shah and fundamentally failed to understand religion.
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The CIA, Weiner writes, failed to warn of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan,
even though the signs were there for nine months. This was a world-changing
event, and the CIA missed it, because it didn’t know Soviet intentions. The lack
of insight on Soviet decision-making, as Weiner repeatedly states throughout
Legacy of Ashes, was a failure in what, Weiner says, was the CIA’s primary job;
he points out that the CIA never managed to recruit a single Soviet Politburo
member. This shortcoming allows him to downplay the significance of Colonel
Ryszard Kuklinski – a CIA source on Soviet and Warsaw Pact capabilities from
1972 through to 1981, whose case is considered by others as a major Agency
espionage triumph. On the Iranian hostage ordeal, Weiner takes the one bright
spot – the CIA’s exfiltration of six US diplomats from the Canadian Embassy –
and inexplicably (for an alleged expert on intelligence) describes it as ‘a classic
espionage operation’ and downplays it as a ‘rare exemplar’.58
Andrew criticises the CIA for much during this period, but he is more even-
handed, not only balancing the CIA failures with its successes, but in explaining
Carter’s (and Turner’s) missteps. After Carter’s sacking of CIA Director Bush
– which Andrew calls ‘an unhappy precedent’59 in politicising the position –
Turner’s approach and style hurt morale at the Agency, but Carter was oblivious,
thinking that Turner was actually improving the CIA’s morale. Carter actually
valued and occasionally praised CIA intelligence on Soviet advances in the Third
World and on foreign leaders. The CIA’s mistaken assessments on Iran showed
Carter the limits of technical intelligence and the importance of espionage.
The failure to foresee the rise of Islamic radicalism belonged to the intelligence
community and the White House. The CIA followed administration policy not
to develop independent assets in Iran, yet the CIA became the ‘scapegoat’ on
Iran when, in fact, no one in the US Government took religion very seriously.
Andrew also reveals that planning for the hostages’ rescue was hampered by
Carter’s decisions on emphasising diplomacy. On Afghanistan, Andrew with-
holds judgement on whether it was an intelligence failure, but he notes that
Carter received intelligence reports on the Soviet military build-up for weeks
before the invasion. (This topic might lead to useful discussion over whether
intelligence services can reasonably be expected to go beyond assessing capabili-
ties to divining intentions.) In the end, Andrew asserts, the Iran crisis and the
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan ‘converted Carter’ on the need for covert action
as a ‘major instrument’ of foreign policy. (On Kuklinski, Andrew assesses his
significance in his chapter on the Reagan administration, portraying the Polish
colonel as a successful CIA spy, who was exfiltrated.)
Supplemental material: on Kuklinski, Weiner – had he chosen to highlight it
as a CIA espionage success, rather than to dismiss it – had the advantage over
Andrew, in terms of new scholarship. Andrew, nonetheless, understands the
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case’s significance far more thoroughly than Weiner. Students who choose (or
are assigned) to read the excellent and reliable work on Kuklinski, which was
published after Andrew’s history – namely, Benjamin Weiser’s A Secret Life –
are in for a treat; it reads like a spy novel, and although, clearly, the CIA made
some mistakes, any intelligence agency that can run such a valuable spy for
nine years and exfiltrate him and his family safely has at least something on the
ball.60
THE CIA UNDER REAGAN: THERE YOU GO AGAIN

The contrasts in perspective on the CIA – which are already fruitful – multiply
further in the authors’ treatments of Ronald Reagan and intelligence – a phrase
Weiner would consider an oxymoron;61 Reagan knew little more about the CIA
and its work, Weiner says, ‘than what he had learned at the movies’.62 President-
elect Reagan, Weiner recounts, only allowed an hour to be briefed on the world
in a scene that he calls a ‘screwball comedy’.63 Andrew, by contrast, emphasising
Reagan’s background knowledge of intelligence, highlights Reagan’s wartime
service (in which he helped make intelligence briefing films); his later fight
against communist clandestine labour activity in Hollywood; and his work on
the Rockefeller Commission in 1975.64
Weiner says CIA Director William Casey ‘junked’ reporting that indicated
the Soviets were in decline, as well as other analyses with which he disagreed,
such as on international terrorism, which he was convinced was supported by
Moscow. On Nicaragua, Reagan never tried to make a public case for support-
ing the Contras. Reagan and Casey continued many of Carter’s covert actions,
including Afghanistan, which was ‘CIA’s biggest gunrunning mission’.65 Weiner
implies that the CIA created al-Qaeda, because it did not think through ‘the
endgame’ (a point also made by the recent film Charlie Wilson’s War).
Andrew gives the CIA good marks for accuracy on its Soviet analysis dealing
with the leadership succession issue and Soviet economic decline; intelligence
on Soviet economic problems helped shape administration policies. The CIA did
underestimate Mikhail Gorbachev’s willingness to change superpower relations.
On the question of whether the KGB was behind the attempted assassination of
Pope John Paul II – a topic missing from Weiner’s book – Andrew recounts that
most CIA analysts were sceptical. Afghanistan was ‘one of the most successful
covert operations since World War II’, because the CIA had run it, rather than
the ‘bungling amateurs’ of the National Security Council, who had concocted the
Iran–Contra mess.66
Supplemental material: a number of authors – Robert Gates, Douglas
MacEachin, Bruce Berkowitz and Jeffrey Richelson – have pointed out that the
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CIA’s record of Soviet analysis, as the USSR declined, was actually good. A good
start would be Berkowitz’s 2008 article. The CIA has also declassified a trove
of relevant documents from that period, and my recent essay on Reagan as a
consumer of intelligence should dispel the myths that Reagan knew little about
intelligence or was not interested in it.67
CONCLUSION: LET THE READER BEWARE

By now, the perceptive reader may have concluded that I don’t much agree with
the book that is at the centre of my radical proposal for a CIA history course.
Indeed, Legacy of Ashes has too many shortcomings to be used on its own. It tries
too hard to be a compendium solely of CIA mistakes, disasters, ignorance and
other failures to be considered a balanced treatment. Where Weiner is fair about
the fact of failures, he fails to provide motivations and historical context. Writing
history is an act of choosing, and Weiner chooses to emphasise the negative,
while minimising the objectively positive. It strikes one as ‘gotcha journalism’.
I titled this essay ‘Bonum ex malo’, or ‘good from bad’, which is the closest,
short Latin phrase that approximates the idea: ‘when you have lemons, make
lemonade’. (It turns out the classical Romans knew neither lemons nor lem-
onade.) According to Dr David Butterfield of Christ’s College, Cambridge, the
full idea is expressed by Pliny the Elder (23–79 ad) in his Historia Naturalis as
malum nullum est sine aliquo bono (there is nothing bad that is without some
good).68 Pliny refers to the belief among the ancient Greeks that the poisonous
herb monkshood could be used for healing the eyes, but only in conjunction
with certain real medicines. This is precisely the point of this essay: poison is less
noxious when combined with good things and may even do some good. But, on
its own, it’s still poison. Caveat lector.
Notes
1 Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (New York, NY: Doubleday,
2007).
2 Nicholas Dujmovic, ‘Elegy of Slashes’, Studies in Intelligence, 51(3), September 2007,
pp. 33–43.
3 Jeff Stein, ‘Celebrated History of the CIA Comes Under Belated Fire’, SpyTalk,
15 March 2008, available at: http://spytalkblog.blogspot.com/2008_03_01_archive.
html.
4 No malice went into the writing of the review, which I had agreed to do before
reading Weiner’s book. I had nothing against Weiner before reading Legacy of Ashes,
had expected the book to be critical but fair and had wanted it to do well. Weiner
and I actually exchanged email pleasantries early in 2007, and I helped provide an
important historical photo for his book. Reading it, however, changed everything.
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5 Weiner responded to his critics at: tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com on 23 March

2008. See, also, Stein, ‘Belated Fire’.
6 Nicholas Dujmovic, ‘Getting CIA History Right: The Informal Partnership Between
CIA Historians and Outside Scholars’, Intelligence and National Security, 26(2–3),
April–June 2011, pp. 228–45.
7 Paul Pillar, ‘Intelligent Design? The Unending Saga of Intelligence Reform, Foreign
Affairs, 87(2), March–April 2008, pp. 138–44. Richard Dearlove’s review appeared
in the Financial Times on 22 September 2007. John McLaughlin, quoted in Gary
Thomas, ‘US Central Intelligence Agency 60 Years Old This Month’, Voice of
America English News, 14 September 2007, available at: http://www.voanews.com/
content/a-13-2007-09-14-voa21-66590412/555712.html.
8 Christopher Andrew’s review in The Times (London), 1 September 2007. Loch
Johnson and Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, ‘Review Roundtable: Tim Weiner’s Legacy of
Ashes: The History of the CIA’, Intelligence and National Security, 23(6), December
2008, pp. 878–91. See, also, Loch Johnson’s letter to the editor in Foreign Policy,
November–December 2007. R. Gerald Hughes, ‘Of Revelatory Histories and Hatchet
Jobs: Propaganda and Method in Intelligence History’, Intelligence and National
Security, 23(6), December 2008, pp. 842–77. Jeffrey Richelson, ‘Sins of Omission
and Commission’, Washington Decoded, 11 September 2007, available at: www.
washingtondecoded.com. Stephen Weissman, ‘Twist the Evidence, Win a Prize:
Are Investigative Reporting Standards Slipping?’, Talking Points Memo, 20 March
2008, available at: http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/03/20/twist_the_
evidence. Inexplicably, Weiner recently wrote, in trying to refute similar criticism
of his latest book, Enemies: A History of the FBI (New York, NY: Random House,
2012), that: ‘The only bad review of my last book, Legacy of Ashes, a history of
the CIA, was written by an official CIA historian’. See http://hnn.us/articles/
what-susan-rosenfeld-gets-wrong-about-enemies.
9 Unlike in the United Kingdom, where intelligence services commission official histo-
ries that are generally well regarded, the CIA has not done so, for a variety of reasons.
Even if it did, in my opinion, there would still be a need for a good independent CIA
history, not least because it would be more widely received as credible.
10 Stephen H. Campbell, ‘A Survey of the US Market for Intelligence Education’,
International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, 24(2), Summer 2011,
pp. 307–37.
11 Christopher Andrew, For the President’s Eyes Only: Secret Intelligence and the
American Presidency from Washington to Bush (New York, NY: HarperCollins,
1995).
12 This judgement is based on many conversations since 2005 with intelligence special-
ists – professional academics and former intelligence officers alike – teaching the
subject at college level and the data that follows, which tends to confirm it.
13 Based on Internet searches conducted on 8 August 2011 and 5 September 2011. The
entries under Andrew’s book reflect courses offered after the publication of Weiner’s
book in mid-2007. For both books, I include courses taught at foreign universities, as
well as US universities abroad.
14 Andrew’s work, in addition to its coverage of CIA history, also emphasises signals
intelligence (SIGINT – the province of the National Security Agency) and counter-
intelligence (the FBI’s domain). Andrew also – and, naturally, for a British historian
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– emphasises liaison work and the British connection. An even better choice than
Andrew, in my view, would be John Ranelagh’s The Agency: The Rise and Decline
of the CIA (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1986), for its exclusive focus on CIA
history and for its comprehensiveness and balance, but Ranelagh’s excellent work
has long been out of print. Though dated, Ranelagh is still highly recommended for
background and preparatory reading for any teacher of CIA history.
15 Weiner’s book begins with a superficial treatment of US intelligence in the immedi-
ate post-Second World War period and ends shortly after the office of the Director
of National Intelligence was established in 2005. Andrew’s text compasses ‘the
Georges’, beginning with intelligence under George Washington and covering each
presidential administration through to that of George H. W. Bush. Therefore, the
period of overlap, for the two works, is 1945 to 1992. I am ending this notional history
course with Reagan, in part because of the newly declassified materials available
30 years after he became President and, in part, because more recent CIA history
becomes increasingly problematic for a CIA Staff Historian, in terms of still sensitive
information.
16 Weiner, Legacy of Ashes, pp. 3–70.
17 Andrew, For the President’s Eyes Only, pp. 149–98.
18 Michael Warner (ed.), The CIA Under Harry Truman (Washington, DC: Center for
the Study of Intelligence, 1994). Michael Warner (ed.), Foreign Relations of the United
States, 1945–1950: The Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment (Washington, DC:
GPO, 1996).
21 US Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963: Volume
XXV (2001), Documents 80 and 84.
22 Philip Taubman, Secret Empire: Eisenhower, the CIA, and the Hidden Story of America’s
Space Espionage (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2003). Jeffrey Richelson, The
Wizards of Langley: Inside the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology (Boulder,
CO: Westview, 2001). Gregory Pedlow and Donald Welzenbach, The CIA and the
U-2 Program, 1954–1974 (Washington, DC: CIA History Staff, 1998). Kevin Ruffner
(ed.), CORONA: American’s First Satellite Program (Washington, DC: CIA History
Staff, 1995). The CIA works are available online through the website: cia.gov/library/
center-for-the-study-of-intelligence. A. Ross Johnson, Radio Free Europe and Radio
Liberty: The CIA Years and Beyond (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press,
2010).
25 Andrew, For the President’s Eyes Only, p. 267.
27 Weiner, Legacy of Ashes, p. 197.
28 Jerrold Schecter and Peter Deriabin, The Spy Who Saved the World: How a Soviet
Colonel Changed the Course of the Cold War (Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 1992).
29 Donald Steury (ed.), Intentions and Capabilities: Estimates on Soviet Strategic Forces,
1950–1983 (Washington, DC: CIA History Staff, 1996), Documents 4 through 10,
especially.
MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd 108 21/02/2013 08:24


37 George W. Allen, None So Blind (Chicago, IL: Ivan Dee, 2001). Ahern’s six previously
classified histories can be found at: www.foia.cia.gov/vietnam.asp. Bruce Palmer,
Jr, The 25-Year War: America’s Military Role in Vietnam (New York, NY: Simon
& Schuster, 1985). Searching the phrase ‘Capabilities of the Vietnamese commu-
nists’ at the webpage: www.foia.cia.gov/search_options.asp will yield the declassified
Vietnam estimates that bedevilled the CIA’s relationship with the military. David
Robarge, Archangel: CIA’s Supersonic A-12 Reconnaissance Aircraft (Washington,
DC: CIA History Staff, 2007), which is also available at: www.cia.gov.
44 Kristian Gustafson, Hostile Intent: U.S. Covert Operations in Chile, 1964–1974
(Dulles, VI: Potomac Books, 2007).
45 Thomas Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA (New
York, NY: Knopf, 1979). Robert Hathaway and Russell Jack Smith, Richard Helms as
Director of Central Intelligence (Washington, DC: CIA History Staff, 1993); redacted
and released in 2006, this book can be found by searching the title at: www.foia.
cia.gov/search_options.asp. Richard Helms with William Hood, A Look Over My
Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency (New York, NY: Random House,
2003).
54 Searching on the phrase ‘Family Jewels’ at: www.foia.cia.gov/search_options.asp will
yield the entire document. Kathryn Olmsted, Challenging the Secret Government: The
Post-Watergate Investigations of the CIA and FBI (Chapel Hill, NC: University of
North Carolina Press, 1996). Norman Polmar and Michael White, Project AZORIAN:
The CIA and the Raising of K-129 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2010).
MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd 109 21/02/2013 08:24

60 Benjamin Weiser, A Secret Life: The Polish Officer, His Covert Mission, and the Price
He Paid to Save His Country (New York, NY: Public Affairs, 2004).
67 Bruce Berkowitz, ‘U.S. Intelligence Estimates of the Soviet Collapse: Reality and
Perception’, International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, 21 February
2008, pp. 237–50. The Reagan era intelligence documents were released for a
November 2011 symposium at the Reagan Presidential Library on ‘Ronald Reagan,
Intelligence, and the End of the Cold War’ and are available at: www.foia.cia.gov/
Reagan.asp. See also my essay on Reagan as a serious intelligence customer: Nicholas
Dujmovic, ‘Reagan, Intelligence, Casey, and the CIA: a reappraisal’, International
Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, 26:1, 2013, pp. 1–30.
68 I am grateful to Dr Butterfield for his insights and his online Latin consulting service,
available at: www.classicalturns.com.
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Chapter 5
NARRATING COVERT ACTION: THE CIA,

HISTORIOGRAPHY AND THE COLD WAR
Kaeten Mistry*
In the conduct of foreign relations, it represents the option laden with most risk
and danger. For many policymakers, it is the least appealing choice. Its raison
d’être is to be inconspicuous to the extent that its very occurrence is in doubt.
Some even question whether it is a core intelligence activity.1 Covert action
nonetheless remains the most intriguing, controversial, intensely debated and
headline-grabbing aspect of intelligence. Among the numerous agencies that
make up the American intelligence community, none has been as closely asso-
ciated with clandestine activities – historically and, moreover, in the popular
imagination – than the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). From its creation
in 1947 to the present day, the CIA has, rightly or wrongly, been synonymous
in the public consciousness with covert operations. The struggle to frame the
popular debate has involved a range of narrators – from government officials,
spies, journalists, scholars, political activists and ordinary citizens – promoting
divergent, and often contrasting, histories of covert action. Rather than offer
another story of secret activities conducted by, or linked to, the Agency, this
essay considers the evolution of these competing narratives through a history of
the history of covert action. It analyses how historiographical and popular nar-
ratives changed over the course of the Cold War, with particular attention to the
CIA’s relationship with the media and scholars, before outlining potential lines
of future historical inquiry. Understanding how arguments concerning covert
action have been constructed and challenged better defines US power and inter-
ventionism abroad, alongside the diverse conceptions of America’s role in the
world.
Covert action was a consistent feature of US foreign policy in the Cold
War, yet public definitions emerged at a remarkably late stage. One of the
first official references did not come until 1974, and this was in negation. In
amending a Foreign Assistance Act from the early 1960s, the Hughes–Ryan Act
* I am grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for their financial support of this work.
111
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instructed executive officials to report on any funds the CIA wished to spend
on ‘operations in foreign countries, other than activities intended solely for
obtaining necessary intelligence’. The President would have to convince eight
separate congressional subcommittees that such ‘covert action’ represented a
national security priority, before any funds were approved.2 The legislation had
a short shelf life, although a clearer definition soon emerged, with the advent of
an administration that enthusiastically embraced covert action. Executive Order
12333, signed by President Ronald Reagan during his first year in office in 1981,
defined it as ‘activities conducted in support of national foreign policy objectives
abroad which are planned and executed so that the role of the United States
Government is not apparent or acknowledged publicly’.3 Mindful of the furore
stoked by revelations of CIA activities in previous decades, conscious efforts
were made to differentiate covert action from traditional diplomacy, intelligence
collection and law enforcement, while any involvement in domestic American
political or cultural life was strictly precluded. Congress reiterated the point, as
well as the definition of covert action as ‘an activity or activities . . . to influence
political, economic, or military conditions abroad, where it is intended that the
role of the United States Government will not be apparent or acknowledged
publicly’, as the Cold War came to an end.4
The overriding concern was for secrecy and, furthermore, to inoculate the
American political system from any association with underhand activities.
Simply put, it was imperative for the sponsoring power to remain in the shadows.
There could not be a repeat of dirty operations laundry being washed in public,
like during the 1970s. The case could be made that ‘covert action’ represents a
distinctly American expression, given that the terms used by other nations – the
Soviet Union referred to ‘active measures’ and the British phrased it as ‘special
political action’ – had a slightly different emphasis (broader and narrower in
scope, respectively) and were less concerned with explicating their covert nature.
Despite differing origins, the measures that nations embraced in the clandestine
Cold War were analogous. While governments slowly and sheepishly admit-
ted to, and offered definitions of, covert action, it has been left to scholars and
former intelligence practitioners to outline the specific tactics utilised. Looking
to affect political, economic, military, social and ideological conditions, one
leading voice notes that covert action entails ‘methods ranging from bribing
opinion-formers to paramilitary operations’. Others have outlined a hierarchy of
activities, starting with routine tools (i.e. propaganda and information sharing),
to modest intrusion (i.e. secret funding of friendly groups) and to aggressive,
high-risk and violent methods that are difficult to disassociate from if the hidden
hand is revealed (i.e. coups, assassination plots, hostage-taking).5
Such pedagogically inspired accounts are, nonetheless, recent developments.
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Narrating Covert Action 113
News of covert action practises and methods initially entered the public arena
in a protracted, partisan and partial fashion. Much relied on the efforts of the
media, particularly journalists at leading national publications, some of whom
enjoyed privileged relationships with senior CIA officials. When this consensual
arrangement began to fray – as the broader Cold War consensus unravelled – it
marked a new era defined by increased antagonism, which had a galvanising
effect on the quantity and scope of covert action narratives.
* * *
Activities of a secret nature were not, of course, unique to the Cold War. The
work of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II showcased
the efficacy of American covert operatives, especially in Europe. The continued
existence of an intelligence agency during peacetime, particularly one rooted in
a culture of clandestine action, was an altogether more contentious issue. After
receiving (leaked) word of William Donovan’s post-war plans for a permanent
intelligence group, the Chicago Tribune – a leading conservative, isolationist
publication – led a campaign against such a ‘Gestapo Agency’ modelled on
the OSS. To fight hostility among the press corps and, more crucially, within
Congress, certain OSS veterans set out to explain their work in a positive light.
Donovan sought to win over a sceptical audience through a public relations
campaign that involved numerous speeches and interviews about the need for
a permanent intelligence group, as well as collaborating with Hollywood pro-
ducers to shape positive representations of the OSS in popular culture. More
tangibly, Stewart Alsop and Tom Braden offered a journalistic account of the
group’s vital contribution to the war effort and defended the need for American
espionage.6 Yet in so doing, such efforts consolidated the impression of intel-
ligence as synonymous with covert action. Even though the OSS engaged in
secret intelligence, research and analysis, and counter-intelligence, it was their
covert activities that attracted the most attention. Ironically, this was aided by
the publications by former officials.7
With the creation of the CIA as part of the new National Security State in
1947, references to covert action were deliberately avoided. Such tools were not,
however, to be excluded. The Agency’s founding document contained the seem-
ingly innocuous proviso to ‘perform such other functions and duties related
to intelligence affecting the national security as the President or the National
Security Council may direct’. Subsequent confessions by Executive officials
revealed that this was to allow a small-scale covert function, without attracting
congressional and public attention.8 The intention may have been for a modest
capability, although a series of secret National Security Council (NSC) direc-
tives led to its rapid expansion. In December 1947, NSC 4-A instructed the CIA
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to engage in ‘covert psychological operations’, which was superseded only six

months later by the more expansive NSC 10/2, authorising:
propaganda, economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-
sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states,
including assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrillas and refugee
liberation groups, and support of indigenous anti-communist elements in threat-
ened countries of the free world.9
The following years witnessed the launch of multiple covert operations to
provoke unrest behind the Iron Curtain and ensure Western European political
and economic stability. While the latter enjoyed a degree of success, efforts in
Eastern Europe proved universally inept and ineffective. The propaganda and
subversion schemes by Agency-sponsored émigré groups had little impact on
communist regimes in the Soviet Bloc, while guerrilla and liberation campaigns
met bloody ends.10
Crucially, details of these clandestine schemes remained out of the public
realm. This was due to lackadaisical congressional oversight, as well as the fact
that operations, while certainly violent and dangerous, remained somewhat
small-scale. Joseph Stalin was aware of the plots in Eastern Europe through
his own covert operation networks in the West, but the lack of open discus-
sion inside the United States ensured that the sponsoring government’s hand
remained concealed. In short, there was no domestic impediment to implement-
ing bigger and bolder covert action. Indeed, US officials were more concerned
with bolstering clandestine activities. Tasked with producing a top-secret review
of the CIA’s efforts to date, a 1954 commission led by James Doolittle concluded
that:
We must develop effective espionage and counterespionage services and must
learn to subvert, sabotage and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisti-
cated and more effective methods than those used against us. It may become neces-
sary that the American people be made acquainted with, understand and support
this fundamentally repugnant philosophy.11
It would take another twenty years before the American public were confronted
by this ‘fundamentally repugnant philosophy’, with their reaction proving far
from understanding and supportive. In the meantime, the Cold War consensus
held true and ensured that covert activities remained out of sight.
It is frequently suggested that the 1950s represented a ‘Golden Age’ as the
CIA enjoyed unprecedented scope to pursue covert action in the so-called Third
World. This is an exaggeration of its influence over events abroad and national
security decision-making. However, the era was unique with respect to public
opinion as Congress and, especially, the mainstream press rallied behind Agency
activities. While members of Congress were not entirely absent in oversee-
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ing Agency schemes, they certainly cast a friendly eye and knew when to look
away.12 CIA Chief Allen Dulles made concerted efforts to ensure that Congress
was sympathetic to his Agency. He was also conscious of the need for broader
domestic support. ‘Of course, there is a great deal that one must keep secret’,
Dulles noted privately:
but without a reasonable [sic] friendly public opinion to back Congressional
support, this Agency would be in trouble indeed. By and large, the press comment
throughout the country is on the whole friendly and so far my relations with
Congress are on a satisfactory basis.13
In fact, Dulles provided good copy – especially in comparison with his dour
brother, John Foster Dulles, the Secretary of State – and frequently penned
op-eds and granted interviews. While eager to maintain operational secrecy,
Dulles was keen to engage the press. As the comments of The New York Times
(NYT) reporter Hanson Baldwin to Dulles attested, many in the press were
happy to do likewise: ‘I have no desire to be other than accurate and no desire,
as you know, to hurt or hamper the Central Intelligence Agency in any way. My
interest has been the same as yours – improvement of our Intelligence services’.14
The CIA enjoyed particularly good relations with news magazines across the
political spectrum, with some agents offered journalistic cover when operating
abroad. Once again, Dulles actively courted the media, hosting private dinners
for Time and NYT reporters. When Time–Life proprietor Henry Luce sought
a clearer picture of the Eisenhower administration’s policy toward the Middle
East, he asked Dulles confidentially: ‘would it be useful (and convenient)
for one of our correspondents to talk to you first – or had he better proceed
through regular channels?’15 Luce enjoyed several intimate ties with the US
Government – his wife, Clare Booth Luce, was Ambassador to Italy and his
company’s Managing Director, C. D. Jackson, was the President’s Special
Assistant for Psychological Warfare – and his publications played a key role
in sounding the drumbeat for action in Iran in 1953. Depicting Iranian Prime
Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh as an unstable, childlike figure who posed a
threat to American security interests, Time provided a clear public rationale for
overthrowing Mosaddegh. More crucially, following the CIA-sponsored coup,
it made no mention of the American role, instead reporting it as an indigenous
Iranian affair.16
Public understanding – or, rather, lack thereof – of the Agency’s covert
campaign to topple the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz
in Guatemala the following year also benefitted from close ties with prominent
media opinion-makers. As in the Iranian operation, the NYT made no mention
of the American connection and, in this instance, took vital steps to ensure the
CIA link remained concealed. When correspondent Sydney Gruson’s reports
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of increasing rumours inside Guatemala about a coup were picked up by the

Eisenhower administration, Dulles met privately with former Princeton class-
mate and NYT general manager, Julius Ochs Adler. As the brother-in-law of
NYT publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, Adler was informed that the Dulles
brothers would feel more comfortable if Gruson was kept away from the delicate
story in Guatemala. Such was the climate of trust between the CIA and NYT –
Sulzberger was a close friend of Dulles and rumoured to have taken an oath to
secrecy with the Agency – that Gruson was soon reassigned to Mexico as the
Agency-sponsored forces felled Arbenz. This would not be the only occasion
when the NYT pulled unfavourable stories relating to the CIA – most notably,
before the botched invasion by Cuban exiles armed by the Agency to topple Fidel
Castro at the Bay of Pigs in 1961.17
Yet, for all the operational ‘successes’ of the campaigns in Iran and Guatemala,
there remained an inherent tension regarding understanding and discussions of
the CIA at home. Dulles’ comment about keeping public and congressional
opinion on-board was telling. Efficient operations would leave no trace of the
Agency role, but how would the public then learn of its accomplishments? After
all, intelligence remained a misunderstood subject. The CIA and its Director
both found the allure of acknowledging foreign endeavours hard to resist.
Shortly after the Guatemalan campaign, the Saturday Evening Post published a
feature on the Agency, praising ‘the supersecret Central Intelligence Agency, our
first line of defense in today’s underground war with Russia’.18 In preparation
for the article, Dulles reportedly briefed the authors.19 Having worked to define
‘acceptable’ governments abroad, it appeared logical for the CIA to also shape
domestic public opinion in the United States.
Why did stalwarts of the fourth estate rally behind the Agency’s covert
schemes, rather than inform the general public? First, there were close personal
and professional ties between the press and government, with several journalists
having served in some official capacity during one, if not both, of the World
Wars. Many continued to have friends, spouses, lovers and associates in posi-
tions of power. It was the epitome of a northeast establishment: individuals
attended the same colleges and universities and were part of the same elite social
scene in cities such as New York and Washington. Second, the spectre of an
expanding communist enemy loomed large, both abroad, especially following
Mao Zedong’s victory in the Chinese Civil War, and at home, with prominent
spy cases, such as the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss.20 It was patriotic to toe the line.
Finally, there was an element of convenience, as journalists received a steady
stream of exclusive material, while the Agency gained favourable coverage – or,
of equal importance, no reporting – of policies and plans. In short, there was
little desire or motivation in speaking truth to power.
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The early Cold War consensus ensured that the tension between secrecy and
positive public opinion did not rise to the surface, as press and congressional
attention remained generally non-intrusive and favourable towards the CIA. By
the early 1960s, there were, however, signs of unrest. Both the NYT and Time
were notably more critical of the Bay of Pigs plot, albeit by questioning if the
CIA should have an operations capability, rather than whether covert action was
a permissible enterprise.21 There was, of course, no mention of their own com-
pliance in reporting previous campaigns. In the meantime, a new generation of
journalists took up the mantle by exploring the CIA’s role amid US foreign rela-
tions. The first major breakthrough came in 1964, with a publication to ‘inform
the American public’ by two journalists, who claimed the Agency was at the core
of a parallel ‘Invisible Government’ wielding great power and influence. David
Wise and Thomas Ross noted: ‘This second, invisible government gathers intelli-
gence, conducts espionage, and plans and executes secret operations all over the
globe’.22 Picking up on a little-known congressional investigation concerning
the tax-exempt status of private organisations, the Left-leaning news magazine
The Nation questioned why the Agency’s name had cropped up in the findings.
Moreover, it asked what the CIA was doing funding intellectual magazines like
Encounter in Europe and America. Rumours that had previously only been
whispered on the elite social scene were now finding a voice in mainstream
outlets.23
The key jolt to public consciousness came in early 1967 with the revelation
that the CIA had been secretly financing the National Student Association
(NSA). Although the NYT headline of 14 February made the splash, the scoop
was made by a small Californian muckraking magazine named Ramparts. Part
of a Left-wing underground press movement dissatisfied with the mainstream
media, in 1966, Ramparts began publishing articles linking the CIA to nominally
private projects led by American universities in South Vietnam, through infor-
mation provided by a whistle-blower with first-hand knowledge of the scheme.
It was another whistle-blower, this time, former-NSA fundraiser Michael
Woods, who provided evidence for the story that would definitively expose the
CIA’s hidden hand and generate newfound public awareness of covert activities.
Dedicating its March 1967 issue to the CIA’s sponsorship of the NSA, Ramparts
protected its scoop by taking out full-page adverts for the edition in the NYT and
Washington Post. The NYT, scarred by its earlier complicity in failing to report
the Bay of Pigs, as well as boasting a new cadre of reporters and editors, also
decided to go on the offensive by covering the story and, in the following days,
unravelled Agency secret funding of numerous other private organisations in
America. The story proved a media sensation, with newspapers, magazines and
TV programmes covering the issue, while Congress pressed President Lyndon
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Johnson to launch an official investigation. The scandal was reported around the
world, with further exposure of CIA involvement in cultural organisations in
Allied countries from Europe to India.24
Aware of the pending Ramparts story, the CIA attempted to discredit the
magazine and trump the exposé. Once this failed, it fell to former agent Tom
Braden to offer the most remarkable defence of the Agency’s work after the
scandal broke in a Saturday Evening Post column entitled ‘I’m Glad the CIA
is “Immoral” ’. It remains unclear whether Braden was working in a personal
capacity or if he had the tacit support of the Agency, although the move per-
manently ruptured his friendship with Dulles. Yet, the Ramparts disclosure
did little to stem the CIA’s covert activities within America, as, alongside the
FBI, they ramped up investigations into alleged communist connections to
an increasing number of magazines that now opposed the Vietnam War.25
Operation MHCHAOS came to light, along with the existence of a 702-page
‘Family Jewels’ report, detailing over twenty-five years of covert Agency misde-
meanours, through the reporting of Seymour Hersh. The re-emergence of inves-
tigative journalism was seen most famously in the work of Carl Bernstein and
Bob Woodward, who revealed the cover-up of the break-in of the Democratic
National Committee headquarters in the Watergate office complex ordered by
Richard Nixon – and involving former CIA employees – that contributed to the
fall of the President. Yet, it was Hersh’s NYT article of 22 December 1974 that
triggered a new phase in congressional debate on the Agency’s past and current
practises. It also signalled the first official public inquiry into covert operations.26
The following year represented a landmark, as both the House and Senate
launched investigations that revealed Agency involvement in the 1973 over-
throw of Salvador Allende in Chile, as well as previous bungled attempts to
assassinate foreign leaders, such as Fidel Castro in Cuba, Patrice Lumumba in
Congo, Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, the Diem brothers in South
Vietnam and René Schneider in Chile. The House Report, chaired by Otis Pike,
was deemed so antagonistic that its general release was prohibited. Once again,
the underground press played a vital role in bringing news of CIA activities into
the public sphere, as the Left-wing New York magazine Village Voice published
leaked extracts (the source of the leak was unclear, with congressional and
executive officials blaming one another). The interest proved international, as
the Pike Report was initially published not in the US, but by Spokesman Books
– a small English publishing house. Yet, it was the Senate’s investigation led by
Frank Church that generated most headlines, introducing the notion of the CIA
as a ‘rogue elephant on the rampage’ into the public lexicon. Even though the
Church Committee concluded that Agency covert action did not resemble the
work of a ‘rogue elephant’, the term resonated and proved hard to dislodge.27
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Harbouring presidential aspirations, Church was keen for the previous sins of
the Agency – and, by extension, the executive and congressional branches – to
be confessed and the process of redemption to begin. It was a struggle to re-
establish public trust in the political system, especially following the exposure
of lies and abuses of power around Watergate and Vietnam. The Cold War con-
sensus was rapidly collapsing. While the CIA was under investigation, the entire
government had let the American people down and getting all the skeletons out
of the closet was considered the best path to salvation. This was the rationale
behind CIA Director William Colby’s candid public testimony and admission
of its previous activities. To the chagrin of many in the Agency, Colby set out to
admit guilt and express regret. While he agreed to mild reform and oversight, he
also asserted that an on-going Cold War still required the use of covert action.
‘As we lift this veil to open intelligence to the kind of public review and control
we Americans want today, we have two problems’, Colby suggested:
One is how far to go, on which we must jointly develop some guidelines and
understandings, or we risk seriously and unnecessarily injuring our intelligence.
The other is to ensure that our people have an accurate perception or what modern
intelligence really is.
The second point was vitally important, because: ‘Without this, an individual
act is seen as the norm, in applications of Aesop’s fable of blind men describ-
ing a whole elephant as only an extension of the part he perceives’. Yet Church
and Colby, like Braden beforehand, found the debate hard to control once the
genie was out of the bottle. Even though the aforementioned Hughes–Ryan Act
ensured covert action was harder than ever to organise, the CIA found itself
under unprecedented attention from the public and Congress.28
The public were certainly gaining an insight into ‘what modern intelligence
really is’, although not in the fashion that Colby and other government officials
had in mind. The disintegration of trust in the Agency also affected morale within
its ranks, leading to the resignation of several covert operatives. When some of
these figures subsequently published groundbreaking books based on their expe-
riences, it ensured that covert action controversies remained in the headlines
and were now on the bookshelves. Exposés and memoirs by the likes of John
Marks, Victor Marchetti, Philip Agee, Frank Snepp and John Stockwell provided
unique insights into CIA practises, drawing condemnation – and attempts to
silence them – from the US Government (see Figure 7). Simultaneously, they
attracted praise from the New Left. Figures like Agee lent their services to a host
of new magazines that emerged, such as Covert Action Information Bulletin and
CounterSpy, the latter which advocated ‘naming names’ to expose covert agents
abroad.29
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Figure 7 Philip Agee, the most famous whistle-blower in CIA history, holding
his controversial publication On the Run (US National Archives and Records
Administration)
On the other side of the fence were spies eager to defend the Agency. Colby
led the way with several public speeches and newspaper interviews that painted
a less bellicose image, explaining that the CIA engaged in clandestine activities
‘only when specifically authorized by the National Security Council. Thus, CIA
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covert actions reflect national policy’.30 Meanwhile, a group of retired covert

operatives, including David Atlee Phillips (who founded the Association of
Former Intelligence Officers), Ray Cline, Lyman Kirkpatrick and Joseph Smith,
made their case as private citizens by re-emphasising the threat posed by com-
munism and the need for continued vigilance. Noting the important work being
done by CIA staff, which, contrary to common belief, was not just focused on
covert action, Phillips promoted Agency successes in a bid to boost morale,
attract new recruits and maintain good relations with foreign allies. It was an
essential, effective and honourable arm of government service. The intelligence
defenders of the faith engaged the whistle-blowers in TV and radio debates,
while writing their own memoirs of life in the Agency. As the title of one account
stated, this was the ‘real’ CIA.31
Yet, far from diminishing discussions about earlier covert actions, the late
1970s and early 1980s witnessed unparalleled public attention to the CIA’s role in,
and contribution to, the Cold War. By the 1980s, intelligence emerged as an area of
academic inquiry. Straddling the fields of politics and history, if slightly weighted
towards the former, ‘intelligence studies’ took off in the US and UK. In late 1979,
a group of North American scholars, largely concentrated around the northeast
and with close ties to government, set out to systematically analyse intelligence
by creating the ‘Consortium for the Study of Intelligence’ (CSI). Highlighting the
flood of material released during the previous decade, it suggested that it was now
‘increasingly possible to undertake objective, scholarly and unclassified research
into the intelligence process and product, and to examine their relationship to
U.S. decision-making’. The CSI developed teaching programmes and theories of
intelligence, built research networks and considered problematic issues, like the
relationship between intelligence and democracy. ‘For various cultural and politi-
cal reasons, the study of intelligence has too often been regarded by academicians
as ultra vires’, it noted, ‘Their self-exclusion from the subject has inhibited an
understanding of this significant instrument of the modern nation-state’.32 The
CSI reached out to former practitioners, such as William Casey – soon to be
CIA chief in an administration especially fond of covert action – and organised
a series of colloquia analysing current and future practises.33 Bringing together
International Relations (IR) scholars and former agents, the CSI adopted a peda-
gogical approach to ‘improve’ intelligence, making aspects like covert action more
effective foreign policy tools and publishing a series of books with the express
purpose of reaching out to policymakers.34 Intelligence scholars also sought the
opinion of former officials in proofing manuscripts on clandestine activities. This
was, on the one hand, understandable, given that figures like William Colby had
first-hand knowledge of such methods. On the other, it signalled a curiously close
connection between scholars and the subjects of their inquiry.35
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Another legacy of the 1960s, the fruits of which started to flower in the 1980s,
had particular resonance for another group of scholars.36 Drawing on newly
declassified government documents through the Freedom of Information Act
(FOIA) of 1966, historians began to produce a host of survey texts and focused
studies on CIA covert action. The possibilities for empirical research were
heightened further in the 1990s, as the end of the Cold War saw the Agency
proclaim a new era of ‘openness’, which would see the records on eleven major
clandestine operations reviewed for general release. The CIA History Staff pub-
lished a number of documentary collections and released previously classified
internal studies. The clearest sign of this new attention to ‘openness’ came when
the historian Nick Cullather was hired to write an official study of the Agency’s
1954 covert operation in Guatemala, which was subsequently published by
Stanford University Press.
Early optimism would, however, prove misplaced. Cullather’s study marked
the apogee, as historians and centres like the National Security Archive fought
the CIA to fulfil its declassification pledges. In reality, the writing was on the
wall as early as 1984, when Reagan ensured that Agency operational files were
no longer subject to FOIA requests. Moreover, increasingly loud noises from
influential congressional figures required a response, as questions were put
forward about the CIA’s role in the post-Cold War era. Senator Daniel Patrick
Moynihan famously asked in a NYT op-ed that, in a world without the Soviet
enemy, ‘Do We Still Need the C.I.A.?’ In reality, Moynihan was not calling for
the end of intelligence per se, but was challenging the cult of secrecy surround-
ing the Agency and foreign policy establishment. Secret organisations funded by
American tax dollars were incongruent with democracy.37 The Agency’s pledge
to ‘openness’ was, therefore, as much to placate key congressional forces as it was
a commitment to greater public knowledge of its secret past.
The lack of primary records helped ensure that CIA covert action remained in
the press and the focus of journalistic inquiry. It was also increasingly seen on the
TV, bookshelves and in film by the turn of the century. Disparate interpretations
continued to divide spies, journalists, scholars, political activists and artists, as
the battle to construct covert action narratives waged unabated, following the
end of the Cold War. One of the new ‘positive’ approaches depicted intelligence
as American as apple pie. Linking covert activities to the founding fathers of
the nation, some historians and former practitioners set out to ‘end the myth
of America’s pre-Cold War innocence of clandestinity and place the “abuses”
of America’s Cold War presidents in proper historical perspective’. Noting that
all CIA activities are through presidential decree, they traced a lineage of covert
action to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson: clandestine action was
‘neither . . . unethical, immoral, or un-American’. The problem was that most
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Americans failed to recognise it as ‘a legitimate tool of statecraft’.38 Nevertheless,

the most common interpretation – particularly in terms of book sales and
viewing figures – has been overwhelmingly critical, with journalists continuing
to serve as prominent narrators of Agency action. Whether through the concept
of ‘blowback’, shadowy imperialism or a perennially bumbling covert operator,
the most popular narratives have been crafted by journalists, scholars and activ-
ists.39 The nature of press relations with the CIA may have moved on from the
start of the Cold War, but journalists remain essential interlocutors for public
understanding of covert action.
* * *
What, therefore, can the historian contribute to current and future debates?
How to move beyond a historiography that is more often defined by partisanship
than scholarship? The current literature may be large (and growing), but, aside
from a handful of texts, is generally poor. There are several interesting avenues
open for historians in discussing covert action. Firstly, it is useful to recall the
importance of lateral thinking, with regard to documents. Indeed, much of the
foundational intelligence scholarship employed sources from non-intelligence
collections. The growth in the American federal government has created a long
paper trail, with documents, which are frequently addressed to more than one
recipient, located in multiple locations. Resources like the CIA’s Records Search
Tool (CREST) – a useful, if incredibly problematic, tool – need not be the first
point of call. More candid opinions can often be located in personal diaries and
oral history projects. Of even greater potential is to move research beyond the
state to the private groups, individuals and transnational forces with whom
the CIA collaborated. From trade unions to student groups to regular citizens,
private collections are not subject to government classification and provide
greater context, vis-à-vis covert action in practise. Better defining the sponsor’s
hand, this approach also offers more opportunities to understand how activities
panned out on the ground.40
Potentially the most interesting path is to be found beyond the US and UK.
While not without challenge, this approach holds the most possibilities to enrich
the historiography of covert action. It will not reveal CIA operational informa-
tion or find the ‘smoking gun’, but it will, however, draw attention to the local
partners working with, and occasionally against, the Agency. Effective covert
action demands credible indigenous actors, which, as one historian suggests,
creates the ‘architecture’ for intervention.41 It can also alter our understand-
ing of seemingly well-known cases, like the Guatemalan operation. Max Paul
Friedman has shown that, contrary to the opinion of US officials and journalists
of the day, other Latin American countries did not offer a diplomatic bulwark
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against communism in the region. In fact, they opposed and resisted American
noises about intervention, with the subsequent CIA campaign flouting a firm
diplomatic consensus. In so doing, Friedman’s work identifies a ‘North–South
perpetual divide’, both in the minds of contemporary American protagonists
and the subsequent work by scholars. Mark Kramer has also emphasised the
need to compare and contrast the CIA record with materials in foreign archives.
Highlighting deficiencies in American interpretations of key moments in the
final decade of the Cold War, policy choices and operations appear in a different
light when seen through the eyes of other protagonists.42 Such work does require
scholars to master new linguistic skills, accompanied by awareness for other cul-
tures and mind frames. Recent developments identifying European intelligence
‘schools’ beyond the Anglo-American sphere is a start.43 The crucial point is to
restore agency to the ‘other’ and offer greater attention to those protagonists that
are affected by, and help shape, covert campaigns.
Historiographical developments in the fields of American foreign rela-
tions and Cold War history reveal the vitality of increasingly international
frameworks. Locating CIA covert action in the broader context of foreign
policymaking and international history helps clarify its contribution to the
wider competition between nations promoting different models of progress
and pursuing distinct national interests. Considering US intervention in light
of interventions by other actors – from Moscow to Havana to London to Rome
– fosters historiographical debates that steer clear of moralising.44 Uncovering
the full details of covert action is unfeasible and looking to do so sets the wrong
objective. Empirical approaches remain essential, although there is a need for
greater attention to ideas and concepts. The task at hand is to consider what
covert action reveals about US conceptualisation of its place in the world,
how others negotiate this vision and, concurrently, how they promote their
own. It is to provide greater context to the CIA’s role in foreign intervention-
ism and to establish how – or if – it shaped the contours of the Cold War.
Rigorous historical work can go some way to debunking the ‘useful myths’
that have come to surround the Agency.45 This establishes a platform for more
fruitful conversations about the effectiveness and costs of covert action for all
concerned.
Notes
1 Raymond Garthoff, ‘Foreign Intelligence and the Historiography of the Cold War’,
Journal of Cold War Studies, 6(2), 2004, p. 54.
2 Cited in Abram Shulsky and Gary Schmitt, Silent Warfare: Understanding the World
of Intelligence, 3rd edn (Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 2002), p. 207.
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3 Executive Order 12333, ‘United States Intelligence Activities’, UCSB American

Presidency Project, 4 December 1981, available at: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/
ws/index.php?pid=43324#axzz1qPBTpNWo.
4 Intelligence Authorization Act of 1991, 105 STAT. 443-444: US Senate Select
Committee on Intelligence website [henceforth US-SSCIw], available at: http://
www.intelligence.senate.gov/statutes.htm. For the Agency’s own definition: CIA,
Consumer’s Guide to Intelligence (Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency,
1995), p. 38.
5 Christopher Andrew, ‘Intelligence in the Cold War’, in Melvyn Leffler and Odd
Arne Westad (eds), The Cambridge History of the Cold War. II: Crises and Détente
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 422; Mark Lowenthal, Intelligence:
From Secrets to Policy, 4th edn (Washington, DC: CQ, 2009), pp. 169–71; Loch
Johnson, Secret Agencies: US Intelligence in a Hostile World (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1996), pp. 61–9.
6 Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, The CIA and American Democracy, 2nd edn (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 30–2; James Deutsch, ‘“I Was a Hollywood Agent”:
Cinematic Representations of the Office of Strategic Services in 1946’, Intelligence and
National Security, 13(2), 1998, pp. 85–99; Stewart Alsop and Thomas Braden, Sub
Rosa: The OSS and American Espionage (New York, NY: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1946).
7 Wesley Wark, ‘“Great Investigations”: The Public Debate on Intelligence in the US
after 1945’, Defense Analysis, 3(2), 1987, pp. 120–1.
8 National Security Act of 1947, US-SSCIw; Clark Clifford, Counsel to the President
(New York, NY: Random House, 1991), p. 170.
9 NSC 4-A; NSC 10/2, 18 June 1948. Foreign Relations of the United States, Emergence
of the Intelligence Establishment, 1945–1950 (Washington, DC: US Government
Printing Office, 1996), Documents 253, 292, available at: http://www.state.gov/www/
about_state/history/intel/index.html.
10 Richard Aldrich, ‘OSS, CIA and European Unity: The American Committee on
United Europe, 1948–60’, Diplomacy & Statecraft, 8(1), 1997, pp. 184–227; Trevor
Barnes, ‘The Secret Cold War, I: The CIA and American Foreign Policy in Europe,
1945–56’, The Historical Journal, 24(2), 1981, pp. 399–415; Trevor Barnes, ‘The
Secret Cold War, II: The CIA and American Foreign Policy in Europe, 1945–56’,
The Historical Journal, 25(3), 1982, pp. 649–70; Peter Grose, Operation Rollback:
America’s Secret War Behind the Iron Curtain (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin,
2000); Sallie Pisani, The CIA and the Marshall Plan (Lawrence, KS: University Press
of Kansas, 1991).
11 Doolittle Commission, ‘Report on the Covert Activities of the Central Intelligence
Agency’, CIA FOIA Reading Room, 30 September 1954, p. 3, available at: http://www.
foia.cia.gov/search.asp.
12 David Barrett, The CIA and Congress: The Untold Story from Truman to Kennedy
(Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2005).
13 Allen Dulles to James Mooney, 14 November 1955, Box 57, Folder 14.
14 Hanson Baldwin to Dulles, 6 July 1954, Box 7, Folder 4, Allen W. Dulles Papers,
Mudd Library, Princeton [henceforth AWDP]; ‘We Tell Russia Too Much’, U.S.
News & World Report, 19 March 1954; ‘C.I.A. and its Role in Maintaining the
National Security’, Ladies Auxiliary V. F. W. National Bulletin, March 1954; Caball
Phillips, ‘Allen Dulles of the Silent Service’, NYT Magazine, 29 March 1953.
MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd 125 21/02/2013 08:24

15 Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2008), pp. 229–31; James Reston to Arthur H. Sulzberger,
19 November 1958, Box 20, Folder 15, New York Times Company Records: Arthur
Hays Sulzberger Papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public
Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations [henceforth AHSP]; Henry Luce to
Dulles, 5 March 1952, Box 38, Folder 33, AWDP.
16 John Foran, ‘Discursive Subversions: Time Magazine, the CIA Overthrow of
Musaddiq, and the Installation of the Shah’, in Christopher Appy (ed.), Cold
War Constructions: The Political Culture of United States Imperialism, 1945–1966
(Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000), pp. 165–8, 173–80.
17 Foran, ‘Discursive Subversions’, p. 181; Sydney Gruson, ‘Guatemala Says U.S. Tried
To Make Her Defenseless’, The New York Times, 22 May 1954; Sulzberger memo for
file, 20 July 1954, Box 30, Folder 1, AHSP; Peter Grose, Gentleman Spy: The Life of
Allen Dulles (London: André Deutsch, 1995), p. 380; Harrison Salisbury, Without
Fear or Favor: An Uncompromising Look at The New York Times (New York, NY:
NYT Books, 1980); Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer, pp. 227, 310, note 7.
18 Richard Harkness and Gladys Harkness, ‘The Mysterious Doings of CIA’, Saturday
Evening Post, 6 November 1954.
19 Foran, ‘Discursive Subversions’, p. 181; Douglas Little, ‘Mission Impossible: The CIA
and the Cult of Covert Action in the Middle East’, Diplomatic History, 28(5), 2004,
p. 66.
20 See John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Early Cold War Spies: The Espionage Trials
That Shaped American Politics (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2006);
Phillip Deery and Mario Del Pero, Spiare e Tradire: Dietro le Quinte della Guerra
Fredda (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2011).
21 Bevan Sewell, ‘The Pragmatic Face of the Covert Idealist: The Role of Allen Dulles
in US Policy Discussions on Latin America, 1953–61’, Intelligence and National
Security, 26(2–3), 2011, p. 289.
22 David Wise and Thomas Ross, The Invisible Government (New York, NY: Random
House, 1964), pp. 3–7.
23 Tity de Vries, ‘The 1967 Central Intelligence Agency Scandal: Catalyst in a
Transforming Relationship between State and People’, Journal of American History,
98(4), 2012, p. 1078.
24 Peter Richardson, A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts
Magazine Changed America (New York, NY: New Press, 2009), pp. 74–7; de Vries,
‘The 1967 CIA Scandal’, pp. 1080–6; Wilford, Mighty Wurlitzer, pp. 237–42; Eric
Pullin, ‘“Money Does Not Make Any Difference to the Opinions That We Hold”:
India, the CIA, and the Congress for Cultural Freedom’, Intelligence and National
Security, 26(2–3), 2011, p. 396.
25 Thomas Braden, ‘I’m Glad the CIA is “Immoral” ’, Saturday Evening Post, 20 May
1967; Wilford, Mighty Wurlitzer, pp. 237, 243–6; de Vries, ‘The 1967 CIA Scandal’,
pp. 1082, 1086–7; Angus Mackenzie, Secrets: The CIA’s War at Home (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1997).
26 Seymour Hersh, ‘Huge C.I.A. Operation Reported in U.S. against Antiwar Forces,
Other Dissidents in Nixon Years’, The New York Times, 22 December 1974.
27 ‘Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders’, Interim Report of Senate
Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence
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Activities, 20 November 1975, available at: http://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/con-

tents/church/contents_church_reports.htm; CIA, The Pike Report (Nottingham
Spokesman, 1977). See, also, Loch Johnson, A Season of Inquiry: The Senate
Intelligence Investigation (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1985).
28 Kathryn Olmstead, ‘The Truth is Out There: Citizen Sleuths from the Kennedy
Assassination to the 9/11 Truth Movement’, Diplomatic History, 35(4), 2011, pp.
685–6; John Prados, Lost Crusader: The Secret Wars of CIA Director William Colby
(New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 306–7; ‘Colby Statement before
US Senate Select Committee to Study Government Operations With Respect to
Intelligence Activities’, 16 September 1975, Box 8, Folder 2, William E. Colby Papers,
Mudd Library, Princeton [henceforth WECP]; L. Britt Snider, The Agency and the
Hill: CIA’s Relationship with Congress, 1946–2004 (Washington, DC: Center for the
Study of Intelligence, 2008), pp. 259–82.
29 Victor Marchetti and John Marks, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence (New York,
NY: Knopf, 1974); Philip Agee, Inside the Company: CIA Diary (London: Penguin,
1975); Frank Snepp, Decent Interval: An Insider’s Account of Saigon’s Indecent End
Told by the CIA’s Chief Strategy Analyst in Vietnam (New York, NY: Random House,
1977); John Stockwell, In Search of Enemies: A CIA Story (New York, NY: W. W.
Norton, 1978).
30 William Colby, ‘The View from Langley’, Address to the Fund for Peace Conference
on CIA and Covert Actions, 13 September; Colby, ‘Meet the Press’, 29 June 1975, Box
8, Folder 4, WECP.
31 David Atlee Phillips, The Night Watch (New York, NY: Atheneum, 1977); Ray
Cline, Secrets, Spies and Scholars: Blueprint of the Essential CIA (Washington, DC:
Acropolis, 1976); Lyman Kirkpatrick Jr, The Real CIA: An Insider’s View of the
Strengths and Weaknesses of Our Government’s Most Important Agency (New York,
NY: Macmillan, 1968); Joseph B. Smith, Portrait of a Cold Warrior (New York, NY:
Putnam, 1976); ‘The CIA – An Attack and A Reply’, US News & World Report, 11
October 1971; Ray Cline, ‘All Great Countries Take Covert Actions’, Edwardsville
Intelligencer, 19 November 1974; Ray Cline, ‘Erasing the “C” in “Covert”: In
Complete Security’, The New York Times, 19 February 1975.
32 CSI, ‘CSI Statement of Purpose, 1979’, Box 15, Ray S. Cline Papers, Library of
Congress, Washington.
33 Roy Godson to William Casey [c.1979], Box 249, Folder 1, William J. Casey Papers,
Hoover Institution, Stanford. The emergence of intelligence studies in Britain can
be traced to Christopher Andrew and David Dilks (eds), The Missing Dimension:
Governments and Intelligence Communities in the Twentieth Century (London:
Macmillan, 1984) and the 1986 launch of Intelligence and National Security.
34 Roy Godson (ed.), Intelligence Requirements for the 1980s: Vol.4, Covert Action
(Washington, DC: National Security Information Center, 1981); Abram Shulsky and
Gary Schmitt, Silent Warfare, pp. 75–97.
35 Gregory Treverton to Colby, 28 October 1986; Colby to Treverton, 14 November
1986, Box 7, Folder 10, WECP; Gregory Treverton, Covert Action: The Limits of
Intervention in the Postwar World (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1987).
36 The following passage draws on Kaeten Mistry, ‘Approaches to Understanding the
Inaugural CIA Covert Operation in Italy: Exploding Useful Myths’, Intelligence and
National Security, 26(2–3), 2011, pp. 247–9, 269.
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37 The CIA Information Act of 1984, available at: http://www.foia.cia.gov/

CIAinfoact1984.asp; Daniel Patrick Moynihan, ‘Do We Still Need the C.I.A.?’, The
New York Times, 19 May 1991; Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Secrecy: The American
Experience (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).
38 Stephen Knott, Secret and Sanctioned: Covert Operations and the American Presidency
(New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 4–6; William Daugherty,
Executive Secrets: Covert Action and the Presidency (Lexington, KY: University Press
of Kentucky, 2006), pp. xv–ii.
39 Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire
(New York, NY: Metropolitan, 2000); William Blum, Killing Hope: US Military
and CIA Interventions Since World War II (Montreal: Black Rose, 1997); Seymour
Hersh, Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib (New York, NY:
HarperCollins, 2004); James Risen, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the
Bush Administration (New York, NY: Free Press, 2006); Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes:
The History of the CIA (New York, NY: Doubleday, 2007).
40 See Anthony Carew, ‘The American Labor Movement in Fizzland: The Free Trade
Union Committee and the CIA’, Labor History, 39(1), 1998, pp. 25–42; Quenby
Olmstead Hughes, In the Interest of Democracy: The Rise and Fall of the Early Cold
War Alliance Between the American Federation of Labor and the Central Intelligence
Agency (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011); Wilford, Mighty Wurlitzer; Max Holland, ‘Private
Sources of U.S. Foreign Policy: William Pawley and the 1954 Coup d’état in
Guatemala’, Journal of Cold War Studies, 7(4), 2005, pp. 36–73.
41 Zachary Karabell, Architects of Intervention: The United States, the Third World, and
the Cold War, 1946–1962 (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1999).
42 Max Paul Friedman, ‘Fracas in Caracas: Latin American Diplomatic Resistance to
United States Intervention in Guatemala in 1954’, Diplomacy & Statecraft, 21(4),
2010, pp. 669–89; Mark Kramer, ‘US Intelligence Performance and US Policy during
the Polish Crisis of 1980–81: Revelations from the Kukliński Files’, Intelligence and
National Security, 26(2–3), 2011, pp. 313–29.
43 Peter Jackson, ‘Intelligence and the State: An Emerging “French School” of Intelligence
Studies’, Intelligence and National Security, 21(6), 2006, pp. 1061–5; David Kahn,
‘Intelligence Studies on the Continent’, Intelligence and National Security, 23(2),
2008, pp. 249–75; Antonio Díaz Fernández, ‘The Spanish Intelligence Community: A
Diffuse Reality’, Intelligence and National Security, 25(2), 2010, pp. 223–44.
44 Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making
of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Piero Gleijeses,
Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976 (Chapel Hill, NC:
University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Bradley Simpson, Economists with Guns:
Authoritarian Development and US–Indonesian Relations, 1960–1968 (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2008); Tanya Harmer, Allende’s Chile and the Inter-
American Cold War (Chapel Hill, NC: University of Carolina Press, 2011).
45 Mistry, ‘Approaches to Understanding the Inaugural CIA Covert Operation’; Little,
‘Mission Impossible’.
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Chapter 6
FBI HISTORIOGRAPHY: FROM LEADER TO

ORGANISATION
Melissa Graves
In 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt established the Bureau of Investigation,

later renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 1935. When J. Edgar
Hoover assumed directorship of the organisation, he used his public relations
perspicacity to oversee the careful construction of accounts from hired writers
(see Figure 8). During his forty-eight years as Director, Hoover required writers
to obtain his approval for access to the FBI’s internal files. Subsequently, the
few writers that dared to craft negative depictions of the Bureau relied solely
on outside information gleaned primarily from embittered former agents and
Congress; they could not access any of the Bureau’s official information. Only
after Hoover’s death and upon the passage of the Freedom of Information Act
(FOIA) did FBI scholarship gradually gain objectivity. In the 1970s, the Bureau
began declassifying its internal files after the American public demanded trans-
parency from federal law enforcement and intelligence communities follow-
ing the discovery of such scandals as COINTELPRO, Operation CHAOS and
Watergate. In 1974, historians gained access to FBI files through the Freedom
of Information Act (FOIA). Only then did historians have the sources needed
to construct critical, revisionist histories of the FBI. Newly available sources
deepened historical understandings of the Bureau and shifted the narrative away
from the image of one-dimensional, heroic ‘G-men’ braving danger on behalf of
their impeccable Director, Hoover, towards nuanced depictions of an organisa-
tion struggling to maintain order and security amid challenges such as the Cold
War, racism and postmodernism. In recent years, historians have moved away
from political histories, crafting labour and cultural histories. These historical
forays have deepened understanding of an organisation that shrouds itself in
secrecy, while presenting a carefully constructed public image.
The first account published about the FBI is Courtney Ryley Cooper’s Ten
Thousand Public Enemies.1 Arguably one of the most important books written
about the Bureau; it provides a carefully constructed depiction of a fearless
and effective agency. Approved personally by Hoover, the account shaped the
129
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Figure 8 FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover enjoying the company of Holly Spring of
Ballerina, a boxer-dog champion (Press Association, PA.9762788)
public’s earliest impression of the FBI.2 In the preface, Hoover heartily endorsed
the author, claiming he could not imagine a man more fit to tell the history of
the FBI. Despite Hoover’s praise, his Bureau insisted upon reviewing and editing
Cooper’s book prior to publication. His book is as much a historical product as it
is a mass-marketed piece of propaganda; he praised Hoover as ‘the most feared
man the underworld ever has known’.3
Richard Gid Powers maintains that Cooper’s book introduced the ‘FBI
formula’ – an easily readable crime story involving villains and action by the
federal government, with Hoover as the central hero.4 Using melodrama to
effect, Cooper warned readers of ubiquitous networks of crime supported by
seemingly ordinary people; he wanted readers to understand the many threats
facing each individual, so they would see the need for a federal law enforcement
agency, such as the FBI. Cooper posited that, but for the FBI, any person might
fall victim to crime at any moment.
Cooper inserted himself into a debate relevant at the time, regarding state
versus federal rights. A fair number of Americans – particularly those in the
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FBI Historiography: From Leader to Organisation 131
South – believed that only states should regulate law enforcement. Cooper,
Hoover and the Bureau’s public relations department, however, sought to
convince Americans of an indispensable need for the FBI to fight increasingly
sophisticated crimes. An understanding of Cooper’s book and its slick portrayal
of the FBI is important for understanding later historiographical works pub-
lished during Hoover’s reign as Director from 1924 to 1972; until the time of
Hoover’s death, books about the FBI either closely followed Cooper’s format,
thereby winning the endorsement of Hoover and, subsequently, the rest of the
FBI, or the books diverted from the formula and presented a critical analysis that
resulted in Hoover’s disparagement.
HISTORIOGRAPHY AND HOOVER

In 1950, Max Lowenthal published The Federal Bureau of Investigation5 – the
first critical, well-researched history of the Bureau. Because Lowenthal did not
have access to FBI records, he relied extensively on congressional documents,
public hearings and newspaper articles. Lowenthal presents a largely negative
view of the Bureau, as well as Hoover, of whom he disapproves. Despite the
book’s salacious allegations, its laborious and dull writing style attracted few
readers.
Lowenthal refuted the myth that the Bureau emerged because of Congress’s
overwhelming belief in a need for such a service. Rather, he contended that
congressmen worried whether such an organisation would become a secret
service bureau, like the ones found in Russia and in Napoleon’s French Empire.
He argued that President Roosevelt coerced Congress into creating a federal law
enforcement bureau after it introduced legislation refusing to fund private detec-
tives for the Secret Service.6 To continue any investigations, the government had
to create its own agency. Despite Congress’ well-intentioned efforts, Lowenthal
argues that the FBI ultimately became the American version of a federal secret
police, particularly during the Palmer Raids and the first Red Scare.
Unlike Lowenthal’s scathing book, Don Whitehead’s The FBI Story presents
the FBI as an institution with a precarious start that later evolved, under the
leadership of Hoover, into a great and honourable crime-fighting institution.
Whitehead – a journalist – wrote to Hoover, requesting permission to write
an article about the Bureau’s battle against communists. Rather than grant his
request for a mere article, the Bureau unexpectedly extended an unprecedented
offer to Whitehead to draft a full history of the FBI and offered to give him
unparalleled access to FBI files. In response to Lowenthal’s scathing portrayal
of the Bureau, Hoover insisted that citizens read his version of the organisa-
tion’s history.7 In exchange for Whitehead’s access to files, Hoover insisted
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upon personally reviewing the drafts, reserving the right to make changes when
necessary.8 Upon the release of Whitehead’s book, the FBI purchased thousands
of copies to boost sales and endorsed favourable reviews to ensure that the work
became a bestseller.9
Whitehead portrayed the FBI as a somewhat inept organisation until the tri-
umphant promotion of Hoover, who, as Director, instilled his sense of discipline
and rigorous standards to create the greatest crime-fighting fleet of specially
trained agents the world had ever known. He relayed story after story, detailing
the success of the anonymous and congregate ‘G-Men’ and portrayed Hoover
as a central figure, lording over the FBI and ensuring the success of its crime
fighters. In keeping with many histories written during this time, Whitehead
embraced a myth of historical progress and republicanism; he wrote, ‘the
history of the FBI, in reality, is the story of America itself and the struggle for
an ideal. It isn’t perfect, but it has made progress in great strides’.10 Whitehead’s
analysis supported the notion that the history of the United States is the ‘history
of the progress of the nation, its people, and its institutions’.11 Whitehead’s
patriotic endorsement of republicanism elevated Hoover to the likes of George
Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. As those historical
figures shuffled America ever closer to its ultimate ideal, so did Hoover direct his
country toward a world free from communism and crime.
Hoover followed the success of Whitehead’s book with his own widely read
narrative about the threat of communism, entitled Masters of Deceit: The Story of
Communism in America and How to Fight It.12 Throughout his career, he wrote
many polemics against communism containing similar rhetoric and only slight
differences; among government reports and magazine articles, Hoover published
A Study of Communism13 and a series in Christianity Today that encouraged
churchgoers and clergy to beware the atheistic threat of communism.14 William
Sullivan – former head of the FBI’s intelligence operations – later alleged that
he and a team of six agents ghostwrote Masters of Deceit.15 The book, while not
a history of the FBI, explained the historical origins of communism and alerted
readers to the threat that communism posed against the United States. He
argued that such an ideology could become dominant if citizens failed to take
seriously its threat against democracy. The book galvanised public support for
the Bureau’s fight against communism.
Fred J. Cook’s 1964 critical piece, The FBI Nobody Knows, provided a scathing
analysis of the FBI. Cook begins with the story of Jack Levine – a man hired by
the Bureau to work as an agent. After less than a year on the job, Levine resigned
and turned against the Agency, urging Congress to consider a broad Agency
reform. Levine detested ‘the Bureau’s ideological brainwashing [and] its virtu-
ally old-maidish prejudices’.16 Levine revealed that training instructors pres-
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sured new agents to purchase Hoover’s Masters of Deceit, as well as Lowenthal’s

work.17
Cook contended that the FBI historically abused its powers, thereby violating
citizens’ constitutional rights. He argued that the Bureau pressured agents to
secure convictions at the behest of civil liberties. Cook shredded Whitehead’s
earlier analysis by portraying Hoover as obsessive, conceited and erratic. He dis-
cussed Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone’s promotion of Hoover to the role
of Director of the FBI in 1924. Cook argued that Stone explicitly tasked Hoover
with reducing the amount of activities that the Bureau would engage in, making
them responsible only for ‘investigations of violations of the law’.18 Instead of
following orders, Hoover greatly expanded the Bureau, in order to fight the
inflated threat of communism.
Cook took issue with Hoover’s masterful use of ‘propaganda’ to persuade
public opinion. He argued that the American public failed to see Hoover’s
messages as propaganda and instead viewed them as fact, ‘one of the verities of
the ages, because it is disseminated under the FBI’s impressive imprimatur’.19
Hoover’s propaganda, though intended to reassure the American people that the
FBI would not become a secret state police, had the exact opposite consequence.
Cook depicts an institution exempt from criticism, thanks to Hoover’s massive
public relations campaigns that elevated the FBI to the status of ‘sacrosanct’.20
The historiography of the early books about the history of the FBI – written
during Hoover’s tenure as Director – is inseparable from the context in which
the books were written; simply stated, the books are more than the mere histori-
cal arguments that the authors make. Some, like Cooper and Whitehead’s works,
are the amalgamation of Hoover’s insecurities and the FBI’s desire to control its
public relations; they reinforce, to their readers, idyllic images of morally impen-
etrable and heroic agents, heralded by their brilliant leader. Other works, like
that of Lowenthal and Cook, provide unpopular counter-arguments, presenting
a Bureau whose power has superseded any intended limits, thanks to Hoover’s
idiosyncratic lust for surveillance and power. All of the early books reflect a
dearth of sources and bias. Either the authors praised the FBI and supported
their work through use of the Agency’s files or they denigrated the organisation
by relying upon second-hand accounts by those whom the FBI had wronged.
The books discussed demonstrate the issues inherent in trying to write an
accurate history of the FBI prior to the 1974 amendments to the Freedom of
Information Act (FOIA), which made it possible for historians to obtain FBI files
for research purposes. Prior to the FOIA, writers needed to convince Hoover
that they would portray the Bureau favourably, in order to receive access to cen-
sored and carefully selected FBI files. Writers who would not promise to portray
the FBI favourably were forced to look outside the Bureau for primary sources.
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Furthermore, neither Cooper nor Whitehead had formal historical training.

Their pieces discuss the FBI from particularly favourable angles and read like
journalistic or fictional exploits; though the books engage the reader, they lack
historical legitimacy. Critical pieces, like those of Lowenthal and Cook, rely
upon congressional records or interviews with former agents who were gener-
ally unhappy with the FBI. Right or wrong, people like Jack Levine had an axe to
grind and a message to convey.
Simply put, Lowenthal and Cook’s works are biased, though it is likely that
Hoover would never have allowed them access to FBI files, and it is probable
that they would not have wanted access in exchange for allowing Hoover to have
the final say on their work. Thus, the historiography of the FBI is a rare instance
where history responded to one of its central figures: Hoover. As historians and
popular writers attempted to craft the Bureau’s history, Hoover inserted his own
voice into the mix, skewing history. Therefore, the historiography of the FBI, in
the days of Hoover, cannot be divorced from the events necessitating the need
for certain histories to be written.
AGENT MEMOIRS
Following Hoover’s death, former Bureau leaders provided their own accounts
of their experiences. The books, released after the uproar of COINTELPRO,
often sought to justify the authors’ involvement in unlawful surveillance.
William C. Sullivan’s The Bureau: My Thirty Years in Hoover’s FBI provides
a scathing depiction of Hoover. Sullivan served as Assistant to the Director
under Hoover. In 1971, when Sullivan questioned Hoover’s contention that the
Communist Party USA had fuelled the Civil Rights movement, an apoplectic
Hoover changed the locks on Sullivan’s office doors while he was away for
vacation, firing him.21 Prior to his dismissal, Sullivan allegedly offended Hoover
when he offered, on his own accord, to organise a separate presidential surveil-
lance service for the Nixon administration, which would be bolstered by Bureau
assets. In 1979, Sullivan’s posthumous autobiography was released. His book,
dedicated ‘to the special agents in the field who are the backbone of the Bureau’,
attacked the leadership of the FBI, of which he had been a central figure. His
book sought to expose the Bureau, particularly in his unfavourable portrayal of
Hoover. Sullivan’s book is compelling, but hardly convincing; it reads exactly
like one might expect a book to read that was written by a devoted employee
who got fired. Sullivan seethed with bitterness towards his former boss and
pointed a finger at him for all Bureau abuses. Sullivan used his book as an outlet
to attack those whom he hated and to justify his actions and the work of other
agents.
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Mark Felt’s The FBI Pyramid22 and Cartha DeLoach’s Hoover’s FBI: The Inside
Story by Hoover’s Trusted Lieutenant23 both provide accounts about the FBI that
juxtapose that of Sullivan. Unlike Sullivan, Felt, aka ‘Deep Throat’, and DeLoach
praise Hoover’s leadership. DeLoach, however, acknowledged Hoover’s later
tendencies to exceed the boundaries of his allotted authority. Felt discussed
Sullivan at length, as the two men had a working relationship, which was largely
characterised by rivalry. Felt called Sullivan a ‘Judas’ for conspiring with the
White House to wiretap the Nixon administration’s foes. Felt disregarded the
public anger against COINTELPRO activities and whined about the ‘gaping
wounds’ that the FBI suffered from the leak in Media, Pennsylvania.
Both authors acknowledged Martin Luther King Jr’s participation in sexual
orgies and associations with known communists, such as Stanley Levison. Felt
discussed opposition among the leadership administration within the Bureau
against women serving as agents, writing superciliously that: ‘[women] are
capable and competent and do a good job, but in tough or dangerous situations
they are not above using womanly guiles to leave it to the men’.24 In his discus-
sion about the changes brought about by Hoover’s death related to women, he
elucidated a conservative environment of the Bureau that was out of touch with
the outside world. All the advances of feminism had little to no impact on the
Bureau, prior to Hoover’s death.
These three books present starkly different portrayals of the FBI and Hoover.
Sullivan, Felt and DeLoach worked side by side, and each attained comparably
high authority within the Bureau. That three leaders could come away with
vastly different interpretations of Hoover and the history surrounding the
Bureau speaks to the controversy and the politicisation of the agency, even
under Hoover. Because all three men were involved in controversial actions on
the part of the FBI, such as COINTELPRO, their memoirs largely provide justi-
fication either for them, for the Bureau at large or for Hoover.
Finally, Joseph L. Schott’s No Left Turns discusses the idiosyncrasies of
Hoover’s Bureau. Schott spent twenty-three years working for the Bureau and
used his book as ‘a form of oral history’.25 His account recalls the seriousness
of any agent’s rebellion dissent against Hoover and the god-like reign of the
Director. Schott’s book is significant for the criticism he heaps on Hoover, but
also for the perspective that he adds. Unlike Sullivan, Felt or DeLoach, Schott
never entered the FBI’s administration, and he remained removed from the
political realm of the Bureau’s leadership. His work conveys Hoover’s influence
within the everyday culture of the FBI for agents.
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THE FBI AND COINTELPRO

With the enactment of key amendments to the Freedom of Information Act
(FOIA) in 1974, historians could finally request files from the FBI to aid their
research.26 Following the uncovering of the FBI’s COINTELPRO, historians
flocked to newly released FBI files and crafted a slew of new and revelatory his-
torical works. During the 1970s, as public distrust of the government increased,
most historical literature about the FBI mirrored public sentiment and sought
to expose the Agency’s abuses, beginning with the FBI’s alleged fear-mongering
against the illusory menace of communism.27 During the height of the Cold
War, Hoover accumulated files about anyone deemed ‘subversive’; his accumu-
lation of named threats eventually included persons from disparate groups with
loose or even non-existent ties to communism, including Civil Rights activists,
student protest groups and second wave feminists. During this time, the FBI
sought to disenfranchise subversive groups through covert operations intended
to reap dissention and disunion. The revelation of his actions in the early 1970s
became known as ‘COINTELPRO’.
Cathy Perkus’ COINTELPRO: The FBI’s Secret War on Political Freedom28
argues that the FBI effectively harassed Left-wing political groups and carried
out unlawful covert actions, similar to the Watergate years and before Nixon’s
impeachment. In the introduction, Noam Chomsky traces the origin of
COINTELPRO back to the FBI’s earlier Palmer Raids, as well as the Alien and
Seditions Act and the explosion of a bomb in Chicago’s Haymarket Square in
1886.
In support of Perkus’ thesis, Kenneth O’Reilly’s Hoover and the Un-Americans:
The FBI, HUAC, and the Red Menace29 claims that the FBI’s impact on Cold War
political attitudes, through such means as propaganda, was ‘more [important]
than the efforts of any other anticommunist group’.30 Hoover’s treatises on
communism, included in such works as Masters of Deceit, inflated the threat
of communism among average citizens and galvanised public support for the
FBI’s actions. Moreover, O’Reilly argues that McCarthyism would not have
become as powerful as it did without the help of the FBI. The FBI assisted Joseph
McCarthy in identifying subversives, harassing those who were identified as
dissident threats and influencing the opinions of liberals, which O’Reilly dif-
ferentiates into two groups: ‘Cold War liberals’, such as Morris Ernst,31 who
believed that communists were not entitled to First Amendment protection, and
‘First Amendment extremists’, who believed in protection for communists and
communist sympathisers. In turn, O’Reilly alleges that Hoover greatly expanded
the FBI’s political authority, allowing the Bureau to investigate cases within the
prerequisite criminal actions.
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O’Reilly’s tendency to chastise ‘pseudo’ liberals who did not effectively argue
for the protection of alleged communists’ rights emerges as a central theme in
William W. Keller’s The Liberals and J. Edgar Hoover.32 Keller argues that the
liberals turned over power to Hoover during the Second Red Scare, thinking
that he was a better alternative to McCarthy. Rather than create a well-regulated
investigative agency, the Bureau soon exceeded the limits of the liberals’ comfort.
Though liberals initially supported the FBI’s investigation of the Ku Klux Klan,
they became increasingly uneasy with the Bureau when it began spying on King.
Keller posits that liberals, in creating the FBI, originally envisioned a bureau of
domestic intelligence. Despite the Bureau’s distaste for all forms of radicalism,
either Left or Right, O’Reilly argues that the Agency digressed into a political
police unit and later into an independent security state within a state.33 Thus, the
FBI became the liberals’ worst nightmare, largely thanks to their earlier support
of Hoover. Additionally, Keller notes the Bureau’s aversion to all forms of radi-
calism; whether the radicalism stemmed from white hate groups or Left-wing
subversives.
Indeed, historians have long pondered the breadth of FBI surveillance
towards radical groups. From the 1950s to the early 1970s, the FBI used covert
operations against widely divergent voices, such as the Ku Klux Klan, the
Students for a Democratic Society and Martin Luther King, Jr. Sociologist David
Cunningham’s There’s Something Happening Here: The New Left, The Klan, and
FBI Counterintelligence34 asks why the Bureau’s COINTELPRO-related activi-
ties extended to such a wide array of disparate political groups and finds that
the FBI’s repression of such groups can only be understood within the organisa-
tional context of the Bureau. Cunningham maintains that local FBI field offices
routinely reported to FBI headquarters any issues related to subversive groups
within their jurisdiction; each jurisdiction faced different subversive groups. In
turn, headquarters amalgamated the local reports and issued master priority
lists to all fifty-six FBI field offices. Thus, the strange consolidation of activities
against disparate groups can be understood as a collective representation of what
individual field offices experienced; not all offices experienced the same threats.
Earlier works on the FBI and COINTELPRO seemed intent on ‘exposing’
the FBI’s indiscretions. Historians and journalists leapfrogged over each other
to demonstrate, first, the close, ill-meaning relationship between Hoover and
McCarthy. Indeed, the historians had not suffered a long enough divorce,
time-wise, from their topic of study; COINTELPRO was exposed in 1971 and
by 1976, Perkus published his treatise to prove that the FBI’s detestable actions
had occurred for much longer than anyone realised. O’Reilly took Perkus’ thesis
further, by arguing that McCarthyism would never have gained such power were
it not for Hoover. Following the exposé works of Perkus and O’Reilly, historians
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began to point fingers; Keller assigned fault by blaming liberals, who created a
monster that they could not keep under their control.
Only later, once a fair amount of time had passed, does the historical
literature gain nuance and credibility. Cunningham’s 2004 work asks the
level-headed question of why COINTELPRO was carried out against so many
groups and finds a very technical and non-political answer. Earlier works about
COINTELPRO were published so soon after the programme’s public unveiling
that the books read more like angry journalistic accounts. Although they trace
the history leading to COINTELPRO, the authors still reside in close proximity
to their subject; thus, sophisticated questions are replaced with basic questions,
such as ‘what happened?’
Alternatively, however, the earlier books reflect the public’s process of coming
to terms with the FBI’s actions for the very first time. Since the Bureau’s found-
ing in 1908, the public had never learned, from the FBI’s files, of any wrong-
doing. The earlier books reflect the shock of researchers, who learned, for the
first time, what the FBI had been surreptitiously doing for all those years.
BIOGRAPHIES OF HOOVER
Following Hoover’s death in 1972, historians, journalists and popular writers
all clamoured to write the definitive piece on the enigmatic man. Rhodry
Jeffreys-Jones contends that early Bureau historians, such as crime fiction writer
Courtney Ryley Cooper and Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Don Whitehead,
portrayed the history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation as ‘virtually synony-
mous with the efforts of Hoover himself’.35 Despite the vast amount of public
relations literature available about Hoover, historians hoped FOIA amendments
would allow them the chance to finally write the definitive biographic piece
about Hoover. No longer would works about Hoover undulate with praise or
reflect Hoover’s vision for how he wished to be seen. Rather, historians would
finally portray Hoover with as much historical accuracy as possible, because,
for the first time, historians had access to reams of new information that would
vastly redefine him. Historians such as Theoharis, Gentry and Powers skilfully
honed their abilities to peruse FBI files and constructed intricate profiles of
Hoover, taking him beyond the stereotypes and, at times, defending him against
those writers that constructed baseless, salacious portrayals.
Athan G. Theoharis and freelance writer John Stuart Cox’s The Boss:
J. Edgar Hoover and the Great American Inquisition36 examines Hoover’s abuse
of power and usurpation of civil liberties. They conclude that Hoover, more
than any political before or since, had done more to ‘[undermine] American
constitutional guarantees’.37 The authors rely upon interviews with Hoover’s
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family members, former acquaintances and employees, as well as FBI files,

including three ‘sensitive FBI files’ never used before in any historical research:
the record destruction file, the Symbol Number Sensitive Source Index and the
Surreptitious Entries file.38
Their use of such files is particularly noteworthy, as the authors also surmise
that Hoover’s files allowed him to ‘shape the government [and] alter the laws
and attitudes of the country’.39 Because Hoover held such sensitive and, at
times, compromising information about politicians, he was able to wield a great
amount of power and control; presidents, attorneys general and other politicians
did not have the courage to act against him, and politicians refused to insist
upon any congressional investigations. This ‘inquisition’ on the part of Hoover
to uncover as much negative information about his political counterparts as he
possibly could, ensured his continued authority as ‘Boss’; he could wield serious
leverage on presidential decisions, and he ran the FBI with unlimited authority.
In addition to Hoover’s access to such information, the authors contend that
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s directives allowing for limited federal wiretapping by
the FBI were exploited by Hoover and expanded the power of the FBI. Towards
the end of his life, however, the authors find that Hoover’s authority as boss had
been greatly diminished in light of the COINTELPRO controversy.
In The Boss, Theoharis and Cox discuss Hoover’s sexuality and surmise,
‘Hoover never knew sexual desire at all’.40 Popular author Anthony Summers’
Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover41 relied upon hearsay
and rumour to argue that Hoover was a homosexual who donned drag clothing
to attend homosexual orgies and that organised crime bosses used compromis-
ing information on Hoover’s sexuality to neuter any efforts on the Director’s
part to investigate or prosecute their wrongdoing. In response to Summers’
book, Theoharis wrote J. Edgar Hoover, Sex, and Crime: An Historical Antidote.
He deconstructs Summers’ argument and finds no evidence to prove Hoover’s
homosexuality. Theoharis surmises that even if Hoover had been a homosexual,
he would never have entered into the sort of compromising situations Summers
details. Furthermore, Theoharis argues that Hoover’s failure to adopt a hard
stance toward organised crime resulted from a dearth of legislation that would
have allowed the FBI to successfully prosecute the Mafia at that time.
Curt Gentry’s J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets42 exposes Hoover’s
enormous power wielding and further advances Theoharis and Cox’s thesis that
Hoover had a huge amount of control over presidents, due the compromis-
ing information he kept on them. Gentry also details corruption in the upper
echelons of the FBI, including slush fund accounts set aside by Hoover to evade
paying taxes on his published books. He details the destruction of Hoover’s
personal files by his personal secretary, Helen Gandy, and intimates that many
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of the files were distributed among other agencies, such as the CIA. He also
discusses Hoover’s hypocrisy; although he publicly repudiated pornography,
Gentry reports that he was delighted to receive photographs from comedian W.
C. Fields, which depicted Eleanor Roosevelt – a woman that Hoover held little
regard for – and when turned upside down, depicted an anatomically correct
photo of a female sexual organ.
Richard Gid Powers’ Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover43 argues
that Hoover’s childhood values greatly shaped the priorities of the Bureau under
Hoover’s leadership. Hoover came from a traditional, middle-class, religious
background. As such, he used the FBI to protect the values that he espoused.
Powers argues that Hoover held onto his position as Director for too long. As
the world around him changed, his old vision increasingly contrasted with new
societal values espoused by the Civil Rights movement and similar progres-
sive agendas. Towards the end of his life, Hoover no longer represented the
values of America, but rather his own, outdated values and the values of his
Bureau. It is difficult to argue with Powers about his contention that Hoover
stayed around too long. Indeed, the legislature voted into law a measure before
Hoover’s death that subsequent FBI Directors could only serve ten-year terms.
Furthermore, Power’s argument that Hoover’s values influenced his Bureau
priorities is convincing, given the extent to which Hoover appeared out of touch
with contemporary society. Perhaps he appeared increasingly out of touch with
the world around him because, each year, his childhood values became slightly
more irrelevant.
In recent years, biographies of Hoover have succumbed to critical works
about Hoover’s involvement within the larger Cold War era. Steve Rosswurm’s
The FBI and the Catholic Church, 1935–1962 deconstruct the relationship
between two important Cold War institutions.44 He examines Hoover’s inter-
est in the Catholic Church, despite his lifelong Presbyterian affiliation. Hoover
believed that the Bureau and the Church had similar missions revolving
around men as priests and agents. Hoover only admired the Catholic Church’s
mission against communism, however, until the Church protested the Vietnam
War; once the Church politically opposed the war, Hoover’s admiration
tempered.
Douglas M. Charles’ The FBI’s Obscene File: J. Edgar Hoover and the Bureau’s
Crusade against Smut satisfies an omission in prior FBI historiography by dis-
cussing the contents and evolution of Hoover’s obscenity files. Charles argues
that the Bureau’s mission against illicit material ran parallel to American social
values; the Bureau operated against that, which the country, as a whole, found
unacceptable. Charles also argues that the leadership of the Bureau (Hoover
and his successors) influenced the FBI’s definition of ‘obscene’.45 His focus on
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Hoover’s obsession with obscenity, supplemented with the evidence obtained

from Hoover’s files, greatly enhances historical understanding of the Director.
THE FBI AND RACE

Hoover expressed great suspicion towards the Civil Rights movement, which
he believed held ties to communism. David J. Garrow’s Bearing the Cross:
Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference46
details the FBI and Hoover’s obsessive surveillance of King. He disdained King
and described him as ‘a “tom cat” with obsessive degenerate sexual urges’,47
‘the “most notorious liar” in America’48 and ‘one of the lowest characters in
the country’.49 Furthermore, Sullivan authorised the FBI to bug King’s hotel
room. Garrow relays the history of the FBI through the lens of King’s experi-
ence, particularly conveying the fear that King felt when his wife, Coretta Scott
King, received a package from the FBI containing a threatening note and illicit
recordings of King’s conversations, as well as sexual indiscretions. Garrow fails,
however, to do more than merely relay the events involving King and the FBI.
He fails to put the FBI’s treatment of King into a broader perspective and never
explains the motive behind Hoover’s animus towards the Civil Rights leader.
While Darrow looks at the FBI’s involvement with Martin Luther King, Jr.
and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones’ The
FBI: A History50 looks at race on a larger scale and argues that the history of
the FBI is largely related to race. He begins his analysis by providing a pre-FBI
history, dating back to the days when the Secret Service employed agents and
private detectives to support Reconstruction efforts and squelch white Southern
violence. Jeffreys-Jones argues that the FBI initially began as a progressive law
enforcement agency intent on protecting people from discrimination. He con-
trasts his analysis of the FBI’s place in history to the historical narrative of the
Dunning School – a group of historians who wrote about Reconstruction from
the perspective of jilted white Southerners; the message of the Dunning School
was a widely held sentiment across the South, for which the Secret Service fought
against. Jeffrey-Jones notes that later in its existence, the FBI lost its progressive
stance on race, which, he argues, is particularly evident in Hoover’s diatribe
against King.
Jeffreys-Jones’ analysis is compelling, and his coverage of the FBI substantial,
but, at times, his argument about race serving as the backstory for the FBI is
over-stated. Certainly, race played an enormous role in the early formation
of the Bureau, and the issue resurfaced with COINTELPRO’s illicit activities
against King and other Civil Rights leaders. Other points in history, such as
World War I and World War II, pushed the issue of race to the periphery.
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Jeffreys-Jones’ extensive treatment of World War II leaves no room for a discus-

sion about race. Also, his treatment of the FBI, post-Hoover, merely mentions
FBI hiring practices and the failure of the Bureau to adequately represent in their
employee population the racial statistics in America at large.
FROM LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENCY TO INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

Following the release of the 9/11 Commission Report, the FBI has continued to
transform from a primarily law enforcement agency into a fully fledged intelli-
gence agency. Two notable works examine the FBI’s transformation into intelli-
gence prior to 9/11. Raymond J. Batvinis’ The Origins of FBI Counterintelligence51
seeks to dismantle misconceptions about the FBI’s lack of foreign intelligence
work by showing that the FBI’s work in foreign counter-intelligence predated
the Office of Strategic Services – an intelligence agency headed by William
Donovan during World War II, as well as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Garrett M. Graff’s The Threat Matrix: The FBI at War in the Age of Terror52
examines the history of the FBI’s involvement in counterterrorism operations,
beginning with the 1972 Munich Olympics and continuing until the Times
Square bombing in 2010. Graff argues that the FBI gradually mastered the art of
counterterrorism, and he relays the competitiveness between the FBI and CIA,
which often got in the way.
Both works are compelling, as they revise earlier understandings of the
Bureau as a largely crime-fighting organisation. The books demonstrate that
the Bureau crossed the murky boundary into intelligence territory long before
Congress demanded, in light of 9/11, that the FBI make intelligence a priority.
Tim Weiner’s Enemies: A History of the FBI changes the historical debate
regarding the FBI’s evolution from law enforcement to intelligence agency.
Weiner, long revered for his work on the Central Intelligence Agency,53 uncov-
ered new archival material about the Bureau and concluded:
we think of the FBI as a police force, arresting criminals and upholding the rule of
law. But secret intelligence against terrorists and spies is the Bureau’s first and fore-
most mission today, and that has been true for most of the past hundred years.54
Weiner and Garrett’s works suggest a new direction in historical understand-

ing of the FBI, as they both argue against the notion of the FBI as primarily a
law enforcement agency prior to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Their works have
a revised understanding of the Bureau in the early days, stressing the FBI’s
advanced intelligence capability during World War II and its battle against ter-
rorism, beginning in the 1970s. Both works suggest that criticism lobbied against
the FBI following the 9/11 attacks may merit new attention, as the authors
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disprove the argument that the Bureau only recently entered into the arena of
intelligence.
CONCLUSION
The historiography of the FBI continues to shift, but the historiography makes
apparent several ideas. First, there is a need for more than mere political histories
of the FBI. For too long, stories about the leadership of the FBI have dominated
the literature. Cunningham scratched the surface of a new research direction by
exploring the long-distance relationship between FBI headquarters and the field
offices. Some journalists, such as Kessler and Graff, interviewed a significant
number of agents for their research. Many of the stories surrounding the history
of the FBI, however, centre on the perspective of the leadership; there is a need
for histories told from more diverse perspectives.
There will always be issues related to telling the history of the FBI, while
having limited access to primary resources. As time progresses and more FBI
files are declassified, the story of the FBI will become increasingly more complex.
In the meantime, historians will continue to draw upon the resources that are
currently available, so as to understand, as best as possible, a truly fascinating
government agency.
Notes
1 Courtney Ryley Cooper, Ten Thousand Public Enemies (Boston, MA: Little, Brown &
Co., 1935).
2 Richard Gid Powers, Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover (New York, NY:
The Free Press, 1987).
3 Cooper, Ten Thousand Public Enemies, p. 30. Powers, Secrecy and Power, p. 185.
Powers contends, in Secrecy and Power, that Cooper’s portrayal of Hoover in
American Magazine may have helped then-Associate Director Hoover hang onto
his position with the Bureau, following the forced resignation of Director William
J. Burns, as a result of the Teapot Dome Scandal. Cooper’s article, which praised
Hoover’s work, appeared in conjunction with the scandal.
4 Powers, Secrecy and Power, p. 198.
5 Max Lowenthal, The Federal Bureau of Investigation (New York, NY: William Sloane,
1950).
6 Lowenthal, The Federal Bureau of Investigation, p. 4.
7 Athan Theoharis, The FBI and American Democracy: A Brief Critical History
(Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas), p. 118.
8 Athan Theoharis and John Stuart Cox, The Boss: J. Edgar Hoover and the Great
American Inquisition (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1988), p. 310.
9 Athan Theoharis, From the Secret Files of J. Edgar Hoover (Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee,
1993), p. 309.
MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd 143 21/02/2013 08:24

10 Don Whitehead, The FBI Story: A Report to the People (New York, NY: Random
House, 1956), p. 323.
11 Joyce Appleby, Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 4.
12 John Edgar Hoover, Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America and How
to Fight It (New York, NY: Holt, 1958).
13 John Edgar Hoover, A Study of Communism (New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart &
Winston, 1962).
14 For Hoover’s articles in Christianity Today, see J. Edgar Hoover, ‘The Communist
Menace: Red Goals and Christian Ideals’, Christianity Today, 5(1), 10 October
1960, pp. 3–5; J. Edgar Hoover, ‘Communist Propaganda and the Christian Pulpit’,
Christianity Today, 5(2), 24 October 1960, pp. 53–5.
15 William C. Sullivan, The Bureau: My Thirty Years in Hoover’s FBI (New York, NY:
W.W. Norton & Co., 1979).
16 Fred J. Cook, The FBI Nobody Knows (New York, NY: Pyramid Books, 1965), p. 11.
17 Cook, The FBI Nobody Knows, p. 246.
21 Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, The FBI: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2007), p. 178.
22 Mark Felt, The FBI Pyramid (New York, NY: Putnam, 1979).
23 Cartha D. Deloach, Hoover’s FBI: The Inside Story by Hoover’s Trusted Lieutenant
(Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 1997).
24 Felt, Pyramid, p. 241.
25 Joseph L. Schott, No Left Turns (New York, NY: Praeger Publishers, 1975), p. 5.
26 Tony G. Poveda, Susan Rosenfeld and Richard Gid Powers (eds), The FBI: A
Comprehensive Reference Guide (Phoenix, AZ: The Oryx Press, 1999), p. ix; Athan
Theoharis, From the Secret Files of J. Edgar Hoover (Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee, 1991),
p. 10. This text contains excerpts of FOIA-obtained documents from the files of FBI
leaders, such as Director J. Edgar Hoover, Associate Director Clyde Tolson and FBI
Assistant Director Louis Nichols.
27 For additional histories about the FBI and COINTELPRO, see David Wise, The
American Police State: The Government Against the People (How the CIA, FBI, IRS,
NSA and Other Agencies Have Spied on Americans During Seven Administrations)
(New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1976). Wise posits that the abuses of intelligence
agencies around the time of Watergate can be traced back for many years, extend-
ing far before Nixon’s administration. See, also, Nelson Blackstock, COINTELPRO:
The FBI’s Secret War on Political Freedom (New York, NY: Vintage, 1975); see, also,
Athan Theoharis, Spying on Americans: Political Surveillance from Hoover to the
Huston Plan (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1978).
28 Cathy Perkus (ed.), COINTELPRO: The FBI’s Secret War on Political Freedom (New
York, NY: Monad Press, 1975).
29 Kenneth O’Reilly, Hoover and the Un-Americans: The FBI, HUAC, and the Red
Menace (Philadelphia, PI: Temple University Press, 1983). O’Reilly served as a con-
tributing writer for Theoharis’ Beyond the Hiss Case.
30 O’Reilly, Hoover and the Un-Americans, p. 8.
MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd 144 21/02/2013 08:24

31 Morris Ernst, legal counsel for the ACLU, published an article in Reader’s Digest
entitled ‘Why I No Longer Fear the FBI’. To counter Max Lowenthal’s work, Ernst
reassured Americans of the FBI’s good deeds.
32 William W. Keller, The Liberals and J. Edgar Hoover: Rise and Fall of a Domestic
Intelligence State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989).
33 Keller, The Liberals and J. Edgar Hoover, p. 13.
34 David Cunningham, There’s Something Happening Here: The New Left, The Klan, and
FBI Counterintelligence (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004).
2007), pp. 10, 162.
36 Athan Theoharis and John Stuart Cox, The Boss: J. Edgar Hoover and the Great
American Inquisition (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1988).
37 Theoharis and Cox, The Boss, p. 17.
41 Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover (New
York, NY: Pocket, 1994).
42 Curt Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (New York, NY: W. W.
Norton & Co., 1991).
43 Richard Gid Powers, Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover (New York, NY:
The Free Press, 1989).
44 Steve Rosswurm, The FBI and the Catholic Church, 1935–1962 (Amherst, MS:
University of Massachusetts Press, 2009).
45 Douglas M. Charles, The FBI’s Obscene File: J. Edgar Hoover and the Bureau’s Crusade
Against Smut (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2012).
46 David Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference (New York, NY: William Morrow & Co., Inc., 1986).
47 Garrow, Bearing the Cross, p. 313.
2007).
51 Raymond J. Batvinis, The Origins of FBI Counterintelligence (Lawrence, KS: University
Press of Kansas, 2007).
52 Garrett M. Graff, The Threat Matrix: The FBI at War in the Age of Terror (New York,
NY: Little, Brown & Co., 2011).
53 Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (New York, NY: Anchor Books,
2008).
54 Tim Weiner, Enemies: A History of the FBI (New York, NY: Random House, 2012),
p. xiii.
MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd 145 21/02/2013 08:24

Chapter 7
RECONCEIVING REALISM: INTELLIGENCE

HISTORIANS AND THE FACT/FICTION
DICHOTOMY
Simon Willmetts
If official secrecy had a devastating impact on American history, its impact on
Americans’ understanding of that history was a collateral disaster.1
The academic study of intelligence has long established itself in opposition to
spy fiction. In Christopher Andrew and David Dilks’ seminal introduction to
The Missing Dimension, they argued that the lurid embellishments and gross
inaccuracies of novelists, journalists and filmmakers had dissuaded professional
historians from undertaking a serious study of intelligence history:
The treatment of intelligence by both mass media and publishers often seems
ideally calculated to persuade the academic world that it is no subject for scholars
. . . Alexander Dumas once said of a woefully inaccurate history of the French
Revolution that it had ‘raised history to the level of a novel’. Many writers on
intelligence have achieved the same feat. But historians have been far more put off
the subject of intelligence than they need have been. One of the purposes of this
volume is to show what can be reliably based on existing archives and published
source material.2
The historical study of intelligence is conceived of here as a response to fiction. Its
epistemological foundations rest in its self-defined status as a verifiable author-
ity on the past, with the expressed aim of correcting the factual inaccuracies of
popular misconceptions. In this manner, the fact/fiction dichotomy has formed
both a methodology and an epistemology for historians of intelligence. Not only
has it shaped their attitude and approach towards spy fiction, but it has also
come to define the way in which scholars of intelligence envisage the craft of
intelligence history itself. Fiction, in other words, has become the ‘other’ against
which historical approaches to the study of intelligence have been defined.
Although The Missing Dimension remains a manifesto for many British his-
torians of intelligence, it would be misleading to present it as representative of
the entire field of intelligence studies. Len Scott and Peter Jackson, for example,
describe intelligence studies as an essentially interdisciplinary field, which is
open to various methodological and theoretical approaches.3 Furthermore, dis-
146
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Reconceiving Realism 147
tinct academic traditions have emerged in different countries. In the US, studies
have tended to be more policy-oriented, adopting the legacy of early intelligence
practitioners/scholars, such as Sherman Kent and Harry Howe Ransom. In
the UK, by contrast, institutional histories, written by diplomatic historians,
such as Christopher Andrew, Richard Aldrich and Keith Jeffery, have achieved
pre-eminence.4
Whilst this article focuses primarily upon historical approaches to the study
of intelligence, the fact/fiction dichotomy is by no means limited to the histo-
rian. In a recent article, prominent US professor of public policy, Amy Zegart,
re-rehearsed many of the same arguments as The Missing Dimension in a post-
9/11 context. In the past decade, high profile intelligence failures, accusations of
politicisation in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, scandals over secret prisons,
rendition, torture and assassinations have all raised the profile of intelligence
and led to considerable debate within the public sphere. In spite of this, Zegart
observes, academics ‘have been strikingly absent from the debate’.5 Like The
Missing Dimension, Zegart contends that this dearth of professional scholarship
has allowed popular culture misrepresentations to gain a dangerous degree of
influence. Zegart epitomises this point in a section entitled ‘Why Academics
Matter’, in which she introduces the issue with the following subheading: ‘Public
Perceptions: Fact Versus Fiction’. For Zegart, academia’s principal contribution
to the debate on intelligence resides in its status as a bulwark of authenticity,
standing in direct opposition to ‘hit television shows like Alias and 24, James
Bond movies and spy novels’.6
For Zegart, this remedial function of the academy is not only a moral and
epistemological imperative, whereby the professional scholar is duty-bound
to maintain a standard of objective reality, but also serves a practical purpose
in forming the basis for sound policy. ‘Academic research and teaching’, she
concludes, ‘are vital for bridging this gap (between public perceptions and
policymaking imperatives) – providing a realistic and dispassionate view of the
capabilities that U.S. agencies have, the constraints under which they operate,
and the challenges they face’.7 In spite of the heterogeneous composition of
intelligence studies, Zegart’s essay suggests a remarkable degree of consensus
in method and attitude towards spy fiction across national and disciplinary
boundaries.
This chapter seeks to examine both the methodological and epistemological
implications of the fact/fiction dichotomy in historical approaches to intel-
ligence. It argues that the divide is an artificial one, which has committed
intelligence scholars to a narrow understanding of spy fiction as ‘pure fantasy’.
As such, other modes of interpretation, particularly the approaches of cultural
and historical theorists, such as Fredric Jameson, Hayden White and Dominick
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LaCapra, who provide valuable insights into the relationship between history
and fiction, have been overlooked at the expense of a value-laden criterion of
analysis that sees little historical worth in spy fiction, beyond the extent to which
it has distorted popular perceptions.8 To evaluate fiction on the basis of its
adherence to the standards of professional historiography is to miss the point of
fiction itself. For although spy novels and films often convey ideas about history,
unlike works of academic history, their overriding function and purpose is rarely
to provide a mimetic representation of historical reality.9 To evaluate a James
Bond film on the basis of its historical accuracy, for example, seems as preposter-
ous as it does futile, given the series’ self-indulgence in fantasy. Yet, equally, to
regard Bond ahistorically, as neither a product of, nor influence upon, its social
context, appears naively formalistic and strips culture of its historical agency.10
What is required, then, is an approach to spy fiction which recognises its
historical content, without regarding the said content as an attempt to write or
rewrite historical reality itself. In line with intelligence historian Wesley Wark’s
largely unheeded introduction to the topic of spy fiction, written over two
decades ago, this essay argues that a more nuanced interdisciplinary approach
to fiction is needed – one which incorporates new insights and developments,
particularly within the fields of cultural and narrative theory, that could, to
invert Dumas’ phrase, raise the novel to the level of history, without dismissing
or diminishing either one or the other.11
Perhaps the more dangerous critique of the fact/fiction dichotomy, however,
relates to the epistemological, rather than the methodological, assumptions of
this approach. By challenging the idea that the academic history of intelligence
provides an appropriate countermeasure to fiction, one is, by implication,
undermining the very meaning and purpose of the discipline itself. Here, then,
we address the second part of Andrew and Dilks’ statement – the response to
the threat of fiction through rigorous scholarship and, in particular, archival
research. By conceiving of academic history as a response to mass media dis-
tortions, intelligence historians are, by implication, assuming the role of the
guardians of historical authenticity. It is the contestation of this essay that this
‘mythbusting’ approach is not only deeply epistemologically problematic, but
that it is also often decidedly political, both in its aims and its implications.
There are three facets to this critique. The first attempts to complicate the
assumed distinction between non-fictional and fictional forms of historical rep-
resentation. Drawing upon wider debates within historical theory – particularly
the work of Hayden White – it is argued that historical narratives themselves
often include elements of fictionalisation. There is a need, then, for the intelli-
gence ‘mythbusters’ to consider the nature of their own craft, before positioning
it as the authority of truth on the topic of espionage. For, as Peter Novick sug-
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gested in his canonical survey of American historiography, the idea of objectivity

can itself be regarded as a foundational ‘myth’ of the historical profession.12
The second part of this critique addresses the more specific problem of study-
ing secret state institutions. Here, the relevance of Hayden White’s scepticism
toward historical objectivity becomes acutely clear. Not only are intelligence his-
torians confronted with the same epistemological problems that afflict all archi-
val historians, but the authority of their accounts are further attenuated by the
knowledge that much of the documentary record they engage with – particularly
the use of national archives – has been deliberately concealed or even distorted.
Of course, the documentary record of any institution, whether secret or not, is
unavoidably elliptical in nature. What makes secret institutions unique is their
practice of what Hugh Urban described as ‘active dissimulation’.13 Much of the
archival record of secret institutions is not lost through accident, lack of storage
space or bureaucratic oversight, but by design. Knowing this, the historian,
as well as the general public, is reluctantly forced into a dual hermeneutics of
suspicion. Not only are the documents themselves treated with caution, but the
earnestness of the institution which has made them available is equally called
into question.
In this respect, secrecy poses a fundamental problem for historical represen-
tation. For the academic historian to invoke state archives of secret institutions
as a standard of historical veracity in opposition to spy fiction requires a degree
of wilful naivety towards the precarious status of his/her empirics. Although
intelligence historians have made some attempts to address the problem of clas-
sification, almost invariably, the wider epistemological implications of secrecy
have been overlooked.14 Indeed, paradoxically, the solution to secrecy and classi-
fication for intelligence historians is often found within a renewed commitment
to the archive.15 If the government were simply to make more material available,
they argue, or if the shrewd historian were able to circumvent state censorship
through the use of private papers, memoirs, interviews and so forth, then a thor-
oughly independent account, which was both apolitical and untainted by the
influence of the state, would be made possible.16 Thus, in order for the archival
approach to intelligence history to remain concrete, it becomes necessary to
enact a degree of ‘epistemological blindness’ towards the archive, if the belief in
the possibility of an authoritative and relatively comprehensive history of secret
institutions is to be maintained.
The final pillar of this critique examines the political implications of exalting
the archive – particularly state archives – as the authoritative repository of his-
torical authenticity. By critiquing spy fiction as ‘pure fantasy’, whilst simultane-
ously invoking the state as the uncontested standard of historical veracity, not
only have intelligence historians attempted to assert the authority of academic
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history, but they have also unselfconsciously associated historical ‘truth’ with the
documentary utterances of the state. Often this is merely a natural consequence
of the epistemological position of the historian’s craft. Occasionally, however,
the politics of ‘mythbusting’ is quite explicit, with both current and former CIA
officers, for example, producing numerous publications on the historical inaccu-
racies of critical fictional representations of their Agency.17 Thus, the operative
notion of historical ‘authenticity’ within intelligence studies and the interests
of the intelligence services themselves are directly aligned. For if the state acts
as the guardian of historical authenticity, it has the power to reject critical fic-
tions of their institutions on the basis of their inaccuracies, even if, as discussed,
fictional texts do not seek to establish themselves as works of history in the first
place.
The fact/fiction dichotomy is thus not only a question of epistemology, but
of politics and power – of who defines what is a historically accurate vision of
the past and what that past means. This struggle for the guardianship of histori-
cal authenticity is not a one-way street. Fictional texts and Hollywood cinema,
in particular, have vociferously critiqued the idea of state-sourced histories
of intelligence just as much as intelligence historians and practitioners have
critiqued the way in which fiction and film represent the past. Films, such as
Oliver Stone’s JFK or the Bourne series, television shows, such as The Prisoner or
Edge of Darkness, novels, such as Don DeLillo’s Libra or John le Carré’s The Spy
Who Came in from the Cold, are all predicated on the idea that state secrecy has
concealed the ‘truth’ of history. Indeed, the entire narrative thrust of all of these
examples focuses upon the recovery of the past from the mendacious influence
of the state. Few of these fictions assert themselves as works of history, although
some, most notably JFK, have caused furore on this basis.18 Yet, in spite of their
status as fiction, these works are engaged in a critique of the state-sourced notion
of historical authenticity.
In this respect, we might regard these critical fictions not as works of history,
but as historiographic – operating in a similar fashion to what Linda Hutcheon
termed ‘historiographic metafictions’ – texts which call ‘into question the claims
to authority in historiography by uncovering history’s status as narrative and
unmasking its claims to an unmediated access to the real’.19 These ‘historio-
graphic metafictions’ have performed a vital historical function in problematis-
ing the idea that the history of secret institutions can be written through the
secret archives of the state.20 The significance of these fictional representations
of espionage within our culture resides not in the extent to which they have
provided historically accurate or inaccurate visions of the past, but in their
combative historiographical reassessment of the state’s centrality to histori-
cal representation in the context of increasing government secrecy. History is
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only ever as credible as our faith in the veracity of the documentary record
itself.21
INTELLIGENCE HISTORIANS/INTELLIGENCE PRACTITIONERS:

THE GUARDIANS OF HISTORICAL AUTHENTICITY
The ‘problem’ of spy fiction’s distortion of historical reality has become a key
topic of concern for intelligence scholars. Practitioner–historians have authored
a number of book-length studies comparing the ‘real’ world of espionage with
fictional spies. Moreover, the intelligence services themselves – particularly
the CIA – have penned numerous responses to the fictional misrepresentations
of their Agency. To date, Intelligence and National Security (INS) – one of the
leading academic journals within the field of intelligence studies – has published
two separate special editions, in 1990 and 2008, specifically devoted to the topic
of spy fiction. A brief survey of the contents of these special editions reveals the
general perception among intelligence scholars and practitioners of the clear and
unbridgeable divide between the domain of factual history and the misconcep-
tions of popular culture. As Stan A. Taylor wrote in his pun-ridden introduction
to the 2008 special edition:
. . . given the prevailing theme of most of the papers presented in this issue, one
might say . . . that from the beginning, spy fiction and, especially, spy cinema, has
. . . enjoyed a special license to lie another day. Or, given the inflation adjusted net
profit of the already released Bond movies of about 11 billion US dollars, one could
even say that the misrepresentations of how intelligence is actually conducted have
constituted a golden-lie.22
In general, two methodologies to approaching spy fiction prevail among
intelligence scholars. The first involves a direct juxtaposition and comparison
between the fictional and the ‘real’ world of intelligence. This offers the clearest
and most direct expression of the fact–fiction binary opposition that under-
lines the discipline’s general aversion to the misleading myths of spy fiction.
In this approach, the scholar acts as an ombudsman of historical accuracy,
most commonly adopting the mantle of ‘mythbuster’, thereby revealing the
untruths, distortions and manipulations of the past contained within a spy film
or a spy novel’s depiction of intelligence. This approach was exemplified by
CIA Staff Historian Nicholas Dujmovic in his indicatively titled article on the
2006 feature film The Good Shepherd, ‘Hollywood, Don’t You Go Disrespectin’
My Culture: The Good Shepherd versus Real CIA History’.23 Dujmovic goes
to great lengths to demonstrate the pervasive historical inaccuracies in the
film’s representation of the CIA’s early history, even providing a balance
sheet of the film’s distortions, comparing each fictional character with their
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apparent real-life counterpart and pointing out the discrepancies between the
two.
A slightly less combative example of this demythologising approach can be
found in former CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz’s book-length com-
parison of spy fiction and spy ‘fact’, The Great Game: The Myths and Reality
of Espionage.24 Hitz – who also contributed to the 2008 special edition on spy
fiction – concludes that the ‘truth’ of espionage is far stranger than fiction.25 He
makes the same claim in a chapter in this collection.
A related method of interpreting spy fiction has been to compare the real-
life intelligence careers of numerous spy novelists, such as John le Carré, Ian
Fleming and Somerset Maugham – each of whom have worked in intelligence
– with their fictional creations.26 Whilst this approach does not provide a correc-
tive to the factual inaccuracies in spy fiction, it nevertheless maintains the same
distinction between ‘real intelligence’, as defined by the academy, and ‘fictional
intelligence’.
Two of the ‘mythbusting’ authors cited are either current or former employees
of the CIA; this is no coincidence. As discussed in the introduction, by denounc-
ing and correcting the historical inaccuracies of spy fiction, these intelligence
historians and former intelligence officers are, by implication, reasserting the
authority of the state as both the subject and the source of the historical record.
The ‘mythbusting’ approach, therefore, has quite clear political ramifications
in its attempts to provide a corrective to the often critical fictional visions of
the CIA and other intelligence agencies. In this sense, appeals to the historical
record, in order to correct the misconceptions of spy fiction, are frequently, by
implication, a corrective of the state. This latter point will be returned to later in
the essay.
The second methodology could be described as ‘contextualist’. This approach
treats spy novels and films as historical documents of their times, revealing social
and cultural attitudes towards intelligence and issues of national security. In this
sense, the historical validity of spy fiction is established in terms of the ‘real-
world impact’ of public perceptions upon the development of intelligence agen-
cies.27 An oft-cited example of this is the influence of early twentieth-century
British spy fiction upon the founding of Britain’s Secret Service Bureau and its
development into a modern intelligence bureaucracy. Early spy novelists, such
as William Le Queux and Erskine Childers, conjured illusions of German espio-
nage on Britain’s shores, which, in turn, fuelled a growing public appetite for
increased security and vigilance, paving the way for the expansion of Britain’s
intelligence services. At the same time, these novels, along with such classic fic-
tional celebrations of British nationalism and empire, such as Rudyard Kipling’s
Kim, generated the myth of intelligence as ‘The Great Game’ – a gentlemanly
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pursuit with highly effective results that helped to preserve Britain’s national
interest and, as Christopher Andrew writes, avoided ‘public revelation of British
intelligence weakness’.28
Whilst such an approach is less openly dismissive of spy fiction than the first,
it still regards the texts themselves as near total fictions, which distort and misin-
form the public about the real nature of intelligence. In this sense, the historian’s
task remains one of correction – pointing out the distance between the miscon-
ceptions of popular culture and a fixed notion of historical reality. Critiquing
this ‘contextualist’ approach to the historical study of fiction, Dominick LaCapra
argued that it offers an overly reductive vision of texts as purely ‘documentary’
in nature and converts the ‘context into a fully unified or dominant structure’.29
As John Zammito put it:
documents need not and should not always be ‘gutted’ for information; read for
their ‘worklike’ elements, they can offer a richer harvest for historical interpreta-
tion. And literary works may well serve as the richest evidence for the complexity
of the historical epoch in which they are embedded.30
Both the ‘mythbusting’ and the ‘contextualist’ approaches to spy fiction by intel-
ligence scholars have maintained a clear distinction between the fictional and
the historical. Whilst they acknowledge that elements of history can be located
in fiction, and vice versa, their chief analytical objective is to demonstrate the
point of separation between the two domains. For the ‘mythbusters’, the key task
is to demonstrate the way in which history is distorted in fiction, returning the
former to a state of purity, in which the historical record remains unmediated
by the gnarling processes of fictional representation. For the ‘contextualists’,
however, the objective is reversed. Here, the historian attempts to demonstrate
the manner in which history itself – or, at least, ‘public’ history – has become
fictionalised and how social attitudes and beliefs are both influenced by, and
contained within, fictional texts. While there is a greater degree of reciprocity
between fact and fiction here than in the ‘mythbusting’ approach, as modes of
representation, they continue to be regarded as entirely separate. According to
the ‘contextualist’ historian, fiction as a form only ever distorts the past and is
incapable of conveying any intrinsic historical meaning beyond the individual
historical events and characters which it portrays.
RECONCEIVING REALISM: HISTORY AND THE NOVEL

Understanding the relationship between spy fiction and historical reality
requires a confrontation with what Wesley Wark described as the ‘fundamental
role of the illusion of realism’.31 This is not as straightforward as it seems. As the
previous section outlined, intelligence historians have consistently misconstrued
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realism in terms of their own craft’s professional ideal of providing an unmedi-

ated and objective denotation of historical reality itself. In Christopher Moran
and Robert Johnson’s article on early twentieth-century British spy fiction, for
example, they define ‘realism’ as ‘the symbiosis between real spies and fictional
spies’.32 Such an understanding of realism maintains the fact/fiction divide – at
an epistemological level, at least – by upholding a concrete notion of historical
reality or ‘real spies’, as the criterion upon which the degree of realism in a given
text is gauged. As Wark rightly noted, ‘realism is not about the relative success
in depicting historical context and political process accurately, but is rather a
mechanism – a literary device for achieving other kinds of literary, political and
psychological effects’.33
Such an understanding of realism as an effect in literary works is relatively
uncontroversial. ‘It is a contemporary critical truism’, wrote Linda Hutcheon,
‘that realism is a set of conventions, that representation of the real is not the same
as the real itself’.34 To claim, however, that works of history are equally guilty of
the same stylistic ‘confidence trick’ challenges the very basis of verisimilitude in
historical writing upon which historical objectivity is based. Yet, as the follow-
ing section will explore, realism as a literary form is the common denominator
between history and the novel. To come to terms with the ‘fundamental role of
the illusion of realism’ requires an uncomfortable acknowledgment on the part
of intelligence scholars, not only of what makes spy fiction and spy histories
distinct, but to ask what they share.
The spy novel emerged as an identifiable form in early twentieth-century
Britain out of this shared status of history and the novel as a mode of represen-
tation rooted in the mimetic literary effect of realism. Yet, defining precisely
what realism as an effect is and how it works in the spy novel is a daunting task.
Michael Denning, for example, one of the few writers to have addressed the
problem of realism in the spy novel, suggests that there is not one notion of
realism, but various realisms within separate aesthetic contexts. In the case of
the spy novel, realism is used ‘as a synchronic mapping of the genre and as a
diachronic construct that serves to explain the history of the genre’.35 In the first
instance, spy fiction is often divided into ‘realism’ and ‘romance’. Spy ‘realism’
finds its progenitor in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907) and was devel-
oped in the treacherous and morally ambiguous worlds of Somerset Maugham,
Graham Greene and John le Carré. The romantic form is, of course, epitomised
by the heroic figure of Ian Fleming’s James Bond, but dates back to the Great
Game of imperial adventure in Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1900). In the second
instance, the term realism refers to the development of the genre, whereby each
succeeding generation of novelists achieves ‘a higher level of reality’ in their
fictions.36
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Foregrounding Wark’s essay, Denning argues that ‘we must recast the debate
about realism in terms other than simple accuracy or inaccuracy . . . Realism is
not simple authenticity of detail and fidelity to the “facts” of history . . .’37 Settling
on Marxist theorist Georg Lukács’ theorisation of realism, Denning argues that
realism ‘is based not on the distinction between reality and fiction, not on a
notion of the world and its verbal mirror, but on the distinction between narra-
tion and description’.38
In a seminal essay entitled The Reality Effect, French structuralist Roland
Barthes explored precisely this distinction by examining the function of what
he terms ‘structurally superfluous notations’ – descriptive details within a text,
which serve no obvious narrative purpose.39 Barthes furnishes us with examples
of these notations from both a historian – Jules Michelet’s account of Charlotte
Corday receiving ‘a gentle knock at a little door behind her’ prior to her execu-
tion – and a novelist – Gustave Flaubert’s description of a barometer in A Simple
Heart.40 Whilst such descriptive details add almost nothing to the development
of the story, it serves the purpose, Barthes argues, of denoting a self-sufficient
concrete reality. According to Barthes, this is achieved through ‘the direct collu-
sion of a referent and a signifier’ at the expense of the signified, which is expelled
from the sign.41 This absence of the signified generates what Barthes terms ‘the
referential illusion’.42 ‘The truth of the illusion is this’, Barthes concludes:
eliminated from the realist speech–act as a signified of denotation, the ‘real’ returns
to it as a signified of connotation; for just when these details are reputed to denote
the real directly, all that they do – without saying so – is signify it; Flaubert’s
barometer, Michelet’s little door finally say nothing but this: we are the real; it is the
category of ‘the real’ (and not its contingent contents) which is then signified . . .43
The history of the spy novel is replete with examples of such ‘structurally super-
fluous notations’. Early pioneers of the genre, such as Erskine Childers and
William Le Queux, were often commended on the basis of their authenticity, due
to their granular description of tradecraft and technique. Childers’ The Riddle
of the Sands, for example, is filled with mundane nautical details taken almost
verbatim from his logbooks, whilst sailing in and around the English coast and
the Baltic.44 From the reportage of Graham Greene and Somerset Maugham
through to the semi-documentary spy films of the 1950s, the bleak ‘realism’ of
authors such as John le Carré and Len Deighton in the 1960s right up until more
contemporary authors such as Tom Clancy, whose novels have been branded
‘techno-thrillers’ due to their inordinate use of technical detail, it is possible to
trace the development of the genre in terms of its progressive deployment of
referential devices that provide an illusion of the real.45
For Barthes, however, it was not the novelist who originated the referential
illusion of realism, but the historian. Historical narratives are justified precisely
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because of their description of ‘concrete reality’, and the origins of realism can
be found in the nineteenth-century emergence of objective historical discourse
– historia rerum gestarum – which provided the model for the reality effect in the
modern novel.46 Thus, the reality effect is equally present in non-fictional historical
narratives of intelligence, as in the spy novel. Take, for example, Tom Mangold’s
description of James Jesus Angleton’s office at the CIA’s Langley headquarters:
In the staff’s offices (painted institutional gray) there were no personal items or
mementos, save one. Inside one of the stalls in the men’s washroom was a single
piece of graffiti which read: ‘E=MC2’ . . . Angleton’s inner office was large (20 by 25
feet). The windows on the far wall were covered with venetian blinds that were per-
manently closed when he was in residence . . . He sat in a high-backed leather chair
behind a large, executive-style wooden desk that dominated the room . . . Since the
blinds were firmly closed, the room was always dark, like a poolroom at midday.
The only lights came from the tip of Angleton’s inevitable cigarette, glowing like a
tiny star in the dark firmament of his private planet, and the dirty brown sun of his
desk lamp, permanently wreathed by nicotine clouds.47
This passage is almost entirely comprised of structurally superfluous details.

Although serving a symbolic purpose, the graffiti on the toilet wall, the high-
backed chair and the venetian blinds are all structurally superfluous to a histori-
cal account of Angleton’s life. Admittedly, Mangold’s prose provides an extreme
example, given that it was taken from a popular biography – a historical form
that indulges in such superfluous descriptions far more than, for example, an
institutional history. But institutional histories also make use, perhaps with
slightly less élan, of descriptive notation. Nevertheless, the point, if we follow
the logic of Barthes, is that both fiction and non-fiction – in other words, both
history and the novel – deploy the same technique or literary illusion in order to
connote the category of ‘the real’.
Of course, neither spy fiction nor intelligence histories consist purely of
descriptive notations. Even Denning is forced to concede that, with perhaps the
exception of Len Deighton’s early novels, ‘description is in the service of the nar-
ration’.48 Here, then, we turn to other side of Lukács’ equation – the function of
narrative in both history and the novel in conjuring the real.
The emergence of spy fiction as an identifiable genre, from the turn of the
century to the 1930s, coincided almost precisely with literary modernism – a
movement which rejected narrative linearity in order to break with ‘representa-
tionalism’. Wary of the threat that modernism posed, spy novelists, particularly
Greene and Maugham, proffered robust defences of narrative realism in opposi-
tion to what Damon Marcel DeCoste described as Greene’s suspicion of ‘the
aesthetic elitism and dubious politics of the generation of high modernist writers
that preceded his own’.49
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For Maugham, realism as a form and, in particular, the ordering of historical

experience in the form of a story was significant precisely because of its depar-
ture from historical reality. Indeed, modernism, Maugham argued, with its
seemingly arbitrary structure or lack of structure, proved a far more realistic
form of representation than realism itself. In his preface to Ashenden – a series of
short stories based on his experiences working for British intelligence during the
First World War – Maugham, who was both an early pioneer of the spy novel,
memoirist and historian of intelligence, addressed the complex relationship
between realism, modernism and historical reality, which is worth quoting at
some length here:
This book is founded on my experiences in the Intelligence Department during the
war, but rearranged for the purposes of fiction. Fact is a poor story-teller. It starts a
story at haphazard, generally long before the beginning, rambles on inconsequen-
tially and tails off, leaving loose ends hanging about, without a conclusion . . . There
is a school of novelists that look upon this as the proper model for fiction. If life,
they say, is arbitrary and disconnected, why, fiction should be so too; for fiction
should imitate life . . . They do not give you a story, they give you the material on
which you can invent your own . . . The skeleton of a story is of course its plot. Now
a plot has certain characteristics that you cannot get away from. It has a beginning,
a middle and an end. It is complete in itself. It starts with a set of circumstances
which have consequences, but of which the causes may be ignored; and these con-
sequences, in their turn the cause of other circumstances, are pursued till a point
is reached when the reader is satisfied that they are the cause of no further conse-
quences that need to be considered . . . I have written all this in order to impress
upon the reader that this book is a work of fiction, though I should say not much
more so than several of the books on the same subject that have appeared during
the last few years and that purport to be truthful memoirs.50
By imposing the structure of a story upon the disparate and often inconsequen-
tial experiences that comprised his career with British intelligence, Maugham
argues that his account, by its very nature, follows the format of fiction.
The problem of narrative for historical representation, which Maugham
identifies here in the context of his ostensibly fictional work, is no less a problem
for the professional historian. Indeed, it has become one of the overriding ques-
tions for contemporary historical theorists. Hayden White, for example, whose
work dovetails almost precisely with Maugham’s sentiments, argues that life
does not appear before us ‘already narrativized’.51 The story of the past is not an
a priori given, but is imposed by the historian. For White, it is only through the
imposition of narrative by the historian – which, given its autonomy from objec-
tive reality, is by its very nature a fictional imposition – that the past takes on a
meaningful form to the modern reader. Here, White’s sentiments appear almost
identically aligned with those of Maugham:
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Does the world really present itself to perception in the form of well-made stories,
with central subjects, proper beginnings, middles, and ends, and a coherence that
permits us to see ‘the end’ in every beginning? Or does it present itself more in
the forms that the annals and chronicle suggest, either as mere sequence without
beginning or end or as sequences of beginnings that only terminate and never
conclude?52
The implications of White and Maugham’s observation that ‘all stories
are fictions’ is far-reaching for the study of intelligence history.53 Just as they
emphasised the importance of a beginning, middle and end, whilst at the same
time acknowledging its arbitrary nature, so, too, must intelligence historians
begin their accounts with consequences without cause and end at an appropriate
point, when the reader’s demand for a climax and closure has been satisfied.
When, for example, should the history of American intelligence begin and
end? In 1947, with the creation of the CIA – the first permanent peacetime
foreign intelligence service? During the Second World War, with the estab-
lishment of the Office of Strategic Services and its antecedents? Or, even, as
in Christopher Andrew’s seminal account, as far back as the founding of the
American Republic itself, with George Washington’s deployment of spies during
the American revolutionary war?54 One could go back further in time – as many
intelligence historians have – with tales of espionage from the ancient and the
mythical texts of Sun Tzu or biblical references to Moses spying out the land
of Canaan. When should such accounts end? Did the end of the Cold War
bring about a narrative resolution of sorts to the development of the American
intelligence apparatus? Did it mark an end of history, as some commentators
observed?55 Did the fateful events of 9/11 mark a new beginning for intelligence
in a brave new world of uncertainty in the context of globalisation? Or, were
the Cold War and post-Cold War periods marked by continuity, as opposed to
change? Was it the failure to realise the narrative resolution of the Cold War
and a failure to adapt to the new story of global terrorism, as one prominent
intelligence scholar has argued, which accounts for the failure of the American
intelligence services to foresee the World Trade Center attacks?56 Understanding
where the two points of the narrative curve lie is as central to the intelligence
historian’s argument and explanation of intelligence institutions as the factual
referents that comprise their analysis.
Choosing these points of departure also carries a political significance.
The relationship between narrative and historical representation, argued
White:
becomes a problem for historical theory with the realization that narrative is not
merely a neutral discursive form that may or may not be used to represent real
events in their aspect as developmental processes but rather entails ontological
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and epistemic choices with distinct ideological and even specifically political
implications.57
For example, by constructing a long and continuous legacy of American intel-

ligence dating back to the American Revolution and even before, is there a
danger of legitimising through historicising? It is surely not without political
significance that such robust defenders of American intelligence as the former
Director of Central Intelligence, Allen Dulles, the former CIA Historical Curator,
Edward Sayle, and the historian Stephen F. Knott have all narrated the history
of American intelligence on this basis.58 As Bernard Porter has argued, this long
and continuous narrative of intelligence, which claims that ‘every state and every
government has resorted to it, since the dawn of time’, implicitly supposes that
‘espionage is both necessary and “natural” ’. This deliberate propagation of the
naturalistic fallacy seeks ‘both to excuse and to explain’ the secret state.59
The academic writing on intelligence not only shares the fictional structure of
narrative in an abstract sense, but occasionally borrows specific narrative frame-
works from fiction, within which debates on contemporary issues take place.
The debate on torture, for example, is almost invariably narrativised in terms
of the ticking time bomb – an almost entirely fictitious scenario. Indeed, fiction
has informed the debate beyond merely providing the narrative apparatus. The
popular television show 24 is frequently drawn upon by both scholars and poli-
cymakers as evidence that torture, in certain situations, is morally justifiable.60
Similarly, the long-standing academic and public debate on the conflict
between surveillance and civil liberties is so indebted to Orwellian images of
a Big Brother society that Wesley Wark has suggested that if society is to learn
to live with intelligence in the twenty-first century, it must first learn to escape
Orwell’s omnipresent shadow.61 Like Andrew and Dilks, Wark suggests that
Orwell’s fiction has prevented a reasoned and considered engagement with
the issue of surveillance and has distorted public perceptions of the subject.
To ignore Orwell, however, would be to ignore one of the guiding images and
narrative frameworks through which the academic and popular debate on intel-
ligence, surveillance and civil liberties has taken place.
Fictional narratives have not only framed the academic debate on intel-
ligence, but have also played a significant part in establishing and maintaining
the identity of the intelligence services. As previously discussed, a common topic
of debate among intelligence historians is the extent to which the invasion nar-
ratives of early twentieth-century spy–thriller authors, such as Erskine Childers
and William Le Queux, led to the establishment of the British Secret Intelligence
Service.62 The fear of German spies performing subterfuge on British soil
– although largely the product of fiction – was nevertheless influential in
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bolstering the growing calls for a permanent professional British intelligence

service. Moreover, in the nineteenth century, British intelligence activities were
frequently framed within the highly mythologised narrative of the Great Game.
As scholars such as Gerard Morgan and Winston Yapp have argued, the Great
Game owed its existence and identity as much to fictional accounts, such as
Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, along with the overactive imaginations of British intel-
ligence officers themselves, as it did to geopolitical reality.63
The origins of US intelligence are no less indebted to fiction. The establishment
of the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947, for example, was at least partially a
product of General William Donovan’s publicity campaign, which celebrated
and sensationalised the wartime achievements of the CIA’s predecessor, the
Office of Strategic Services (OSS). In addition to encouraging the publication of
insider accounts in magazines such as Time and Reader’s Digest, Donovan also
worked extensively with Hollywood film studios, leading to the release of three
major motion pictures regarding the OSS in 1946.64
If any American intelligence agency owed its existence and development as
much to its fictional image as it does to any concrete historical reality, however,
it was J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. In the 1930s, Hoover worked tirelessly to abrogate
the popular gangster genre in the cinema, with a celebration of law and order via
the figure of the FBI ‘G-Man’. His carefully crafted public persona ensured that
the FBI maintained a reverential position in American political life, until the
scandals of the late 1960s and 1970s swept away the image, which had for so long
provided Hoover with a near-omniscient place within American politics, culture
and society. As Richard Gid Powers put it:
J. Edgar Hoover and his G-Men operated on two levels of American culture gener-
ally considered quite distinct, and their success depended on hidden connections
between politics and popular entertainment; the bureau’s reputation was kept aloft
by the pressure of fantasy on politics and of politics on the public’s fantasy life.65
William Truettner once wrote that ‘myth functions to control history, to shape it
in text or image as an ordained sequence of events’.66 Whether conceived of as a
countermeasure to the popular legends of espionage or by utilising and adopting
the language and narrative framework of spy fiction, the writing of intelligence
history, as well as the intelligence services themselves, have, to a large extent, been
controlled by the mythology of espionage. By reconceiving realism, in order to
understand it as a literary effect that is present in both history and the novel, the
dichotomy between fact and fiction begins to dissolve. Escaping this dichotomy
may provide grounds for new approaches to intelligence historiography.
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HISTORIOGRAPHIC FICTIONS: CONSPIRACY AS A

COUNTER-HISTORY OF INTELLIGENCE
Inspired by Dominick LaCapra’s notion of literature as a ‘contestatory voice’,
Wesley Wark argued that spy fiction could be regarded as a ‘counter-history’
of intelligence. For Wark, echoing the sentiments of Andrew and Dilks, this
‘counter-discourse’ of spy fiction ‘can only be understood in opposition to pro-
fessional history and does not quite deliver this sort of enlightenment’.67 Here,
once again, in spite of the engagement with literary and historical theorists such
as LaCapra, whose entire intellectual project depends upon pointing out the
affinities between history and the novel, the separation between fact and fiction
remains vividly clear. A rereading of LaCapra’s original discussion of ‘contes-
tatory voices’ in the context of his overarching intellectual project, however,
allows for a redeployment of Wark’s conceptualisation of spy fiction as ‘counter-
history’, in terms of a truly critical engagement with intelligence historiography.
As LaCapra put it:
In fact the most telling question posed by the novel to historiography may be
whether contemporary historical writing can learn something of a self-critical
nature from a mode of discourse it has often tried to use or to explain in overly
reductive fashion. A different way of reading novels may alert us not only to the
contestatory voices and counter-discourses of the past but to the ways in which
historiography itself may become a more critical voice in the ‘human sciences’.68
Thus, LaCapra’s ‘contestatory voices’ is conceived not merely in an oppositional
sense, but as a dialectic, through which the counter-discourses of the past can
inspire new ways of thinking about historiography.
What, then, can intelligence historiography learn from spy fiction? The
answer can be found, at least partially, within the genre’s prevailing contesta-
tion of secrecy and its obfuscation of the ‘real’. Perhaps more than any other
popular twentieth-century genre, spy fiction concerns itself with the recovery
of historical reality or ‘truth’. From the theme of the innocent man in search of
vindication, pioneered in John Buchan’s The 39 Steps, to the later ‘realist’ thrill-
ers of John le Carré, which are characterised by a tragic loss of human agency
in a world of bureaucratic opacity and ambiguity, the spy novel has articulated
popular anxieties concerning what Fredric Jameson has described as the indi-
vidual’s dislocation from history.69
These themes of alienation crystallised in the 1970s with the ascendancy of the
conspiracy thriller in both literature and film. Heavily inspired by the spy thriller,
novelists such as Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon, along with films such as
Three Days of the Condor (1975), The Conversation (1974) and The Parallax
View (1974), all critiqued, both directly and allegorically, the disorienting effect
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of secrecy, particularly state secrecy, upon historical representation.70 The

context of the conspiracy thriller’s emergence in American culture is almost too
obvious to mention – namely, Watergate, Vietnam and the series of revelations
surrounding the nefarious activities of the intelligence agencies culminating in
the 1975 Church Commission investigations into the activities of the CIA and
the FBI. What must be noted, however, is that all these culturally defining events
were manifestations of the same logic: state secrecy.
In his introduction to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s critique of secrecy
in US Government, Richard Gid Powers wrote that: ‘if official secrecy had a
devastating impact on American history, its impact on Americans’ understand-
ing of that history was a collateral disaster’.71 Since the events of the 1970s raised
government secrecy to the height of the public consciousness, conspiracy thrill-
ers, adopting the legacy of spy fiction, have performed a historiographic critique
by questioning the ‘official stories’ of the past and challenging ‘the transparency
of historical referentiality’ in emphasising the distorting effects of secrecy upon
the historical record.72
The epistemological challenge which secrecy poses for historiography is thus
not only a concern for the academic historian, but a deeply-embedded cultural
anxiety that has found its clearest form of expression in the conspiracy thriller.
As a consequence, it is not professional historians who have driven the debate
on secrecy and openness, but filmmakers, novelists and television producers.
Consider the legacy of Oliver Stone’s JFK – a film widely reviled by academic
historians for its simplistic conspiratorial narrative of President Kennedy’s
assassination and its carefully disguised manipulation of documentary footage
and reconstructed material (see Figure 9).73 Yet, in spite of its obvious shortcom-
ings when considered as a work of ‘history’, JFK ignited a public debate, which
led to the passage of The President John F. Kennedy Assassinations Records
Collection Act (1992) that saw the release of thousands of previously unavail-
able historical documents.74 The historical significance of Stone’s film can be
found not in its far-fetched conclusions, but in its powerful articulation of the
public’s historiographic anxieties over secrecy and its implications for America’s
national past. In doing so, Stone’s counter-history may have enraged the profes-
sional historical community, but it has arguably enriched the historical record of
Kennedy’s assassination far more than any work of scholarly research could have
achieved.
Today, with contemporary commentators heralding the return of the 1970s
paranoid style, the interwoven forms of spy fiction and the conspiracy thriller
continue to provide a popular historiographic critique of secrecy.75 Like the
1970s, the abundance of conspiracy culture in post-9/11 America has coincided
with a period of public outcry against the excesses of government secrecy and
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Figure 9 Actress Sissy Spacek waves to the crowd as actor Kevin Costner and
director Oliver Stone arrive for the world screening of JFK on 17 December 1991
(Press Association, PA.4951891)
the controversial activities of intelligence agencies. With the 9/11 Commission

Report replacing the Warren Commission as the tainted ‘official story’ of
contemporary conspiracy culture, it has once again been left to Hollywood to
articulate a shared utopian longing for the recovery of the past. In 2010, the
comic-thriller REDS featured former CIA operative Frank Moses, played by
Bruce Willis, being forced to break into the CIA’s Langley headquarters in order
to retrieve a file from a secret basement archive, which reveals the true history
of an Agency operation in Guatemala. In the 2008 Coen Brothers comedy Burn
After Reading, former CIA officer Osbourne Cox, played by John Malkovich, lit-
erally loses his past, in the form of his memoir, which sets in motion a cacopho-
nous hunt for its safe return.
The figure of Jason Bourne is perhaps the perfect allegory of the impact of
secrecy upon the past and the utopian longing to recover the truth of history in
the aftermath of 9/11. We are first introduced to Bourne when he is fished out of
the Mediterranean with bullet wounds in his back in The Bourne Identity (2002).
When he awakes, the audience learns that Bourne has no memory of his past life
as a CIA operative and no understanding of why he has been left for dead off
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the coast of France. Bourne’s amnesia and his attempt to recover his past drive
the narrative of the entire series. Bourne, in a sense, is Hollywood’s archetypal
citizen–historian. Like Jim Garrison in Stone’s JFK or the figure of the investiga-
tive journalist in the conspiracy films of the 1970s, the appearance of the heroic
agent of romantic spy fiction within the conspiracy narrative allegorises the
public’s dislocation from the past, whilst holding out the promise of history’s
return from the opaque realm of state secrecy.
None of these aforementioned films can be considered works of history or
even historical films in the conventional sense. Yet, each says something about
history or about our (the public’s) idea of history in an era of increasing govern-
ment secrecy. Perhaps what the intelligence historian can learn or borrow from
spy fiction is its value as a site of historiographic reflection upon the relationship
between secrecy and the construction of a shared national past. What spy fiction
has consistently articulated is that government secrecy, and our recognition of
its existence and pervasive function in the modern nation state, raises funda-
mental questions about the state’s centrality to the construction of the past and
its role as the arbiter of historical authenticity. Secrecy destabilises the past and
our relationship to it.
CONCLUSION
For both spy fiction writers and historians of intelligence, state secrecy has func-
tioned as the governing problematic, which has defined their individual crafts.
Historians have confronted the problem of secrecy through calls for greater
declassification, the publication of official histories and an increasingly close
relationship with intelligence practitioners. Spy novelists, on the other hand,
have tended to adopt a far more sceptical position. Through conspiratorial nar-
ratives, they have laid bare the problem of secrecy for historical representation
and called into question the ‘official story’ of the intelligence services. The result
has been to place academic historians and popular spy novelists and filmmakers
at odds with one another. For the historian, spy fiction offers a myopic vision of
the past, which has misled the public about the real nature of intelligence ser-
vices. For the spy novelist, state-sourced histories have carried equally nefarious
implications and obfuscated historical reality. Whilst historians of intelligence
have continued to exalt the state archive as the basis for historical authenticity,
popular novelists and filmmakers have challenged the idea that the partially
disclosed records can provide a representative vision of intelligence history.
This essay has suggested that this fact/fiction dichotomy in intelligence
studies is neither necessary nor natural. The novelist or filmmaker can learn
from the historian; the historian can learn from novelists and filmmakers. By
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dispensing with this binary, it has been argued, a new space for historiographical
self-reflection is made possible. For, as Hayden White concluded in his preface
to The Fiction of Narrative, ‘history without poetry is inert, just as poetry without
history is vapid’.76
Notes
1 Richard Gid Powers, ‘Introduction’, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Secrecy: The American
Experience (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 17.
2 Christopher Andrew and David Dilks, ‘Introduction’, Christopher Andrew and
David Dilks (eds), The Missing Dimension: Government and Intelligence Communities
in the Twentieth Century (London: Macmillan, 1984), p. 3.
3 Len Scott and Peter Jackson, ‘The Study of Intelligence in Theory and Practice’,
Intelligence and National Security, 19(2), 2004, pp. 139–69.
4 Loch K. Johnson, ‘An Introduction to the Intelligence Studies Literature’, Loch K.
Johnson (ed.), Strategic Intelligence: Understanding the Hidden Side of Government,
Volume 1 (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2006), p. 3.
5 Amy Zegart, ‘Cloaks, Daggers, and Ivory Towers: Why Academics Don’t Study U.S.
Intelligence’, Loch Johnson (ed.), Strategic Intelligence: Understanding the Hidden
Side of Government, Volume 1 (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2006), p. 22.
6 Zegart, ‘Cloaks, Daggers, and Ivory Towers’, p. 28.
7 Zegart, ‘Cloaks, Daggers, and Ivory Towers’, pp. 28–9.
8 The theoretical insights that undergird this essay cannot be easily conveyed via a
single argument or footnote. Broadly speaking, many of the theorists discussed
here are key thinkers in the field of narratology, engaging specifically with the
relationship between narrative and historical representation. Some of the more
significant works of this ilk include: Dominick LaCapra, History and Criticism
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985); Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse:
Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978);
Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in the Nineteenth Century
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973); Hayden White, The Content
of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation, (London: Johns
Hopkins Press, 1990); Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a
Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981); Frank Ankersmit,
History and Tropology: The Rise and Fall of Metaphor (Berkeley, CA: University
of California Press, 1994); Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History,
Theory, Fiction, (London: Routledge, 1988); Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Robert Rosenstone, Visions of the
Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History (Boston, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1995).
9 The special status of ‘fiction’ as a relatively autonomous discursive field from more
empirically grounded disciplines, such as history, is a position often advocated by
formalist literary critics. As the narrative theorist Tzvetan Todorov puts it: ‘literature
is not a discourse that can or must be false . . . it is a discourse that, precisely, cannot
be subjected to the test of truth; it is neither true nor false, to raise this question has no
meaning: this is what defines its very status as “fiction” ’. Such a position – although
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in opposition to the critical approach of diplomatic historians, who dismiss litera-

ture on the grounds of its historical inaccuracy – still maintains an essential divide
between the domains of fact and fiction. However, the purpose of this essay, being
influenced by, in particular, the work of Hayden White, is to demonstrate the com-
monalities between fiction and history, particularly with respect to the field of espio-
nage. The point, therefore, is not to deny that fiction contains something of value for
the historian or vice versa, but merely to point out that separate discursive modes
require separate hermeneutic apparatuses. Linda Hutcheon, for example, has argued
that although Todorov is correct in his assertion that the truth/falsity dichotomy is
not the appropriate mode of analysis through which to engage with literature, fiction
nevertheless conveys ideas about history – or, more specifically, historiography –
that does indeed require an engagement with literature at the level of the historical.
Similarly, Fredric Jameson has argued, paraphrasing Althusser, that both factual and
fictional representations of the past are interesting to the historian, not because they
‘produce some vivid representation of History “as it really happened”, but rather
(because they) produce the concept of history’. Echoing these arguments, this essay
attempts to shift from a historicist to a historiographical approach to spy fiction,
arguing that whilst their individual elements and contents may deviate substantially
from ‘historical reality’, they nevertheless convey ideas about history that are them-
selves historically conditioned and therefore worthy of attention by the historian. See
Tzvetan Todorov, Introduction to Poetics, trans. Richard Howard (Minneapolis, MN:
Minnesota University Press, 1981), p. 18. Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism,
p. 109; Fredric Jameson, ‘Periodizing the 60s’, Social Text, 9(10), 1984, p. 180.
10 As Fredric Jameson writes, ‘to overemphasize the active way in which the text reor-
ganizes its subtext (in order, presumably, to reach the triumphant conclusion that the
“referent” does not exist); or on the other hand to stress the imaginary status of the
symbolic act so completely as to reify its social ground, now no longer understood
as a subtext but merely as some inert given that the text passively or fantasmatically
“reflects” – to overstress either of these functions of the symbolic act at the expense
of the other is surely to produce sheer ideology, whether it be, as in the first alterna-
tive, the ideology of structuralism, or, in the second, that of vulgar materialism’. See
Jameson, The Political Unconscious, p. 82.
11 Wesley Wark, ‘Introduction: Fictions of History’, Intelligence and National Security,
5(4), 1990, pp. 7–16.
12 Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American
Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 3–6.
13 Hugh Urban, ‘The Torment of Secrecy: Ethical and Epistemological Problems in the
Study of Esoteric Traditions’, History of Religions, 37(3), 1998, p. 209.
14 See Richard J. Aldrich, ‘Policing the Past: Official History, Secrecy and British
Intelligence since 1945’, English Historical Review, 119(483), 2004, pp. 922–53;
Wesley K. Wark, ‘In Never-Never Land? The British Archives of Intelligence’,
The Historical Journal, 35(1), 1992, pp. 195–203; Christopher Andrew, ‘Secret
Intelligence and British Foreign Policy 1900–1939’, Christopher Andrew and Jeremy
Noakes (eds), Intelligence and International Relations 1900–1945 (Exeter: University
of Exeter Press, 1987), p. 9.
15 Peter Hennessy, for example – one of the leading historians of British secrecy – is so
enamoured with archival research that he devotes an entire chapter to it in The Secret
MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd 166 21/02/2013 08:24

State. Significantly, he describes the experience in the quasi-religious terms of ‘pure

elation and illumination’ and praises the ‘god of the archives’ who was with him that
day. See Peter Hennessy, The Secret State: Whitehall and the Cold War (London:
Penguin Books, 2002), pp. xv–xi.
16 In a recent article, Richard J. Aldrich does indeed critique intelligence history’s
over-reliance upon National Archives or what he terms the ‘history supermarkets’.
Nevertheless, his prescription, in calling for a greater use of interviews with former
practitioners, arguably involves an even greater reliance upon state sources or the
recollections of individual state employees as the arbiters of historical authenticity.
As noted above, this type of critique is indicative of the discipline of intelligence
history more broadly, which regards secrecy and classification as problematic, but
ultimately tractable and fails to account for the more fundamental question that
secrecy poses for the traditional ‘state-sourced’ empirical approach to historical
representation. See Richard J. Aldrich, ‘Grow Your Own: Cold War Intelligence
and History Supermarkets’, Intelligence and National Security, 17(1), 2010,
pp. 135–52.
17 It would be misleading to conflate professional historians who write about intel-
ligence with current and former practitioners who ‘dabble’ in history. Nevertheless,
particularly within the field of intelligence studies, the line between practitioners and
academic historians is far from clear. Some of the leading historians of intelligence
within the field are either former intelligence officers or have worked for the intel-
ligence services, either as contractors or as official historians. Moreover, historians
employed by the intelligence services, such as the CIA staff history team, draw the
same dichotomy between fact and fiction by contrasting ‘serious’ scholarly archival
research with the misconceptions of the mass media. For more on the relationship
between academia and, in particular, the CIA, see David N. Gibbs, ‘Academics and
Spies: The Silence that Roars’, Los Angeles Times, 28 January 2001; Arthur S. Hulnick,
‘CIA’s Relations with Academia: Symbiosis not Psychosis’, International Journal
of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, 1(4), 1986, pp. 41–50. For examples of both
current and former CIA officers adopting this ‘mythbusting’ approach, see Nicholas
Dujmovic, ‘“Hollywood, Don’t You Go Disrepectin’ My Culture”: The Good Shepherd
versus Real CIA History’, Intelligence and National Security: Special Issue on Spying in
Film and Fiction, 23(1), February 2008, pp. 25–41; Frederick P. Hitz, The Great Game:
The Myths and Reality of Espionage (New York, NY: Vintage Press, 2005).
18 See endnote 71.
19 Not all of the spy novels and films examined in this article can be regarded as
metafictional in traditional sense. Simply defined, metafictions are texts which self-
consciously draw attention to themselves as literary artifacts and thereby question the
relationship between fiction and reality. Nevertheless, as will be argued, the examina-
tion of secrecy in the spy novel – whether metafictional or not – is historiographic
in nature by calling into question the veracity of the state as the arbiter of historical
authenticity. See Thomas Carmichael, ‘Lee Harvey Oswald and the Postmodern
Subject: History and Intertextuality in Don DeLillo’s Libra, The Names, and Mao II’,
Contemporary Literature, 34(2), 1993, p. 204.
20 As Hutcheon argued in the Poetics of Postmodernism, ‘In both fiction and history
writing today, our confidence in empiricist and positivist epistemologies has been
shaken . . .’ See Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, p. 106.
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21 The term ‘documentary record’ can be taken to include any empirical data upon
which historians craft their narratives. Private collections, photographs, films, oral
testimony and even fiction all requires a degree of faith in their historical veracity or
representativeness. What makes the state archives of secret institutions unique – in a
political sense, at least – is that the public’s faith in their authority is directly related
to wider issues of trust in government. It is no coincidence, for example, that some of
the most sceptical ‘historiographic metafictions’ emerged in the US during the 1970s
in the aftermath of Watergate and Vietnam.
22 Stan A. Taylor, ‘Introduction: Spying in Film and Fiction’, Intelligence and National
Security: Special Issue on Spying in Film and Fiction, 23(1), 2008, p. 1.
23 Dujmovic, ‘“Hollywood, Don’t You Go Disrepectin’ My Culture” ’, pp. 25–41.
24 Frederick P. Hitz, The Great Game: The Myths and Reality of Espionage (New York,
NY: Vintage Press, 2005).
25 Frederick P. Hitz, ‘The Truth of Espionage is Stranger than Fiction’, Intelligence and
National Security: Special Issue on Spying in Film and Fiction, 23(1), 2008, pp. 55–60.
26 See, for example, David Stafford, The Silent Game: The Real World of Imaginary Spies
(London: Viking Press, 1989).
27 The murky realm of public perceptions is a growing area of concern for intelligence
agencies and the scholars who study them. My research on the CIA is the product
of a large UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) project entitled The
Landscapes of Secrecy, which examines the role of public perceptions in shaping
the history of the CIA. Similarly, one of the leading historians of the CIA, Rhodri
Jeffreys-Jones, argues that the success or failure of the Agency is largely dependent
upon its public reputation, which is greatly influenced by spy fiction popular culture.
For more on The Landscapes of Secrecy project, visit the website, available at: http://
www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/research/landscapes/. See, also, Rhodri Jeffreys-
Jones, The CIA and American Democracy, 3rd edn (Binghampton, NY: Vail-Ballou
Press, 2003).
28 Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5
(London: Allen Lane, 2009), p. 4. See, also, Christopher Moran and Robert Johnson,
‘In the Service of Empire: Imperialism and the British Spy Thriller, 1901–1914’,
Studies in Intelligence, 54(2), June 2010, p. 1.
29 LaCapra, History and Criticism, p. 117.
30 John H. Zammito, ‘Are We Being Theoretical Yet? The New Historicism, the New
Philosophy of History, and “Practicing Historians” ’, The Journal of Modern History,
65(4), 1993, p. 793.
31 Wark, ‘Fictions of History’, p. 2.
32 Moran and Johnson, ‘In the Service of Empire’, p. 1.
34 Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, p. 125.
35 Michael Denning, Cover Stories: Narrative and Ideology in the British Spy Thriller
(New York, NY: Routledge, 1987), p. 26.
36 Denning, Cover Stories, p. 26.
39 Roland Barthes, ‘The Reality Effect’, Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language, trans.
Richard Howard (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 141–8.
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39 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).
40 Gustave Flaubert cited in Barthes, ‘The Reality Effect’, p. 141.
41 Barthes, ‘The Reality Effect’, p. 147.
43 Barthes, ‘The Reality Effect’, pp. 147–8.
44 Erskine Childers’ original logbooks are available to view at the National Maritime
Museum in Greenwich, London. A description of the logbooks and their relation-
ship to The Riddle of the Sands can be found on the Royal Museums Greenwich
webpage, available at: http://www.rmg.co.uk/explore/sea-and-ships/in-depth/
erskine-childers/.
45 Walter L. Hixson, ‘“Red Storm Rising”: Tom Clancy Novels and the Cult of National
Security’, Diplomatic History, 17(4), 1993, pp. 599–614.
47 Tom Mangold, James Jesus Angleton: The CIA’s Master Spy Hunter (New York, NY:
Simon and Schuster, 1991).
49 Damon Marcel DeCoste, ‘Modernism’s Shell-Shocked History: Amnesia, Repetition,
and the War in Graham Greene’s The Ministry of Fear’, Twentieth Century Literature,
45(4), 1999, p. 428.
50 William Somerset Maugham, ‘Preface’, Ashenden, or, The British Agent (London:
Vintage Classics, 2000), pp. iv–viii.
51 Hayden White, ‘Narrativity in the Representation of Reality’, Hayden White, The
Content of the Form, p. 25.
52 White, ‘Narrativity in the Representation of Reality’, p. 24.
53 Hayden White, Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1999), p. 9.
54 Christopher Andrew, For the President’s Eyes Only: Secret Intelligence and the
American Presidency from Washington to Bush (London: Harper Perennial,
1986).
55 The immediate aftermath of the Cold War inspired an expansive debate over the need
for intelligence or, at least, such expansive intelligence budgets in a unipolar world.
Perhaps the most famous critique of US secrecy and intelligence was made by Senator
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who chaired a special commission on government secrecy.
See Moynihan, Secrecy: The American Experience. See, also, Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones’
introduction to the third edition of The CIA and American Democracy for a summary
of post-Cold War debates on American intelligence: Jeffreys-Jones, The CIA and
Democracy, pp. 1–10.
56 Amy Zegart, Spying Blind: The CIA, the FBI, and the Origins of 9/11 (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2009).
57 Hayden White, ‘Preface’, Hayden White, The Content of the Form, p. ix.
58 Allen Dulles, The Craft of Intelligence: America’s Legendary Spy Master on the
Fundamentals of Intelligence Gathering for a Free World (Guildford, CT: The Lyons
Press, 2006); Stephen F. Knott, Secret and Sanctioned: Covert Operations and the
American Presidency (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Edward Sayle, ‘The
Historical Underpinnings of the U.S. Intelligence Community’, Journal of Intelligence
and Counterintelligence, 1(1), Spring 1986, pp. 1–27; Ray S. Cline, ‘Covert Action as
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Presidential Prerogative’, Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, 12(2), 1989, pp.
357–70.
59 Bernard Porter, Plots and Paranoia: A History of Espionage in Britain, 1790–1988
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 1.
60 Amy Zegart, ‘“Spytertainment”: The Real Influence of Fake Spies’, International
Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, 23(4), 2010, pp. 599–622.
61 Wesley K. Wark, ‘Learning to Live with Intelligence’, Intelligence and National
Security, 18(4), 2003, pp. 1–14.
62 Moran and Johnson, ‘In the Service of Empire’.
63 Gerald Morgan, ‘Myth and Reality in the Great Game’, Asian Affairs, 4(1), 1973, pp.
55–65; Malcolm Yapp, ‘The Legend of the Great Game’, Proceedings of the British
Academy, 111, 2001, pp. 179–98.
64 James I. Deutsch, ‘“I Was a Hollywood Agent”: Cinematic Representations of the
Office of Strategic Services in 1946’, Intelligence and National Security, 13(2), 1998,
pp. 85–99; Larry Valero, ‘“We Need Our New OSS, Our New General Donovan, Now
. . .”: The Public Discourse Over American Intelligence, 1944–53’, Intelligence and
National Security, 18(1), 2003, pp. 91–118; Wesley K. Wark, ‘“Great Investigations”:
The Public Debate on Intelligence in the US after 1945’, Defence Analysis, 3(2), 1987,
pp. 119–32; Bradley Smith, The Shadow Warriors: O.S.S. and the Origins of the C.I.A.
(London: André Deutsch, 1983), pp. 390–420; Thomas Troy, Donovan and the CIA:
A History of the Establishment of the Central Intelligence Agency (Frederick, MD:
Aletheia Books, 1981), pp. 255–60.
65 Richard Gid Powers, G-Men: The FBI in American Political Culture (Carbondale, IL:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1983), p. xii.
66 William Truettner, The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier,
1820–1920 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), p. 40.
68 LaCapra, History and Criticism, p. 132.
69 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 1991).
70 The conspiracy thriller, as a form of narrative, includes a range of fictional texts which
lay outside of what would commonly be regarded as spy fiction in either the ‘realist’
or the ‘romantic’ guise. Nevertheless, the influence of the spy thriller upon the devel-
opment of conspiracy cinema and literature of the 1970s is clear. Numerous examples
of conspiracy cinema, for example, are often cited as direct homages to the spy films
of Alfred Hitchcock, and the themes of secrecy and the innocent individual caught
in the machinations of state or corporate power have a clear lineage in the spy genre.
Moreover, conspiracy thrillers are frequently about intelligence agencies or shadowy
secret institutions with clear allusions to the revelations surrounding the US intel-
ligence agencies in the 1970s. Unfortunately, there is not enough space here to engage
in a full discussion on the relationship between spy fiction and the conspiracy thriller,
suffice to say that the two are so closely interwoven that the latter could almost be
regarded as a development of the former. In contemporary culture, this point is quite
evident, with films such as the Bourne series or The Good Shepherd and television
series such as The X-Files, all of which incorporate elements from both spy fiction and
the conspiracy thriller. For more on Hitchcock’s influence upon the development of
the conspiracy thriller, see Robert Barton Palmer, ‘The Hitchcock Romance and the
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’70s Paranoid Thriller’, David Boyd and Robert Barton Palmer (eds), After Hitchcock:
Influence, Imitation and Intertextuality (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2006)
and Charles Derry, The Suspense Thriller: Films in the Shadow of Alfred Hitchcock
(New York, NY: McFarland & Co., 2001). For an excellent examination of the rela-
tionship between secrecy and conspiracy narratives, see Mark Fenster, Conspiracy
Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture (Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press, 1999).
71 Richard Gid Powers, ‘Introduction’, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Secrecy: The American
Experience (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 17.
72 Linda Hutcheon, The Poetics of Postmodernism, p. 110.
73 The academic debate over Oliver Stone’s role as a historical filmmaker and JFK
specifically is too vast to comprehensively list here. Some notable examples include
Robert Brent Toplin (ed.), Oliver Stone’s U.S.A.: Film, History and Controversy
(Lexington, KY: University Press Kentucky, 2003); Michael Rogin, ‘JFK: The Movie’,
The American Historical Review, 97(2), 1992, pp. 500–5; Robert Rosenstone, ‘JFK:
Historical Fact/Historical Film’, The American Historical Review, 97(2), 1992, pp.
506–11; Marita Sturken, ‘Reenactment, Fantasy, and the Paranoia of History: Oliver
Stone’s Docudramas’, History and Theory, 36(4), 1997, pp. 64–79; Trevor McCrisken
and Andrew Pepper, American History and Contemporary Hollywood Film: From
1492 to Three Kings (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), pp. 131–9.
74 For an excellent compendium of the exhaustive debate surrounding the release of the
film, see Oliver Stone and Zachary Sklar (eds), JFK: The Book of the Film (New York,
NY: Applause Books, 1992).
75 Ross Douthat, ‘The Return of the Paranoid Style’, The Atlantic, April 2008,
available at: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/04/the-return-of-
the-paranoid-style/306733/1/.
76 Hayden White, The Fiction of Narrative (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2010), p. xi.
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Chapter 8
THE REALITY IS STRANGER THAN FICTION:

ANGLO–AMERICAN INTELLIGENCE
COOPERATION FROM WORLD WAR II THROUGH
THE COLD WAR
Frederick P. Hitz
This chapter will first consider the odd relationship that existed between the
British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and the American Office of Strategic
Services (OSS) and its successor, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), during
the waning days of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War. In addition
to surveying a number of pertinent memoirs and biographies, it will examine
fictional accounts of espionage. The lion’s share of the analysis will be devoted to
John le Carré’s classic espionage novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, published in
1974. The novel, which has recently been made into a feature film starring Gary
Oldman and Colin Firth, underscores the underlying distaste, widely felt in the
SIS, for the American role in intelligence-gathering during this period.1 To be
sure, this was not a majority view. Despite some embarrassing moments, both
the United Kingdom (UK) and United States (US) were able to work together
productively, for the most part, to track down the Nazis and Soviets who were
working against the Allies. But the dissimilarity in the two nations’ approaches
to espionage and special operations was sufficiently pronounced to become part
of recently written histories of the period and healthy fodder for spy fiction.
Second, I shall consider the Cold War cooperation between the US and
UK intelligence services, as the CIA, having gained its stripes, took the lead in
combating Soviet subversion and espionage in Europe and around the world. In
this part of the discussion, the key argument will become more clearly defined:
namely, that the reality of espionage is far more complicated than its subsequent
characterisation in fiction.
Finally, I will introduce the two most damaging American spies of the Cold
War era – Aldrich Ames of the CIA and Robert Hanssen of the FBI. There is
no way to give a simple ideological explanation for the betrayals of Ames and
Hanssen. They both needed the money that the Soviets paid them, but their
primary motivation was inspired by spy fiction. Inspired by Kipling, they were
172
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The Reality is Stranger than Fiction 173
motivated by ‘the game for the game’s sake’ – a chance to show their more
dim-witted colleagues that they were far cleverer at the profession of spying.
* * *
To begin with, at the outset of World War II, the Americans were brand new
at the game of espionage. Although there was certainly intelligence staff in the
US Army and Navy prior to 1939, there was no permanent US civilian intel-
ligence service until the OSS was established in 1940 under General William
J. Donovan.2 By contrast, the UK had established both domestic and foreign
intelligence services in 1909, prior to World War I. Despite a stagnant period
between the wars, Britain’s far-flung empire and proximity to Europe ensured
that her basic substantive knowledge of intelligence matters far exceeded that of
her isolationist, foreign-language challenged cousins across the Atlantic. In addi-
tion, by 1940, the SIS was reading encrypted German military messages by virtue
of its capture of an Enigma encoding device and the work on intercepted Axis
messages (ULTRA) taking place at Bletchley Park. Winston Churchill’s govern-
ment successfully wooed the United States and President Franklin Roosevelt
through General Donovan and William Stephenson, using intercepted ULTRA
traffic as evidence of the extent of Hitler’s war planning.
Despite these early disadvantages, when the United States came on the scene
after Pearl Harbor, OSS sought to become a full and equal partner in the Allied
intelligence collection and analysis effort. It achieved this by providing substan-
tial amounts of money and by deploying an energetic and well-trained batch
of spies. This led to some conflict and professional resentment. Feathers were
ruffled in SIS, due to the fact that General Donovan never failed to personally
participate in a significant Allied military landing during the war (including
Normandy on D-Day) and prominently pushed OSS’s presence and involve-
ment in them as well. SIS antagonism towards Donovan was exacerbated by
the fact that Donovan – an absentee from the fighting – relentlessly pushed for
OSS involvement in these operations.3 As noted in the recent history of the MI6
penned by Keith Jeffery, before the war, the SIS had a reputation as a second-rate
outfit. However, the experience of war placed it well and truly ahead of the OSS;
it benefitted from new blood, and it excelled in the management of the superior
ULTRA intelligence decryption system.4 Consequently, the SIS believed that
General Donovan should have taken more of a backseat to the SIS, at least in the
beginning.
As the war progressed, different factors came into play. The Soviet Union had
penetrated the SIS during the 1930s. Moscow’s most prominent success was a
Soviet illegal, Arnold Deutsch, who would recruit the so-called Cambridge Five
– a group of upper-class university mates from Cambridge. Deutsch was a clever,
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highly attractive, Viennese graduate student at Cambridge University in the

mid-1930s, who worked for the Soviet intelligence. He befriended Kim Philby,
Donald MacLean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross as part
of Stalin’s campaign to strengthen the Soviet intelligence’s access to Britain’s
privileged elite. Each of the five brought important insights into Britain’s posi-
tion before, and during, World War II. However, they were particularly valuable
sources in 1946, when a gap opened up between the Soviet Union and its closest
wartime Allies, Britain and the United States. Although any of the five would
have presented excellent subjects for spy fiction, Kim Philby’s position in the top
ranks of SIS was the most fascinating and devastating for both the US and the
UK. In fact, the basic elements of Philby’s successful career of espionage against
the UK and US are so fantastic, that it proved impossible for a spy novelist to
fully capture its extent and brazenness.
John le Carré – a former MI5 and SIS officer – tried to capture this in Tinker
Tailor, Soldier, Spy (see Figure 10). Bill Haydon – the traitor in the novel – was
clearly inspired by Philby. The theme of betrayal is succinctly captured in the
following extract from the book:
As a lover, a colleague, a friend; as a patriot; as a member of that inestimable body
that Ann loosely called the Set: in every capacity, Haydon had overtly pursued one
aim and secretly achieved its opposite. Smiley knew very well that even now he did
not grasp the scope of that appalling duplicity; yet there was a part of him that rose
already in Haydon’s defence. Was not Bill also betrayed? Connie’s lament rang in
his ears: ‘Poor loves. Trained to Empire, trained to rule the waves . . . You’re the
last, George, you and Bill.’ He saw with painful clarity an ambitious man born to
the big canvas, brought up to rule, divide and conquer, whose visions and vanities
all were fixed, like Percy’s upon the world’s game; for whom the reality was a poor
island with scarcely a voice that would carry across the water.5
Le Carré painted Haydon from the perspective of his long-time colleague, rival
and now pursuer, George Smiley, who was brought back from retirement to clean
up the SIS and rid it of moles. Le Carré devised a plot involving a non-official
cover SIS officer named Ricki Tarr. Tarr befriends and seduces a Soviet illegal
named Irina in south-east Asia. It is Irina who knows of a colleague in the Soviet
intelligence service in Moscow who is helping to run a mole – Haydon – in the
SIS. This is a direct replay of Philby’s effort to quash the Soviet defector Volkov
in 1943, who was about to betray Philby to the British, before Philby ratted him
out to the KGB, and he was drugged and forcibly removed to the USSR.
Although le Carré does a masterful job of recreating in Haydon and his col-
leagues the types of people that Philby would have worked with and betrayed, he
could not have even begun to match the real extent of Philby’s treachery. Philby
had been a traitor for many years. He had earned an extraordinary level of trust
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Figure 10 Spy novelist John le Carré boards a Pan Am flight to Rome at Kennedy
International Airport (Press Association, PA.2419669)
from his colleagues in the SIS. He had also been given great responsibility within
the SIS, especially with respect to the Services’ relationship with the CIA. This
is my primary reason for arguing that the truth of espionage and betrayal is far
stranger than is captured in spy fiction.6
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While the British operated the crown jewels of signal interception in World
War II with the ULTRA operation, the US developed a similar dominant insight
in counter-intelligence through the VENONA intercept programme during
the Cold War. From VENONA’s inception in 1943, the US Army Security
Agency (ASA)7 sought to decrypt messages sent via Western Union commercial
telegraph from the Soviet Embassy in Washington and the Soviet Consulate
in New York to Moscow. Until well into the 1960s, Meredith Gardner and his
fellow cryptographers were identifying Soviet spies in the US atomic bomb
programme – the Manhattan Project – such as Klaus Fuchs and Julius and Ethel
Rosenberg. Over the course of his post in Washington in 1949 as SIS representa-
tive to the United States, Philby was brought into the VENONA project and
advised his Soviet masters of what the United States knew about the Rosenberg
atomic secret spy ring. In a final instance of unbelievable irony, Philby’s need-
to-know was deemed sufficiently strong that he was granted access to VENONA
traffic, whereas the then US President, Harry S. Truman, was not. Ironically,
General Omar N. Bradley – Army Chief of Staff and controller of both the ASA
and the VENONA projects – had decided that President Truman did not need
to know the specifics about how VENONA was obtained in order to discharge
his responsibilities. The rationale was that, since President Truman was in such
a public position, he might inadvertently blurt out some of the details as to how
the VENONA intelligence was obtained; ergo, he was not briefed on them. Even
le Carré’s fertile imagination never pushed Haydon’s role that far.
The unintended consequences of Philby’s betrayal were never examined by le
Carré. In another of his novels, Smiley’s People, Smiley toys with a similar possi-
bility when he seeks to prod Karla into defecting to India, as he journeyed home
to Moscow in the wake of the failure of his spy network in the western United
States. It did not work.
Yet, this is not as remarkable as the psychological effect of Philby’s betrayal
on his CIA colleague, James J. Angleton – America’s Counter-Intelligence Chief.
Philby first met Angleton in the UK during World War II, when the latter was
first earning his counter-intelligence spurs. The two men resumed contact in
Washington in 1949, by which point the KGB defector, Anatoli Golitsyn, had
provided ‘leads’ on suspected Soviet intelligence penetrations of the SIS and the
CIA. Golitsyn’s evidence caused Angleton to lose all confidence in the West’s
ability to successfully recruit and run a penetration of the Soviet intelligence
service. This poisoning of the mind of the United States’ top counter-intelligence
maven never graced the pages of spy literature during this period, but was a
troublesome obstacle for a generation of US intelligence operations directed at
the Soviet Services. Angleton thwarted CIA plans to approach and recruit poten-
tial Soviet spies on the grounds that the Soviet Union would never allow such
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a target to be dangled in front of the SIS or the CIA. Alas, this attitude blighted
offensive US counter-intelligence operations against the Soviets at a critical
moment in the West’s position towards the Soviet Union.
What does the Philby phenomenon (and the successes of the four other
Cambridge spies against the United States) say about the intelligence-gathering
and sharing relationship generally between the US and the UK during the Cold
War? Surprisingly, the answer is not much, since both the US and the UK were
mutually dependent on one another in the struggle against Soviet intelligence
penetration.
Miranda Carter’s excellent biography of Anthony Blunt explores a theory
concerning a different motivation for spying.8 Rather than acting out of an
absolute commitment to communism like Philby, Blunt viewed his actions as
a parlour game, much like ‘cowboys and Indians’, for example. Blunt did not
think his actions were going to materially affect or alter the course of the Cold
War, thus he continued to meet his Soviet handler long after he had lost his faith
in Stalin’s communism.9 For Blunt, it was easier to continue as a traitor, than
to make a scene and perhaps endanger his Cambridge colleagues – Burgess,
Maclean and Philby. This is a variation of Aldrich Ames’ and Robert Hanssen’s
obsession with the notion of the ‘game for the game’s sake’. Blunt was good at
it, and he enjoyed some aspects of spying. However, at the end of the day, in his
view, it was simply not that consequential.
By and large, spy novelists have yet to pick up and elaborate on this trivialisa-
tion of the ‘great game’. In an endeavour so dependent upon humans and per-
sonal motivation, allowances are made for betrayal. Spies’ motivations change.
They get bored. They begin to believe that they are invincible. As in most matters
involving ordinary mortals, circumstances change. Spies become tired or disen-
chanted or come to enjoy the act of betrayal for its own sake. One cannot read
Kim Philby’s account in My Silent War of his manoeuvering to replace his SIS
superior Felix Cowgill on orders from Soviet intelligence, without noting that he
clearly enjoyed the challenge of the task of betrayal. The same is true of Robert
Hanssen’s appointment to head the team searching for the mole in the FBI in the
1990s, where he amusedly notes that he is, in fact, the mole.
Hanssen is a particularly curious figure for a spy. He was a conservative, Opus
Dei Catholic, who attended the same church as his superior, FBI Director Louis
Freeh, yet he gave the godless Soviets every important secret that he could lay
his hands on during the thirty-year period in which he served the USSR as a
spy. He betrayed the names of US agents in the Soviet Union; he uncovered the
sophisticated listening post that the US was constructing beside the new Soviet
Embassy on Mount Alto in Washington; and he even tried to warn Soviet agents
when the US were close to uncovering them, so that they could escape. He was
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not an ideological communist, but, rather, an FBI spy hunter, who yearned to be
accepted as ‘one of the boys’ in the FBI culture of street-smart field agents.
But his reputation for aloofness and his uncommon skill as an internet ‘techie’
set him apart from the FBI’s locker-room culture, so he betrayed them. He
sought to show that he could be the best undercover spy that there was by betray-
ing to his Soviet contacts every bit of information that came to him as an FBI
computer whizz. In the end, he relished his position as the only spy who knew
all the important US secrets and could dominate relations between the two spy
services, as the US belatedly tried to figure out how the Soviets rolled up some
American spies that Aldrich Ames had not been in any position to turn over. I
am not mindful of any spy novelist who has elaborated on a plot as convoluted
as the web that Hanssen wove for so many years. What is bemusing was that
Hanssen betrayed his country, given that he achieved so little material benefit
from doing so. It had to be for the love of the game of betrayal itself.
Finally, there is Aldrich Ames – my spy-school classmate – who, from 1985
to1994, gave away the names of every spy working for the US against the USSR,
leading to the deaths or arrests of at least twenty agents. Ames was intelligent,
spoke good Russian, wrote and briefed well and was a better-than-average agent
handler. But he was not outgoing, he could not recruit and he had a propensity
for excessive drinking. As a consequence, after nearly thirty years in CIA, he had
only risen to a middling pay grade – GS-14 – and was unlikely to receive another
promotion. His specialty was Soviet Affairs, and he served as a case officer in
Mexico City in the early 1980s, where he was trying to recruit and manage
Soviet sources. There he met and became infatuated with a Colombian female
diplomat, who had expensive tastes and was high maintenance. At the same
time, Ames was becoming more disenchanted with intelligence work and, espe-
cially, the single-minded pursuit of the Soviet target. He began to believe that he
was engaging in ‘spy wars’ – essentially, meaningless contests between the CIA
and KGB in trying to recruit one another, with each service trying to outdo the
other, but not leading to the production of much meaningful intelligence.10 In
the spring of 1985, Ames contrived to pass to a contact in the Soviet Embassy in
Washington the names of several spies working for the US against the Soviets
for the sum of $100,000. In June 1985, he made ‘the big dump’: the names of all
of the US spies who were working against the USSR. He gave this information
to Soviet spy master Viktor Cherkashin at Chadwick’s Restaurant on M and
Wisconsin in Georgetown for several million dollars.11
What makes these two real life cases – Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames –
so interesting is that no spy novelist would have attempted to fashion plots as
far-fetched and unbelievable as to encompass what they attempted in real life.
As noted previously, who would have thought that the FBI’s top spy ‘techie’
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could have inserted himself so successfully into his own service that he would
have been chosen to lead the mole hunt to determine who might have supplied
spy information to the Soviets that Aldrich Ames had been in no position to
provide? As for Ames, it is inconceivable to think that CIA’s security procedures
were so flimsy that it would place, on the first team dealing solo with Soviet
intelligence officers, a terminal GS-14 US case officer who had a chronic alcohol-
abuse problem and a record as a cynical under-achiever.
* * *
In spy literature, therefore, even when you are not trying to pursue the bad guys
in your Aston Martin à la James Bond, novelists occasionally fall down in their
efforts to successfully portray the realities of espionage. Curious coincidences
occur. Spies have good periods of accomplishment, but falter later on. Your
closest allies get it right sometimes, but butcher it the next. Betrayals occur,
but the basic harmony of the relationship between spies and their handlers or
between allied intelligence services, such as the US and the UK, override indi-
vidual episodes of human frailty, overreach and even betrayal.
Few real spies can be as wise and indefatigable as George Smiley or live as
many lives as Karla. However, the ability and determination of spies such as
Oleg Penkovsky are the real stories of human espionage during the Cold War.
Penkovsky was hugely important. He provided critical information to President
Kennedy, namely, that Premier Khrushchev might retreat from his installation
of Soviet IBMs in Cuba in October 1962, if the West just stood up to him. By
the same token, Ames and Hanssen are examples of spies who have gone sour,
betraying their colleagues and countrymen. These narratives are seldom fully
captured in spy fiction. Espionage is, indeed, akin to a game of cowboys and
Indians, but at a very high level.
It is striking that the spy odyssey has continued in the post-9/11 era by revert-
ing to the adventures of the OSS during World War II. We have rediscovered the
spy commando who is inserted behind enemy lines. Today, the spy commando is
tasked with searching out the Taliban and relaying the enemy’s whereabouts by
satellite. With this information, Predator drones armed with Hellfire missiles will
be dispatched from remote locations. Once again, spy fiction has been unable to
keep up. There is no spy novel that currently recreates the lives of men like Gary
Schroen – who led the initial CIA incursion into Afghanistan in September 2001
– or Hank Crumpton – the Deputy Director of the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism
Center at that time. Moreover, there is no spy novel that mirrors the present work
of Special Operations command operatives who fly over the Hindu Kush into
central Afghanistan seeking out Taliban terrorists. In short, the reality of current
day espionage far outpaces the efforts to keep up with it.
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Notes
1 John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1974).
2 The pre-existing US military staff did have some experience in signals intelligence
work. For example, the US Navy cracked the Japanese diplomatic code and was
working on Japanese naval cryptography by the beginning of WWII.
3 Douglas Waller, Wild Bill Donovan: The Spymaster who Created the OSS and Modern
American Espionage (New York, NY: Free Press, 2011), p. 240.
4 Keith Jeffery, MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909–49 (London:
Bloomsbury, 2010), pp. 741, 744.
5 Le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, p. 332.
6 Frederick P. Hitz, The Great Game: The Myth and Reality of Espionage (New York,
NY: Vintage, 2004).
7 The ASA was later incorporated into the National Security Agency (NSA).
8 Miranda Carter, Anthony Blunt: His Lives (London: Macmillan, 2001).
9 Carter, Anthony Blunt, pp. 270–2.
10 This narrative is taken from the author’s recollection of the never-declassified CIA
Inspector General on Aldrich Ames of 1994.
11 Viktor Cherkashin, Spy Handler (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2005).
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PART II
BRITISH INTELLIGENCE
HISTORIOGRAPHY
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Chapter 9
A PLAIN TALE OF PUNDITS, PLAYERS AND

PROFESSIONALS: THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE
GREAT GAME
Robert Johnson
DEFINING THE GREAT GAME

During the nineteenth century, the inexorable acquisition of territories across
Central Asia by Russia seemed to menace the security of British India. In
response, the British tried to reach agreements with St Petersburg, launched
military campaigns to secure their Indian borders and attempted to coerce the
Afghans, Persians and Tibetans into protected spheres of influence. The British
authorities in India sent intelligence agents to survey, map and monitor the
approaches to the Indian subcontinent in preparation for a war that appeared
to some, at least, as inevitable. This was the classic ‘Great Game’ immortalised
by Rudyard Kipling (see Figure 11). There was, however, an internal dimension
to the threat. The British did not, on the whole, fear an invasion of India itself,
which could be thwarted, but they were concerned that anti-colonial sedition
within India could be spread, if Russia drew close to the subcontinent or demon-
strated its military prowess. These developments would, in turn, require a larger
garrison and a greater financial outlay. Sir John Malcolm – who served in Tehran
as a diplomat – captured the essence of that threat, when he stated that Russian
strategy involved: ‘threatening and disturbing our Indian Empire in a degree
that will have the immediate effect of injuring our resources and may ultimately
endanger our power’.1
There has been much debate about not only what the Great Game was and
when it began, but even how it should be entitled. The field has been domi-
nated by popular writers and some professional historians, but scholars from
international relations and strategic studies have been conspicuous by their
absence. The concept of a Central Asian ‘pivot’ featured briefly during interest
in geostrategy – most notably in the work of Olaf Caroe, a former frontier gov-
ernor – but the Great Game was subsumed into broader studies of the Cold War
after 1945.2 Britain’s departure from India in 1947 added to the neglect of the
archival riches on the subject. As is so often the case, aside from the voluminous
183
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Figure 11 Cartoon of English writer Rudyard Kipling writing in an Indian bush

watched by a lion and a snake (Mary Evans Picture Library, 100155555)
official records in the National Archives and India Office Records in London
and the National Archives in Delhi, it is within the demi-official and private
correspondence of the key players where the most detailed and revealing data is
to be found. These private records are scattered throughout the national libraries
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A Plain Tale of Pundits, Players and Professionals 185
of the United Kingdom, but are also in the hands of private collections, societies
and county record offices. The sheer scale of these records has perhaps deterred
many scholars from attempting to shape them into a coherent form, par-
ticularly when, for so long, the Cold War overshadowed the older history of the
region.
There were also more significant problems of definition. Malcolm Yapp, in
addressing the British Academy in 2000, argued that the Great Game was a
‘legend’.3 He posited that the term was not in common use until after the Second
World War and was not used by either of its players or its contemporary actors.
Captain Arthur Connolly – a Company officer on a diplomatic mission in 1842 –
is often credited with the origin of the phrase, but in describing a ‘Grand Game’
to Sir Henry Rawlinson – later the President of the Royal Geographical Society
– he was actually referring to an attempt to release slaves held by Central Asian
despots in Khiva and Bokhara. Sir Francis Younghusband, while trying to outwit
his Russian adversaries up on the Pamirs in the 1890s, also described the struggle
for influence as a ‘big game’ played against the Russians. However, while Yapp
drew attention to the rarity of the expression, that did not diminish the existence
of serious and sustained efforts to gather intelligence – overtly or covertly – from
rivals. Both sides made use of local peoples as informal agents, made deliberate
and high profile military reconnaissance missions and sometimes engaged in
more clandestine surveys.
Malcolm Yapp had long advanced the idea that the Great Game was, in fact,
no more than a policy debate about the means with which to ensure the strategic
defence of India.4 In Strategies of British India: Britain, Iran and Afghanistan,
Yapp focused on the way that policymakers had initially advocated support
for Persia as the key component in the scheme of defence for India, before
subsequently turning to Afghanistan. In the 1810s, the British had sought to
bolster the Qajar Dynasty, training its troops and providing financial backing.
However, after the Treaty of Turkmanchay in 1828, Yapp maintained that
Afghanistan took the central position in the debate concerning the defence of
India. Afghanistan was conceived of as a buffer state, and Herat, in particular,
lying astride the routes from the north and west, was seen as the key to India.
According to Yapp, Herat remained crucial to British strategic thinking for the
rest of the century. In fact, the strategic defence of India was far more extensive
than concern for a single settlement. In the 1830s, the Hindu Kush range was
regarded as far more important, and by the 1870s, these mountains were consid-
ered to be the ‘scientific border’ for India and the most important, from a mili-
tary point of view, for India’s defence. By the end of the century, Lord Salisbury
– the Conservative Prime Minister – had overturned the Liberal preference for
the delimitation of border lines or ‘close border’ policy of not engaging with the
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Afghans, in favour of a zone of defence in which the Russians would be delayed,

harassed and ultimately destroyed if they ever attempted to assault India.
It was Lord Salisbury who conceived of an intelligence screen using consulates
and agents in an arc from Turkey to the north of India.5 Their role was to provide
intelligence for the diplomatic solutions that were, in essence, the first line of
defence for the subcontinent. Under his ministry, this was largely achieved. The
idea of a network was first established at the beginning of the nineteenth century,
when the Company had employed news-writers in Kabul, Kandahar and Herat.
Mountstuart Elphinstone – who led an official mission to Afghanistan from
1808 to 1809 – added to the network and employed agents casually across the
country.6 By 1811, the network had reduced in size, until it was resurrected in
1832.7 By the 1880s, as L. P. Morris noted, there were agents operating across
Central Asia, as well as within Afghanistan and Persia.8 It was clearly difficult for
Europeans to operate undetected, and Asian personnel were preferred, because
they were cheaper to employ, had fluent command of the necessary languages
and were more integrated into society. Banking families with connections in
India were the most favoured.9 However, it was still possible for the Afghans
to subvert the information that these men proffered. The news-writers tended
to rely on a combination of verified information and speculation in the bazaar,
based on the frequent transit of caravans, horse traders, doctors, merchants
and itinerants. When Indian Army personnel and Europeans did travel in
Afghanistan as surveyors or envoys, often in disguise, in an attempt to protect
themselves, they took on the identity of these professions and gathered informa-
tion on routes, strength of defences and the allegiances of local populations.10
Few agree on how the Great Game should be defined, because of differing
genres of scholarship. According to G. J. Alder and many other diplomatic-
political historians, it was a power struggle in Asia between Britain and Russia
that began with British plans to resist the Franco-Russian invasion of India that
was expected to follow the Treaty of Tilsit in 1807. This followed a British desire
to thwart French attempts to wrest the subcontinent from the Company’s grasp,
which could be dated to either Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 or perhaps
as far back as the Carnatic Wars of the 1740s and 1760s.11 By the end of the nine-
teenth century, Britain was concerned with ensuring the compliance of Persia,
Afghanistan and China in the security scheme for India, requiring a sustained
and extensive diplomatic effort. The Ottoman Turks also played a part in British
calculations, since the Caliph was the nominal head of the Muslim world. Britain
was eager to keep Russia out of Constantinople, in part to prevent the Russians
exercising leverage over the millions of Muslims who lived under the British flag.
Britain’s attempts to keep other European powers’ influence at bay have been
the feature of a clutch of studies. For example, Christopher Wyatt and Rob
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Johnson focused their work on the strategic defence of India, which extended
into the wider region.12 By the end of the nineteenth century, the British had
a clear policy towards Afghanistan and Persia – namely, to encourage their
governments to reform and to develop their economies, so as to deprive Russia
of the pretext for intervention. Stability was important, but so was the main-
tenance of order through good governance. Maintaining closer relations with
these states, in order to keep out foreign influences, was extended to the Gulf
States in 1903. In 1907, the signing of the Anglo-Russian Convention formally
demarcated spheres of influence and a neutral zone. In the First World War,
this tacit Anglo-Russian cooperation was strengthened against a Turco-German
mission, which sought to win Persian and Afghans allies against the British. In
1915, the Turco-German mission, accompanied by Indian nationalists, became
the plotters at the centre of John Buchan’s novel Greenmantle, and it was Peter
Hopkirk who sought to examine the historical narrative behind the story.13 In
2004, Antony Wynn investigated Sir Percy Sykes and his role in the British
attempt to thwart the plot.14 The Afghan Conspiracy, when it reached fruition
in 1919 under Amanullah, came too late to alter the course of the war, and this
threat was contained. Milan Hauner has shown that the Germans made a second
attempt to subvert British rule in India in the Second World War, with equally
dismal results.15
According to historian Edward Ingram, we should not confuse international
relations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with a very specific British
policy of influence and information gathering, which he believes truly charac-
terises the Great Game. He wrote:
If the Great Game is treated as the struggle for control of Central Asia, Halford
Mackinder’s Heartland, whose possessor was to dominate the world, the game
is going on today. That is not how the subject should be treated . . . the phrase
describes what the British were doing, not the actions of Russians and Chinese.16
Ingram argued that the British wanted their empire ‘on the cheap’ and refused to
countenance large expenditures to secure their possessions, and, although they
had created a large Indian Army, they felt that their frontiers were insecure and
perhaps could not even be defended against a Russian invasion. Ingram summed
this up: ‘The Great Game was planned as an offensive by which the British might
escape the consequences of their military weakness’.17
Ingram’s views have been challenged. His contention that the British learnt
they could not defend India by military means because of the wars in Afghanistan
(1838–42) and the Crimea (1854–6) tends to generalise the findings of both
political and military figures too much. While certain army officers did feel that
India was difficult to defend, and there was a risk that the Indian population
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might rebel behind their frontier defences, the Company and Crown armies had
proven their ability to check Russian and Afghan forces in the two conflicts, even
though they could not hold either the Crimea or Afghanistan indefinitely. The
key problem was not military or naval power, but information. It was the desire
to acquire intelligence on topography, potential enemies, local leaders, troop
deployments and probably invasion routes. It required local interlocutors to
provide that information, and, thus, local elites to be compliant.
Others have sought to redefine the Great Game with a more inward-looking
emphasis. Ben Hopkins believes that the European conception of a Great Game
– a struggle for influence and power – distorted the actual power relationships
of the South and Central Asian region.18 Hopkins argued that the East India
Company felt most equipped to tackle the threat posed by the Russian Empire
across the steppe, because it mirrored its own annexation of South Asia, its force
structures and its security concerns. In support of this view, it is clear that most
disputes between the empires were resolved through diplomacy in the capitals,
rather than on the battlefield of Central Asia. However, the Company – later the
Raj – was less well-equipped to deal with the Asian states and potentates that
existed in the region between the empires, including Persia and Afghanistan.
Hopkins argues that the handful of European officers and explorers who
survived the diseases, hostile peoples and objective dangers in their travels
accrued for themselves the credit for playing the game, but this has obscured the
calculations that had to be made, in regards to local powers. To this, we might
add that Asian agents, who risked their lives in the service of empire, were also
overshadowed.19
Hopkins suggests that the British invented the Great Game as a means to
compensate for their lack of knowledge about internal threats and their inability
to cope with rumours. He states that the threat posed by the Sikh Kingdom of
Ranjit Singh in the Punjab was rendered less important, because the British
could more easily conceive of a threat posed by the Russians, whose ways and
means more closely mirrored their own. Crucially, they had no solution to the
whispering campaigns in the bazaars. Thus, he argued:
Control of rumour needed to be preventative. Efforts concentrated on combating
the initiation of rumour, rather than containing or refuting one already dissemi-
nated. Thus it was better for the Company to pre-empt a Russian advance on India
via Afghanistan by establishing its power there first . . . it did not require them to
either understand or attempt to manipulate the unknown, the exotic and uncivi-
lised other . . . The Chimera of the Russians was easier for British policy-makers to
grapple than the reality of rumour in the Indian bazaar.20
It is surely difficult to accept that the British invasion of Afghanistan in 1838
was driven by the desire to thwart rumours in the bazaar, chiefly because it
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assumes that the British were more concerned with unverified information
amongst Indians than with the pragmatic business of governing or the risks
of a Russian threat. Rather more persuasively, Hopkins argues that the British
invasion of Afghanistan was driven by a desire to contain the Sikh Punjab, citing
the size of the Sikh Khalsa (Army) as evidence of its potential to threaten India.
The Punjab was important, insofar as it lay astride the routes from Kabul into
India.21 Nevertheless, he plays down the Russian dimension of British planning,
in favour of a critique of the British ‘information order’.
For the evolution of that ‘information order’, or intelligence within India,
Richard Popplewell’s excellent study Intelligence and Imperial Defence dimin-
ishes the extent of internal surveillance and intelligence, noting: ‘A strong
aversion to the use of spies was one of the alien traditions of government which
the British brought to India’.22 Tracing numerous episodes of where the British
were badly informed, he shows that the British sought to avoid harassment of
the people, concluding: ‘What they could not afford was to alienate the Indian
public on a substantial scale. The maintenance of British rule in India depended
upon the acquiescence and participation of the ruled’.23 Popplewell’s purpose
was to show how intelligence developed in the early twentieth century and how
it acquired a global range by the time of the First World War. It is clear from
the archives that spy networks inside India and, indeed, the police were tasked
to detect subversion, albeit with varying degrees of success. Lawrence James
noted that it was in the interests of every colonial British soldier and civilian to
keep alert to possible intrigue and sedition: ‘In the broadest sense, every Briton
abroad in India was a spy, expected to use his ears and eyes and record what he
had seen and heard’.24
C. A. Bayly points out that British rule in India in the early nineteenth century
had been dependent on the acquisition of knowledge about India far beyond
topographical information for the creation of military maps or the assessments
of which passes could be traversed by Russian artillery. Information on lan-
guages, customs, loyalties, beliefs and ethnicity had a part to play in helping the
British to rule India. Collating the various peoples of India gave the British: ‘a
reassuring certainty that they were all identifiably distinct elements which could
be arranged legibly and clearly in the “living museum of mankind” ’.25 The obses-
sion with recording and collating can be traced back to the scientific traditions of
the eighteenth century, but the Victorians faced the practical problem of how to
govern a vast Empire of great diversity. As an example of how information made
government possible, Bayly observes systemisation in the ordering of knowledge
in anthropology, although it has to be said that the process emerged over time
and in a piecemeal fashion.26 There was no one central agency directing the
acquisition of intelligence for the purposes of British rule. However, it is perhaps
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significant that 468 photographs recording the various ethnic groups of the
subcontinent in The People of India, which was begun after the mutiny in 1858,
was kept in the Political and Secret Department of the Government of India
– the repository of much intelligence material. Moreover, there were attempts
to discern whether caste or ethnic identity had been a determinant of ‘loyalty’
during the uprising. The concept was developed into identification of ‘martial
races’ and ‘inherent lawlessness’ in the late nineteenth century and became an
important tool in the administration of the North-West Frontier Province.27
It is noticeable that commerce was also closely interlinked with intelligence
assessments, both from its logistical potential and as a means to sustain the area
administratively.
At the end of British rule in India in 1947, Narendra Singh Sarila argues that
the British continued to regard the subcontinent as the means with which to
maintain its influence in the world against the Soviet Union.28 While the con-
temporary orthodoxy was that Britain was unable to contain the waves of com-
munal and political unrest that gave rise to Independence and Partition – the
very elements the British had feared for so long – Sarila argues, in The Shadow
of the Great Game, that Britain was prepared to countenance Partition as the
means to build better relations with Muslim Pakistan and therefore the wider
Muslim world, on which its strategic influence and oil supplies depended.29 It
was understandable that Sarila should find an answer to the question of the
origins of Partition and its bloody consequences in international affairs, but
the book tended to downplay Britain’s other strategic motives, particularly its
desire to preserve what possessions it had left that were commercially or politi-
cally viable (such as Malaya and East Africa) and to establish close and enduring
relations with the new nations (including the sharing of intelligence). Above all,
Britain sought to maintain its influence, with some British officers staying on to
mentor new national armed forces and intelligence services, without antagonis-
ing the local populations. The tragedy is that South Asian groups had sufficient
agency to carry out the atrocities of Partition, even without the British generat-
ing the crisis.
GREAT GAME INTELLIGENCE AND DIPLOMACY

Malcolm Yapp argued that the British believed in an existential Russian threat
to India, but they did not think that the Russians could spark an uprising that
would cast the British into the sea: ‘Britons did not believe that an Indian move-
ment could muster sufficient unity for that purpose or that such a movement
could prevail against the military power which Britain could bring to bear
against it’.30 Such a view appeared to downplay the impact of the Indian Mutiny
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on British rule in India and would suggest that the British must have had other
motives when taking the extreme measures of invading Afghanistan, which, in
the official archives, was justified as the means with which to prevent the estab-
lishment of Russian influence adjacent to India.
Hopkins, in common with many other authors, draws attention to intelligence
failure as the means to understand the British error of invading Afghanistan,
blaming this on the erroneous way in which the British conceived of South and
Central Asia. He illustrates how, exaggerating the threat of Russian interference,
sometimes wittingly by ambitious officers who collated news-writers’ reports,
the British blundered into Kabul in 1839. Hopkins notes: ‘By failing to invest
in an intelligence network, the [East India] Company placed an enormous
amount of power into the hands of a few men’.31 These men were driven by a
new zeal, based on utilitarian and evangelical ideals, to create a bureaucratised,
professional and, above all, civilised state, based on the principles of free trade.
Afghanistan, like China and Persia, was to be ‘opened up’ to Western goods and
systems. Corrupt and restrictive regimes were to be swept away. Hopkins argues
that, while the archives of the Company articulated a Russian threat and a Great
Game, it was this undercurrent of knowledge, opportunism and morality that
was really driving change.32
Trade was certainly a consideration for the British diplomatic mission to
Kabul in the early 1830s, but there is no evidence that proves trade was the
priority in the invasion of Afghanistan in 1838 or, indeed, in 1879. The news-
writers were not collecting commercial information. Anxiety about the arrival
of a Russian envoy was not about the penetration of Russian goods. Indeed,
the Russians had serious difficulties with trade in Central Asia, which Hopkins
acknowledged.33 Intelligence gathered on the Afghans and the region in this
period was military in nature, focusing on routes (and the practicality of roads
for artillery and cavalry), fortresses, tribal groups and their military potential,
defiles and passes. Nevertheless, Hopkins insisted that it was the domestic fear
of revolt in India that drove the Great Game policies: ‘the real nightmare’, he
argued, ‘was the loss of British prestige which would encourage internal dissent
within India’.34
Yapp had also suggested that the role of prestige in British imperial thinking
was important and made manifest in the Great Game. Deploying only minimal
military forces and investing heavily in the recruitment of local troops carried
an inherent vulnerability in maintaining internal security and in deterring
rival external powers. The solution was to convey the impression of strength,
although this was underpinned by self-confidence in the imperial and civilising
mission amongst many in the British administration.
In the 1960s and 1970s, studies of the Great Game were almost entirely
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focused on the diplomatic sphere. A. P. Thornton examined the diplomacy

of British policy in Persia and the question of Afghanistan (1954; 1956),
Alastair Lamb drew attention to the India–China policies towards Central Asia
(1960), while Gerald Alder wrote an excellent account of the settlement of the
northern borders of Afghanistan in the late nineteenth century.35 Relations
between London and St Petersburg were dominant in these studies. In 1977,
David Gillard gave a detailed diplomatic history of Anglo-Russian rivalry in
The Struggle for Asia, as did Rose Louise Greaves with her study on Persia.36
Lars-Erik Nyman examined Russian relations over Chinese Central Asia, and
Premen Addy assessed Tibet in this context.37 Similarly, Edward Ingram devoted
much work to the origins of the Great Game, with the emphasis again on the
diplomacy and power politics of Russia and Great Britain.38 There seemed to
be general agreement that British policy favoured the creation of buffers, which
changed to a policy of creating delimited borders in the later nineteenth century.
This was, according to Ingram, an attempt to coerce Persians and Afghans to
defend India’s outer perimeter on their behalf, but the atmosphere in which
these policies were created was one of Russophobia.39
GREAT GAME AGENTS

The ‘players’ of the Great Game were, however, also beginning to emerge. In
1975, Michael Edwards wrote a short book, Playing the Great Game, to explore
some of the anecdotes of covert intelligence-gathering. John Keay, in Where
Men and Mountains Meet (1975), drew attention to William Moorcroft and
other explorers, using evidence from the Royal Geographical Society Archives
and the India Office records to highlight their geographical achievements, but
also the imperatives of the Great Game. In The Gilgit Game (1977), he was more
concerned to offer a critique of the policymakers in an excellent reappraisal of the
northern Indian border area in the 1890s. Moorcroft was also the subject of study
for Gerry Alder.40 In the United States, Derek Waller wrote a fascinating study on
the Pundits – Asian personnel – who, disguised, were sent to gather topographi-
cal and military information in Afghanistan and Central Asia, and he also made
extensive use of archival sources. George Pottinger highlighted the work of his
namesake, Eldred, in Afghanistan in the 1830s (1983), while Gerald Morgan
wrote a detailed biography of Ney Elias (1971) – the explorer and government
agent who surveyed the Pamirs, prior to Russian annexation.41 Sir Francis
Younghusband – the explorer and government agent who went on to lead a mili-
tary expedition into Tibet in 1904, in order to deny it to Russian influence – was
the subject of various biographies by George Seaver, Anthony Verrier and Patrick
French, while agent Frederick Bailey was covered by Arthur Swinson (1971).42
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The subject was then popularised by the verve of Peter Hopkirk’s narrative
in The Great Game in 1990.43 Hopkirk gave a broad, if incomplete, survey of the
British agents and the context in which they operated, making the efforts of indi-
vidual ‘agents’ the main focus of his study. Hopkirk’s prose buzzed with energy,
and, with the exception of the Second Afghan War (1878–81), it traced the
development of the intense rivalry between the British and the Russians to 1907.
The book was a successful historical study in its own right, but it also managed
to capture the imagination by adopting the style of a John Buchan novel at the
same time – a formula he repeated in subsequent studies.44 Jan Morris called
Hopkirk ‘the Laureate of the Great Game’. Karl Meyer and Shareen Brysac made
another attempt to give a broad overview of the Great Game and its agents in
The Tournament of Shadows in 1999. Taking their narrative further into the
twentieth century, the book looked for an American dimension, and their style
tried to emulate the pace and vividness of the original Hopkirk. After Hopkirk,
the subject was bound to be exploited further, and a number of related or more
detailed scholarly endeavours were to follow. In a synoptic study, Rob Johnson,
making extensive use of the archives, tried to highlight the role of Asian person-
nel and to illustrate how the machinery of intelligence in India began to evolve
alongside the agencies in London and across the Empire.45
The most recent manifestations are Stephen Wade’s Spies in the Empire
(2007), which borrowed heavily on the secondary literature, and John Ure’s
Shooting Leave (2009) and Jules Stewart’s Spying for the Raj (2006), which were
both limited to descriptions of individuals – European and Asian – and their
expeditions.46
A useful survey of personalities and their impact appeared in Hugh Leach’s
history of the Royal Central Asian Society (RCAS), Strolling About on the Roof
of the World (2003).47 Leach was able to show that those directly connected with
the Great Game, both in terms of intelligence and diplomacy, were the architects
of a society that was eager to exploit open-source information about the region.
It was a group founded in 1901, in order to give ‘consideration of Central Asian
questions from their political as well as from their geographical, commercial
or scientific aspect’, the latter of which had been the emphasis of the existing
Royal Geographical Society. Amongst the earliest adherents were Sir Francis
Younghusband, Colonel Mark Sever Bell – an officer of the Military Intelligence
branch in India – and Colonel Holdich – the military surveyor who had worked
in Afghanistan in the 1880s. The RCAS went on to attract a variety of soldiers,
diplomats, Indian administrators and writers.
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KIM AND THE SOVIETS

In Kim, Rudyard Kipling’s colourful novel of the Raj, the fictional characters
articulated an anxiety that existed in the real world – namely, that agents of
rival empires would seek to rouse the frontier peoples of India and Afghanistan
in a revolt against the British authorities.48 Kipling’s characters are sent to keep
watch on the passes and confront the foreign surveyor-emissaries, ending with a
dramatic struggle in the mountains. The thwarting of plots by Asian rulers and
rival empires using resourceful and plucky agents was Kipling’s melodramatic
conception of the Great Game. While only a novel, it was striking that Kipling
alluded to real agents who were despatched, not only along the frontier, but also
into Central Asia to report on Russian troop movements.49
Gerald Morgan believed that Kim ‘owed practically everything to Kipling’s
imagination’, and the only thing that was not an invention was his use of the
name ‘The Great Game’.50 Morgan argued there was no secret world of spies
and counter-espionage endemic throughout northern India and central Asia.
He tried to show how little that the British institutions in reality matched
the mythical inventions of Kim, and he argued that even the Indian Survey
Department, employing a number of Asian agents with code names, were not
employed on intelligence work, for their tasks were strictly limited to gather-
ing information on topography. Morgan played down the importance of the
Intelligence Department, both in India and Britain, maintaining that their tasks
were only really those of ‘collating information’. The Political Service, formed
in 1820, was little more than the diplomatic corps designed to send agents to
neighbouring states; their use of disguise, Morgan believed, fooled no one. These
agents rarely collected information on the Russians and had no powers to make
treaties. Their ‘special duty’ was carried out quite openly, with letters of intro-
duction for the rulers they visited, and British officers never entered Russian
territory without permission. Morgan even questioned the success of the intel-
ligence officers, doubting if they achieved ‘anything’, beyond some geographical
knowledge.51
Others are not convinced that Kipling’s work is entirely an invention.52
If the fictional struggle was between the Russians, who sought to encourage
Afghans and frontier tribesmen to fall upon the British, and the loyal Indians
and British agents who aimed to thwart them by observation and survey work,
then the essence of Kipling’s story is not an exaggeration. Morgan was prepared
to acknowledge the existence of ‘news-writers’ – the name given to local spies
hired by British Political officers when they were en poste in Teheran, Kabul
and Kandahar. He argued that they ‘rarely contributed much of importance’
and while Morgan admitted that, on at least one occasion, Asian agents were
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despatched to spy on the Russian army, he promptly dismissed this as an ad hoc

and isolated example.53
Morgan’s intention was to demolish the fanciful claims of the Soviet historian
N. A. Khalfin, who believed that the British intelligence network was highly
organised and aimed ultimately at ejecting Russia from Central Asia.54 Khalfin
believed, like many Russian historians, that British agents had swarmed across
Russian Central Asia ‘for the purposes of reconnaissance and propaganda’.55 The
Russian scholar had apparently misunderstood the role of the ‘Pundits’ – Asian
surveyors who moved across Central Asia and Tibet in disguise. He believed that
they had been specifically trained in intelligence work at the ‘Captain Dalgetty
School’. Morgan points out that the reference to a special school for spies came
from a memoir by Captain Rollo Burslem.56 This officer had met a traveller who
imparted information about Khokand, but he described him as a member of the
‘Captain Dalgetty School’. This was not, Morgan explained, a centre for training
spies at all, but a way of describing a mercenary – Dalgetty was a fictional soldier
of fortune of the English Civil War created by Sir Walter Scott.
Khalfin’s work revealed that the Russians had long-feared the British annexa-
tion of Central Asia. Count Ignatiev led a large trade mission to Khiva in 1858
to forestall British designs. Unable to make any headway, he had moved on to
Bokhara, only to learn that five British agents had recently visited the city. He
also seems to have accepted the rumour that British officers were training the
army of Khokand. The Russian anxiety about the British training Central Asian
troops – a recurrent theme in the nineteenth century – was, Morgan argued,
a ‘baseless rumour’.57 According to Morgan, gunrunning was ruled out by the
British authorities, too.
The Soviets took a keen interest in the British experiences in Afghanistan.
Steinberg argued that, other than a few hot-headed generals, there had been
no Russian plans for the invasion of India and that the British had used the
myth of a threat to justify military expansionism or to denigrate Russia.58 M. A.
Babakhdzhayev wrote on the First and Second Anglo-Afghan Wars using the
standard Marxist–Leninist theoretical frameworks, as did Khalfin.59 The worst
of the genre was E. Nukhovich’s work on Afghan foreign policy in 1962, which
suggested, amidst theoretic Leninist justifications, that the Afghan state was
historically an ‘active fighter for peace against colonialism and imperialism’,
without bothering to seek any empirical evidence. Its only redeeming feature
was to recognise the Afghan strategy of remaining neutral towards neighbouring
empires and doing what it could to preserve its independence and sovereignty.60
Understandably, a number of Soviet studies dealt with the history of Afghan–
Soviet relations, but many also attempted to explain Afghanistan’s economic
backwardness and the incidence of peasant uprisings.61 The context of these
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evaluations was to justify the Soviet military intervention and the country’s
economic ‘improvement’ in contrast to the neglect or aggression of the British
Empire. Specific studies of intelligence, other than Khalfin’s, nevertheless failed
to appear. Yet, Khalfin’s allegations – which were reinforced later by Mitrokhin
– namely, that British agents had sought to undermine Russian rule in Central
Asia, had some truth.62 British officers had trained the Persian Army in the
1810s, and there was a British gunrunning effort to support Imam Shamyl in his
resistance to the Russian annexation of the Caucasus in 1836.63 Britain enlisted
Afghan’s Central Asian agents to augment its news-writer networks to keep
watch on Transcaspia and Turkestan. Yet, the purpose of intelligence work was
not, as Khalfin suspected, covert operations and sedition against the Russians,
but the desire to secure India and, by extension, maintain its influence over
Persia and Afghanistan.64
THE GREAT GAME, IMPERIAL DEFENCE AND FUTURE RESEARCH

There are strengths in current studies of the Great Game. The shifting relation-
ship between London and St Petersburg and the global context of Anglo-Russian
relations is now more thoroughly understood. Histories of European explora-
tion have also highlighted the role of the British and Asian surveyors and the
missions of some of the more colourful characters who travelled across Central
Asia have been examined in-depth.65 Curiously, for years, the agents and explor-
ers were seen as figures concerned only with mapping and topography, without
acknowledging that the purpose of this work fitted into the wider needs of
intelligence-gathering. Christopher Wyatt places the strategic defence of India
back at the heart of the subject, showing that the diplomatic and military poli-
cies on Afghanistan between 1903 and 1915 were much debated.66 The defence
of India necessitated the acquisition of better intelligence. In an informative
article, Rob Johnson noted that, in the absence of a general staff, the Intelligence
Branch in India and the Intelligence Division in London supplied data and
plans from the 1870s onwards and assisted in the establishment of a policy that
would endure until the end of British rule in India – that is, to hold the strategic
passes and routes on the frontier, to create a reserve expeditionary force and to
secure allegiances of those on the peripheries of formal rule through a variety of
means.67 Intelligence was critical to this policymaking, but, also, increasingly,
as the means to nip seditious movements in the bud and to prevent widespread
unrest within India. Thus, the Great Game was a facet of the construction of
what Martin Thomas describes as an ‘intelligence state’ – an important aid to
policy formation that was ‘pivotal to the survival of colonial states’.68
The future direction of research in the field is uncertain, but it seems likely
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that debates over the rise of China, the contest for hydrocarbon resources and
the gestation of internationalist Jihadism in the region will provoke interest
in historical intelligence work.69 Indeed, the conflict in Afghanistan after 2001
generated studies on ‘human terrain’ analysis amongst military forces, which
had echoes of the intelligence pioneers of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless,
specific academic studies of the Great Game still have much scope for develop-
ment, particularly if scholars have command of Russian, French and either Farsi
or Dari. Fragmentary Persian and Afghan diplomatic material needs collation
and analysis, in order to complete this aspect of the strategic decision-making
and reactions to the encounters with Europeans. There is still much that can
be done on the relations between the Islamic and Western authorities in the
region, as well as their construction and cultures of knowledge in the domain of
strategy and foreign relations. Civil military relations in the context of the Great
Game are still underdeveloped, and, while individuals have been such a sig-
nificant part of the historiography, the systems and processes that they created
and the bureaucratisation of intelligence that they served are less well under-
stood. Detailed archival work of the records held in the Khyber Pakhtunkwa
at Peshawar, the monthly reports held in the Proceedings of the Government of
India in the India Office Records and several large sections of similar files in the
National Archives in Delhi are also still needed. Thus, this is an area with a great
deal of potential for future scholars.
Notes
1 Sir John Malcolm, Minutes, 4 July 1830, Bengal Secret Consulations 358, no. 3, 20
August 1830; Malcolm Yapp, ‘British Perceptions of the Russian Threat to India’,
Modern Asian Studies, 21(4), 1987, p. 650.
2 Sir Olaf Caroe, Wells of Power: The Oilfields of Southwestern Asia: A Regional and
Global Study (London: Macmillan, 1951); Peter John Brobst, The Future of the Great
Game: Sir Olaf Caroe, India’s Independence and the Defense of Asia (Akron, OH:
University of Akron Press, 2005). The most prominent studies on the beginning of
the Cold War in the region include: Julian Lewis, Changing Direction: British Military
Planning for Post-War Strategic Defence, 1942–47, 2nd edn (London: Frank Cass,
2003); Robert MacMahon, Cold War on the Periphery: India, Pakistan and the United
States (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1994); Martin A. Wainwright,
Inheritance of Empire: Britain, India and the Balance of Power in Asia, 1838–1955
(Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994); R. J. Aldrich (ed.), British Intelligence, Strategy and
the Cold War, 1945–51 (London: Routledge, 1992). The advent of the Soviet inva-
sion of Afghanistan produced numerous studies of the conflict, but included, from a
geostrategic perspective, Rosanne Klass (ed.), Afghanistan: The Great Game Revisited
(New York, NY: Freedom House, 1987).
3 Malcolm Yapp, ‘The Legend of the Great Game’, Proceedings of the British Academy,
111, 2000, pp. 179–98.
MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd 197 21/02/2013 08:24

4 Malcolm Yapp, Strategies of British India: Britain, Iran and Afghanistan, 1798–1850
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980).
5 W. H. Smith [Secretary of State for War] to Salisbury, 9 November 1885; Smith to
Salisbury, 18 November 1885; Salisbury to Smith, 19 November 1885. WO 110/9,
National Archives, Kew, UK.
6 H. W. C. Davis, ‘The Great Game in Asia’, Proceedings of the British Academy, p. 10;
Ben Hopkins, The Making of Modern Afghanistan (Basingstoke and New York,
NY: Palgrave, 2008), p. 14; George Pottinger, The Afghan Connection (Edinburgh:
Scottish Academic Press, 1983), p. 71.
7 Robert Johnson, Spying for Empire: The Great Game in Central and South Asia,
1757–1947 (London: Greenhill, 2006), pp. 40, 49.
8 L. P. Morris, ‘British Secret Service Activity in Khorassan’, Historical Journal, 27,
1984, pp. 657–75.
9 Johnson, Spying for Empire, pp. 71–2. On the Seth family and the banking sector,
see, for example, Mark Thornhill, The Personal Adventures and Experiences of a
Magistrate during the Rise, Progress and Suppression of the Indian Mutiny (London:
John Murray, 1884), pp. 10, 20, 68, 71.
10 See, for example, Pottinger, The Afghan Connection, pp. 25–7. See, also, John Keay,
The Gilgit Game (London: John Murray, 1979), p. 116.
11 Edward Ingram, ‘Great Britain’s Great Game: An Introduction’, The International
History Review, 2(2), April 1980, p. 161.
12 Christopher Wyatt, Afghanistan and the Defence of Empire: Diplomacy and Strategy
During the Great Game (London and New York, NY: I. B. Tauris, 2011); Johnson,
Spying for Empire.
13 Peter Hopkirk, On Secret Service East of Constantinople (London: John Murray,
1994).
14 Antony Wynn, Persia in the Great Game: Sir Percy Sykes – Explorer, Consul, Soldier,
Spy (London: John Murray, 2004).
15 Milan Hauner, ‘One Man Against the Empire: The Faqir of Ipi and the British in
Central Asia on the Eve of the Second World War’, Journal of Contemporary History,
16, 1981, pp. 183–212.
16 Ingram, ‘Great Britain’s Great Game’, p. 160.
17 Ingram, ‘Great Britain’s Great Game’, p. 160.
18 Hopkins, The Making of Modern Afghanistan, pp. 34–5.
19 Robert Johnson, Spying for Empire: The Great Game in Central and South Asia,
1757–1947 (London: Greenhill, 2006).
20 Hopkins, Afghanistan, p. 42.
21 Douglas Peers, Between Mars and Mammon: Colonial Armies and the Garrison State
in Early Nineteenth Century India (London: I. B. Tauris, 1995), p. 231.
22 Richard J. Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defence: British Intelligence and the
Defence of the Indian Empire, 1904–1924 (London: Frank Cass, 1995), p. 10.
23 Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defence, pp. 28–9.
24 Lawrence James, Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India (London: Little,
Brown, 1997), p. 145.
25 C. A. Bayly, Raj: India and the British, 1600–1947 (London: Abbeville Press, 1990),
p. 254.
26 Bayly, Raj, p. 257.
MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd 198 21/02/2013 08:24

27 D. Arnold, Police Power and Colonial Rule, Madras, 1859–1947 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1986), p. 138.
28 Narendra Singh Sarila, The Shadow of the Great Game: The Untold Story of India’s
Partition (London: Constable, 2005).
29 For a survey of the scholarship on this issue, see John Darwin, Britain and
Decolonisation: The Retreat from Empire in the Post-Cold War World (London:
Macmillan, 1988) and Wm. Roger Louis and Ronald Robinson, ‘The Imperialism of
Decolonisation’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 22(3), 1994, pp.
462–511.
30 Malcolm Yapp, ‘The Legend of the Great Game’, Proceedings of the British Academy,
111, 2000, p. 179.
35 A. P. Thornton, ‘British Policy in Persia, 1858–1890’, English Historical Review, 69,
1954, pp. 55–71; Alastair Lamb, British and Chinese Central Asia (London: Routledge,
1960); Gerald Alder, British India’s Northern Frontier (London: Longmans, 1963).
36 David Gillard, The Struggle for Asia (London: Methuen, 1977). See, also, David
Gillard, ‘Salisbury and the Indian Defence Problem 1885–1902’, K. Bourne and
D. C. Watt (eds), Studies in International History (London: Longmans, 1967); Rose
Louise Greaves, Persia and the Defence of India 1884–1892 (London: Athlone, 1959).
See, also, J. D. Hargreaves, ‘Entente Manquee: Anglo Russian Relations 1895–6’,
Cambridge Historical Journal, 1(65), 1953, pp. 65–92.
37 Lars-Erik Nyman, Great Britain and Chinese, Russian and Japanese Interests in
Sinkiang, 1918–34 (Malmo: Esselte Studium, 1977); Premen Addy, Tibet on the
Imperial Chessboard (Calcutta: Academic Publishers, 1984). See, also, J. Dobbs, A
History of the Discovery and Exploration of Chinese Turkestan (The Hague: Mouton,
1963).
38 Edward Ingram, The Beginning of the Great Game in Asia, 1828–34 (Oxford and New
York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1979).
39 Edward Ingram, ‘The Rules of the Game: A Commentary on the Defence of British
India, 1789–1829’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 3 1975, pp.
257–9; G. J. Alder, ‘Britain and the Defence of India: The Origins of the Problem,
1789–1815’, Journal of Asian History, 6, 1972, pp. 14–41; J. H. Gleason, The Genesis of
Russophobia in Britain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950). See, also,
Beryl Williams, ‘The Strategic Background to the Anglo Russian Entente of August
1907’, History Journal, IX(3), 1966, pp. 360–73.
40 G. Alder, Beyond Bokhara. The Life of William Moorcroft, Asian Explorer and Pioneer
Veterinary Surgeon, 1767–1825 (London: Century, 1985).
41 George Pottinger, The Afghan Connection (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press,
1983); Gerald Morgan, Ney Elias (London: Allen & Unwin, 1971).
42 George Seaver, Sir Francis Younghusband: Explorer and Mystic (London: John
Murray, 1952); Anthony Verrier, Francis Younghusband and the Great Game
(London: Jonathan Cape, 1991); Patrick French, Younghusband: The Last Great
Imperial Adventurer (London: HarperCollins, 1994); A. Swinson, Beyond the
Frontiers: The Biography of Colonel F. M. Bailey (London: Hutchinson, 1971).
MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd 199 21/02/2013 08:24

43 Peter Hopkirk, The Great Game (London: John Murray, 1990).

44 See, also, Peter Hopkirk, Setting the East Ablaze: On Secret Service in Bolshevik Asia
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).
45 Robert Johnson, Spying for Empire.
46 Stephen Wade, Spies in the Empire: Victorian Military Intelligence (London: Anthem,
2007); John Ure, Shooting Leave (London: Constable, 2009); Jules Stewart, Spying for
the Raj (Thrupp: Sutton, 2006).
47 Hugh Leach, with Susan Maria Farrington, Strolling About on the Roof of the World
(London and New York, NY: Routledge Curzon, 2003).
48 Rudyard Kipling, Kim (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 222.
49 HD 2/1, p. 34, National Archives, London.
50 Gerald Morgan, ‘Myth and Reality in the Great Game’, Asian Affairs, 60, 1973, p. 55.
51 Morgan, ‘Myth and Reality’, pp. 57, 58–9.
52 Peter Hopkirk, The Quest for Kim (London: John Murray, 1996), pp. 15, 33.
53 Morgan, ‘Myth and Reality’, p. 59.
54 N. A. Khalfin, Politika Rossii v Sredney Azii, 1857–1868 (Moscow: Central Asian
Research Centre, 1960; translated by Hubert John Filmer Evans, Central Asian
Research Center, University of Michigan, 1964).
55 N. P. Vernon, ‘Soviet Historians on the Russian Menace to India in the Second
Half of the Nineteenth Century’, Indian History Congress (Calcutta: Indian History
Congress, 1976); see, by contrast, Peter Morris, ‘Russian Expansion into Central Asia’,
Peter Morris (ed.), Africa, America and Central Asia: Formal and Informal Empire in
the Nineteenth Century (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1984); Firuz Kazemzadeh,
Russia and Britain in Persia, 1864–1914 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1968).
56 Captain Rollo Burslem, A Peep into Toorkisthan (London: Pelham Richardson,
1846).
57 Morgan, ‘Myth and Reality’, p. 64.
58 E. L. Steinberg, ‘Angliiskikaia Versiia o “Russkoi Ugroze” Indii v XIX–XX v.v.’ (The
English version of the ‘Russian Threat’ to India), Istoricheskie Zapiski, 33, 1950, pp.
47–66. This view was shared by some Indian nationalists: see K. Menan, The Russian
Bogey and British Aggression (Calcutta: Eastern Trading Co., 1957).
59 M. A. Babakhdzhayev, Bor’ba Afganistana za Nyezavisimost (1838–42) (Afghanistan’s
War for Independence) (Moscow: Oriental Literature Press, 1960); see, also, Nikolai
Khalfin, Proval Britanskoy Agressii v Afganistanye (19 v. Nachalo 20 v.) (The Downfall
of British Aggression in Afghanistan) (Moscow: Socio-Economic Literature Press,
1959).
60 E. Nukhovich, Vnyeshnaya Politika Afganistana (Afghan Foreign Policy) (Moscow:
Institute of International Relations Press, 1962).
61 Soviet Union’s Academy of Sciences, Afghanistan: Past and Present (Moscow: Social
Sciences Today Press, 1981).
62 Morgan, ‘Myth and Reality’, p. 59; Khalfin, Politika Rossii (Russian Policy in Central
Asia, 1857–1868) (London: Central Asian Research Centre, 1964); Leonid Mitrokhin,
Failure of Three Missions: British Efforts to Overthrow Soviet Government in Central
Asia (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1987).
63 Hopkirk, Great Game, pp. 153–62; Moshe Gammer, Muslim Resistance to the Tsar:
Shamil and the Conquest of Chechnia and Daghestan (London: Routledge, 1994).
MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd 200 21/02/2013 08:24

64 The Iranian perspective can be found in M. Mahmud, Tarikhe Ravabete Siyasiye Iran
ba Englis dar Qarne Nuzdahome Miladi (The History of Anglo Persian Diplomatic
Relations in the Nineteenth Century); Teheran, pp. 1328–9, 1957–62.
65 John Keay, Where Men and Mountains Meet (Oxford and Karachi: Oxford University
Press, 1977); Peter Hopkirk, Trespassers on the Roof of the World: The Race for Lhasa
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982).
66 Christopher Wyatt, Afghanistan and the Defence of Empire: Diplomacy and Strategy
During the Great Game (London and New York, NY: I. B. Tauris, 2011).
67 R. A. Johnson, ‘“Russians at the Gates of India”? Planning and the Defence of India,
1885–1900’, Journal of Military History, 67, July 2003, pp. 697–744.
68 Martin Thomas, Empires of Intelligence: Security Services and Colonial Disorder After
1914 (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2008), p. 2.
69 Lutz Klevemann, The New Great Game: Blood and Oil in Central Asia (New York, NY:
Atlantic Books, 2004); Dilip Hiro, Inside Central Asia (London: Gerald Duckworth,
2009); Rob Johnson, Oil, Islam and Conflict: Central Asia Since 1945 (London and
New York, NY: Reaktion, 2007); C. Dueck, ‘New Perspectives on American Grand
Strategy’, International Security, 28(4), 2004, pp. 197–216; R. Menon, ‘The Strategic
Convergence between Russia and China’, Survival, 39(2), 1997, pp. 101–25; S. G.
Brooks and C. W. William, ‘American Primacy in Perspective’, Foreign Affairs, 81(4),
2002, pp. 20–33.
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Chapter 10
NO CLOAKS, NO DAGGERS: THE

HISTORIOGRAPHY OF BRITISH MILITARY
INTELLIGENCE
Jim Beach
The history of military intelligence has now become almost inextricably bound
up with that of intelligence generally. This is perhaps inevitable. As Sir Kenneth
Strong, Eisenhower’s wartime intelligence chief, put it:
Intelligence is indivisible. No area of activity – politics, economics, military affairs,
science and technology – can be treated as a subject apart and treated in isolation.1
Although he was making a point about the necessity of centralised intelligence

management, he captures the field’s inherent complexity and interdependence.
In recent decades, the submergence of military intelligence can also be attributed
to the higher profile of ‘civilian’ intelligence, especially of collection agencies,
within Western popular culture. In Britain, the public automatically associate
the MI prefix with the Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Intelligence Service
(MI6), even though both organisations have long ceased to be closely connected
to the military. But it is not for this chapter to analyse British intelligence history
as a whole. Instead, this chapter will attempt to disentangle the historiography of
British military intelligence from the whole, and, in so doing, will try to suggest
why it now has a low profile. The chapter will also offer a survey of the current
literature, in the hope that this may be helpful to new scholars of the subject.
This body of work has been largely focused on the pre-1945 period, so that date
has been adopted as a de facto cut-off point.2 The chapter draws the overall con-
clusion that, in order to get ‘better’, studies of British military intelligence will
probably need to get ‘duller’.
The first challenge facing the academic historian of military intelligence is to
define the parameters of the subject. The second challenge is to position their
activity in relation to the broader fields of military history and intelligence
studies.3 Definitional debates can often generate more heat than light, but, in this
case, it is important to try to peg out what falls inside military intelligence and
what does not. Because it was agreed, presumably by consensus, as far back as
1981, NATO’s definition of intelligence is a useful starting point:
202
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No Cloaks, No Daggers 203
intelligence / renseignement | Int. INTEL | The product resulting from the process-
ing of information concerning foreign nations, hostile or potentially hostile forces
or elements, or areas of actual or potential operations. The term is also applied to
the activity which results in the product and to the organizations engaged in such
activity.4
Laid down at a time when that organisation had a very clear military purpose
in defending against an external Soviet threat, the potential targets are defined
by their intent, and there is an overt link to operational activity. Taking this as a
primary focus also allows the filtering out of the cognate areas of security intel-
ligence, counter-intelligence, deception and special operations. This conceptu-
alisation is helpful in providing a general context, but it does not discriminate
between military intelligence and broader ‘civilian’ intelligence.
Delineating military intelligence by its producer is the obvious solution.
Intelligence produced by people in military uniforms may be consumed mainly
by those who also wear them, but the difficulty is that this relationship is not
an exclusive one. What the military collect and analyse may be of interest to
many others. Things may be further confused if a country’s wider intelligence
services are subordinated to their military command structures. The alternative
would, therefore, seem to lie in defining military intelligence by its consumers,
with all intelligence that might be used by those in uniform being labelled as
military intelligence. This is better, but is still problematic, as the net could then
be thrown so widely, as to become meaningless. Therefore, the solution would
seem to lie in accepting, first, that its boundaries are always going to be blurred
and, second, that military intelligence is not an absolute, but is conditional upon
the wider military context. In simple terms, what the people in uniform want or
need will vary continually and may include material that, at other times, would
be given the more civilianised labels of ‘political’, ‘technical’ or ‘economic’.
To take an historical example, intelligence on the political stance of the Vichy
French regime and its influence upon the behaviour of their forces would have
been of considerable significance during the preparations for Operation Torch
– the Allied invasion of North Africa in November 1942. But eighteen months
later, within the context of the invasion of Normandy, it would have been of
marginal significance at best, because of the very different geographical, military
and political circumstances of that operation. These boundaries of military intel-
ligence are perhaps more porous at the top than at the bottom. At the higher
levels of strategy, the use of the military as an instrument should be integrated
closely with other aspects of a state’s power, so there will be greater overlapping
of intelligence interests. Moving down to the operational and tactical levels, mili-
tary organisations and their internal intelligence providers theoretically have
more independence to conduct their business. This dichotomy also contributes
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to the overshadowing of military intelligence, with intelligence studies as a

discipline defaulting naturally towards the study of the higher levels, where the
military become merely part of the general mix, rather than a discrete entity.5
But this does not preclude serious historical examination of military intelligence
matters at these higher levels. For example, Peter Jackson’s excellent book on
French intelligence in the 1930s began as a DPhil thesis with a military title.6
The rest of this chapter explores the historiography of British military intel-
ligence, by primarily examining the body of scholarly literature that currently
exists. It also concentrates on the ‘modern’ period of the nineteenth and twenti-
eth centuries, as this is the point at which a formalised intelligence function can
be discerned within military organisations.7 After pausing to examine the rela-
tionship between intelligence and military history, the chapter examines general
surveys of military intelligence history. It then explores the specific histories
of British military intelligence, using the four Ps – people, policy, process and
product – as a checklist to understand their relative focus and merits.
INTELLIGENCE AND MILITARY HISTORY

Intelligence was not completely missing from the history of warfare before
Christopher Andrew and others proclaimed its significance in the 1980s.8 For
example, the index of Cruttwell’s History of the Great War shows that half a
century earlier, one former intelligence analyst had managed to make reference
to intelligence and/or espionage over thirty times within 600 pages.9 To be fair,
he mostly referred to general perceptions, rather than any meaningful discussion
of intelligence systems, methods or reporting, but the scale and existence is still
noticeable.10 Taking another snapshot, this time from the 1970s, Brian Bond’s
France and Belgium, 1939–1940 contained a detailed discussion of Allied intel-
ligence and military decision-making, with regard to the Mechelen Incident.11
But, again, his writing did not stray too far into judgements about the workings
of the intelligence machinery. Instead, it focused on how commanders used the
picture that they had been given; his key intelligence point being that:
It is of course only too easy after a military disaster . . . to select those scattered
items of intelligence which, if correctly pieced together in good time, would have
enabled the defender to parry the blow.12
The growth of intelligence studies since, then, has, arguably, allowed military
historians to provide a less forgiving perspective.13 In their landmark work
on military effectiveness, Allan Millett and Williamson Murray placed intel-
ligence systems alongside logistics and communications as key determinants
of operational-level effectiveness.14 Therefore, just as the quality of an army’s
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supply system or its radio network can be unpacked, analysed and judged, so,
too, must its intelligence feed. Such enquiries might present specific meth-
odological challenges, particularly with regard to sources and context, but they
cannot be avoided if that military organisation is to be truly understood. In this
conception, intelligence provision is not some centralised or civilianised deus ex
machina, but an integrated part of the military system. Within military organisa-
tions, products – such as daily intelligence summaries – mount up at multiple
levels at an alarming rate. This can present the researcher with a mountain of
textual material to wade through, in order to understand the nature of the intel-
ligence picture at any particular moment. Such painstaking jigsaw work is not
for the faint-hearted, but can be very rewarding. Similarly, careful analysis of
operational documentation can pick up the ‘echo’ of the intelligence picture,
even when the latter has not survived intact.
It has helped that, from the 1980s onwards, academic military history has
become more sophisticated, moving away from its traditional ‘drum and
trumpet’ roots.15 But the question then arises, as to whether historical examina-
tions of military intelligence grew simply because of better academic military
history or because of the emergence of intelligence studies? The answer would
seem to be that the two have, to some extent, been symbiotic, with intelligence
studies providing, in its simplest terms, something for military historians to lean
against. The existence of basic concepts and on-going debates about matters such
as intelligence failures or even just the intelligence cycle is helpful in framing
historical work. For the mainstream of intelligence studies, the existence of
military historians doing intelligence work adds diversity to their community
and can provide robust case studies of previous intelligence practice. A rough
parallel might be drawn here with the development of the medical humanities
and their enrichment of military history. For example, Mark Harrison’s award-
winning studies of military medicine in the British Army during the First and
Second World Wars or the burgeoning literature on military mental health.16
Mischievously, it might also be argued that military intelligence history simply
constitutes intelligence studies at its least glamorous. As Gerard de Groot put it,
when explaining why he shifted from studying Field Marshal Haig’s intelligence
feed to studying the man himself: ‘Before long I discovered that [military] intel-
ligence has very little to do with cloaks and daggers, being mostly about boring
reports and endless statistics’.17
HISTORIES OF MILITARY INTELLIGENCE

Academic military historians can be simultaneously gladdened and saddened
by the popular military history market.18 In Britain, the proliferation of war
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documentaries on digital television channels, the large military history sections

of high-street bookshops and the popularity of conflict-based computer games
testify to the public’s fascination with the subject.19 Although such a high profile
might be envied, there is always the nagging concern that popular military
history is still too wedded to old-fashioned genres, which thereby devalues the
overall currency of the field. It is difficult to see how this can be changed. Indeed,
its commercial success may be the very thing that makes it impossible for
popular military history to break away from its well-worn subjects and favoured
modes of expression. Military intelligence history is certainly not exempt from
this context; in fact, the public’s fascination with spies, spooks and secret agents
means that a similar dichotomy has always existed between academic and
popular writings on intelligence matters.20
Looking for popular surveys focused upon British military intelligence, one is
immediately struck by their scarcity.21 The ‘best fit’ for this requirement is prob-
ably Peter Gudgin’s Military Intelligence: The British Story, which was published
in 1989 and again in 1999.22 The first part of the book is a synthesis of key sec-
ondary texts, which provides a potted history of intelligence in the British Army.
This is followed by thematic chapters on intelligence functions, sources, espio-
nage and counter-intelligence, and electronic warfare developments. The focus
is inconsistent, as the latter sections drift away from the ostensibly British and
military focus. In the last decade, the two most prominent works of popular mili-
tary intelligence history have been John Hughes-Wilson’s Military Intelligence
Blunders and Cover-Ups (1999) and John Keegan’s Intelligence in War (2003).23
Both books adopt a case study approach, which includes British examples, as
well as addressing intelligence in war from a general perspective. 24 Although
they are both lively reads that are forthright in their judgements, they both rely
on a very limited range of sources.25 More useful as scholarly entry points to
the subject are recent encyclopaedia entries by Hugh Bicheno and Joe Maiolo.26
Bicheno skims across similar ground to Hughes-Wilson and Keegan and cites
many of the same examples, but he does it in fewer words. Maiolo’s piece is
much more helpful, as he signposts many of the milestone publications in mili-
tary intelligence history, before summarising the evolution of the literature and
debates on key issues, such as the contribution of signals intelligence during the
Second World War. Similarly, although dated, both Jonathan House’s military
intelligence research guide and Keith Robbins’ bibliography of British history
contain some pointers to important older books.27 Also, Wesley Wark’s 1988
summation of the British intelligence historiography still repays attention.28
Shifting towards more scholarly surveys of intelligence, the military dimen-
sion is also present. Still a landmark in the historical study of British intelligence,
Christopher Andrew’s Secret Service has a strong military flavour, particularly
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in his discussion of what he calls the ‘Victorian Prologue’ and, of course, the
two World Wars.29 Andrew also argues that the War Office made the ‘the first
hesitant steps towards the creation of a professional intelligence community’.30
Jeffrey Richelson’s survey, A Century of Spies, makes a similar journey to
Andrew’s, but with a wider international and chronological focus.31 Again, his
wartime chapters have the most to say about developments in military intel-
ligence and include a number of famous British examples. More recently, the
National Archives have published British Intelligence: Secrets, Spies and Sources,
in order to ‘highlight [their] rich and diverse collection of intelligence records’.32
Its chapters on military, naval and air intelligence fulfil this primary purpose, but
they are more a miscellany than a coherent account of developments in each of
these fields.
Augmenting these general surveys, we now have a specific literature on
military intelligence as a discrete field of study. To a great extent, responsibil-
ity for this can be attributed to the late Michael Handel and his erstwhile col-
laborator, John Ferris, who has continued to work in this field. This is not to
argue that relevant work did not exist before their work in the early 1990s,33
but, in approaching intelligence from an overtly strategic perspective, they have
provided – and, in Ferris’ case, continue to provide – its military form, with
some strong theoretical and evidential foundations.34 The first key datum point
is the 1990 special issue of Intelligence & National Security, which contained a
very lengthy introduction by Handel that examined military intelligence within
a Clausewitzian framework, as well as surveying a number of examples.35 Five
years later, Handel and Ferris published a lengthy article, entitled ‘Clausewitz,
Intelligence, Uncertainty and the Art of Command in Modern War’.36 Taking
forward their theory and history themes, they set out an important framework
for the ‘evolution of the role of intelligence in military operations and war’.37
This posited three phases to the development of military intelligence, starting
from 1800, with the second phase delineated by 1914 and 1945. By examining
various aspects of military intelligence practice across these periods and linking
them to parallel developments in command and communications, they provided
a very useful model for understanding both the past and present.38
HISTORIES OF BRITISH MILITARY INTELLIGENCE

Categorising intelligence histories is not wholly straightforward. Although
what follows is an adoption of a necessarily conventional and chronologi-
cal structure, it is helpful to pause and reflect upon alternate typologies. Two
varieties of military intelligence history can perhaps be labelled – those that are
organisation-focused and those that are target-focused. However, they should
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be seen more as opposite ends of a continuum, rather than totally separate

categories. Organisation-focused histories are perhaps more common and tend
to dwell upon the more inward-looking aspects of people, policy and process.
This is not to say that they are unimportant, just that they often provide only a
necessary foundation for later work.39 An obvious example would be Thomas
Fergusson’s study of British Army intelligence in the late nineteenth century.40
Target-focused histories are generally more outward-looking and privilege the
intelligence product and the interactions with consumers. Within the normal
academic ‘rules of engagement’, those studies which tend towards this end of the
spectrum are arguably stronger, because they connect intelligence history more
closely to its wider context. A classic British example from this category would
be Wesley Wark’s The Ultimate Enemy.41 However, it should be noted that a
necessary precondition for such a study is a mature military historiography
within which the intelligence history can thrive. If the strategic and operational
histories are immature, the intelligence historian will struggle to shape their own
work to fit with its contours and controversies. This relative immaturity of the
academic literature, rather than difficulties with the intelligence sources, may
help to explain the relative paucity of post-1945 histories of military intelligence.
Within the British context, it is also important to note the long tradition
of regimental history as a particular flavour of military history. Despite their
parochial focus and often celebratory purpose, these sources need to be taken
seriously, particularly as, within their security restrictions, they often have inter-
esting things to say about post-1945 developments. The Royal Navy and Royal
Air Force have long had intelligence-related branches,42 but it is the Army’s
Intelligence Corps, with a continuous ‘tribal’ identity since 1940, which has
been the direct or indirect subject of histories since the early 1970s. The first was
Brian Parritt’s The Intelligencers, which surveyed his corps’ antecedents from the
seventeenth century to 1914.43 This was soon followed by Jock Haswell’s British
Military Intelligence, which also had a great deal to say about the corps. Written
by a former infantry officer and popular military historian, it provided a readable
account of the wider intelligence context, its organisational development and
individual contributions. Twenty years later, the Sandhurst academic and part-
time Intelligence Corps officer Anthony Clayton produced a fully referenced
official history, which covered much of the same ground.44 As works of history,
all three books wrestle with the fact that the modern Intelligence Corps and its
predecessors have always had a wide variety of tasks; from those engaged in
strategic collection or special operations, who have simply worn their badge as a
‘flag of convenience’ in wartime, to the more conventional intelligence sections
operating in support of frontline commanders. This necessitates a patchwork
approach to the subject matter. These histories also labour under what might
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be termed a ‘neglect complex’; a consistent theme, which is summed up by

Parritt’s opening line: ‘The British Army has never liked or wanted professional
intelligence officers’. From an organisational perspective, this piece of folklore
may be useful, but, from an external viewpoint, the pace of intelligence profes-
sionalisation cannot be reduced to the vagaries of hierarchical prejudices.45
Hopefully, future histories will place the Intelligence Corps in a broader and
more measured context.
Starting our general survey with histories of pre-1914 British military intel-
ligence, one notes their relatively small number, but also their improving schol-
arly quality.46 This is illustrated neatly by studies of intelligence support to the
Duke of Wellington. Forty years ago, there was only Haswell’s popular history;
ten years ago came Mark Urban’s study of code-breaking in the Peninsular
War; and, more recently, we have had the emergence of academic work in the
field.47 Moving forward to the mid-nineteenth century, there is Stephen Harris’
fascinating study of intelligence in the Crimea.48 The colonial campaigns of the
second half of the century have attracted some attention, but, in light of their
contemporary resonance, their relative neglect is perplexing.49 Organisational
developments at home and in the field are captured quite comprehensively in
Fergusson’s previously mentioned British Military Intelligence,50 and, for the
period immediately prior to 1914, Matthew Seligmann’s painstaking reconstruc-
tion of the work of Britain’s military attachés in Germany.51
The period of the First World War is blessed with a greater range of work.
The most prominent single-volume history is Occleshaw’s Armour against Fate
(1989). Derived from a doctoral thesis, it sought to examine the Army’s intelli-
gence efforts across the globe between 1914 and 1918.52 As contemporary review-
ers noted, it was ambitious and informative, but also idiosyncratic and eclectic in
its focus.53 Two decades on, it can be judged as perhaps typical of that ‘first wave’
of intelligence histories; it sought to do too much, it relied too heavily on private
papers and it also tried to tap into a popular market for spy stories. But it still
remains, to some extent, a military intelligence equivalent of Andrew’s Secret
Service. Since Occleshaw, our understanding of the Army’s intelligence work has
been expanded in a number of directions through more tightly focused studies.
John Ferris has, with his customary thoroughness, examined signals intelligence,
while Dan Jenkins has subjected the British Expeditionary Force’s Canadian
Corps to close scrutiny.54 Here, also, the author must put modesty aside and
mention his own work on the Western Front.55 The Middle Eastern theatres of
operation have also proved fruitful areas for research. We now have some under-
standing of intelligence matters in Mesopotamia and the Dardanelles,56 but the
most notable work is Yigal Sheffy’s outstanding study of military intelligence in
Palestine.57 By integrating all the intelligence sources with a nuanced discussion
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of organisational development and operational decision-making, Sheffy sets a

high benchmark for future works of military intelligence history. Polly Mohs’
recent study of the Arab Revolt is also informative, but has an odd introduction,
which betrays some ignorance of military intelligence developments elsewhere.58
Naval intelligence between 1914 and 1918 is, unsurprisingly, dominated by the
story of code-breaking, and such studies have had a long pedigree.59 The key
book is still Patrick Beesly’s Room 40, published thirty years ago,60 but, in recent
years, our understanding has been greatly advanced by Nicholas Black’s study
of the naval staff, which helps to put Room 40 in a better context, and by Jason
Hines’ re-examination of intelligence and the Battle of Jutland.61 Until recently,
the air dimension was poorly served, beyond John Ferris’ study of British air
defence, but now, we have Terrence Finnegan’s exhaustive treatment of Allied
air photography.62 The immediate post-war period is notable for develop-
ments in understanding of intelligence during the Irish War of Independence.
Although the general context was sketched in long ago,63 more recent studies of
lower-level activities have given a much better flavour of intelligence at the sharp
end of a brutal guerrilla conflict.64
The Second World War and the years preceding it are now overshadowed
by Ultra, as the signals intelligence output from Bletchley Park and its satel-
lites was formerly known.65 Pushing aside the large and ever-growing popular
literature,66 the core foundations for this field are primarily the dense volumes
of Sir Harry Hinsley’s official history of British intelligence, which seek to give
‘an account of the influence of British intelligence on strategy and operations’.67
Although other forms of collection do appear, signals intelligence is the domi-
nant feature.68 It is also worth noting that, despite its majesty, the history is quite
clear about its structural limitations. As well as limited coverage of the war in the
Far East, Hinsley notes that:
While the archives are generally adequate for reconstructing the influence of
intelligence in Whitehall, there is practically no record of how and to what extent
intelligence influenced the individual decisions of the operational commands. It
has usually been possible to reconstruct what intelligence they had at their disposal
at any time. What they made of it under operational conditions, and in circum-
stances in which it was inevitably incomplete, is on all but a few occasions a matter
of surmise.69
In short, the official history was far from being the final word. Indeed, even
before it was fully published, it was being supplemented by the work of Ralph
Bennett, a mediaeval historian, who – like Hinsley – had worked at Bletchley
Park. In a series of studies focused on Ultra in specific campaigns, he unpacked
the flow of the intelligence product and its impact in considerable detail.70 As
Ferris noted in his assessment of Ultra and Mediterranean Strategy: ‘future stu-
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dents [of Ultra] would do well to adopt the model of Bennett’s method’.71 This
point might also be applied to any history of operational intelligence.
The effect of intelligence on the British war at sea, especially the Battle of the
Atlantic, is one of the more developed areas of scholarship. Patrick Beesly’s early
work helped to set out the organisational foundations,72 and this was followed
with case studies of specific famous engagements.73 More recently, the focus
has shifted to less well-known aspects of the conflict and a desire to understand
the impact of intelligence across the campaign as a whole.74 Within this trend,
Jock Gardner’s 1999 book Decoding History was a significant milestone, as it
sought to assess the true significance of Ultra. In drawing what he describes as
a rather ‘downbeat conclusion’, he offers a useful corrective to the wilder claims
made about its contribution.75 Moving to the exploits of the British Army,
Bennett’s body of work has been augmented admirably by Ferris’ explora-
tion of signals intelligence developments in North Africa.76 Within the same
theatre, Brad Gladman’s book, Intelligence and Anglo-American Air Support,
provides an excellent example of how intelligence, when integrated with the
study of command and control, can bring fresh insights to a well-known cam-
paign.77 Similarly, Kevin Jones’ work on the Eighth Army in Italy shows what
can be achieved when intelligence below the theatre level of command is fully
unpacked.78 For the Far East, the contributions of John Ferris, Anthony Best and
Douglas Ford have generated a strong academic literature.79 Richard J. Aldrich’s
Intelligence and the War Against Japan is focused upon higher level relation-
ships, but his discussion of Singapore and the development of signals intelligence
are pertinent.80 The air war has some coverage, notably of the Battle of Britain
and, more recently, explorations of intelligence and the strategic bombing
campaign.81 Finally, the contribution of air photography has emerged from
the shadows, particularly the work of the Allied Central Interpretation Unit at
Medmenham.82
REFLECTIONS
This chapter set out to excise pre-1945 British military intelligence from the
general body of intelligence literature and subject it to close examination. The
most obvious conclusion is that the literature remains unbalanced chronologi-
cally, because of the greater volume of material related to the Second World War.
In the British case, one could argue that the national intelligence community
reached maturity between 1939 and 1945, and so this focus is wholly justified.
This is probably true, but in the military sphere, we still do not know enough
about the journey up to that point. The archipelagos of case studies before 1939
need to become better connected. This does not necessarily demand that the gaps
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between them are ‘filled in’, as the survival of archival sources would probably
not allow that.83 But we do need some carefully focused studies that explore
some of our fundamental assumptions about organisational development and
the integration of intelligence within the British military. Like archaeologists,
we need to ‘dig across’ the lines delineated by Handel and Ferris, in order to test
their boundaries. Looking forward from 1945, the maturing of the wider military
history should provide a solid context for military intelligence studies. Looping
back, exploration of military intelligence in the ‘irregular’ campaigns at the end
of Empire perhaps also demands a much better understanding of such work
during the period of Empire itself.
Thematically, we also need to revisit our assumptions across the four Ps.
Because of the survival of private papers and a fair number of memoirs, we may
think that we understand the ‘people’ dimension. However, given that these
sources are ultimately self-selecting, are we merely seeing ‘personalities’, rather
than truly understanding the more prosaic dimension of ‘personnel’? Grappling
with the latter would require painstaking collation of data from service records,
so as to create something that would pass muster in social history circles.
Similarly, we are probably confident that we have a good fix on ‘policy’ and
‘process’; but, again, is the picture we have simply a partial and overly formal
one, largely determined by the more accessible high-level documentary sources?
Do we know enough about the informal workings of the intelligence system and,
more importantly, its interaction with consumers at the lower levels? But it is in
the sphere of the military intelligence ‘product’ that the greatest work is prob-
ably required. Where people, policy and process are available as foundations,
target-focused histories ought to become the default setting. Only by carefully
analysing the intelligence output can its resultant picture can be compared to
the operational context. Then, by understanding the connections and discon-
nections, the impact of intelligence on the wider military system can be properly
understood. The advent of tools such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
within the humanities will surely help this process.
Twenty years ago, Christopher Andrew declared that ‘most of the history of
military intelligence has still to be written’.84 Although progress has been made,
his statement remains largely correct. Furthermore, military intelligence history,
particularly in its British manifestation, is unlikely to regain the high profile that
it had in the early days of academic intelligence studies. But, as it incrementally
nudges forward, it can still make a significant contribution, particularly to the
development of wider military history. As Keith Jeffery put it, also twenty years
ago, ‘the real impact . . . will not necessarily be in specialist texts, but in general
accounts’.85 It is inevitable that the cloak-and-dagger connotations will always
linger and the popular end of the market will always trade upon them, but
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perhaps the true measure of success will be when this small subfield is viewed as
being just as dull-but-worthy as military logistics.
Notes
1 Kenneth Strong, Men of Intelligence (London: Cassell, 1970), p. 168.
2 According to the Institute of Historical Research’s registers, between 1972 and 2009,
there were fifty British and Irish history doctorates completed with ‘intelligence’ in
the title. From this sample, forty-two have been completed since 1990, thirty-five
were pre-1945, twenty-three had a military intelligence focus and, of those, sixteen
dealt with British military intelligence. This information is available at: http://www.
history.ac.uk/history-online/theses. From 1986 to 2010, the leading academic journal
Intelligence & National Security (INS) published 123 articles on military intelligence
history; fifty-nine had a British focus and, of these, forty-seven were pre-1945.
This information is available at: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/02684527.
asp. Military intelligence history delineated by inclusion of military, naval/navy,
army, air, defence/defense, a named military organisation or leader or a single battle/
campaign in title and relating to events at least ten years prior to publication date.
3 The validity of ‘intelligence studies’ as a distinct academic entity might be challenged.
The author has listened to John Ferris doing so on more than one occasion. But for
the purposes of this chapter, its existence is assumed, although it is acknowledged
that it may be more of a bureaucratic/academic construct, than an intellectual/
academic one.
4 AAP-6, ‘NATO Glossary of Terms and Definitions’, 2010, available at: http://www.
nato.int/docu/stanag/aap006/aap-6-2010.pdf.
5 Although very different in their tone and content, the following are notable for the
prominence that they give to military intelligence: Michael Herman, Intelligence
Power in Peace and War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Mark
Urban, UK Eyes Alpha: The Inside Story of British Intelligence (London: Faber, 1996).
6 Peter Jackson, ‘French Military Intelligence and Nazi Germany, 1936–1939’, DPhil
Thesis, Cambridge, 1995; Peter Jackson, France and the Nazi Menace: Intelligence and
Policy Making, 1933–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
7 For examples of military intelligence in ancient history, see Arther Ferrill, ‘Roman
Military Intelligence’, in Keith Neilson and B. J. C. McKercher (eds), Go Spy the
Land: Military Intelligence in History (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1992), pp. 17–30; Rose
Mary Sheldon, Intelligence Activities in Ancient Rome: Trust in the Gods but Verify
(London: Frank Cass, 2005), pp.164–74. For the early modern period, see Gunther
Rothenberg, ‘Military Intelligence Gathering in the Second Half of the Eighteenth
Century, 1740–1792’, in Keith Neilson and B. J. C. McKercher (eds), Go Spy the
Land (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1992), pp. 99–114; Barbara Donagan, War in England,
1642–1649 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 99–114.
8 The usual datum points are Christopher Andrew and David Dilks (eds), The Missing
Dimension: Governments and Intelligence Communities in the Twentieth Century
(London: Macmillan, 1984); Christopher Andrew, Secret Service: The Making of the
British Intelligence Community (London: Heinemann, 1985); and the establishment
of INS in 1986. A similar point was made by Keith Jeffery, in relation to the revelation
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of the ‘Ultra Secret’ in 1974: see Keith Jeffery, ‘Intelligence and Military History:
A British Perspective’, in David Charters, Marc Milner and J. Brent Wilson (eds),
Military History and the Military Profession (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1992), p. 105.
See, also, his general discussion of the relationship between intelligence studies and
military history.
9 C. R. M. F. Cruttwell, A History of the Great War, 1914–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1936); Cruttwell served in MI2(e) at the War Office in 1918.
10 The exceptions to this are: French intelligence very poor, due to inferiority in aero-
planes; Russian messages sent in clear captured order; Allied air superiority prevents
German reconnaissance; failure to anticipate Ottoman crossing of the Sinai; sacking
of Charteris; Allied propaganda against German Army. See Cruttwell, A History of
the Great War, 1914–1918, pp. 17, 45, 80, 259, 351, 499 and 530.
11 In January 1940, the Belgians captured, near Mechelen, a set of German invasion
plans from a downed aircraft and passed the details on to the Allies. See Brian Bond,
France and Belgium, 1939–1940 (London: Davis Poynter, 1975), pp. 78–81.
12 Bond, France and Belgium, 1939–1940, p. 80.
13 See, also, the frequent appearance of intelligence in Eliot Cohen and John Gooch,
Military Misfortunes: The Anatomy of Failure in War (New York, NY: Free Press,
1990).
14 ‘Do military organizations have the capability to support their operational practices
with the required intelligence, supply, communications, medical and transporta-
tion systems?’: see Allan Millett, Williamson Murray and Kenneth Watman, ‘The
Effectiveness of Military Organizations’, in Allan Millett and Williamson Murray
(eds), Military Effectiveness, Volume 1: The First World War (London: Unwin
Hyman, 1988), p. 16.
15 Michael Howard, ‘Military History and the History of War’, in Williamson Murray
and Richard Hart Sinnreich (eds), The Past as Prologue: The Importance of History to
the Military Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 12–20.
16 Mark Harrison, Medicine and Victory: British Military Medicine in the Second World
War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Mark Harrison, The Medical War:
British Military Medicine in the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2010). Both have won the Society for Army Historical Research’s prestigious Templer
Medal Book Prize.
17 Gerard De Groot, Douglas Haig, 1861–1928 (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), p. ix.
18 For a measured discussion of the popular military history market, see Jeremy Black,
Rethinking Military History (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 39. For the long view, see
Tim Travers, ‘The Development of British Military Historical Writing and Thought
from the Eighteenth Century to the Present’, in David Charters, Marc Milner and
J. Brent Wilson (eds), Military History and the Military Profession (Westport, CT:
Praeger, 1992), pp. 23–44.
19 For the context of history and heritage, see Jerome de Groot, Consuming History:
Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture (London: Routledge,
2009).
20 For an exploration of the wider relationship between intelligence and the media, see
Robert Dover and Michael Goodman (eds), Spinning Intelligence: Why Intelligence
Needs the Media, Why the Media Needs Intelligence (London: Hurst, 2009).
21 Jock Haswell, British Military Intelligence (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973).
MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd 214 21/02/2013 08:24

This text is, to a great extent, a history of the Intelligence Corps – it even has their cap
badge on its dust jacket – and so it is examined in the next section.
22 Peter Gudgin, Military Intelligence: The British Story (London: Arms & Armour, 1989).
See, also, Peter Gudgin, Military Intelligence: The British Story (Stroud: Sutton, 1999).
A former wartime tank officer, Gudgin’s other publications are on armoured warfare.
23 John Hughes-Wilson, Military Intelligence Blunders and Cover-ups (London:
Robinson, 2004); John Keegan, Intelligence in War: Knowledge of the Enemy from
Napoleon to Al-Qaeda (London: Hutchinson, 2003). Keegan was a former Sandhurst
academic and defence editor of the Daily Telegraph. Hughes-Wilson is a former
Intelligence Corps officer and associate editor of Eye-Spy magazine.
24 Hughes-Wilson: Barbarossa, 1941; Pearl Harbour, 1941; Singapore, 1942; Dieppe,
1942; D-Day, 1944; Tet, 1968; Falklands, 1982; Kuwait, 1990–1; World Trade
Center/Pentagon, 2001. Keegan: Nile, 1798; Shenandoah Valley, 1862; Emden/
Coronel/Falklands, 1914; Atlantic, 1939–45; Crete, 1941; Midway, 1942; V-weapons,
1943–4.
25 Hughes-Wilson includes a handful of primary documents in his bibliography, but he
relies on a small number of popular secondary sources for each of his case studies.
Keegan provides footnotes and draws upon some academic sources, but they are still
fairly limited in their scope. See the following reviews of Keegan: Joseph Mazzafro,
INS, 19(4), 2004, pp. 734–7; M. J. Barber, Canadian Military Journal, 5(1), 2004, pp.
57–8. Hughes-Wilson’s intelligence survey The Puppet Masters: Spies, Traitors and
the Real Forces behind World Events (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004) has
better supporting references and includes some discussion of military intelligence
developments.
26 Hugh Bicheno, ‘Intelligence, Military’, in Richard Holmes (ed.), The Oxford
Companion to Military History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 447–8;
Joe Maiolo, ‘Intelligence’, in Charles Messenger (ed.), Reader’s Guide to Military
History (London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001), pp. 259–61.
27 Jonathan House, Military Intelligence, 1870–1991: A Research Guide (Westport,
CT: Greenwood, 1993); Keith Robbins, Bibliography of British History, 1914–1989
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 351, 363 and 381.
28 Wesley Wark, ‘Intelligence since 1900’, in Gerald Jordan (ed.), British Military
History: A Supplement to Robin Higham’s Guide to the Sources (New York, NY:
Garland, 1988), pp. 503–23.
29 Andrew, Secret Service, pp. 7–15, 20–33, 86–173, 448–86. The haphazard nature of
historical writings on British intelligence before Secret Service is perhaps illustrated
by two contrasting contributions to a 1984 volume ostensibly about intelligence
before the two World Wars. One is a useful survey of pre-1914 policymaking, but has
almost nothing to say about intelligence matters; the other surveys the pre-1939 intel-
ligence community and discusses the utility of its products: Paul Kennedy, ‘Great
Britain before 1914’; Donald Cameron Watt, ‘British Intelligence and the Coming
of the Second World War in Europe’, in Ernest May (ed.), Knowing One’s Enemies:
Intelligence Assessment before the Two World Wars (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1984), pp. 172–204, 237–70.
30 Andrew, Secret Service, p. 7.
31 Jeffery Richelson, A Century of Spies: Intelligence in the Twentieth Century (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1995).
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32 Stephen Twigge, Edward Hampshire and Graham Macklin, British Intelligence:

Secrets, Spies and Sources (Richmond: National Archives, 2008), p. 15.
33 For example, Strong’s Men of Intelligence was subtitled ‘A Study of the Roles and
Decisions of Chiefs of Intelligence from World War I to the Present Day’ (1970) and
examined the interaction between intelligence officers and their commanders.
34 For Handel and Ferris’ academic careers, see Richard Betts and Thomas Mahnken
(eds), Paradoxes of Strategic Intelligence: Essays in Honor of Michael Handel (London:
Frank Cass, 2003), pp. viii–x; John Ferris, Intelligence and Strategy: Selected Essays
(London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 1–7. Ferris’ extensive body of work is included, where
relevant, in the next section. Because of the parameters set out at the start of this
chapter, his excellent work on security, deception and non-military intelligence have
been omitted.
35 Michael Handel, ‘Intelligence and Military Operations’, INS, 5(2), 1990, pp. 1–95;
Michael Handel (ed.), Intelligence and Military Operations (London: Frank Cass,
1990), pp. 1–95. The origins of the special issue/volume lay in a series of conferences
on intelligence and military operations held at the US Army War College in the late
1980s. An earlier special issue had focused on leaders and intelligence: INS, 3(3),
1988; Michael Handel (ed.), Leaders and Intelligence (London: Frank Cass, 1989).
This collection included Harold Deutsch, ‘Commanding Generals and the Uses of
Intelligence’, pp. 194–260.
36 John Ferris and Michael Handel, ‘Clausewitz, Intelligence, Uncertainty and the Art
of Command in Military Operations’, INS, 10(1), 1995, pp. 1–58; Ferris, Intelligence
and Strategy, pp. 239–87. See, also, Michael Handel, ‘Intelligence in Historical
Perspective’, in Keith Neilson and B. J. C. McKercher (eds), Go Spy the Land: Military
Intelligence in History (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1992), pp. 179–92.
37 For commander’s interest in intelligence, organisation, scope and range, sources and
reliability, problems, the balance of intelligence, solutions to problems and better use,
see Ferris, Intelligence and Strategy, p. 281.
38 More recently, see Ferris’ forewords to Stephen Harris, British Military Intelligence
in the Crimean War, 1854–1856 (London: Frank Cass, 1999); Brad Gladman,
Intelligence and Anglo-American Air Support in World War Two: The Western Desert
and Tunisia, 1940–43 (London: Palgrave, 2009). Respectively, these provide further
reflections on nineteenth-century military intelligence and command and control in
the two World Wars. See, also, his elegant summation of intelligence more generally:
John Ferris, ‘Intelligence’, in Robert Boyce and Joseph Maiolo (eds), The Origins of
World War Two: The Debate Continues (London: Palgrave, 2003), pp. 308–10.
39 A similar point is made in Keith Jeffery, ‘Intelligence and Military History’, in David
Charters, Marc Milner and J. Brent Wilson (eds), Military History and the Military
Profession (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1992), p. 110.
40 Thomas Fergusson, British Military Intelligence, 1870–1914: The Development of
a Modern Intelligence Organization (Frederick, MD: University Publications of
America, 1984).
41 Wesley Wark, The Ultimate Enemy: British Intelligence and Nazi Germany, 1933–
1939 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1985).
42 For an accessible survey of RAF photographic intelligence, see Roy Conyers Nesbit,
Eyes of the RAF: A History of Photo-Reconnaissance (Stroud: Sutton, 1996).
43 Brian Parritt, The Intelligencers: The Story of British Military Intelligence up to 1914
MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd 216 21/02/2013 08:24

(Ashford: Intelligence Corps Association, 1983). It has recently been republished

with some brief additional sections: Brian Parritt, The Intelligencers: British Military
Intelligence from the Middle Ages to 1929 (Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2011). His military
career culminated as Director of the Intelligence Corps.
44 Anthony Clayton, Forearmed: A History of the Intelligence Corps (London: Brassey’s,
1993).
45 A similar ‘no one loved/loves us’ worldview can be discerned in the histories of army
education: A. C. T. White, The Story of Army Education 1643–1963 (London: George
Harrap, 1963); Leslie Wayper, Mars and Minerva: A History of Army Education
(Winchester: Royal Army Educational Corps Association, 2004).
46 Although it diverts unnecessarily into matters of domestic security intelligence, a
short and accessible survey of the period can be found in Stephen Wade, Spies in the
Empire: Victorian Military Intelligence (London: Anthem Press, 2007).
47 Jock Haswell, The First Respectable Spy: The Life and Times of Colquhoun Grant,
Wellington’s Head of Intelligence (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1969); Mark Urban,
The Man who Broke Napoleon’s Codes: The Story of George Scovell (London: Faber,
2001); Mark Romans, ‘Professionalism and the Development of Military Intelligence
in Wellington’s Army, 1809–14’, PhD Thesis, 2005, Southampton; Huw Davies,
‘British Intelligence in the Peninsular War’, PhD Thesis, 2006, Exeter; Huw Davies,
‘Integration of Strategic and Operational Intelligence during the Peninsular War’,
INS, 21(2), 2006, pp. 202–23.
48 Harris, British Military Intelligence.
49 Stephen Manning, ‘Learning the Trade: The Use and Misuse of Intelligence during
the British Colonial Campaigns of the 1870s’, INS, 22(5), 2007, pp. 644–60; Edward
Spiers, ‘Intelligence and Command in Britain’s Small Colonial Wars of the 1890s’,
INS, 22(5), 2007, pp. 661–81. Adopting a broader chronological focus, but also useful
for military intelligence in India, is Robert Johnson, Spying for Empire: The Great
Game in Central and South Asia, 1757–1947 (London: Greenhill, 2006).
50 For additional context, see Christopher Brice, ‘The Military Career of General Sir
Henry Brackenbury, 1856–1904: The Thinking Man’s Soldier’, PhD Thesis, 2009, De
Montfort, pp. 168–207; William Beaver, Under Every Leaf: How Britain Played the
Greater Game from Afghanistan to Africa (London: Biteback, 2012).
51 Matthew Seligmann, Spies in Uniform: British Military & Naval Intelligence on
the Eve of the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Matthew
Seligmann (ed.), Naval Intelligence from Germany: The Reports of the British Naval
Attachés in Berlin, 1906–1914 (Aldershot: Ashgate for the Navy Records Society,
2007).
52 Michael Occleshaw, ‘British Military Intelligence during the First World War’, PhD
Thesis, 1984, Keele. For related work at this time, see David French, ‘Sir John French’s
Secret Service on the Western Front, 1914–15’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 7(40),
1984, pp. 423–40.
53 Keith Jeffery, ‘Sources of Confusion’, Times Literary Supplement, 10–16 November
1989, p. 1232; Ian Beckett, Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research, 68,
1990, p. 220.
54 John Ferris, ‘The British Army and Signals Intelligence in the Field During the
First World War’, INS, 3(4), 1988, pp. 23–48; John Ferris (ed.), The British Army
and Signals Intelligence during the First World War (Stroud: Alan Sutton for the
MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd 217 21/02/2013 08:24

Army Records Society, 1992); Dan Jenkins, ‘The Other Side of the Hill: Combat
Intelligence in the Canadian Corps, 1914–1918’, Canadian Military History, 10(2),
2001, pp. 7–26; Dan Jenkins, ‘Winning Trench Warfare: Battlefield Intelligence in the
Canadian Corps, 1914–1918’, PhD Thesis, 1999, Carleton.
55 Jim Beach, ‘British Intelligence and the German Army, 1914–1918’, PhD Thesis,
2005, London; Jim Beach, ‘British Intelligence and German Tanks, 1916–1918’, War
in History, 14(4), 2007, pp. 454–75.
56 Peter Morris, ‘Intelligence and its Interpretation: Mesopotamia, 1914–1916’, in
Christopher Andrew and Jeremy Noakes (eds), Intelligence and International
Relations (Exeter: University of Exeter, 1987), pp. 77–101; Richard Popplewell,
‘British Intelligence in Mesopotamia 1914–16’, INS, 5(2), 1990, pp. 139–72; Peter
Chasseaud and Peter Doyle, Grasping Gallipoli: Terrain, Maps and Failure at the
Dardanelles, 1915 (Staplehurst: Spellmount, 2005). Andrew Syk, ‘Command and the
Mesopotamia Expeditionary Force, 1915–1918’, DPhil, 2009, Oxford, pp. 92–129.
57 Yigal Sheffy, British Military Intelligence in the Palestine Campaign, 1914–1918
(London: Frank Cass, 1998).
58 Polly Mohs, Military Intelligence and the Arab Revolt: The First Modern Intelligence
War (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 4–5.
59 William James, The Eyes of the Navy: A Biographical Study of Admiral Sir Reginald
Hall (London: Methuen, 1955); Robert Grant, U-Boat Intelligence, 1914–1918
(London: Putnam, 1969). See, also, David Ramsay, “Blinker” Hall, Spymaster: The
Man who Brought America into World War I (Stroud: Spellmount, 2009).
60 Patrick Beesly, Room 40: British Naval Intelligence, 1914–18 (London: Hamish
Hamilton, 1982). For a more recent narrative drawing upon National Archives mate-
rial, see Paul Gannon, Inside Room 40: The Codebreakers of World War 1 (Hersham:
Ian Allan, 2010).
61 Nicholas Black, The British Naval Staff in the First World War (Woodbridge: Boydell,
2009); Jason Hines, ‘Sins of Omission and Commission: A Reassessment of the Role
of Intelligence in the Battle of Jutland’, Journal of Military History, 72, 2008, pp.
1117–53.
62 John Ferris, ‘“Airbandit”: C31 and Strategic Air Defence during the First Battle
of Britain, 1915–18’, in Michael Dockrill and David French (eds), Strategy and
Intelligence: British Policy during the First World War (London: Hambledon, 1996),
pp. 23–66; Terrence Finnegan, Shooting the Front: Allied Aerial Reconnaissance and
Photographic Interpretation on the Western Front – World War I (Washington, DC:
National Defense Intelligence College Press, 2006); Terrence Finnegan, Shooting
the Front: Allied Aerial Reconnaissance in the First World War (Stroud: Spellmount,
2011).
63 Eunan O’Halpin, ‘British Intelligence in Ireland, 1914–1921’, in Christopher
Andrew and David Dilks (eds), Missing Dimension: Governments and Intelligence
Communities in the Twentieth Century (London: MacMillan, 1984), pp. 54–77.
For an even broader context, see Keith Jeffery, ‘British Military Intelligence follow-
ing World War I’, in K. G. Robertson (ed.), British and American Approaches to
Intelligence (London: Macmillan, 1987), pp. 55–84.
64 Peter Hart, The IRA and its Enemies: Violence and Community in Cork, 1916–1923
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 293–315; Peter Hart, British Intelligence
in Ireland, 1920–21: The Final Reports (Cork: Cork University Press, 2002), pp.
MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd 218 21/02/2013 08:24

1–16; John Borgonovo, Spies, Informers and the ‘Anti-Sinn Féin Society’: The
Intelligence War in Cork City, 1920–1921 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007); John
O’Callaghan, Revolutionary Limerick: The Republican Campaign for Independence
in Limerick, 1913–1921 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2010), pp. 168–86; William
Sheehan, A Hard Local War: The British Army and the Guerrilla War in Cork,
1919–1921 (Stroud: Spellmount, 2011), pp. 70–90.
65 For pre-war military intelligence, see Wesley Wark, ‘Baltic Myths and Submarine
Bogeys: British Naval Intelligence and Nazi Germany 1933–1939’, Journal of Strategic
Studies, 6(1), 1983, pp. 60–81; Wesley Wark, ‘British Military and Economic
Intelligence: Assessments of Nazi Germany before the Second World War’, in
Christopher Andrew and David Dilks (eds), Missing Dimension: Governments and
Intelligence Communities in the Twentieth Century (London: Macmillan, 1984), pp.
78–100; Wesley Wark, The Ultimate Enemy; Wesley Wark, ‘In Search of a Suitable
Japan: British Naval Intelligence in the Pacific before the Second World War’, INS,
1(2), 1986, pp. 189–211; J. Paul Harris, ‘British Military Intelligence and the Rise of
German Mechanized Forces, 1929–40’, INS, 6(2), 1991, pp. 395–417; T. Harrison
Place, ‘British Perceptions of the Tactics of the German Army, 1938–40’, INS, 9(3),
1994, pp. 495–519; Joseph Maiolo, ‘“I Believe the Hun is Cheating”: British Admiralty
Technical Intelligence and the German Navy, 1936–39’, INS, 11(1), 1996, pp. 32–58;
Joseph Maiolo, ‘Deception and Intelligence Failure: Anglo-German Preparations for
U-Boat Warfare in the 1930s’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 22(4), 1999, pp. 55–76.
66 Within British popular culture, it could be argued that Bletchley Park has become
a very strong heritage ‘brand’. The reasons for this development lie well beyond
the scope of this article, but, of the more popular works, the following are useful
entry points: Michael Smith, Station X: The Codebreakers of Bletchley Park (London:
MacMillan, 1998); Hugh Sebag-Montefiore, Enigma: The Battle for the Code (London:
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000).
67 F. H. Hinsley, British Intelligence in the Second World War (London: HMSO, 1979,
1981, 1984), 1, 1939–41; 2, 1941–3; 3(1) 1943–4; 3(2) 1944–5.
68 For a survey of a different collection technique, see Kent Fedorowich, ‘Axis Prisoners
of War as Sources for British Military Intelligence, 1939–42’, INS, 14(2), 1999, pp.
56–178.
69 Hinsley, British Intelligence, 1, p. x.
70 Ralph Bennett, Ultra in the West: The Normandy Campaign of 1944–45 (London:
Hutchinson, 1979); Ralph Bennett, Ultra and Mediterranean Strategy (New York,
NY: Morrow, 1989); Ralph Bennett, ‘Intelligence and Strategy: Some Observations on
the War in the Mediterranean 1941–45’, INS, 5(2), 1990, pp. 444–64; Ralph Bennett,
Behind the Battle: Intelligence in the War with Germany, 1939–1945 (London:
Pimlico, 1999); Ralph Bennett, Intelligence Investigations: How Ultra Changed
History (London: Frank Cass, 1996).
71 John Ferris, ‘Ralph Bennett and the Study of Ultra’, INS, 6(2), 1991, p. 484.
72 Patrick Beesly, Very Special Intelligence: The Story of the Admiralty’s Operational
Intelligence Centre (London: Greenhill, 2000); Patrick Beesly, Very Special Admiral:
The Life of Admiral JH Godfrey CB (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1980). See, also,
Ralph Erskine, ‘U-Boats, Homing Signals and HFDF’, INS, 2(2), 1987, pp. 324–30.
73 Donald Steury, ‘Naval Intelligence, the Atlantic Campaign and the Sinking of the
Bismarck: A Study in the Integration of Intelligence into the Conduct of Naval Warfare’,
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Journal of Contemporary History, 22(2), 1987, pp. 209–33; Patrick Beesly, ‘Convoy PQ
17: A Study of Intelligence and Decision-Making’, INS, 5(2), 1990, pp. 292–322.
74 Christina Goulter, ‘The Role of Intelligence in Coastal Command’s Anti-Shipping
Campaign, 1940–45’, INS, 5(1), 1990, pp. 84–109; David Syrett (ed.), The Battle of the
Atlantic and Signals Intelligence: U-Boat Situations and Trends, 1941–1945 (Aldershot:
Ashgate for the Navy Records Society, 1998); David Syrett ‘Communications
Intelligence and the Battle for Convoy OG 71, 15–23 August 1941’, Journal of
Strategic Studies, 24(3), 2001, pp. 86–106.
75 W. J. R. Gardner, Decoding History: The Battle of the Atlantic and Ultra (London:
Macmillan, 1999).
76 John Ferris, ‘The British Army, Signals and Security in the Desert Campaign, 1940–
42’, INS, 5(2), 1990, pp. 255–91; John Ferris, ‘The “Usual Source”: Signals Intelligence
and Planning for the Eighth Army “Crusader” Offensive, 1941’, INS, 14(1), 1999,
pp. 84–118; David Alvarez (ed.), Allied and Axis Signals Intelligence in World War II
(London: Frank Cass, 1999), pp. 84–118.
77 See, also, Brad Gladman, ‘Air Power and Intelligence in the Western Desert
Campaign, 1940–43’, INS, 13(4), 1998, pp. 144–62.
78 Kevin Jones, ‘Intelligence and Command at the Operational-Level of War: The British
Eighth Army’s Experience during the Italian Campaign in the Second World War,
1943–5’, PhD Thesis, 2005, London; Kevin Jones, ‘A Curb on Ambition: Intelligence
and the Planning of Eighth Army’s Liri Valley Offensive, May 1944’, INS, 22(5), 2007,
pp. 745–66.
79 John Ferris, ‘“Worthy of a Better Enemy?”: The British Estimate of the Imperial
Japanese Army, 1919–41, and the Fall of Singapore’, Canadian Journal of History/
Annales Canadiennes d’Histoire, 28(2), 1993, pp. 224–56; Anthony Best, ‘“This
Probably Over-Valued Military Power”: British Intelligence and Whitehall’s
Perception of Japan, 1939–41’, INS, 12(3), 1997, pp. 67–94; Douglas Ford, ‘“A
Conquerable Yet Resilient Foe”: British Perceptions of the Imperial Japanese
Army’s Tactics on the India–Burma Front, September 1942 to Summer 1944’, INS,
18(1), 2003, pp. 65–90; Douglas Ford, ‘Planning for an Unpredictable War: British
Intelligence Assessments and the War against Japan, 1937–45’, Journal of Strategic
Studies, 27(1), 2004, pp. 136–67; Douglas Ford, ‘British Intelligence on Japanese
Army Morale During the Pacific War: Logical Analysis or Racial Stereotyping?’,
Journal of Military History, 69(2), 2005, pp. 439–74; Douglas Ford, Britain’s Secret
War against Japan, 1937–1945 (London: Routledge, 2006).
80 Richard J. Aldrich, Intelligence and the War against Japan: Britain, America and the
Politics of Secret Service (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
81 Sebastian Cox, ‘A Comparative Analysis of RAF and Luftwaffe Intelligence in
the Battle of Britain, 1940’, INS, 5(2), 1990, pp. 425–43; Samir Puri, ‘The Role of
Intelligence in Deciding the Battle of Britain’, INS, 21(3), 2006, pp. 416–39; Robert
Ehlers, Targeting the Reich: Air Intelligence and the Allied Bombing Campaigns
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009); John Stubbington, Kept in the Dark:
The Denial to Bomber Command of Vital Ultra and Other Intelligence Information
during World War II (Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2010).
82 ‘Operation Crossbow’, BBC, 15 May 2011. Taylor Downing, Spies in the Sky: The
Secret Battle for Aerial Intelligence during World War II (London: Little, Brown,
2011).
MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd 220 21/02/2013 08:24

83 For example, much of the War Office’s intelligence archive was destroyed by
the Luftwaffe. See Matthew Seligmann, ‘Hors de Combat? The Management,
Mismanagement and Mutilation of the War Office Archive’, Journal of the Society for
Army Historical Research, 84, 2006, pp. 52–8.
84 Christopher Andrew, ‘The Nature of Military Intelligence’, in Keith Neilson and
B. J. C. McKercher (eds), Go Spy the Land: Military Intelligence in History (Westport,
CT: Praeger, 1992), p. 13.
85 Keith Jeffery, ‘Intelligence and Military History’, in David Charters, Marc Milner and
Praeger, 1992), p. 115.
MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd 221 21/02/2013 08:24

Chapter 11
THE STUDY OF INTERROGATION: A FOCUS ON

TORTURE, BUT WHAT ABOUT INTELLIGENCE?
Samantha Newbery
Interrogation that aims to collect intelligence from the person being interrogated
has received scholarly and public attention, largely as a result of its connection
with torture.1 The torture debate – as it is known – began when interrogators
were unable to gain intelligence from ‘four suspect terrorists, among them
Zacarias Moussaoui, being held in a New York prison following the September
11 attacks’.2 Many media organisations then responded to official cues and came
out in support of the use of torture for counterterrorism.3 This debate has inten-
sified discussions about what interrogation practices might be permissible in the
pursuit of intelligence. Swathes of publications on torture have followed, many
of them of an extremely high quality. Far from all of them, though, are of benefit
to the study of interrogation or intelligence. As this chapter will demonstrate,
there are sources on interrogation practices that are waiting to be exploited by
scholars, and now that interrogation has captured the public imagination, it is
likely that the amount of research being conducted will increase.
This chapter will demonstrate the current state of scholarship that addresses,
or is relevant to, interrogation for intelligence-gathering. The first of the three
main themes is justifiability. The question of what interrogation methods
might be justifiable has been approached by legal scholars and moral philoso-
phers. Both put forward arguments as to whether controversial interrogation
techniques ought to be used. The second theme concerns which methods are
effective in the production of intelligence from the interrogated persons. This
is linked to the first: if a particular interrogation technique does not produce
intelligence, then discussions of whether it should be used are obsolete. As will
become clear, though, it is difficult to speak with any authority on the effective-
ness of particular techniques. This issue has been approached from a variety of
angles, with former interrogators, historians and psychologists all making valua-
ble contributions. How controversial interrogation techniques – including those
that might be described as torture – come to be used is the third major theme
of the existing scholarship and, thus, of this chapter. This, too, has seen input
222
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The Study of Interrogation 223
from more than one discipline, notably politics, law and, once again, psychol-
ogy. Drawing upon this variety of viewpoints is a productive way of approaching
the topic of interrogation. Scholars in these disciplines have worked on various
pieces of the puzzle. Only by putting them together can we see how far we have
come in understanding interrogation practices and what work remains to be
done.
The common conception of interrogation as a form of questioning is that it
is ‘officious and rankles’; however, this is too narrow.4 It is fairly easy to accept,
instead, that interrogation involves direct questioning, but is not always acerbic.5
Before meaningful analysis can begin, it is also important to distinguish between
interrogation and torture. They certainly can be, and are, used together, but
interrogation does not necessarily involve torture, and collecting intelligence is
only one among many reasons why torture is used. Edward Peters’ impressive
history of torture serves as a reminder that, as well as being used to aid interroga-
tion, it has been used as a punishment, to terrorise and to force confessions.6 The
frequent confusion of interrogation and torture by the press and in TV dramas,
such as 24,7 perpetuates the belief that torture increases the effectiveness of inter-
rogation and that the latter cannot succeed without the former. It is likely that
this confusion has both been a product of, and contributed to, the focus of the
press and scholars on the ‘ticking bomb’ scenario, rather than on the underlying
issue of what makes interrogation effective. As will be outlined below, there is
little consensus among interrogators, policymakers and academics as to whether
torture enhances or impairs interrogation.
JUSTIFIABILITY
Choices about how to define torture are influenced by what the definition will
be used for. The public at large has a basic understanding of what the word
represents; it has often been remarked that we know torture when we see it.8 It is
a term, though, that is sometimes used to communicate the author or speaker’s
view that what they describe is unjustified. A great deal of the literature on
torture addresses its justifiability. Legal scholars have been particularly vocal
on this matter. Torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading forms of treat-
ment (CIDT) are prohibited by a number of statutes, including the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights
and Fundamental Freedoms.9 Yet, few of these statutes provide definitions of
torture or CIDT. As a result, legal scholars continue to debate what falls under
these definitions, creating a sizeable body of thought on what is permissible,
according to these laws. As methods that might be described as torture or CIDT
are used to aid interrogation, these definitions are closely related to which
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interrogation techniques are legally permissible. Which techniques might be

morally permissible will be addressed shortly.
Case law provides examples of legal bodies’ findings in individual cases that
sometimes provide interpretations of key terms, such as torture. The European
Court of Human Rights’ 1978 ruling in Ireland vs. UK has proved particularly
controversial. The Republic of Ireland initiated a case against the UK for a series
of alleged breaches of the European Convention on Human Rights perpetrated
in the months after internment was introduced in Northern Ireland in August
1971. The Court found that the ‘five techniques’ – comprising of hooding, a
stress position, white noise, limited diet and limited sleep – used to aid the
interrogation of fourteen detainees in Northern Ireland in late 1971, ‘did not
occasion suffering of the particular intensity and cruelty implied by the word
torture’.10 Elaine Scarry of Harvard University draws attention to the difficulty of
expressing pain, serving as a reminder that the demands of grasping others’ pain
further complicates the judgements involved in determining whether the sever-
ity criterion for defining torture has been met.11 The Court’s finding in Ireland
vs. UK, namely that the ‘five techniques’ did not constitute torture, was not only
contrary to the views expressed by many observers at the time, but it has been
noted that more recent decisions of the European Court have ‘pointed to stricter
standards’.12 Manfred Nowak – who has served as the UN Special Rapporteur on
Torture – notes: ‘[t]here are good reasons to believe that the Court today would
consider similar treatment torture’.13 The moving thresholds between torture,
inhuman treatment and degrading treatment under the European Convention
on Human Rights14 coincide, at the very least, with wider developments in the
interpretation of human rights law. This example demonstrates that labels,
even when issued after careful consideration by respected authorities, are not
immune to controversy. The message for scholars of interrogation is that deter-
mining which practices are legal is not simple.
The influence that severity of suffering has on whether a practice ought to
be described as torture, CIDT or neither is not the only component of discus-
sions about the legality of torture that is relevant to interrogation. It has been
argued that in the case of the 1984 United Nations Convention Against Torture
(UNCAT) – which does give a definition of torture – CIDT and torture are
also distinguishable on the basis of the intent behind them. UNCAT describes
the latter as severe pain or suffering intentionally inflicted for named purposes
that include obtaining information from the subject or a third party, or punish-
ment of the subject. It also specifies that torture is something that is carried
out ‘by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public
official or other person acting in an official capacity’.15 It is apparent that some
interrogation techniques will fall under this definition. Nowak argues that the
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‘requirement of a specific purpose is the most decisive criteria distinguishing

torture from cruel or inhuman treatment’.16 Therefore, when controversial
practices that meet the other elements of the definitions of CIDT and torture
are used to aid interrogation, they are more likely to be classed as torture than as
CIDT.
The final contribution of legal scholars on what interrogation techniques
might be permissible is the point that, as well as being open to interpreta-
tion, legal definitions can be manipulated. The manipulation of law by US
Government lawyers after September 2001, in order to construct an argument
that certain interrogation techniques were legal, is a popular example.17 They
maintained that torture was wrong, but sought to massage the definition so that
what most of us would define as torture fell outside of this definition and was
therefore legally permissible. The lawyers’ motivation was based on the belief
held within the US Government that certain interrogation techniques would
produce much-needed intelligence.18 Further details of how people in authority
facilitated the use of controversial interrogation techniques in this case, allowing
them to become part of policy, will be given below. The power of this belief in the
efficacy of interrogation techniques that were widely believed to be illegal draws
attention to the need to examine this claimed efficacy. Only if it is genuine may
it be a potential justification for manipulating or revising law.
Despite their arguable illegality, some interrogation techniques are still being
used by Western states. Although this causes discomfort for many observers,
there is an argument that it should remain an option for those tasked with
protecting national security. This tension has prompted moral philosophers to
discuss not only the nature of objections to using torture, but objections to using
it to aid interrogation aimed at collecting intelligence.
Efforts have been made to try to pinpoint why torture is so widely consid-
ered to be wrong. Philosopher David Sussman persuasively suggests that what
is morally special about torture, compared to most other kinds of violence, is
that: ‘[t]he victim retains enough freedom and rationality to think of himself
as accountable, while he nevertheless finds himself, despite all he can do, to be
expressing the will of another, the will of a hated and feared enemy’.19 This and
other attempts to describe what is so unpalatable about torture when used as an
interrogation technique enhance our understanding of why we react the way we
do to accounts of this kind of treatment. Analysis of the circumstances in which
such methods might be justifiable has also been carried out.
This is an area that has played a significant role in the rise of the subdiscipline
of intelligence ethics. The ‘ticking bomb’ scenario is a popular stimulus for
consideration of the ethics of using torture in conjunction with interrogation.
There are variations of this scenario and which variation that is adopted affects
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what conclusions the scenario leads to. Vittorio Bufacchi and Jean Maria Arrigo
manage to identify three persistent features:
(1) the lives of a large number of innocent civilians are in danger; (2) the catastro-
phe is imminent, therefore time is of the essence; [and] (3) a terrorist has been cap-
tured who holds information that could prevent the catastrophe from occurring.20
The key question that follows is whether these circumstances could render
torture for intelligence-gathering acceptable. There are certainly limits to what
the scenario can help us achieve. It is based on a number of assumptions, includ-
ing that the suspect possesses the required intelligence, that the intelligence will
be used promptly enough to avoid the catastrophe and – an assumption that we
will address in more depth shortly – that interrogational torture will succeed in
collecting that intelligence. Neither does the scenario demand that we take the
wider consequences of using torture for interrogation into account.
Although the ‘ticking bomb’ scenario is useful in provoking reflection on
the morality of controversial interrogation techniques, it is posed in a way that
makes it difficult for respondents to reject torture. The abstract nature of discus-
sions of this issue have also been criticised by the likes of Henry Shue – whose
1978 article overturns the argument that since killing is worse than torture, yet is
sometimes permitted, then torture should also be permitted.21 More recently, he
has argued that hypotheticals are ‘superior to reality and thereby a disastrously
misleading analogy from which to derive conclusions about reality’. Shue goes
on to argue that although interrogational torture is always wrong, there are
times when it seems excusable.22 In other words, it may be necessary, but it
remains morally problematic. Whilst these discussions from the perspective of
moral philosophy should be praised for focusing on interrogation, intelligence
and security, they rest on an implicit claim that torture can succeed in eliciting
intelligence from suspects. Examining whether there is truth behind this claim
is a crucial, yet neglected, element of discussion concerning what kinds of tech-
niques ought to be used in the pursuit of intelligence.
EFFECTIVENESS
Linked closely to the legal and moral perspectives on the justifiability of torture
is the issue of whether it can be an effective aid to interrogation at all. Some
practitioners and scholars believe torture can succeed in eliciting intelligence;
others disagree. Both viewpoints will be discussed here. Claims that it is effective
are frequently used as the basis for arguments about whether using controversial
interrogation techniques are justifiable. As these claims are so fundamental to
judgements of whether torture and other controversial methods should be used
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for intelligence-gathering, it is worth attempting to find a way to assess them.

Assessments of the reliability of claims about which methods are effective use
testimony from interrogators, evidence from historical examples and research
from the fields of neuroscience and psychology. Significantly, each of these
approaches allows us to be specific about the methods being discussed and their
results, mitigating the difficulties of talking about diverse groups of interroga-
tion techniques.
A number of interrogators have spoken out about which ways of condition-
ing people to be interrogated and which questioning techniques they believe to
be effective. These range from book-length contributions to short quotations
given to the press. One example that claims a specific method was effective was
given by a police officer operating during the Malayan emergency of 1948 to
1960. Based on first-hand experience, Dato J. J. Raj (Jr) describes how a com-
munist terrorist was persuaded to cooperate with his questioners when he was
threatened with dogs.23 This is an example that succeeds in being specific about
the methods used, but gives few other details about the circumstances of the
interrogation. Limited detail in examples of what is or is not effective is frustrat-
ing, leaving the reader with little to go on in attempts to reconcile apparently
conflicting statements.
There are, of course, times when information has to be kept classified.
Secrecy did not prevent, however, the publication of the United Kingdom’s
‘Consolidated Guidance to Intelligence Officers and Service Personnel on the
Detention and Interviewing of Detainees Overseas, and on the Passing and
Receipt of Intelligence relating to Detainees’ upon its coming into force in
July 2010.24 Releasing information on interrogation methods currently in use
can help the enemy with their interrogation-resistance training, if they have
not already identified current methods though debriefing former prisoners.
Nonetheless, interrogators have publicised details of methods, the circumstances
in which they were used and the results, and these are valuable contributions to
the torture debate. With such a hotly contested topic, it is particularly important
to identify their reasons for speaking out.
Matthew Alexander’s 2008 book was motivated by a desire to draw attention
to the effectiveness of certain verbal interrogation techniques. Leading a team
sent to Iraq to test new interrogation techniques in the wake of the Abu Ghraib
scandal, Alexander faced opposition from proponents of the existing system of
interrogation, which was based on fear and control and included the use of death
threats. Instead, his team were ‘trained to search out what motivates a detainee,
then use that motivation to [their] advantage’.25 He describes the interrogations
of Abu Haydar – a ‘big fish’ in al-Qaeda – who was taken into custody during a
raid on a safe house. The old approach to interrogation was used on Haydar for
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twenty days with no success. By developing rapport, showing respect, stoking

his ego and offering him an incentive to cooperate, Alexander’s team succeeded
in its objectives. Haydar gave information that led them to their target: Zarqawi,
the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq. The US then killed Zarqawi in a missile strike on
7 June 2006. This book demonstrates that it is possible for interrogators to put
specifics into the public domain, including the characteristics of those interro-
gated, the methods used and the outcome. Further examples that provide these
specifics have been made available by historians.
The Algerian War is a frequently cited historical example of interrogation
being used alongside methods that might be described as torture and in which
these methods produced intelligence. This claim is often balanced by the sister
claim that, overall, the use of torture in Algeria was disadvantageous, leading
to ‘the political defeat of French colonialism’.26 Darius Rejali’s impressive book
offers accounts of ‘clean tortures’ – in other words, those that leave no physical
marks. Addressing the Battle of Algiers from 1956 to 1957 – a key episode in the
National Liberation Front’s (FLN) campaign for independence – Rejali describes
the water and electrical tortures used by French soldiers.27 He finds that though
the FLN was defeated in the Battle of Algiers, it was not because of successful
interrogations. Instead, the key factors leading to success were the instilling of
terror among the population through widescale arrests and violence, effectively
deterring them from working with the FLN, and the use of informants, some
of whom were recruited on the threat of torture or death.28 Of the thousands of
individuals who were interrogated and tortured in Algeria, Rejali does find one
case where ‘critical secret information’ was collected.29
A further example of interrogation techniques and their effects stems from
the London Reception Centre. Opened in January 1941 to sort ‘refugees from
the Continent’, it looked into the details of an estimated 33,000 aliens, with ‘only
three enemy agents with missions in Britain . . . known to have passed through
undetected’.30 It has been reported that: ‘[t]he whole process . . . was greatly
facilitated by an informal and friendly ethos. Most interviews were one to one
and conducted in a relaxed manner’.31 These interrogations were successful,
not only against innocent refugees, but against some agents, who – it is more
than likely – set out to deceive their interrogators. It was difficult for them to
maintain cover stories, as the facility was supported by a database, known as
the Information Index.32 In this example, a relaxed interrogation environment,
supported by access to information for cross-referencing, had what we can
describe as a high success rate. These are not the only examples where the spe-
cifics of the interrogation methods, the people that they were used against and
their results are known, as research on ‘the troubles’ in Northern Ireland dem-
onstrates.33 Research that unearths such examples has a lot to offer our under-
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standing of whether certain interrogation techniques are effective for collecting

intelligence.
It is not only interrogators and historians who can shed light on the effective-
ness of certain interrogation techniques. Neuroscientists have examined the
chemical effects of sleep deprivation on the brain. They have found that pro-
longed sleep deprivation ‘has a deleterious effect on memory’.34 While an inabil-
ity to use one’s memory properly will impair ability to stick to a cover story, it
will also impact on one’s ability to share accurate information. The latter is a
clear disadvantage for intelligence-gathering. There are certainly other examples
of research in this field, in psychology and in psychiatry, which can contribute
to understanding the impact of certain aids to interrogation on the individual
and how that impact relates to their ability and inclination to cooperate with the
interrogator.35 Drawing upon what these disciplines have to offer can help the
study of intelligence-gathering by interrogation.
Psychologists have addressed police interrogation, which forms a part of
criminal investigations, to a much greater extent than they have interrogation
for intelligence-gathering. Research into the effects of sleep deprivation on
police interrogation has found that ‘interrogative pressure on sleep-deprived
subjects leads to a lack of reliability in answering’.36 This appears to be applica-
ble, in principle, to interrogation for intelligence-gathering. It also appears likely
that psychologists’ research into how to avoid inducing false confessions and
how to identify false confessions in the context of criminal investigations would
be of use to interrogators aiming to collect intelligence, as both seek the truth.37
Any differences between these practices, such as the legal environment, do, of
course, have to be given due consideration.
In the 1950s, a group of prominent psychologists sought to explain the rates
of compliance exhibited by American prisoners of war subjected to communist
‘brainwashing’ during the Korean War.38 It has been found that isolating prison-
ers increases the likelihood they will communicate with their interrogators, as
cooperation allows them to ‘enjoy in some degree a much needed social rela-
tionship’.39 To put it another way, there is an innate desire to communicate that
interrogators can exploit. It has also been shown that ‘interrogation late at night,
when the accused would normally be asleep, places them at their lowest level
of resistance and resilience’.40 This material is useful to the scholar interested
in the relationship between certain methods of interrogation and intelligence-
gathering. The question that remains unanswered is to what extent inter-
rogators aiming to collect intelligence draw upon this research. Psychological
approaches have featured in interrogation training at the US Army Intelligence
Centre,41 and CIA interrogation manuals have drawn upon psychologists’ work
directly.42 Psychology, then, has a lot to offer practitioners and scholars, who
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are seeking to understand what makes interrogation an effective way to collect

intelligence.
Before moving on, it should be noted that the quality and quantity of intel-
ligence produced by interrogation is not the only way to assess its effectiveness.
We might also, for example, assess the impact of public knowledge of contro-
versial interrogation techniques on attitudes towards the government that is
using these techniques. Importantly, controversial techniques can also affect the
well-being of the people who experience them, and, as a result, research into how
best to rehabilitate victims of torture has been conducted.43 Effects are also felt
by friends, families and communities. There is a long way to go before compet-
ing statements on what interrogation techniques work can be reconciled, but
progress is being made.
HOW CONTROVERSIAL INTERROGATION TECHNIQUES

COME INTO USE
The final theme in the publicly available material on interrogation concerns how
controversial interrogation methods come to be used. First, there is material
that addresses, or sheds light on, how such methods have come to have official
approval. As a result of significant media attention paid to the treatment of
prisoners in the ‘War on Terror’, many useful primary sources have been made
public, and two edited volumes provide easy access to these sources.44 A series of
memos contained therein reveal the process through which it was made possible
for the US to argue that captured Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters were not prison-
ers of war and the subsequent implications for how they could be treated. These
memos significantly advance our understanding of how interrogation tech-
niques, widely regarded as torture, came to be a part of US policy. When seeking
to argue that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to Taliban or al-Qaeda
fighters, Alberto R. Gonzales – Counsel to the President and later to become
US Attorney General – noted that this would allow the US to obtain informa-
tion quickly, in order to save lives.45 These memos contain the famous quote
attributed to Assistant Attorney General John Bybee, which caused outrage by
specifying that only pain of a kind associated with organ failure would satisfy
the severe pain component of the definition of torture,46 and Donald Rumsfeld’s
similarly provocative comment – not intended for the public domain – ques-
tioning why prisoners’ standing time should be limited to four hours, when
he stood for eight to ten hours a day.47 Rumsfeld also expressed concern about
certain techniques, including ‘good cop, bad cop’ and dietary and environmental
manipulation, specifying that they should only be used on detainees believed
to possess ‘critical intelligence’.48 These documents have been built upon with
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interviews and analysis, which have gone further towards explaining how con-
troversial interrogation techniques came to be approved by the US Government
for use in the ‘War on Terror’, further highlighting the role that some govern-
ment lawyers played in the manipulation of law.49 While it is helpful to have
access to this evidence on how controversial methods can become policy, there
is scope to ask further questions about the extent to which intelligence-gathering
was the motivation of the actors involved in approving them.
Far from all uses of controversial interrogation techniques are approved by
senior decision-makers. Impetus for these practices has also come from the indi-
viduals who are directly responsible for the welfare of prisoners, and there is also
a grey area, in which there is no official approval, but in which official tolerance
or encouragement can be identified. Enlightening research into how individuals
come to be able to mistreat others in this context has been carried out by psychol-
ogists. Notable in this field is Mika Haritos-Fatouros’ work on the use of torture
under the military dictatorship in Greece from 1967 to 1974. Based on interviews
with former torturers, Haritos-Fatouros argues that torturers are made, not
born. She is one of a group of authors who describe the facilitating effect that
the dehumanisation of victims gives to trainee torturers.50 They also found that
exposure to torture and violence can desensitise trainee torturers51 and that a
process of ‘routinisation’ normalises the acts.52 In addition, language can play a
facilitating role. Drawing on interviews with victims of torture, their families and
torturers, Marguerite Feitlowitz examines how the use of language facilitated and
cloaked the controversial treatment and disappearances of thousands of people
during Argentina’s Dirty War of the 1970s. In the La Perla camp in Córdoba, for
example, torture chambers were known as ‘operating theatres’, which were used
‘as a distancing, enabling device’.53 There is insight available, then, into how the
impetus for controversial interrogation practices can come from above or below
and how individuals come to fill the roles expected of them. Research into how
controversial interrogation techniques come to be used provides valuable parts of
the puzzle for those seeking a holistic understanding of interrogation.
CONCLUSION
Individuals specialising in a range of disciplines have contributed to the under-
standing of interrogation for intelligence-gathering, often motivated by an
intention to shed light on practices that are commonly regarded as immoral
and illegal. However, focusing on torture can mask their contributions to intel-
ligence studies. Swapping the popular trend of focusing on torture for a focus on
interrogation draws attention to the unresolved matter of what techniques are
effective for collecting intelligence. Asking whether techniques fulfil their aim of
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eliciting intelligence from those interrogated is an important element in assess-

ing their justifiability. Whether the techniques used are in breach of legal prohi-
bitions of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment also affects
whether they are described as justifiable. The popular ‘ticking bomb’ scenario
can guide discussion of the morality of torture as an aid to interrogation, but is
based on assumptions about effectiveness that warrant further research. Despite
the volume of publications on torture, there is plenty of scope for further work
on what results particular policies and interrogation techniques have brought
about. Research into how and why controversial practices have arisen, as well as
being worthwhile in itself, is a valuable dimension of efforts to judge the justifi-
ability of these practices.
Notes
1 For example, see Alex J. Bellamy, ‘No Pain, No Gain? Torture and Ethics in the War
on Terror’, International Affairs, 82(1), 2006, pp. 121–48; David Leppard, ‘Secrecy
Law to Shield MI6 over Torture’, The Sunday Times (London), 27 May 2012, p. 2.
2 Neil Macmaster, ‘Torture: From Algiers to Abu Ghraib’, Race & Class, 46(2), 2004,
p. 3.
3 Macmaster, ‘Torture: From Algiers to Abu Ghraib’, p. 3.
4 Cyril Cunningham, ‘International Interrogation Techniques’, RUSI, 117, September
1972, p. 32.
5 CIA, ‘KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation’, July 1963, p. 5, available at: www.
gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB122/index.htm.
6 Edward Peters, Torture (Philadelphia, PN: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999).
7 See Jane Mayer, ‘Whatever it Takes’, The New Yorker, 83(1), 19 February 2007, pp.
66–82. I am grateful to Jo Milner for pointing me to this source.
8 Jeremy Waldron, ‘Torture and Positive Law: Jurisprudence for the White House’,
Columbia Law Review, 105(6), October 2005, p. 1695.
9 Nigel S. Rodley, ‘The Prohibition of Torture: Absolute Means Absolute’, Denver
Journal of International Law and Policy, 34(1), 2006, p. 152.
10 Ireland v. United Kingdom, European Court of Human Rights (1978), Series A,
No. 25, 39. For more on this, see Samantha Newbery, Bob Brecher, Philippe Sands
and Brian Stewart, ‘Interrogation, Intelligence and the Issue of Human Rights’,
Intelligence and National Security, 24(5), October 2009, pp. 631–43.
11 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1985).
12 Philippe Sands, Torture Team: Deception, Cruelty and the Compromise of Law
(London: Allen Lane, 2008), p. 215.
13 Manfred Nowak, ‘What Practices Constitute Torture? US and UN Standards’,
Human Rights Quarterly, 28(4), 2006, p. 837.
14 Malcolm D. Evans, ‘Getting to Grips with Torture’, The International and Comparative
Law Quarterly, 51(2), April 2002, p. 370.
15 Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or
MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd 232 21/02/2013 08:24

Punishment, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly, 10 December 1984,

UNTS, 1465, Article 1.
16 Nowak, ‘What Practices Constitute Torture?’, p. 830.
17 See Waldron, ‘Torture and Positive Law’.
18 This view was held, for example, by James T. Hill (General, US Army) and
Michael E. Dunlavey (Major-General, US). Hill to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, Washington, ‘Counter-Resistance Techniques’, 25 October 2002, in Karen J.
Greenberg and Joshua L. Dratel (eds), The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 223; Dunlavey to Commander,
United States Southern Command, ‘Counter-Resistance Strategies’, 11 October 2002,
in Greenberg and Dratel (eds), The Torture Papers, p. 225.
19 David Sussman, ‘What’s Wrong with Torture?’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 33(1),
2005, p. 29.
20 Vittorio Bufacchi and Jean Maria Arrigo, ‘Torture, Terrorism and the State: A
Refutation of the Ticking-Bomb Argument’, Journal of Applied Philosophy, 23(3),
2006, p. 358. Bufacchi is a philosophy scholar; Arrigo is a psychologist.
21 Henry Shue, ‘Torture’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 7(2), 1978, p. 125.
22 Henry Shue, ‘Torture in Dreamland: Disposing of the Ticking Bomb’, Case Western
Reserve Journal of International Law, 37(2–3), 2006, p. 231.
23 Dato J. J. Raj (Jr), ‘A Canine Threat’, in Brian Stewart (ed.), Smashing Terrorism in
the Malayan Emergency: The Vital Contribution of the Police (Subang Jaya: Pelanduk,
2004), pp. 150–1.
24 HM Government, ‘Consolidated Guidance to Intelligence Officers and Service
Personnel on the Detention and Interviewing of Detainees Overseas, and on the
Passing and Receipt of Intelligence Relating to Detainees’, July 2010, available at:
http://www.parliament.uk/deposits/depositedpapers/2011/DEP2011-1796.pdf.
25 Matthew Alexander with John R. Bruning, How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S.
Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, To Take Down the Deadliest Man
in Iraq (New York, NY: Free Press, 2008), p. 77. Alexander writes under a
pseudonym.
26 Macmaster, ‘Torture’, p. 7.
27 Darius Rejali, Torture and Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2007), pp. 157–65.
28 Rejali, Torture and Democracy, pp. 483–4.
29 Rejali, Torture and Democracy, p. 491.
30 Oliver Hoare, ‘Introduction’, in Oliver Hoare (ed.), Camp 020: MI5 and the Nazi
Spies, The Official History of MI5’s Wartime Interrogation Centre (Richmond: Public
Record Office, 2000), pp. 16–17.
31 Hoare, ‘Introduction’, p. 17.
32 Hoare, ‘Introduction’, pp. 16–17.
33 For example, Samantha Newbery, ‘Intelligence and Controversial British
Interrogation Techniques: The Northern Ireland Case, 1971–2’, Irish Studies in
International Affairs, 20, 2009, pp. 103–19.
34 Shane O’Mara, ‘Torturing the Brain: On the Folk Psychology and Folk Neurobiology
Motivating “Enhanced and Coercive Interrogation Techniques” ’, Trends in Cognitive
Sciences, 13(12), December 2009, pp. 497–8.
35 For example, A. T. Woods, E. Poliakoff, D. M. Lloyd, J. Kuenzel, R. Hodson,
MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd 233 21/02/2013 08:24

H. Gonda, J. Batchelor, G. B. Dijksterhuis and A. Thomas, ‘Effect of Background

Noise on Food Perception’, Food Quality and Preference, 22, 2011, pp. 42–7.
36 Mark Blagrove, Dominic Cole-Morgan and Hazel Lambe, ‘Interrogative Suggestibility:
The Effects of Sleep Deprivation and Relationship with Field Dependence’, Applied
Cognitive Psychology, 8, 1994, p. 177.
37 See, for example, Gisli H. Gudjonsson, The Psychology of Interrogations and
Confessions: A Handbook (Chichester: Wiley, 2003).
38 Of the resulting publications, perhaps the most well-known is Albert D. Biderman,
‘Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions from Air Force Prisoners of War’,
Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, 33(9), September 1957, pp. 616–25.
39 I. E. Farber, Harry F. Harlow and Louis Jolyon, ‘Brainwashing, Conditioning, and
DDD (Debility, Dependency, and Dread)’, Sociometry, 20(4), December 1957, p. 277.
40 Gudjonsson, The Psychology of Interrogations and Confessions, p. 312.
41 Chris Mackey with Greg Miller, The Interrogator’s War: Inside the Secret War Against
Al Qaeda (London: John Murray Publishers, 2004), pp. 39–42. Mackey gives an
account of his 1991 training at the Centre.
42 CIA, ‘KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation’, July 1963, available at: www.
gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB122/index.htm; CIA, ‘Human Resource
Exploitation Training Manual’, 1983, available at: www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/
NSAEBB/NSAEBB122/index.htm.
43 For example, Jacqueline C. Bouhoutsos, ‘Treating Victims of Torture: Psychology’s
Challenge’, in Peter Suedfeld (ed.), Psychology and Torture (New York, NY:
Hemisphere Publishing Corporation, 1990), pp. 129–41.
44 Greenberg and Dratel (eds), The Torture Papers; Mark Danner (ed.), Torture and
Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror (London: Granta Books, 2005).
45 Alberto R. Gonzales (Counsel to the President), ‘Memorandum for the President’, 25
January 2005, in Greenberg and Dratel (eds), The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu
Ghraib (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 118–21.
46 Jay S. Bybee (Office of Legal Counsel, Department of Justice) to Gonzales, 1 August
2002, in Greenberg and Dratel (eds), The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 176. David Luban notes that
it appears that the principal author of this document was John C. Yoo (Deputy
Assistant Attorney General). Also, see David Luban, ‘Liberalism, Torture, and the
Ticking Bomb’, Virginia Law Review, 91(6), 2005, p. 1427.
47 William J. Haynes II (General Counsel) to Donald Rumsfeld (Secretary of Defense),
27 November 2002, in Greenberg and Dratel (eds), The Torture Papers: The Road to
Abu Ghraib (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 237.
48 Rumsfeld to General James T. Hill (Commander, US Southern Command), 16 April
2003, in Greenberg and Dratel (eds), The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 361–4.
49 See Sands, Torture Team.
50 Mika Haritos-Fatouros, The Psychological Origins of Institutionalised Torture
(London: Routledge, 2003), p. 63; Albert Bandura with Claudio Barbaranelli, Gian
Vittorio Caprara and Concetta Pastorelli, ‘Mechanisms of Moral Disengagement in
the Exercise of Moral Agency’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71(2),
August 1996, p. 366.
51 Haritos-Fatouros, The Psychological Origins of Institutionalised Torture, p. 7; Janice
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T. Gibson, ‘Factors Contributing to the Creation of a Torturer’, in Peter Suedfeld

(ed.), Psychology and Torture (New York, NY: Hemisphere Publishing Corporation,
1990), p. 84.
52 Haritos-Fatouros, The Psychological Origins of Institutionalised Torture, p. 164;
Herbert C. Kelman, ‘The Social Context of Torture: Policy Process and Authority
Structure’, in Ronald D. Crelinsten and Alex P. Schmid (eds), The Politics of Pain:
Torturers and their Masters (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995), pp. 30–1.
53 Marguerite Feitlowitz, A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture
(New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 65.
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Chapter 12
WHITEHALL, INTELLIGENCE AND OFFICIAL

HISTORY: EDITING SOE IN FRANCE
In the historiography of British intelligence, the publication of SOE in France

– an officially sponsored account of the activities of the Special Operations
Executive (SOE) during the Second World War – stands out as a significant
moment. While the existence of the organisation and its activities already con-
stituted something of an open secret – a consequence of numerous memoirs
and investigative works published since its dissolution in 1946 – SOE in France
was an account of part of the wartime secret world, which was published by Her
Majesty’s Stationery Office: an official history, based on access to SOE’s own
records – material that would not begin to make its way into the public domain
for a further thirty years. Its publication proved controversial; legal action from
disgruntled ex-agents who objected to their treatment in the book soon fol-
lowed, resulting in the speedy appearance of an amended second impression,
while work began on a more extensively amended second edition. Chronicled
in the national press – which had already shown interest in the book – the con-
troversy was not only public, but costly.1 In July 1969, it was recorded that the
book had resulted in lawsuits which saw £10,000 paid out in damages and £5,613
in associated costs, despite the fact that the manuscript had spent almost three
years going through an extensive editorial process.2
While the origins of the book, and the various factors that led Whitehall to
commission it, have already been explored in some detail, and the personal
recollections of the author, Professor M. R. D. Foot, have also been published,
little is known about the period between the original submission of Foot’s manu-
script in May 1963 and the book’s publication in April 1966.3 This chapter seeks
to explore the manuscript’s journey during this time and to consider why an
editorial period of such length failed to address the issues that would cause such
trouble after publication. As such, it aims to shed some light upon Whitehall’s
first experience of preparing official ‘secret history’ for publication, highlighting
the key issues and decisions taken, which emerge in the file material that is now
available at the National Archives.
236
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Whitehall, Intelligence and Official History 237
The decision to commission a history of SOE had been reached at a meeting

held on 18 May 1960.4 Having led the Working Party that had arrived at this
conclusion, Sir Burke Trend – soon to become Cabinet Secretary – proceeded
to head the Steering Committee that took responsibility for the project, working
alongside Peter Wilkinson, Norman Mott and Edwin (‘Eddie’) Boxshall – all
three of whom were ex-SOE personnel, whose post-war careers in Whitehall
continued to involve them with the intelligence world.5 The search for a suit-
able historian to research and write the book resulted in an approach being
made to M. R. D. Foot, the approval of the Chief of SIS, Sir Dick White, having
first been obtained.6 On 7 November 1960, Wilkinson offered Foot the job of
writing a history of SOE in France. A full-time position, it was expected that the
work, ‘based on official material which would be made available’, would take 18
months to complete. Covered by the Official Secrets Act, Wilkinson explained
that publication of the completed work was not guaranteed and that changes to
the text may be demanded ‘for reasons of security’.7 Foot ‘gladly’ took on the
project, work formally beginning on 9 November.8
SECURITY CONCERNS
In late April 1963, Foot informed Wilkinson that his finished draft was in the
hands of ‘our friends’ [ie SIS] typists’.9 By early May, it reached Wilkinson,
who immediately arranged for it to be read by Mott (‘our friend’s [sic] security
expert’) and by representatives of the Foreign Office.10 He received Mott’s ‘pre-
liminary views’ on 5 June.11 While acknowledging that he needed to ‘go through
it again with a hair-comb’, Mott’s initial impression was that there was ‘little
which is objectionable on straight security grounds . . . it seems to me that the
book, even if published as it stands, would do little or no harm to real security
interests’.12 Mott later confirmed his original impression that there was little of
concern from a security point of view, listing only eleven ‘Security Points’ for
further consideration:
M.1 Reference to ‘sizeable . . . deception industries’ (but can possibly pass
nowadays).
M.2 Refs. to ‘the head of the Secret Service’.
M.3 Ref. to ‘the head of the intelligence service’. (an open secret that there is one,
but should not appear in an officially-sponsored book.)
M.4 Ref. to an amendment to SOE’s charter, ‘extending SOE’s sphere to neutral
countries’. (no great secret but possibly best omitted.)
M.5 Ref. to ‘secret vote’.
M.6 Refs. To ‘P.W.E.’ (I am uncertain whether these initials are now ‘respectable’
or whether ‘P.I.D.’ should still be used.)
M.7 Ref. to the use of American and Vatican diplomatic bags.
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M.8 Ref. to ‘the intelligence service’.

M.9 Ref. to Embassy and Consulate help to escapers.
M.10 Ref. to MORTIMORE ‘under MEW cover in LISBON Consulate’.
M.11 Ref. to currency operations – ‘but once’.13
Mott’s points formed part of a larger document, which was compiled for discus-
sion in October, where they were grouped with ‘kindred points’. The description
was a little wide of the mark; these drew attention to ‘Belittlement or Criticism
of de Gaulle and/or Gaullism’, along with ‘Disparaging and possibly slanderous
remarks’ made by Foot – hardly matters of immediate security concern.
At a meeting to discuss all the points raised held on 29 October, five of Mott’s
‘Security Points’ (namely, 1, 5, 6, 8 and 9) were allowed to pass; the references
to SOE activity in neutral countries and the use of American and Vatican
diplomatic bags were to be deleted, while the remaining four points were to be
amended.14 Of the ‘kindred points’, fifteen were to be amended, nine were to
be allowed to stand and one omitted. Three of the remaining points were felt
to warrant legal advice. These concerned the notorious agent Henri Dericourt
and the former second in command of the SOE’s French (F) Section, Nicholas
Bodington.15
Save for these outstanding issues and the need for the author to make a small
number of amendments to the text, by the end of October 1963, the security
side of the editorial process was, effectively, complete. Other issues, not directly
related to security, now proceeded to occupy the attention of the Steering
Committee.
POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS
Wilkinson’s initial comments on the manuscript saw the editorial process imme-
diately move beyond security matters. He informed Trend that he had found it
‘very readable, so far as I can judge it is accurate, and with certain reservations
I think that it is publishable as an official history’.16 Wilkinson’s reservations
related to ‘passages concerning the origins of S.O.E., rivalry between M.I.6 and
S.O.E., and S.O.E.’s running fight with the Foreign Office’, where the potential
for official embarrassment was high. He argued that such passages would be
‘picked on by the sensational press, and cannot fail to damage the memory of
S.O.E. and the reputation of M.I.6.’.17 Wilkinson also predicted, correctly, that
the Foreign Office ‘might propose some toning down in the interests of Anglo-
French relations’.18 Martin Young – representing the Central Department
– suggested that the book was in need of a ‘disarming’ introduction, which
would help make much of what followed altogether more palatable for a French
audience. He considered this an important move, as the book was ‘dealing
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with a subject close to de Gaulle’s own heart and to the pride of Frenchmen in
general’ (adding that, if it ‘can say deservedly nice things about de Gaulle and the
French so much the better’).19 Young also detailed ‘all the remarks which struck
me on first reading as regrettably critical or otherwise undesirable’.20 Totalling
fifty-three points, these were broken down into eight categories: French lack of
security (points 1–10); other French failings (11–18); remarks tending to belit-
tle or criticise General de Gaulle or Gaullism (19–29); criticism or belittling
of French resistance and also of de Gaulle (30–5); suggestions of anti-Gaullist
policy by Her Majesty’s Government (HMG) (36–40); the role of the Foreign
Office (41–4); remarks about the US, Spain and Switzerland (45–48); along with
five miscellaneous points. These were all discussed, alongside security considera-
tions, in October. Just under half of Martin’s points were dismissed, eight were
marked for omission and one for alteration. The views of the Western depart-
ment were to be sought on the remaining fourteen points, which were primarily
concerned with alleged French security failings.21 Over the course of several
meetings – one of which saw Foot in attendance – amendments to the text were
agreed upon, and, by September 1964, the draft was considered ‘acceptable to
the Foreign Office from the political point of view and from the security point of
view’.22
This did not, however, mark the end of the political editing process, as it was
‘understood that the Paris Embassy had some points to raise’. Two pages of
comments were subsequently received from the Embassy, which included par-
ticular concern over a passage that illustrated the extent of anti-Gaullist feeling
in London during the war, which was considered ‘much more likely to be picked
up and used against us by French official propaganda than anything which the
S.O.E. organisation might have said or done’.23 A number of the points raised
were duly communicated to Foot for his consideration.24
Nor did this see the end of politically driven comments on the manuscript.
Further concerns were raised by the newly appointed British Ambassador in
Paris, Sir Patrick Reilly, in January 1965. Sir Patrick’s appointment coincided
with a ‘low ebb’ in Anglo-French relations, following de Gaulle’s veto of Britain’s
attempt to join the Common Market – an application with which Sir Patrick
had been heavily involved.25 He requested that ‘every possible effort should be
made to remove any language not essential to the story to which exception could
reasonably (from their point of view) be taken by the French’.26 While noting
that ‘Mr Foot is to be congratulated on a remarkable piece of work’ and that he
would ‘be very reluctant to recommend against publication’, Sir Patrick felt that
the book had the potential to cause ‘serious trouble’ for Anglo-French relations:
In spite of the generous tribute to General de Gaulle, there is, I think, a good
deal in the book which is likely to be resented by committed Gaullists and by the
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General himself. He is after all made to look pretty silly in a number of places . . .
If Anglo-French relations were reasonably good at the time of publication or de
Gaulle himself were no longer ruler of France and Head of State, the book might
easily pass without serious protest. As things are, Anglophobe supporters of the
regime could easily make much capital out of it: and no amount of emphasis that
the author’s views are his own only will affect the fact that the book is published by
H.M. Stationery Office.27
Sir Patrick’s points were forwarded to Foot by Boxshall on 19 January, and it was
hoped that, ‘in spite of the lateness of the hour’, he would be able to give them ‘all
due consideration’.28 As a result of Sir Patrick’s comments, which ran to a total
of five pages, further amendments (described as ‘substantial alterations’29) were
made to the galleys. Some were made, quite literally, overnight,30 while it took
until the summer for others to be addressed to the satisfaction of the Foreign
Office.31 Sir Patrick returned to voice further concerns on the subject, after the
publication of the book in April 1966, when arrangements for a French language
edition collided with a new effort for Britain to join the European Economic
Community (EEC).32
THE HUMAN FACTOR

On 26 March 1964, Trend wrote to the Prime Minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home,
asking him to approve the publication of SOE in France in principle.33 Both
Douglas-Home and the Foreign Secretary, R. A. Butler, agreed, and the news
soon hit the national press.34 The now heavily amended manuscript (Trend had
apologised to Douglas-Home for its condition, but turning this into a virtue,
he noted that it ‘illustrates the extent of the amendment and revision which
have been effected so far in an attempt to ensure that the book is free from
objection’35) was sent to the Stationery Office for galley proofs to be prepared
in early May.36 A decision now needed to be taken relating to the question of
who should be allowed to read, and comment upon, the galleys, and agreement
was reached over those who were ‘to receive a full set of galley proofs’ and those
who were ‘only to be shown excerpts regarding themselves’.37 A full set was
to be made available to Maurice Buckmaster, who headed SOE’s independent
French (F) Section for much of the war, and Sir James Hutchinson, who had,
for a period, headed RF Section, which worked with the Free French. A small
number of former high-ranking members of SOE – Lord Gladwyn, Brigadier
Mockler-Ferryman, Robin Brook, Douglas Dodds-Parker, David Keswick and
Harry Sporborg – were to be ‘invited to read those passages which contain refer-
ence to themselves’ and were also permitted to read the full text, ‘if they specially
requested to do so’. Nicholas Bodington, who had worked for F Section, was
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to ‘be invited to read extracts referring to himself on the premises of the Paris
Embassy’.38 Beyond former members of SOE, relevant passages were to be sent
to those politicians who were mentioned in the text, as a consequence of their
involvement with SOE’s affairs during the war: Churchill, Macmillan, Lord
Selborne, Lord Attlee, Lord Avon, Lord Thurso and Lord Chandos, with the
complete text being made available to them, if so requested.
The question also prompted consideration to be given to other SOE officers
and agents mentioned by name in the history, described collectively by Boxshall
as ‘the “small fry” ’,39 as to whether they ‘would have to be asked for their
consent on whether they would have to be referred to by their pseudonyms’ – an
issue that proceeded to arouse considerable debate. It was felt that to use SOE
codenames would ‘detract from the book’s value’, but, at the same time, it was
acknowledged that ‘those who joined a secret organisation in wartime might
justifiably expect their connexion with it to remain secret after the war’.40 The
debate raged for some time, the issue being recognised as one which ‘engen-
ders a good deal of feeling’, with opinion ‘fairly evenly divided on whether the
names should be published or not’.41 The ‘burning question’ was finally settled
at a meeting between Foot and Trend, at which it was agreed that the names
of F Section agents ‘could probably be published’, alongside those of other
sections active in France.42
The galleys were finally despatched for comment in October, the resulting
responses necessitating further amendments to the text. Anthony Montague
Browne – representing Churchill – expressed concern over the manner in which
a disagreement between the Prime Minister and de Gaulle had been described:
. . . Sir Winston’s reaction to de Gaulle’s outburst is described as ‘equally infantile’.
I feel that it would be more appropriate to substitute ‘almost as extreme’. A distinc-
tion should really be drawn between de Gaulle’s prima-donna attitude and the
reply of the overburdened Prime Minister.43
Foot ‘readily accepted’ the point.44 What was later described by Trend as the
only comment ‘of substance’ to be received from an ex-Minister came from Lord
Avon, who was ‘not happy at the account given of the F.O.’s part in the business’,
nor with comments that he and Hugh Dalton – SOE’s First Minister – had got
on badly.45 Here, the author stood his ground; Foot suggested that he ‘may have
forgotten in twenty years much that was notorious at the time’.46
Buckmaster’s reaction to the galleys brought with it the first threat of legal
action. Wilkinson had earlier acknowledged, upon first reading the manuscript,
that Buckmaster did ‘not come out of the story at all well’, but believed that this
was ‘only fair’.47 Trend was now informed that Buckmaster had ‘written a v.
vigorous letter about allegedly libellous remarks about himself + stating that he
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was referring the matter to his solicitors’.48 Buckmaster expressed concern over
the portrayal of certain members of his section and objected ‘most strongly to
the light in which I am presented’:
The book is full of cynical innuendos, of tendentious conclusions based on a hap-
hazard and arbitrary assessment of motives. I am made to appear irresponsible,
callous, partial, inefficient, ‘crassly’ insensitive in my optimism, and frequently
mistaken in my judgement, although such reflections are often followed by a rather
generalised explanation . . . which half-heartedly invalidates these criticisms. In
this manner a picture is built up which discredits my personal character and my
role as head of F Section.49
Buckmaster’s complaints resulted in further changes being made to the text.

Here, the secrecy that had surrounded the project, and the associated reluctance
to allow Foot to interview surviving members of SOE’s French sections, revealed
its inherent limitations, prompting Foot to observe that:
much trouble would have been saved if he and I had been allowed in touch some
years ago . . . Many of his comments are valuable, and I have gladly incorporated
them; you will see that I have fallen in with almost all of his principal objections.50
As a result of a continued stream of suggested amendments, so many changes
were made to the galleys that it was agreed that a fresh set would have to be
prepared. By the end of January 1965, the revised text had been sent to the
Stationery Office for new galleys to be prepared, and it was hoped that little
further work would be required; in order to help ensure this, it was agreed that
they would not receive wide circulation.51 This hope, however, was short-lived.
The belief that ‘Buckmaster’s wrath seems to have been assuaged’ was proven
wrong, as he continued to press his outstanding points, along with the desire
from the Foreign Office for further consideration of the points raised by Sir
Patrick Reilly, discussed above.52 While Foot had accepted twenty-three of
Buckmaster’s thirty-four points, eleven remained unresolved. It was agreed
that an effort should be made ‘to persuade Buckmaster to withdraw as many
of his remaining objections as possible’,53 and so it was proposed that Foot and
Buckmaster should be allowed to meet, for reasons that had little to do with the
accuracy of the text. As one official noted, if such a meeting did not go ahead:
I can foresee, after the book is published, Buckmaster announcing that he had
never met Foot and the latter saying in his turn that he was not allowed to see
Buckmaster. This situation might appeal to reviewers, and it would be difficult
to give a convincing reason why Foot was not allowed to see Buckmaster at any
stage.54
As there was a lack of consensus on the matter, it was put to Trend, who agreed
that the two men could meet.55 At the meeting held on 26 July, after ‘consider-
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able argument’ and debate ‘at length’, Buckmaster withdrew some of his remain-
ing objections, while a number of further amendments to the text were also
agreed upon.56 Clearly aggrieved by the fact that he had not been approached
during the writing of the book (‘It looked to me as if I was not to be trusted’),57
Buckmaster remained unhappy at the end of the meeting, but, by this point, it
was widely agreed that the only eventuality that would satisfy him would be if the
project were completely abandoned.
LEGAL QUESTIONS
As noted above, the Steering Committee had recognised that legal advice
would be necessary during the initial meeting to discuss the manuscript held
in October 1963. A copy of the manuscript was subsequently sent to the Office
of the Treasury Solicitor, with the request that certain passages be considered
from a legal perspective, including references to the controversial agent Henri
Dericourt.
The Principal Assistant Treasury Solicitor, F. W. Charlton, read the speci-
fied passages, along with much of the remainder of the manuscript, ‘in order
to understand the background’. Charlton was favourably disposed to the work,
finding it both ‘absorbing’ and a ‘valuable historical record’. In terms of possible
legal action, he believed that, subject to a number of amendments being made,
‘the risk of successful civil or criminal proceedings being brought in England
for libel or injurious falsehood against the author, printers or publishers is very
small’.58 He explained that it would be possible to:
successfully resist any proceedings on the grounds that the statements of fact are
true . . . The facts on which the author relies for his narrative appear to be well
documented by the footnotes to which he refers, and which I imagine have all been
carefully checked.59
Charlton similarly qualified his views (‘Assuming the facts are correctly stated
. . .’)60 on the specific passages that he had been asked to read. As such, while he
was able to advise on the removal of certain specific passages that, he felt, lent
themselves to innuendo, much of the remainder of his opinion rested upon the
assumption that reference back to the original source material had been made.
While Charlton was kept appraised of, and continued to advise upon, sub-
sequent amendments to the draft, at no point did so much as the possibility of
such reference back to the SOE archive appear to have been discussed by the
Committee. Yet, although displaying such faith in the work of their historian, at
the same time, concerns about specific passages persisted. A desire for a second
check to be made of passages describing the torture suffered by F Section agent
Odette Hallowes (née Sansom) resulted in the former Chief of SOE, Sir Colin
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Gubbins, being asked to look again at the relevant passages.61 Having done so, he
agreed ‘that it can stand as [Foot] has put it’.62 It was only after Hallowes herself
made a threat of legal action, prompted by a journalist from the Daily Mail who
was reviewing the book and read the relevant lines to her over the phone, that
Charlton was sent the relevant papers from the SOE archive, in order to provide
a legal opinion, which did not put the Steering Committee’s minds at rest, as
he pointed to discrepancies between the file material and the text.63 Yet, while
Charlton expressed concern, at this point – literally days before the book hit the
shelves – it was too late for any action to be taken.
Nor was this the only legal issue that was raised at the eleventh hour; a need to
amend the text still further emerged after the book had gone to press. Alongside
the editorial process, negotiations had been taking place concerning overseas
publication. In addition to a desire to see a French language version appear as
quickly as possible, there was interest in pursuing an American edition. To this
end, Charlton made enquiries in the United States, regarding how the book
would likely fare under US law. He reported that both his contacts and the legal
advisers of the prospective US publisher, Knopf, had ‘expressed doubts about
some parts’ of the book’s Appendix A, which discussed the available sources on
SOE and included an annotated bibliography on existing works on SOE.64 An
urgent memo to Trend on 17 February 1966 drew attention to the implications
of these views for the British edition:
What is rather worrying is that, according to Mr Charlton, United States law is not
materially different from English Law so far as liability to legal proceedings over
the appendix is concerned. Mr Charlton frankly admits that he did not examine
the appendix as closely as the text of the main book and that if he had, he might
have suggested alterations to it. The book, however, has now gone to press. If we
required the minimum alterations to be made to Appendix A, HMSO calculate that
this will cost about £200 and delay publication by not more than two weeks.
Trend agreed that the necessary changes should be made, and printing was
halted. The first edition of SOE in France finally went on sale on 28 April 1966.65
REFLECTIONS
At the front of the second volume in a series of Cabinet Office files that chronicle
the process whereby SOE in France was commissioned, edited and published, a
‘First Review Form’ has been inserted, on which an official has suggested that
the files should be permanently retained, noting that: ‘In view of the controversy
and legal proceedings generated by this History, it is desirable that all parts of
this file should be retained for future administrative reference’.66 It will not be
possible to fully explore the extent of the shadow cast by the experience of SOE
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in France for some time; the files of the subsequent intelligence-based official
history project – the five-volume British Intelligence in the Second World War
– are only now beginning to trickle slowly into the public domain. While sur-
viving paperwork detailing the later official histories of SOE written by Charles
Cruickshank will hopefully see the light of day in the foreseeable future, the
release of official paperwork surrounding the more recent authorised accounts
of the Security Service and the SIS must be considered to be, at best, decades
away. Nevertheless, it is difficult not to conclude that the editorial process pro-
vided a number of lessons that those involved in any similar enterprise in the
future would do well to remember.
It is clear that difficulties were caused, unsurprisingly, by the path-breaking
nature of the project: an officially sponsored account of an organisation that
had formed part of the wartime British intelligence community. The tentative
approach adopted – to see if such a book could be written, in the first instance,
and to discuss possible publication later – itself hindered the process; a number
of the problems that subsequently arose may not have done so, had Foot been
allowed greater access to former members of the organisation, rather than being
confined, in large part, to what survived of the paper record – a point that was
noted some months after publication. Discussing the possibility of further his-
tories of SOE in 1967, a Foreign Office official questioned whether these should:
be written in the first instance without benefit of interviews with former participants
. . . or whether any eventual authors could start consulting participants straight
away; in the light of our experience over ‘S.O.E. in France’ the latter course might
turn out to be advisable.67
Yet, the innovative nature of the project can surely only explain so much and
not, perhaps, the limitations of the legal advice offered by the Office of the
Treasury Solicitor, which was tacitly acknowledged in the same 1967 study of
possible future histories of SOE, which observed:
The Treasury Solicitors . . . say that no matter how carefully galley proofs may be
checked, they can never totally guarantee that libel actions will not ensue from
publications of this kind. But this risk will naturally be more present in the minds
of those responsible for reading and approving any future draft texts on the subject
of SOE than was the case with Mr Foot’s work.68
While Wilkinson would later point the finger at Foot for the trouble that fol-
lowed (‘I am horrified to learn how much the publication of “SOE in France”
has cost the tax-payer partly at least for the really almost unpredictable reason
that a scholar of Winchester and New College and a professional historian
was found guilty of not verifying his references!’),69 the Committee certainly
needs to be apportioned its part of the blame; having recognised that certain
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passages were problematic, they failed to ensure that they were thoroughly
investigated.
What drove the editorial committee? Perhaps surprisingly, it had little to do
with security concerns; on the contrary, the manuscript was quickly passed from
a security point of view, with only a limited number of revisions considered
necessary. Overall, one cannot help but feel a certain ironic symmetry at work,
as the history of an organisation that had long been tagged derisorily as a col-
lection of ‘amateurs’ was itself taken through the editorial process by a group of
former SOE officers-turned-civil servants, who were themselves ‘enthusiastic
amateurs’ when it came to the world of publishing. But beyond such a sense of
‘amateurness’, the editorial priorities of Whitehall are clear. In his essay ‘Official
History: Its Pitfalls and Criteria’, Herbert Butterfield suggested that it ‘is difficult
for men to place truth above public advantage’, citing ‘the circumvention of
a diplomatic crisis’ and ‘the covering of a reputation’ as two areas that would
likely impact upon official history.70 The influence of these factors can be seen
in evidence very clearly during the editing of SOE in France; of greater concern
than ‘security’ were Foreign Office fears that the book would have a negative
impact upon present day Anglo-French relations, alongside a desire to ensure
that references to prominent politicians were ‘carefully examined for accuracy
and propriety’, with such individuals also given the opportunity to read relevant
passages, in order to ensure that they were portrayed in a light that was satisfac-
tory to themselves.71 That option was given to only a select few; many others
named in the book were given no such opportunity, the battle for anonymity
having been fought and lost, primarily for reasons of ‘readability’.72 A later post-
mortem on the experience of SOE in France acknowledged that this had been
a mistake, pointing out that the book had been ‘bitterly criticised for the fact
that it went beyond what some critics regard as the proper role of a historian in
giving the true names of individuals without their consent’.73 With its attention
thus focused, the editorial committee perhaps lost sight of the fact that the book
was, at its heart, an account of the bravery and heroism of numerous individuals
involved in the front line of resistance activity during the war. The very fact that
such individuals were described during the editorial process as ‘the “small fry” ’
certainly suggests, in terms of the legal action that followed, a degree of hubris
and an editorial process that would, ultimately, pay for its chosen priorities.
Notes
1 See, for example, ‘Frozen Secrets Start to Thaw’, Sunday Telegraph, 4 October 1965;
‘How to Keep a Well-Meaning Spy Out in the Cold . . .’, The Daily Sketch, 20 January
1966; ‘GC Heroine’s Torture was “Untrue”, Says Govt Book’, The Evening News, 21
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April 1966; ‘Torture or Imagination?’, Daily Mail, 28 April 1966; ‘Resistance Author
Hits at Critics’, Sunday Telegraph, 1 May 1966; ‘Author’s Fee of £4,761’, Daily
Telegraph, 24 May 1966; ‘Letters to the Editor (M. R. D. Foot)’, The Times, 11 July
1966; T. H. Johnston, ‘Secret Agent Gets Libel Settlement’, The Evening News, 27
January 1969.
2 All references are to documents held at The National Archives (TNA): Public Record
Office (PRO), Kew. CAB103/570, ‘Study of the Pros and Cons of Publication of
Further Histories of SOE in the Light of Experience Gained Since the Decision to
Publish “SOE in France” ’, PUSD, FCO, July 1969.
3 See M. R. D. Foot, Memoirs of an SOE Historian (Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2008);
Richard J. Aldrich, ‘Policing the Past: Official History, Secrecy and British Intelligence
since 1945’, English Historical Review, 119(483), 2004, pp. 922–53; Christopher J.
Murphy, ‘The Origins of SOE in France’, Historical Journal, 46(4), 2003, pp. 935–52;
Mark Seaman, ‘Landmarks in Defence Literature’, Defense Analysis, 3(2), 1987, pp.
191–3; Christopher R. Moran, Classified: Secrecy and the State in Modern Britain
4 PREM11/5084, SOE History – Meeting, 18 May 1960.
5 Having joined the Foreign Office in 1947, Wilkinson spent the early 1960s working
in the Permanent Under-Secretary’s Department (PUSD) at the Foreign Office,
followed by a secondment to the Cabinet Office in 1963. (John Ure, ‘Wilkinson,
Sir Peter Allix’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, available at: http://www.
oxforddnb.com/view/article/74315.) Boxshall had joined the SIS following the dis-
solution of SOE, ‘with the title of consultant to the Foreign Office . . . In 1959 he was
appointed custodian of the SOE archives’. (Richard Davenport-Hines, ‘Boxshall,
Edwin George’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, available at: http://www.
oxforddnb.com/view/article/45718.) Mott headed the SOE Liquidation Section upon
the organisation’s demise, where his knowledge of the organisation proved ‘of untold
value’, joining the Foreign Office in 1948. (TNA, HS9/1653, Note; Christopher J.
Murphy, Security & Special Operations (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006), p. 211.)
6 CAB103/571, ‘S.O.E. History’, E. G. Boxshall, 23 September 1960.
7 CAB103/571, Wilkinson to Foot, 7 November 1960.
8 CAB103/571, Foot to Under-Secretary of State, 7 November 1960; Wilkinson to Foot,
22 November 1960.
9 CAB103/571, Wilkinson to Wyatt, 8 February 1963.
10 By this point, Wilkinson had been seconded to the Cabinet Office, succeeded at
PUSD by Geoffrey Arthur. Writing to Trend on 8 May, he suggested that he ‘had
better continue to steer this operation since my successor at P.U.S.D. has no S.O.E.
background and knows absolutely nothing of the politics and passions that this par-
ticular subject inflames. I am of course keeping him fully informed’ (CAB103/571,
Wilkinson to Trend, 8 May 1963).
11 CAB103/571, Boxshall to Wilkinson, 5 June 1963.
12 CAB103/571, ‘Mr Norman Mott’s Preliminary Remarks on the Draft History’, 4 June
1963.
13 CAB103/571, ‘Comments on M. R. D. Foot’s “S.O.E. in France” ’.
14 CAB103/571, ‘CONFIDENTIAL, Meeting on October 29, 1963, 4.30–6pm’. Point 2
and point 3 were to be replaced with ‘The Head of the Intelligence Service’.
15 Suspected of having been in contact with the Germans during the war while acting
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as Air Movements officer for SOE’s French (F) Section, Dericourt had been arrested
in France in November 1946 and put on trial. He was subsequently acquitted in
1948, following evidence given by his friend (and former Second in Command of F
Section), Nicholas Bodington.
16 CAB103/571, Wilkinson to Trend, 22 May 1963.
19 CAB103/571, ‘S.O.E. in France’, M. F. Young, 19 July 1963.
20 CAB103/571, ‘S.O.E. in France’, M. F. Young, 19 July 1963.
21 CAB103/571, Boxshall to Wilkinson, 7 November 1963.
22 CAB103/572, ‘Notes on Meeting in Cabinet Office’, 23 September 1964.
23 CAB103/572, ‘Comments of Peter Ramsbotham and Robin Farquharson on the
Galley Proofs’, Leahy to Boxshall, 13 November 1964.
24 CAB103/572, Leahy to Boxshall, 13 November 1964. Leahy suggested that, in passing
on the comments, Boxshall should ‘omit the reference to “suppressing” a passage,
since it would not be very tactful’.
25 John Ure, ‘Reilly, Sir (D’Arcy) Patrick’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography,
available at: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/73087.
26 CAB103/573, Patrick Reilly, 7 January 1965.
27 CAB103/573, Patrick Reilly, 7 January 1965.
28 CAB103/573, Leahy to Boxshall, 19 January 1965.
29 CAB103/573, J. H. G. Leahy, 19 January 1965; CAB103/573, ‘S.O.E. History’, 21
January 1965.
30 Figg noted that: ‘The last comments to arrive, which were also numerous, were those
of Sir Patrick Reilly, the Ambassador-designate to Paris. I believe Foot stayed up
most of the night taking these into account in order to get the amendments made to
the galley in time for his meeting with Woods’ (CAB103/573, Figg to McIndoe, 25
January 1965).
31 Reviewing the revised galley proofs in April with a view to checking ‘whether the
Ambassador’s amendments and comments . . . have been met’, Tickell was ‘able to
track down most of them but not all’. While he noted that the author had ‘in general
removed those various sentences to which the Ambassador drew attention, which
could be construed as needlessly offensive to the French’, he also pointed out that
‘few of the general points’ made by Sir Patrick had been met and that while Foot had
‘done his best to meet the Ambassador’s detailed points’, there remained ten separate
instances ‘where it seems to me that he has not done so’ (FO146/4628, Tickell, ‘S.O.E.
IN FRANCE’, 23 April 1965.). Further amendments to the proofs were subsequently
made, in order to address Sir Patrick’s outstanding points. (FO146/4628, ‘Mr. Foot
and S.O.E.’, Tickell, 18 June 1965.)
32 CAB103/574, McIndoe to Thompson, 18 February 1966. In February 1966, HMSO
had been given the green light to enter into negotiations with a prospective French
publisher. Originally in favour of a French language edition, by November, in light
of the new British application, Reilly had changed his mind. While it was initially felt
that ‘the Ambassador is showing rather too strong signs of alarm’ (STAT14/2956,
‘Note’, Logan, 26 July 1966), by December, it was agreed to recommend to Ministers
that the French edition should be ‘postponed’ (STAT14/3956, Greenhill to Reilly,
16 December 1966). In February 1967, Curtis Brown was informed that a decision
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had been taken to no longer proceed with a French language edition (STAT14/3956,
Thompson to Waters, Curtis Brown Ltd, 10 February 1967).
33 CAB103/572, Trend to Prime Minister, 26 March 1964.
34 CAB103/572, Wilkinson to Trend, 10 April 1964; Butler to Prime Minister, 6 April
1964; ‘Resistance History to be Published’, Daily Telegraph, 14 April 1964.
35 CAB103/572, Trend to Prime Minister, 26 March 1964.
36 CAB103/572, L. C. W. Figg, 6 May 1964.
37 CAB103/572, ‘S.O.E. in France’, 13 July 1964.
38 CAB103/572, ‘S.O.E. in France’, 13 July 1964.
39 CAB 103/572, Boxshall to Figg, 13 July 1964.
40 CAB103/572, Notes on Meeting in the Cabinet Office, 3.30pm, 23 September 1964.
41 CAB103/572, Figg to Woods, 9 December 1964. The question was put out for con-
sultation, but this only served to entrench the opposing perspectives: Bill Deakin
was strongly in favour of the majority of names being ‘disclosed in a straightforward
historical manner’, while Colin Gubbins had already argued that, ‘unless the consent
can be obtained from S.O.E. H.Q. staff for their names to be quoted, they should be
referred to by their symbols’ (CAB103/572, Deakin to Trend, 7 December 1964; Draft
Steering Minute, 24 January 1964).
42 CAB103/572, Woods to Figg, 15 December 1964; CAB103/573, ‘Record: S.O.E.
HISTORY’ (undated).
43 CAB 103/572, Montague Browne to Trend, 9 October 1964.
44 CAB103/572 Anon to Leahy, 11 December 1964.
45 PREM13/949, ‘The History of the Special Operations in France’, 3 August 1965;
CAB103/572, Avon to Caccia, 28 October 1964.
46 CAB 103/572, Foot to Boxshall, 9 November 1964.
47 Wilkinson’s apparent lack of concern over Buckmaster appears to have had as much
to do with his post-war discussion of SOE as with his wartime activity. Having dis-
cussed the history with Gubbins, Wilkinson reported to Trend: ‘Unfortunately Mr.
Foot’s draft quite legitimately exposes Colonel Buckmaster’s repeated incompetence
as head of F Section, as well as the inaccuracies in his own book describing his experi-
ences. In view of his past behaviour, particularly since the end of the war when he has
done nothing but blow his own trumpet, Colonel Buckmaster deserves the scantiest
consideration, but we agreed that it might save trouble if he were shown the draft’
(CAB 103/571, Wilkinson to Trend, 12 December 1963).
48 CAB103/572, Minute to Trend, 20 November 1964.
49 CAB103/572, Buckmaster to Boxshall, 11 November 1964.
50 CAB 103/572, Foot to Boxshall, 16 November 1964. Buckmaster’s involvement was
summarised in a note for the record in January 1965, which stated that he ‘submitted
a great number of points on the galley proofs; and after going through them with
great care, Charlton had two meetings with Buckmaster and a meeting with Foot. As
a result, a substantial number of amendments will have to be made to the text . . . A
number of the points which Buckmaster had made were valid . . . but although these
points were accepted and changes made . . . Buckmaster is still quite incensed with
the general tone of the history’ (CAB103/573, ‘Note For Record’, 13 January 1965).
51 CAB103/573, Figg to McIndoe, 23 January 1965.
52 CAB103/573, Note to Trend, 23 April 1965.
53 CAB103/573, Figg to Trend, 18 May 1965.
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54 CAB103/573, Figg to Trend, 18 May 1965.

55 CAB103/573, Figg to McIndoe, 16 July 1965. Boxshall felt that such a meeting ‘would
not be advisable at this late stage’ and ‘may be counter-productive in that it would
give Buckmaster a further chance of reopening certain questions which were satis-
factorily disposed of during two meetings he had with Charlton four months ago’
(CAB103/573, Figg to Trend, 18 May 1965).
56 CAB103/573, Meeting in Treasury Solicitor’s Office, 26 July 1965.
57 CAB103/573, Meeting in Treasury Solicitor’s Office, 26 July 1965.
58 CAB103/572, Charlton, 20 January 1964.
61 In the text, Foot suggested that Hallowes had been ‘confused’ when recalling the
details of the horrific treatment that she had received (See CAB103/575, ‘SOE in
France’, 21 April 1966). As SOE’s final Executive Head (CD) and an integral member
of the organisation since its early days, Colin Gubbins had been sent a copy of the
manuscript with Trend’s approval in late 1963 (CAB103/571, Wilkinson to Trend, 31
October 1963).
62 CAB103/573, Gubbins to Boxshall, 10 May 1965.
63 CAB 103/575, ‘Threat of Libel Action by Odette Sansom (Mrs Hallowes)’, Boxshall to
Jackson, 18 April 1966. Boxshall reported that Charlton had ‘examined the surviving
papers on Odette Sansom’s file which he asked me to make available to him’. Having
reviewed the material, Charlton pointed to the fact that Sansom’s interrogation
reports – dated 12 May 1945 – were ‘incomplete’. He described this as ‘unfortunate’
and ‘of some importance because Foot says in his book that in her formal interroga-
tion on her return she made no reference to this incident at all. I do not see how he
can say this if he has not seen the whole of the interrogation . . . I feel that Counsel
for Mrs. Hallowes could make considerable play with this document as it stands at
present’. Charlton also pointed to the ‘difficulty’ presented by the relevant medical
certificate, which was ‘quoted as the authority for saying that Odette Sansom for
many months had difficulty in distinguishing fantasy and reality, unfortunately does
not contain words to this effect’.
64 CAB103/574, McIndoe to Trend, 17 February 1966.
65 CAB103/575, Charlton to Sauerwein, 29 April 1966.
66 CAB103/572.
67 CAB103/569, Jackson to Reid, 23 May 1967.
68 CAB103/570, ‘Study of the Pros and Cons of Publication of Further Histories of
SOE’, p. 13.
69 FCO12/75, Wilkinson to Salt, 4 July 1969.
70 Herbert Butterfield, ‘Official History: Its Pitfalls and Criteria’, in Herbert Butterfield
(ed.), History and Human Relations (London: Collins, 1951), p. 183.
71 CAB103/572, Note for Record: ‘S.O.E. in France’, 23 March 1964.
SOE’, p. 10.
SOE’, p. 10.
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Chapter 13
A TALE OF TORTURE? ALEXANDER SCOTLAND,

THE LONDON CAGE AND POST-WAR BRITISH
SECRECY
Daniel W. B. Lomas
The immediate post-war period saw the publication of a number of secret service
accounts recounting wartime exploits, giving the impression that, with the end of
hostilities, these could now be revealed.1 In fact, as has been clearly demonstrated
by Richard J. Aldrich, officials in Whitehall attempted to manage the release
of intelligence-related subject matter into the public domain, largely to protect
the secrets of code-breaking and strategic deception.2 While receiving the most
attention, these were not the only wartime activities which were strictly off-limits
to publishers, as far as the authorities were concerned. Efforts to publish details
of prisoner interrogation – a valuable source of human intelligence (HUMINT)
– also gave cause for official concern, prompting the authorities to engage in a
lengthy process to prevent Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Paterson Scotland from
detailing his experiences as head of the London District Cage.
While the authorities certainly attempted to keep these secrets, their efforts to
do so met with mixed results. They were hampered by two significant limitations.
First, they had to know, of course, that such publications were in the pipeline.
In addition, they had to deal with authors and publishers, who, while warned of
the potential consequences of publication, pressed ahead, regardless. Here, the
authorities muddied the waters with an apparent tendency to vary their response;
the differing consequences that authors could face being effectively illustrated by
the cases of Alfred Duff Cooper and Eddie Chapman. A Chair of the wartime
Security Executive and close ally of Winston Churchill, Cooper had published a
lightly fictionalised account based on the now-famous Operation MINCEMEAT
in November 1950, but was not prosecuted; the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Norman
Brook, quickly ruling that retrospective action would be ‘unprofitable’ – a stance
that only infuriated others, but which ended with the publication of The Man
Who Never Was in 1953.3 The career criminal and MI5 agent Eddie Chapman
was treated quite differently. An earlier attempt to publish in a French newspa-
per, with the assistance of Sir Compton Mackenzie – the former SIS officer and
himself a victim of the Official Secrets Act – led to Chapman being prosecuted
251
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under the Act. Further attempts to tell his story in Britain were unsuccessful; one
effort resulting in the withdrawal and pulping of an entire edition of a national
newspaper. The authorities also raided his flat and eventually found a handwrit-
ten copy of a memoir, which was subsequently destroyed.4
Instances where individuals were seemingly allowed to publish without
consequence, such as Duff Cooper, themselves served to strengthen the hands
of other would-be authors, who had been successfully persuaded to keep silent.
Such cases gave these individuals further leverage in their battle to publish; the
authorities having dealt a blow to their own arguments that they should desist
from publication. As such, while the authorities wanted to prevent the release of
certain information into the public domain, the process by which they attempted
to achieve this can be best described as contradictory and messy. In the case of
The London Cage, despite the intervention of Special Branch – in itself, illustra-
tive of the lengths that the authorities were prepared to go to in order to prevent
publication – the authorities failed in their efforts to prevent details about the
work of the Cage entering the public domain, primarily due to the impact of
further unexpected, and unauthorised, disclosures. As such, the case of The
London Cage further illustrates the fact that the course of official secrecy did not
always run smoothly in post-war Britain.
While code-breaking and deception are regularly cited as the intelligence
secrets that officials sought to protect, the authorities could resort to comparable
tactics to prevent other intelligence activities, such as prisoner interrogation,
from reaching the public domain. In the case of The London Cage by Alexander
Scotland, officials were concerned by the potential disclosure of such infor-
mation and the controversy it generated, owing to allegations of torture. The
book focused on the London District Cage, known as the Cage – an interroga-
tion facility in Kensington run by the Prisoner of War Interrogation Service
(PWIS), commanded by Scotland.5 Under War Office supervision, the Service
was tasked with the extraction and collation of intelligence from Axis captives
taken during hostilities, prior to their transferral to a permanent prisoner of
war (POW) camp. Scotland went on to run the successor organisation, the
War Crimes Investigation Unit (WCIU), formed in December 1945 to gather
evidence regarding suspected war crimes.6 From Kensington, the Cage played
an important part in the conviction of German war criminals and, from WCIU’s
formation until its disbandment three years later, a total of 3,573 men were
interrogated at the Cage, with around 1,000 giving statements concerning war
crimes.7 While influential in Britain’s war crimes convictions, operations at the
Cage were blemished by persistent allegations of maltreatment and torture made
by several former prisoners.8 One of these, Fritz Knochlein – an SS officer later
sentenced to death for his part in the deaths of British prisoners of war – alleged
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A Tale of Torture? 253
sleep deprivation and physical abuse. Knochlein had claimed that, during one
particularly brutal interrogation, a fellow prisoner had received repeated blows
to the face, leaving ‘his face smashed and his eyes bleeding’ – allegations that
Scotland later dismissed as ‘lame’.9
As both the British war crimes tribunals and allegations of prisoner abuse
drew the attention of the national press, literary agent George Greenfield
telephoned Scotland, proposing that he should consider committing his rec-
ollections to paper. During a telephone conversation on 2 November 1953,
Greenfield expressed his interest in meeting Scotland in person to discuss the
publishing of his wartime experiences.10 Scotland proceeded to send Greenfield
a selection of personal papers, which, Greenfield believed, would ‘form the basis
of an eminently publishable book’.11 In due course, Scotland agreed to produce
detailed notes of an account of his wartime experiences, and the journalist
Alan Mitchell, co-author of several wartime memoirs, was tasked with turning
these, and the results of further conversations, into a publishable manuscript.12
Greenfield approached Evans Brothers Ltd and, on the basis of Scotland’s notes,
its Managing Director, Lesley Browning, agreed to commission the book. The
company was no stranger to controversial subject matter, having recently pub-
lished The Man Who Never Was. By mid-December, a contract was agreed for a
book entitled The London Cage.
During discussions with Greenfield and Mitchell, Scotland recalled that he
was asked ‘about other experiences, not included in the book’.13 At this point,
the decision to include details of interrogation techniques used at the Cage
– material which, alongside Scotland’s belligerent attitude, would provoke a
forceful response from the authorities – was taken. Evans Brothers felt that such
information would be a ‘most valuable addition’; Mitchell’s discussions over
serialisation rights having indicated that there was an audience eager for details
of interrogation, possibly because of its sensational nature, especially after the
post-war war crimes trials, with one magazine, John Bull, keen on the inclusion
of ‘as many examples’ as possible.14 Mitchell decided that the book should focus
on ‘the work and methods of an interrogator’, asking Scotland to provide mate-
rial on the interrogations of German war criminals. While he later claimed to
have objected to the inclusion of such material, the available correspondence
shows that Scotland was happy to discuss his ‘lurid past operations’.15
The manuscript was completed by mid-June and, with hopes high for a ‘big
success’ that ‘should earn considerable royalties’, it was submitted to the War
Office public relations department for review and subsequently circulated to
various interested parties.16 Its contents gave considerable cause for concern. In
July, John Waterfield of the Foreign Office summarised the department’s reac-
tion, stating that ‘publication of acts of an apparently irregular behaviour’ within
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the context of prisoner interrogation would ‘cause considerable embarrassment

to Her Majesty’s Government’.17 In particular, the Foreign Office was concerned
about public opinion in the German Federal Republic, given its planned incor-
poration in the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation.18
Further official concerns, beyond political embarrassment, were highlighted
by Lieutenant Colonel Broughton of MI11 – the War Office’s security branch
– on 9 August.19 Broughton identified a number of irregularities regarding
the treatment of prisoners that could be deemed to contravene the Geneva
Convention, concluding that publication of the book, providing such insight
into the methods of interrogation would be ‘highly undesirable’.20 A month
later, another MI11 official suggested that publication would be ‘highly embar-
rassing’ to the War Office, the Security Service and the Foreign Office, resulting
in the re-opening ‘of the case of German war criminals by the Germans which
would not show the War Office in a good light’.21 Further resistance came from
the Director of Military Intelligence, Major-General Valentine Boucher, who
recommended that the War Office notify the publisher that it was ‘not prepared
to clear the book’ and suggested that action against Scotland was needed, in
order ‘to dissuade others from exploiting their war service for financial gain’.22
The irregularities earlier identified by Broughton were the focus of a report
by Bernard Hill – MI5’s legal adviser – in January 1955. Hill’s concerns were set
within the context of the Cage’s function as a transit camp, where, unsupervised
by the International Red Cross, prisoners could be made ‘to do chores, etc. . . .
as a matter of expediency to keep such a camp running’. Under the subheading
‘Embarrassing Disclosures’, Hill pointed to instances in Scotland’s manuscript
that not only illustrated breaches ‘of the spirit’ of the Geneva Convention, but
‘worse’.23 Referring to the case of several U-boat officers, who had provided no
significant information after days of interrogation, Scotland wrote:
We took away their uniform and set them to work in denim suits on cage chores for
three days . . . we found the ruling of the Geneva Convention that prisoners may
be employed on various duties and chores in a transit camp to be useful on many
occasions.24
After this treatment, the officers ‘were broken’. Hill concluded that the whole
interrogation ran ‘completely contrary’ to the Convention. Another case cited
involved a ‘young Nazi’ who was forced to stand for twenty-six hours, after
which, in Scotland’s words, ‘he answered my questions freely’. Of greater
concern, was the fact that many of the cases detailed showed that the Cage ‘was
not being used as a transit camp at all, but a centre to which prisoners from
camps were specifically sent for interrogation’ during which various pressures
were ‘used to extract information’.25
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By the end of August 1954, Greenfield was notified that the authorities were
not prepared to sanction publication and that any attempt to do so would breach
the Official Secrets Act, particularly Section 2, which committed individuals
working with sensitive information to refrain from disclosing it for perpetuity.26
Responding, Greenfield conveyed Scotland’s disappointment, arguing that it
was unreasonable for Scotland to be ‘expected to accept a sort of blanket veto
on the whole book’, and asked for details of ‘the specific passages which are
regarded as a contravention of the Official Secrets Acts’, suggesting that these
could be ‘discussed with the author’.27 Scotland, meanwhile, proceeded to criti-
cise the decision in public and was quoted in The Times, claiming that much of
the information contained within his memoir had previously been revealed in
open court, pointing to the Knochlein trial, during which several disclosures
were made regarding the Cage.28 Prior to this, Scotland had visited the offices of
MI11 using ‘threats, blandishments and every conceivable argument for quick
approval of his manuscript’. His belligerent attitude continued in a subsequent
meeting with Pulverman, during which Scotland stated that ‘the book would
be published both in the UK and United States with a foreword saying that this
was the book which the War Office refused to grant permission to publish’.29
Officials would no doubt have taken the threat seriously; the earlier publica-
tion by Chapman having shown Whitehall’s inability to prevent disclosures
overseas – a weakness later exploited to great success by others, including J. C.
Masterman, author of The Double Cross System.
The authorities’ unwillingness to discuss changes led Greenfield to protest
how ‘[t]his “censorship of silence” hardly accords with the various freedoms’
for which Scotland ‘served with considerable distinction in two major wars’.
Greenfield claimed that Scotland’s character had suffered since 1947, when he
had been ‘wrongly accused . . . of mistreating German prisoners at the London
District Cage’. Ironically, given the earlier observation that the book illustrated
breaches of the Geneva Convention, Greenfield argued how the banning of the
memoir denied Scotland the opportunity of clearing his name.30 Browning also
attempted to overturn the War Office decision, claiming that their stance had
imposed a great hardship on author and publisher alike and suggesting that
he was willing to work with the authorities to delete objectionable passages.
Scotland’s memoir would also refute, he claimed, suggestions by Fritz Wentzel
in his biography of Franz von Werra – a Luftwaffe pilot – that German prisoners
of war had been ill-treated by their Allied captors.31
The War Office’s response was lukewarm. On 3 December, Broughton
explained that objections were ‘only’ being made to the publication of infor-
mation acquired by Scotland during ‘the course of his employment under the
War Office’ and not material acquired outside of this period. With much of
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the material detailing the former, Broughton suggested that ‘no good purpose’
would be served by complying with the request to discuss specific passages.32 This
provoked further threats from Scotland. During a meeting with Diane Hewitt of
the War Office on 4 January 1955, he announced his intention ‘to send the book
to his friends in America who would arrange publication there’. Replying to sug-
gestions that this would result in serious repercussions, Scotland went on to state
‘that he did not in the least mind going to prison’.33 Maintaining this position at a
subsequent meeting with Wood on 20 January, Scotland said that, whatever hap-
pened, he intended to ‘publish the book in one form or another’, believing that
the War Office would never prosecute and suggesting that, should they attempt
legal action, he ‘would be happy to have the . . . authorities examined in Court’.34
By permitting the publication of The Man Who Never Was and The Scourge of
the Swastika – an account detailing several German war crimes – he also argued
that War Office policy was inconsistent.35 These books, in his view, contained
information that was ‘far more . . . harmful’ than his memoir.36 Complicating
matters further, the authorities also found themselves dealing with a film script,
telling the story of Scotland’s wartime service.37
Scotland’s persistent belligerence now led the authorities to take serious
measures. During a meeting attended by Bernard Hill, Commander Leonard
Burt and Detective Superintendent Smith of Special Branch on 3 February, the
Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Theobald Matthew, authorised action to
confiscate Scotland’s manuscript, believing he was about to publish. Days later,
having obtained the warrant, detectives travelled to Scotland’s home, seizing all
correspondence regarding the book’s publication and a large quantity of mate-
rial detailing work at the Cage, including interrogation reports and prisoner
statements, allegedly retained ‘for security reasons’.38 Detectives also visited
Greenfield to take possession of the manuscript. During questioning, Greenfield
stated that, after he had received it, three copies were made and sent to the editor
of Empire News, Evans Brothers, while he retained the last copy. Greenfield
agreed to recover the copy from the editor of Empire News and submit this,
as well as his own, to Special Branch. Questioned about publishing overseas,
Greenfield answered that his company had not conducted any negotiations for
the book to appear outside the Commonwealth.
Further activity followed and, just days later, Smith approached Browning,
who reiterated that, throughout the case, both he and his company had been
willing to cooperate with the authorities and would not seek to publish without
War Office approval. During the meeting, Browning expressed his strong dis-
approval of Scotland’s persistent intervention, claiming that this interference
had occurred without his knowledge. Asked if he was prepared to hand over
his manuscript, Browning – on the advice of the Evans Brothers’ solicitor –
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indicated that ‘serious consideration would have to be given to the matter’ if an

official request was made, probably not to abandon any chance of publishing a
revised form of The London Cage.39
Special Branch’s involvement led to increased interest in the case. In an
article on 14 February, Scotland described the visit by detectives, detailing how
he had handed over a ‘fairly thick wad of material’.40 By the next month, details
also appeared in The New York Times.41 On 3 March, questions were addressed
to the Home Secretary, Gwilym Lloyd George, in the House of Commons.
Anthony Marlow – Conservative MP for Hove – enquired about the circum-
stances surrounding Special Branch action, asking the Home Secretary what
evidence, if any, there was to suggest that Scotland had intended to break the
Official Secrets Act and whether he was satisfied that, in carrying out action
prior to an offence being committed, the Act had been correctly enforced. Lloyd
George responded, arguing that the Act allowed a search warrant to be issued
if it was clear that a breach of the Act was about to occur, effectively defending
the granting of a warrant, citing Scotland’s threats to release a book ‘containing
unauthorised disclosures of confidential information’.42 Responding, Marlowe
portrayed Scotland as a loyal servant of the Crown, who had ‘served the country
well’, and asked whether assurances could be given that detectives had not
intervened to ‘enforce Foreign Office policy’.43 Anthony Greenwood – Labour
MP for Rossendale – suggested that, rather than containing material damaging
to security, Scotland’s manuscript questioned War Office competence during
the war. Drawing attention to the paradoxical nature of War Office vetting,
Greenwood echoed Marlowe’s sentiment, suggesting how it was unfortunate
that Scotland should be ‘hounded . . . whilst more influential people, like Field
Marshall Montgomery and the Prime Minister, have got away with publishing
their memoirs based largely on official information’. Unable to comment, given
the on-going nature of the case, the Home Secretary withdrew.44 The debate
highlighted the contrasting cases of Scotland and others, such as Churchill.
While the latter enjoyed privileged access to government papers, Scotland faced
the wrath of Whitehall for attempting to tell his own wartime story.45 In short,
there was one rule for the high and mighty and another for smaller fry.
Scotland proceeded to prepare a heavily revised version of his memoir, now
entitled The Scotland Story. This avoided any mention of his wartime service,
focusing instead on his involvement in the war crimes trials, particularly his
cross-examination in court. The first part of the manuscript was submitted to
the War Office by early summer and quickly received approval. On 22 July,
Broughton wrote that MI11 held no security objections.46 Details of the second
half were provided by Greenfield later in the month, who explained that it would
deal with the war crimes trials in which Scotland had testified and that he did
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‘not intend to discuss the London Cage nor any of the details of the work he did
there’.47 By mid-September, the remainder of the manuscript was submitted. A
memo by MI11 suggested that, as much of the information had been disclosed in
court, the War Office held no objection to publication. Matthew agreed; writing
that, in his view, any further demand to remove material would be ‘pedantic’ and
that the book was unlikely to be a ‘sensational success’.48
At this point, Scotland’s ability to make reference to the Cage shifted unex-
pectedly in his favour. The serialisation of Cyril Jolly’s book, The Vengeance of
Private Pooley, in the Evening Standard in December considerably undermined
War Office arguments for the retention of information about the London
Cage. Jolly’s account contained several references to the Cage and detailed the
questioning of two war crimes witnesses, Signaller Albert Pooley and Private
William O’Callaghan, by Scotland and other members of his unit.49 War Office
surprise at the publication was apparent in a note dated 28 December, in which
an official suggested that the department had known nothing about the book.
The serialisation revived the controversy regarding the content of Scotland’s
memoir. On 13 December, Greenfield, angered by Jolly’s account, wrote to
Wood, demanding to know why references to the Paradis case appeared within
Jolly’s account. Greenfield concluded by stating that, as material had been
written concerning Scotland, it seemed unfair that ‘Scotland himself has not so
far been permitted to tell his own version of the story’.50 Greenfield’s complaint
over the serialisation of The Vengeance of Private Pooley led Curtis to write to
Matthew, rightly predicting that the protest would not be the last regarding the
case. He determined that some of the information gained by Jolly, including that
about the Cage and Scotland, came from Pooley, who had been discharged from
the Army prior to his visit to the Cage, and his disclosure of information to Jolly
had occurred sometime after the Cage had ceased to exist as a ‘prohibited place’
under the Official Secrets Act. In response, Matthew noted that, although a place
had ceased to be prohibited under the Act, this did not allow an individual to
publish material about it, though he conceded that any decision to prosecute
would be for the War Office to decide.51 No further correspondence about pros-
ecution followed.
Despite the absence of further archival material, it can be suggested that the
unexpected appearance of Pooley’s account provided Scotland with consider-
able leverage to mention the Cage, both in wartime and during the subsequent
war crimes enquiries, in his now revised memoir – the most obvious alteration
being the change of title from The Scotland Story to The London Cage. Scotland
also found that he was able to discuss his War Office service. While the cases
of the U-boat officers and the ‘young Nazi’ were removed from the final book,
details of the Cage’s wartime operations were retained, despite the earlier assur-
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ances from Greenfield. While brief, segueing between Scotland’s pre-war and
post-war experiences, Scotland made clear reference to the Cage, describing
it as an ‘important transit camp’. In addition, examples of wartime interroga-
tion were also included. One of these, a traumatised survivor of the German
warship Bismarck – the ‘Boy Who Wouldn’t Stop Laughing’ – was said to have
surrendered information on ‘the latest types of German mines’.52 Another case
involved ‘the Graf Spee spy’, part of a South American ‘Nazi spy ring’, who
‘resigned himself’ to answering Scotland’s questions after extensive interroga-
tion.53 The Cage again featured in the latter part of the memoir, concerning
‘the most massive task of all – the investigation of War Crimes’.54 This part of
Scotland’s memoir, while telling the story of several war crimes cases, included
detailed references to interrogations conducted at the Cage, primarily to deny
accusations of ill-treatment – claims that had ‘greatly troubled’ Scotland. In his
account, Scotland vigorously denied allegations that he, and members of his staff,
turned to violence to exact confessions, explaining: ‘We were not so foolish to
imagine that petty violence, nor even violence of a stronger character, was likely
to produce the results we hoped’.55 In the case of Fritz Knochlein, who, during
his trial, had alleged the use of coercive techniques, Scotland provided informa-
tion to the contrary, referring to his ‘pitiful behaviour’ at the Cage. During his
final nights at the Cage, Scotland stated that Knochlein ‘began screaming in a
half-crazed fashion, so that the guards . . . were at a loss to know how to control
him’. The next evening, Scotland ‘removed everything from his room, even his
bed – leaving only a mattress on the floor to ensure that he did no damage’.56
Other examples citing the Cage included the investigations into the deaths of
unarmed RAF personnel, following their escape from a German prisoner of war
camp. One example was the interrogation of Max Wielen – head of the Criminal
Police in Breslau – later sentenced to life imprisonment for his part in the kill-
ings, who Scotland threatened to ‘punch on the nose’.57 While detailing post-war
experiences, these and other examples gave insight into the Cage and came from
information obtained during Scotland’s employment with the War Office.
* * *
This chapter has illustrated the somewhat random nature of post-war secrecy
in Britain. While the authorities certainly attempted to suppress the release of
intelligence-related material in the post-war years, their efforts to do so were not
always successful. Officials could only attempt to prevent the appearance of such
publications if pre-warned of their existence and were powerless to prevent dis-
closures from would-be publishers and authors who refused to play by the rules.
In such cases, an aversion to resort to retrospective measures – which would
likely draw further unwanted attention to a subject considered sensitive – tended
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to result in little action being taken. Absurdly, by submitting their work for offi-
cial approval, authors such as Scotland effectively created their own worst case
scenario: the risk of their books being banned and the prospect of prosecution.
By informing the authorities and subsequently adopting a somewhat combative
stance, Scotland invoked the wrath of Whitehall, culminating in the involve-
ment of Special Branch and the confiscation of his manuscript and papers.
Through these actions, the case certainly illustrates that the authorities were
perfectly willing to take action to halt the release of what was considered sensi-
tive information into the public domain. Yet, even after such action was taken,
Scotland was eventually able to publish more on the subject of the Cage and
prisoner interrogation than the authorities wished, on account of the publica-
tion of another, hitherto unknown, book – The Vengeance of Private Pooley. The
authorities were frustrated in their efforts to constrain Scotland by the actions of
those who were willing to ‘publish and be damned’; Scotland’s eventual ability to
refer to the Cage was not, as Donald Thomas suggests, the result of parliamen-
tary and press interest, but a consequence of the unauthorised, and unexpected,
release of material on the Cage by Cyril Jolly.
Notes
1 Richard J. Aldrich, The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret
Intelligence (London: John Murray, 2001), p. 1. By 1945, details of the work of
Britain’s Special Operations Executive had begun to emerge, see Mark Seaman,
‘Good Thrillers, But Bad History: A Review of Published Works on the Special
Operations Executive’s Work in France during the Second World War’, in K. G.
Robertson (ed.), War, Resistance and Intelligence: Essays in Honour of M. R. D. Foot
(Barnsley: Leo Cooper, 1999), pp. 119–49.
2 See Richard J. Aldrich, ‘Policing the Past: Official History, Secrecy and British
Intelligence Since 1945’, English Historical Review, 119(483), 2004, pp. 922–53.
3 CAB 21/3943, Brook to Clement Attlee, 5 November 1950; Ewan Montague, The
Man Who Never Was (London: Evans Brothers, 1953).
4 Ben Macintyre, Agent ZIGZAG: The True Wartime Story of Eddie Chapman: Lover,
Traitor, Hero, Spy (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), p. 318; Nicholas Booth, ZigZag:
The Incredible Wartime Exploits of Double Agent Eddie Chapman (London: Portrait,
2007), p. 302.
5 Biographical material outlining Scotland can be found in A. P. Scotland, The London
Cage (London: Evans Brothers, 1957). For previous accounts of the publication of
The London Cage, see David Hooper, Official Secrets: The Use and Abuse of the Act
(London: Coronet, 1988), p. 246; Donald Thomas, Freedom’s Frontier: Censorship in
Modern Britain (London: John Murray, 2007), pp. 296–7.
6 On the importance of wartime interrogations, see Kent Fedorowich, ‘Axis Prisoners
of War as Sources for British Military Intelligence, 1939–42’, Intelligence and
National Security, 14(2), 1999, pp. 156–78; Andrew Barry Sullivan, Thresholds of
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Peace: Four Hundred Thousand German Prisoners and the People of Britain, 1944–48
(London: Hamish Hamilton, 1979).
7 WO 208/4294, Note on the operations of the War Crimes Interrogation Unit, 30
November 1948.
8 Liddell 9/24/195 (Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, LHCMA); Fred Redman
and Joseph Garrity, ‘The Strange Case of the Hanged Colonel’, Sunday Pictorial, 20
January 1949; WO 208/4685, London District Cage: Complaints of Ill Treatment by
War Criminal Fritz Knoechlein and Heins Druwe. For recent revelations regarding
the allegations, see Ian Cobain, ‘The Secrets of the London Cage’, The Guardian, 12
November 2005, p. 8.
9 Liddell 9/24/195, Statement about occurrences in the London District Cage by Fritz
Knoechlein; Scotland, The London Cage, p. 85.
10 WO 208/5381, Statement by Greenfield, 15 February 1955.
11 WO 208/5381, Greenfield to Scotland, 12 November 1953.
12 WO 208/5381, Statement by Superintendent Smith, 17 February 1955.
13 WO 208/5381, Statement by Scotland, 11 December 1955.
14 WO 208/5381, Mitchell to Scotland, 16 May 1954.
15 WO 208/5381, Statement by Scotland, 11 December 1955; WO 208/5381, Scotland to
Greenfield, 19 December 1953.
16 WO 208/5381, Greenfield to Scotland, 6 June 1954.
17 WO 208/5381, Waterfield to Pulverman, 31 July 1954.
18 Thomas, Freedom’s Frontier, p. 296.
19 WO 208/5381, Broughton, ‘Article; “The London Cage” ’, 9 August 1954.
20 WO 208/5381, Broughton to Director of Public Prosecutions, 9 September 1954.
21 WO 208/5381, Memorandum by Pulverman, 3 September 1954.
22 WO 208/5381, Boucher to VCIGS, 16 August 1954.
23 WO 208/5381, ‘Security Service Report’, 26 January 1955.
26 Official Secrets Act 1911 (Original as Enacted), available at: http://www.legislation.
gov.uk/ukpga/Geo5/1-2/28/contents/enacted.
27 WO 208/5381, Greenfield to Wood, 30 August 1954.
28 ‘Colonels Book Banned’, The Times, 25 August 1955.
29 WO 208/5381, ‘Article “The London Cage” ’, 13 August 1954.
30 WO 208/5381. Greenfield to Wood, 8 September 1954.
31 WO 208/5381, Browning to Wood, 16 November 1954; Fritz Wentzel, Single or
Return? (London: William Kimber, 1954).
32 WO 208/5381, ‘The London Cage-Lt. Col. Scotland’, 3 December 1954.
33 WO 208/5381, Hewitt to MI11, 4 January 1955.
34 WO 208/5381, ‘Interview – Col. Scotland’, 20 January 1955.
35 See Edward Frederick Langley Russell, The Scourge of the Swastika: A Short History of
Nazi War Crimes (London: Cassell, 1954).
36 WO 208/5381, ‘Interview – Col. Scotland’, 20 January 1955.
37 The script led to the film The Two-Headed Spy. Allegedly a ‘true’ account of Scotland’s
wartime exploits, it told the fictitious story of General ‘Schottland’ played by Jack
Hawkins – a German staff officer and British ‘master spy’ who courageously ‘fooled
Hitler’. Due to a lack of interest in a ‘fictional script’, the producers attempted to
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portray the film as ‘the true story of how the allies secured secret information from
inside Germany’. While they could find no security objections to the script, War
Office officials held reservations concerning the producer’s claim that the film was
‘based on a true story’ and asked for any such claims to be removed (WO 32/16025,
Film Britain’s Two-Headed Spy: provision of facilities and correspondence with
Colonel A. P. Scotland).
38 WO 208/5381, ‘Lt. Col. A. P. Scotland – Retention of Official Documents’, 7 March
1955.
39 WO 208/5381, ‘Metropolitan Police, Special Branch’, 15 February 1955. This final
outstanding manuscript was handed to Special Branch on 11 March after the inter-
vention of the Attorney General, Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller.
40 ‘Colonel’s Banned Book: Visit From Special Branch Officials’, The Times, 14 February
1955.
41 ‘British Spy Seeks to Tell His Story’, The New York Times, 2 March 1955.
42 Parliamentary Debates (Hansard), 537, cc. 2213, 3 March 1955.
43 Parliamentary Debates (Hansard), 537, cc. 2213–4.
44 Parliamentary Debates (Hansard), 537, cc. 2214.
45 On Churchill’s multi-volume war memoir, see David Reynolds, In Command of
History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War (New York, NY:
Random House, 2005); David Reynolds, ‘The Ultra Secret and Churchill’s War
Memoirs’, Intelligence and National Security, 20(2), 2005, pp. 209–24.
46 WO 208/5381, Broughton to Wood, 22 July 1955.
47 WO 208/5381, Greenfield to Wood, 26 July 1955.
48 WO 208/5381, Matthew to Curtis, 14 December 1955.
49 For references to Scotland within the text, see Cyril Jolly, The Vengeance of Private
Pooley (London: William Heinemann, 1956), pp. 153–6. Pooley was one of two sur-
vivors of a massacre perpetrated by second SS ‘Totenkopf’ on 27 May 1940 near La
Paradis, France.
50 WO 208/5381, Greenfield to Wood, 13 December 1955.
51 WO 208/5381, Hornby to Greenfield, 28 December 1955.
52 Scotland, The London Cage, p. 70.
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Chapter 14
1968 – ‘A YEAR TO REMEMBER’ FOR THE STUDY OF

BRITISH INTELLIGENCE?
Adam D. M. Svendsen*
Nineteen-sixty-eight was a momentous year for a multitude of reasons. In the

wider context of the Cold War, the ‘Prague Spring’ was underway in Eastern
Europe, whilst the war in Vietnam was gathering an ugly momentum. Both
Martin Luther King and Robert ‘Bobby’ Kennedy were assassinated.1
Albeit mixed, uneven and occurring on incremental bases, in the context
of British intelligence, trends towards a greater degree of ‘liberalisation’ were
gradually emerging. As scholar Richard J. Aldrich has argued vis-à-vis the world
of intelligence and amid various political propaganda battles: ‘Secret service
exploits were emerging as one of the most eye-catching variants of the Cold War
story and each side wished to be seen as ahead in this clandestine war’. Among
many activities conducted by intelligence communities, a forward lead in
helping to shape overall narratives, extending to wider discourses, was adopted.
Aldrich continued: ‘Accordingly, the 1960s were peppered with authorised
memoirs by veterans of secret service’.2 And the year 1968 was no exception.
On closer examination, 1968 stands out as a significant year for the study of
British intelligence. Significantly, a revised second edition of M. R. D. Foot’s
‘classic study’, SOE in France (1966), appeared – in essence, refining a text which
can be regarded as forming the first overt ‘“official history” in all but name’3 of a
British secret service (the Second World War era Special Operations Executive).
Also significant were two other intelligence books. First, British journalist and
former intelligence officer Donald McLachlan’s Room 39: Naval Intelligence in
* Adam D. M. Svendsen would like to acknowledge and thank David Higham Associates Ltd,
London, for their generous permission to use material from Donald McLachlan, Room 39:
Naval Intelligence in Action 1939–45 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968). Permission
was also extensively sought to use the extracts from Major-General Sir Kenneth Strong,
Intelligence at the Top: The Recollections of an Intelligence Officer (London: Cassell, 1968).
However, despite best efforts at investigation with due diligence (with thanks to Orion,
Continuum, Random House and Octopus publishers of London), unfortunately, no record
of the current rights holder could be found.
263
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Action 1939–45; and, second, retired senior British military intelligence officer
Major-General Sir Kenneth Strong’s memoirs: Intelligence at the Top: The
Recollections of an Intelligence Officer.4 While SOE in France has generated a
sizeable reflexive literature, both Room 39 and Intelligence at the Top are also
deserving of in-depth analysis by scholars. Henceforth, they form the main focus
of this chapter.5
RATIONALES, MOTIVATIONS AND INTENTS?

Further background contextualisation of these texts is helpful. Together with
Oxford Professor and former wartime British intelligence officer Hugh Trevor-
Roper’s offering in The Philby Affair (1968), some addressing of perceived
widespread ‘intelligence imbalances’ and/or other intelligence-related ‘miscon-
ceptions’ can be claimed as being provided by McLachlan and Strong.6
However precisely conceptualised in its overall configuration, this ‘addressing
effect’ soon emerged as especially useful, even timely. The publication of Room
39 and Intelligence at the Top occurred, whether merely by coincidence or due
to the natural ‘ebb’ and ‘flow’ of time, around the same time as My Silent War –
the captivating memoirs of ‘Cambridge Five’ Soviet spy Harold (H. A. R.) ‘Kim’
Philby. My Silent War was completely unauthorised and included a foreword by
the famous British novelist and former wartime MI6 officer Graham Greene.7
Strikingly, both Room 39 and Intelligence at the Top were published in a period
when British intelligence was under an uncomfortable degree of public scrutiny.
The biggest ‘headline-grabbing’ event came in 1967 with the so-called ‘D-Notice
Affair’, which saw renowned British investigative journalist Chapman Pincher
disclose illegal ‘cable monitoring’ by the UK Government’s Communications
Headquarters (GCHQ).8
Different partisan camps were forming. As highlighted by the common saying
‘nature abhors a vacuum’, contemporary evaluations of the subject of intel-
ligence were similarly suffering from all of its surrounding attendant secrecy. A
greater degree of ‘neutrality’ regarding its examination required better encour-
agement, together with greater ‘transparency’ – if not ‘openness’ – being actively
encouraged. As many suitably informed and knowledgeable commentators
increasingly argued, including Greene, the need for the greater discussion of
intelligence on ‘better-balanced’ terms, particularly in Britain, was growing.9
PIONEERING WORKS?
The stimulus and, indeed, the rationale for exploring McLachlan and Strong’s
books stems from their treatment alongside one another in a book review
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1968 – ‘A Year to Remember’? 265
of Intelligence at the Top. The review, which featured during April 1969 in
International Affairs – the journal of the British Royal Institute of International
Affairs (Chatham House) – was written by another well-informed individual.
This individual was Ronald Lewin: a Royal Artillery officer during the Second
World War and later an employee of the British Broadcasting Corporation
(BBC) and established military historian.10
Although the review itself is brief, Lewin quickly recognised and conveyed
the importance of these two books. He argued that they ‘are a stimulating start
for that process of opening closed doors in which the British lag far behind the
Americans’, a trend which he attributed to ‘reasons which may seem watertight
to the [Military] Service Departments in Whitehall but sometimes appear faintly
ridiculous to the dispassionate student’.11
In his foreword to Room 39, then Admiral of the British Navy Fleet Earl Louis
Mountbatten declared:
This book tells an absorbing story for any reader. It is also an important story to
have on the record for future generations of Commanders of all three Services. I
hope it will be a much used book in all Staff College Libraries.12
These commendations were not merely hyped-up in the style of Mad Men 1960s
advertising and marketing rhetoric. Today, in 2012, some forty-four years after
their original publication, these two texts continue to respond remarkably well
to being revisited by both the ‘informed’ and ‘novice’ reader, especially when
exploring the historiography of British intelligence.
This chapter now continues with a general discussion of both Room 39 and
Intelligence at the Top. In particular, attention will be given to what they can
offer students of British intelligence history. Moreover, it will ask whether they
have any relevance to the contemporary intelligence practitioner.
PRELIMINARY INSIGHTS
Briefly leafing through both Room 39 and Intelligence at the Top allows for the
ready communication of several preliminary insights. Room 39 and Intelligence
at the Top reflected the main forms of ‘serious’ non-fiction literature on British
intelligence available in 1968.13 Both authors were conscious of this fact. As
Strong observed in his introduction:
Three kinds of books have been written about Intelligence. First, there are spy
stories, written in the main to be taken at a draught and then forgotten; of these
only a few – largely those concerned with the activities of real agents – are serious
contributions to the study of affairs.14
He continued, outlining further diversity within contemporary intelligence
studies literature: ‘Secondly, there are some earnest tomes, almost all American,
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whose object is to outline the role of Intelligence in support of national policy-

making; these are mainly academic studies, intended for specialist readers’
and, finally: ‘The third group consists of autobiographies or memoirs by actual
Intelligence officers. Books of this kind are relatively rare’. Strong, unsurpris-
ingly, was under no illusions as to where he saw his own contribution fitting into
the overall literature: ‘It is to this third group that my book belongs’.15
Meanwhile, Room 39 reflects what could be termed a ‘lite’ history of an insti-
tution – in this case, the British Naval Intelligence Department (NID) during
the Second World War. Boasting at least some initial ‘foundational’ value, this
volume is substantially informed by, first, McLachlan’s personal first-hand
experience of having worked in the NID institution itself – most notably, in
terms of his intelligence work, he served on the personal staff of the Director
of Naval Intelligence (1941–5), including an attachment to the Psychological
Warfare Division of US Army General Dwight Eisenhower’s staff (1944–5); as
well as, second, being further enlightened by his extensive consultation of other
suitably informed contemporaries, including Strong – himself a holder of several
important high-ranking wartime and post-war intelligence posts, both within
Whitehall and beyond;16 and, third, by McLachlan having similarly consulted
many of his former NID colleagues.17
Room 39 appropriately belongs to the category characterised by Strong as that
of ‘earnest tomes’. Moreover, it substantially represents what can be regarded
as a good example of a rare, early British contribution to that group. From
an official perspective, McLachlan was a respected individual, someone who
was ‘on-message’ about the world of intelligence. By working at prominent
Establishment-friendly news outlets, such as The Economist and The Sunday
Telegraph, he had respectable credentials. His ‘safe’ status was demonstrably the
case, as suggested by his consideration for other ‘sensitive’ intelligence-related
jobs during the Cold War, including after his respected earlier wartime perfor-
mance in the NID.18
Indeed, perhaps it was from their knowledge of one another and their respec-
tive thinking, which can offer us an explanation for Lewin’s remark, in his
early-1969 review of Intelligence at the Top, that: ‘It is interesting to observe how
McLachlan and Sir Kenneth converge in their final assessments’. He continued:
‘Both stress strongly, as a result of the realities of wartime, the need for Services
(and indeed for Allies) to organise and maintain a joint Intelligence set-up’.19
Written by well-placed former British Intelligence ‘insiders’, Intelligence at
the Top and Room 39 both offered authoritative contributions to the overall
developing field of intelligence studies, then in its very early days. In the public
domain, much unhelpful ‘noise’ surrounding contemporary interpretations
of ‘intelligence’ was also becoming increasingly apparent during the 1960s. By
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contrast, Strong and McLachlan offered a clearer ‘top-down’, more ‘officially’

imbued picture.
Both authors ably sampled more widely than merely their own, personal
thoughts. They both drew on the valuable insights of friends and colleagues while
crafting their work. For Strong, this included allies from abroad, such as former
CIA Director Allen Dulles (who had earlier written his own ‘guiding’ book,
The Craft of Intelligence, published in 1963). Strong also befriended Professor
Sherman Kent – the traditional doyen of US intellectual thought on the field of
intelligence analysis. With Dulles’ support, Kent launched the CIA’s Studies in
Intelligence journal in the late 1950s, devoted to raising intelligence studies to
the level of ‘serious’ scholarship. Strong was also able to consult Canadian col-
leagues, with whom he had liaised with in an intelligence capacity.20
In their texts, both McLachlan and Strong tried to capture what intelligence
meant to practitioners. Moreover, in their respective explorations, they both
tried to offer a range of ‘lessons learnt’. Indeed, their ‘retirements’ were anything
but: they further attempted to ‘broach’, if not, at this early stage, going as far
as to ‘bridge’, the contemporaneous ‘scholarship-study/practitioner’, ‘insider/
outsider’ or ‘poacher/gamekeeper’ divides that they each encountered.21 As
Strong remarked, in his introduction to Intelligence at the Top: ‘I have thought
it appropriate to use my experience as a basis for comment upon certain aspects
of Intelligence organization and on the relationship of Intelligence to national
policy and decision-making’.22
Therefore, those studying present-day intelligence, together with its historical
development, can learn much from what both McLachlan and Strong had to say.
DONALD MCLACHLAN AND ROOM 39

Demonstrating Room 39’s heuristic value, glimpses into the contemporaneous
thinking about intelligence at the end of the 1960s are offered. More specifically
regarding the organisation of intelligence, as Mountbatten noted: ‘One of the
chief lessons this book brings out is the enormous benefit which the British
gained from realizing that Intelligence must be a joint Service activity’. He con-
tinued: ‘The other main impression the book has made on me is the outstanding
success of civilians, in and out of uniform, in some of the most vital Intelligence
jobs’.23
Furthering perspectives into civilian/military (CIV/MIL) and intelligence-
related ‘comprehensive approach’ areas, ranging more widely to dealing with
organisational/institutional issues, McLachlan ably provided some current
insights into British intelligence developments at an arguably pivotal time of
its reorganisation – namely, soon after the unitary UK Ministry of Defence
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had been created in 1964. Notably, as he remarked: ‘at the time of writing, the
process of integrating Intelligence is well under way after some eighty years of
independent – or almost independent – naval activity in this field’.24
McLachlan demonstrated where he believed any discourse on intelligence
should ideally begin. This was accomplished through his early presentation
of a working ‘functional’ definition of ‘intelligence’. While continuing to be a
controversial area within intelligence studies, fraught with multiple difficulties,
McLachlan argued that: ‘Simply defined, intelligence is no more than informa-
tion about events or people’. Extending his definition, he claimed: ‘Give the
word a capital letter and it stands for a vast area of state activity, both in peace
and war. Take the capital letter away again and it still stands for something more
than bare fact’.25
McLachlan was also quick to debunk any whiffs of conspiracy surround-
ing the phenomenon of intelligence, beloved by intelligence fantasists. ‘If
Intelligence has come to be associated above all with espionage, violence and
skulduggery that is the fault chiefly of fiction writers; but they have been given
their opportunity to romance’ – here referring to intelligence being intimately
associated with covert action and other clandestine, paramilitary and readily
deniable activities.26
In his writing, McLachlan was clearly keen to encourage a greater degree of
‘openness’ to address what he saw as gaps and imbalances within the overall
history of the Second World War:
Foremost in the minds of those who helped to get this book started was the
conviction that so long as nothing is written about this aspect of the war against
Germany, Italy and Japan, the historical record would be seriously incomplete and
unbalanced.27
Because he clearly had only limited documentary access, McLachlan humbly
urged: ‘I hope that this study – it is neither full enough nor sufficiently
documented to claim the word history – may open a new vein for historians’
mining’.28 Indeed, the last sentence of Room 39 suggested an area that was ready
for future research in 1968: ‘How the [Naval Intelligence] Division met the chal-
lenge of the First World War is a theme which has still to find its historian’.29
This formed a call that Patrick Beesly later answered in a well-accomplished
manner in 1982.30
McLachlan offered more than just peripheral educative utility to intelligence
practitioners. He argued that his study:
should also show that the work demands special kinds of skills and courage, that
it merits more respect as an intellectual and administrative activity than Service
opinion has generally given it, and that the picture of it created by fiction writers is
for the most part a great nonsense.31
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Again, he was keen to ‘mythbust’ and, arguably, better establish the discipline of
the serious scholarly study of intelligence.
Sturdy parameters were established for his work. McLachlan highlighted
caveats for, what he believed, could be accomplished in 1968. Several frustra-
tions were apparent:
Anyone who sets out to write seriously about Intelligence has to accept in advance
certain limitations. Because it has been surrounded with secrecy, which has gener-
ated myth, the subject is ill defined. The very word provokes in different people
completely different expectations. Because it has to do with methods and tricks
which may be needed again, some think it wise to remind enemies as little as pos-
sible of past triumphs and failures. Because so much of the work goes unrecorded
on paper, lost forever in scrambled talk and burnt teleprinter flimsies, any account
must be incomplete. One runs, therefore, the risk of arousing the historian’s inter-
est without fully satisfying his curiosity.32
Reminding us that a degree of methodological reflection about any work on intel-
ligence is essential, he later emphasised that: ‘Sources being so personal, uneven
and diverse this study may appear as unbalanced as it is incomplete’.33
Prolonging his important methodological introspection, he reminded modern
intelligence studies scholars of the central ‘archival constraints’ confronting
them: ‘The sources available have been limited by the fifty years rule which, at
the time of writing, is only just giving way to the thirty year rule about access to
official documents’.34 Some greater ‘liberalisation’ was gradually beginning to
emerge, as evidenced by the second edition of SOE in France. McLachlan, too,
was a beneficiary of the fact that Whitehall was beginning to ‘relax a little’, with
the Naval Historical Branch of the Ministry of Defence giving him support.35
Some disappointment with McLachlan’s book was inevitable. In his review of
Room 39 in the journal Military Affairs, former US Intelligence officer Robert E.
Bublitz particularly criticised the scholarly deficiencies of Room 39, lamenting:
One approaches Room 39 anticipating a solid buffet of scholarship, spiced with
tales of wartime exploits and complemented by the wine of mature contemplation.
The spice is fine, but the buffet unfortunately lacks scholarly substance and the
conclusions are poorly presented.36
Despite his criticism of Room 39, Bublitz did provide some contextualisation.
He acknowledged the sizeable ‘archive-deficit’ problems then confronted by
McLachlan, with the qualifying comment: ‘British Naval archives remain closed
to scholars until 1975’. More positively, Bublitz concluded: ‘Room 39 points
the way for the more scholarly treatment Operational Intelligence deserves.
Until it is, Room 39 is the best work available on this important area of Military
Intelligence’. By 1968, the current rate of progress was appropriately captured by
his concluding remark: ‘Such endeavors move slowly, however’.37
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Generally, given all the methodological and document access-related con-

straints he confronted, McLachlan’s study was suitably ambitious for the era.
Even while a substantial degree of caution remained, he could offer some
further valuable insights. For instance, in his coverage of topics, he did not shy
away from addressing major themes, even enduringly ‘sensitive’ ones, such as
intelligence liaison. On the theme of international intelligence cooperation, he
revealed:
Increasingly after 1948 [international intelligence] work was shared with allies.
Either directly and bilaterally with the Navy Department in Washington, which
had shown itself ready to continue close co-operation with NID in London
[postwar]; or less directly and multilaterally with a dozen or more North Atlantic
Treaty [NATO] allies in Paris.38
Indeed, taking this last theme further, for students of the history of Anglo-
American intelligence relations, as Bublitz noted in his review of Room 39: ‘the
efforts of British Naval Intelligence to tutor the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence
and establish a broad US/UK intelligence exchange program are particularly
interesting’.39 Further research ‘stimulants’ which could, and would, be fol-
lowed up further into the future were increasingly crystallising.40 The recurrent
theme of the ‘educational influence’ of UK intelligence on US intelligence, found
throughout intelligence studies literature, was, again, distinct.41
Showing Room 39’s enduring utility, in 2001, another well-respected former
British intelligence officer Michael Herman recommended it as one of ‘the
best introductions to the all-source [intelligence product] role’.42 Moreover,
according to the ‘Introduction to catalogue’ of the collection of papers assem-
bled in 1981 by Captain Stephen Roskill – naval historian and former Keeper
of the Archives at the Churchill Archives Centre, University of Cambridge –
McLachlan was rated as one of ‘the best qualified and most successful writers on
British Naval Intelligence in the 20th century’.43
By 2012, McLachlan’s work has evidently stood the test of time well. Albeit
perhaps frequently being overlooked or forgotten, Room 39 actually imparts
some valuable knowledge and insights. Instead, therefore, it should arguably be
considered more suitably and become better regarded more widely on general
bases, as holding a sufficiently important position within the early, specialist and
overall ‘serious’ intelligence studies literature. Students should be directed to
better consider what Room 39 has to impart on the theme of British intelligence
and its closely related entities. As many of McLachlan’s highly personalised
quotes ‘speak for themselves’, Room 39’s dusting off is a worthwhile effort. Here,
we should also recall that more oral-style histories similarly have their value and,
while simultaneously heeding human intelligence (HUMINT) constructs and
parameters, their ‘voices’, likewise, deserve to be heard.
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MAJOR-GENERAL SIR KENNETH STRONG AND

INTELLIGENCE AT THE TOP
On 9 May 1966, Major-General Sir Kenneth Strong retired from his final senior
post as the first Director General of Intelligence, UK Ministry of Defence
(1964–6).44 Intelligence at the Top was published two years later. Although his
book was declared as being ‘mainly autobiographical’, similar to McLachlan’s
contribution, Strong, too, sought to provide some of his thoughts regarding
British intelligence. He was keen to do so, despite his personal reservation about
the value of ‘opening up’ about intelligence. In an important caveat, he wrote:
‘public discussion of Intelligence must be inhibited by the inevitable secret
content of the topic’.45
The careful exploration of intelligence was stressed. However, offering some
further ‘added value’ to his account, alongside his more traditional memoir
treatment, Strong attempted a scholarly approach, noting: ‘I have made free use
of the literature now available’.46 In-depth open sources regarding intelligence
were becoming increasingly accessible to the informed reader, provided that
they knew where to look or who to ask.
While he keenly sought to avoid any sensationalism in his account – ‘[t]he
reader will find no explosive secrets or dramatic revelations in its pages, for a
great deal of Intelligence work is not concerned with the secret and the esoteric’47
– Strong was interested in providing readers with greater ‘openness’ regarding
intelligence. Indeed, as he emphasised during his process of contextualisation:
‘it is undesirable and unhealthy that there should be no public debate or consid-
eration of a subject that is of crucial importance in national and international
decision-making, and to which, after all, public funds are devoted’. He also
deemed that: ‘Public debate is also necessary in order to avoid currency being
given to wrong conceptions of Intelligence’.48
On the theme of accountability, Strong astutely remarked: ‘I doubt whether
I shall be able to say enough to satisfy the political analyst that there is no scope
for the abuse of the power which is inherent in any apparatus that deals in secret
information’. Yet, while remaining somewhat enigmatic, he carefully sought to
offer some reassurance: ‘Nevertheless, I am well satisfied that procedures and
institutions exist for preventing abuses even though they do not operate in full
public view’.49 Distinct areas of the intelligence world clearly continued to be
more ‘fenced-off’ from external scrutiny at the time of writing.50 Deeply extend-
ing security and counter-intelligence (CI) related ‘smoke’ and ‘mirrors’ persisted
in their presence and placement.
However, the ‘blocks’ encountered did not have an entirely hindering effect.
In his discussion of the question ‘what is intelligence?’, Strong presented, first,
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a ‘structural’ definition of intelligence. He argued: ‘In the first place it can

be seen as representing an array of antennae through which a Government
receives messages or signals that determine its image of the world to which
its policies must relate’.51 He then followed with a definition of ‘intelligence’
that, like McLachlan’s definition, was more ‘functional’ in its nature: ‘Secondly,
Intelligence can be regarded as an insurance policy’.52 Unsurprisingly, since he
was a former practitioner and high-level manager, both practical and pragmatic
considerations loomed large in his definition.
Strong sought to convey many insights. Another argument he emphasised
and which continues to be highly worthy of note by scholars of intelligence
today, particularly to newcomers to the subject, is that: ‘The initial point of any
discussion of Intelligence is of course a definition of the word’.53 Highlighting
persisting problems encountered when defining intelligence, he pondered a
familiar intellectual dilemma surrounding conceptualisation of the subject’s
core terms: ‘Perhaps [my] definitions of Intelligence do not differentiate it
sufficiently from other forms of government activity. Many departments of
government need information on foreign countries in the normal course of their
work’.54 Differences and the on-going dynamic interplay between the two terms
of ‘information’ and ‘intelligence’ were articulated. Importantly, in his knowl-
edgeable methodological explorations, Strong highlighted the multidisciplinary
nature of intelligence. He stressed: ‘Intelligence . . . is not concerned primarily
with a single-subject approach to the study of foreign phenomena. In support of
policy-making at the highest national level Intelligence prepares balanced and
comprehensive “multi-subject” appreciations of present and likely future situa-
tions’.55 He went on:
A true Intelligence appreciation . . . is a balanced fusing of all the ingredients which

contribute to an understanding of international relations. It is also objective . . .
Intelligence is – or should be – free of pressure or prejudice, whether engendered
within government or by groups outside the government.56
This is a lesson that is deserving of wider dissemination, especially in the context

of the extended controversy surrounding the run-up to the 2003 war in Iraq,
which continues to cast a long shadow today.57
Sustaining his analysis in a comprehensive manner, Strong raised further
intelligence-related methodological problems. Notably, he cited qualitative (or
cultural) ‘failings’: ‘We [in Britain] have sometimes had to contend with certain
common scientific faults: lack of humility, trust in the universal beneficence of
quantitative analysis, and neglect of areas where the latter cannot be brought to
bear’.58 This echoes the oft-referenced argument concerning over-reliance on
technical intelligence (TECHINT) and, by association, technology and techno-
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cratic considerations, at the expense of cultural and ‘human factors’ and human
intelligence (HUMINT).59
Strong also stressed another resonating contemporary theme, namely, the
‘professionalisation’ process of intelligence.60 Concerning the organisation of
intelligence, cultural factors figured prominently, with Strong remarking: ‘The
members [of a ‘national Intelligence staff’] should be intellectual equals and have
equal access to all materials. Positions should be elaborated by consensus, and
there should be provision for the expression of minority views’.61
Moreover, Strong offered his views on that perennial of themes, which
continues to challenge intelligence communities to this day, namely, ‘recruit-
ing troubles’. He conveyed his concern about an over-reliance on the idea,
in Britain, that: ‘our much-advertised improvisatory brilliance will enable us
to muddle through’, urging the adoption of a more scientific and organised
approach, which included a mini-comparison to the system in America:
The United States CIA has been able to recruit some of the best minds in its
country for work of this kind – men who are attracted less by the salary and influ-
ence than by the unique fascination of this contemporary style of international
pattern weaving.62
Britain, he felt, could learn much from their approach. Further useful lessons
from history were presented, with critical judgement passed on the style of
recruitment of the Cambridge Five.63
Similarly to McLachlan, Strong thought highly of Anglo-American intelli-
gence relations. Indeed, according to his introduction, he even wrote Intelligence
at the Top, at least in part, to ‘keep a promise made to [US Army] General
Bedell Smith, Eisenhower’s wartime Chief of Staff, almost twenty years ago’.64
Again invoking the spirit of wartime camaraderie, Strong additionally dedicated
Intelligence at the Top to: ‘old friends on both sides of the Atlantic’. With some-
what of an influential impact, American counterparts and colleagues were again,
at least in part, helping to show the way forward to their British friends.
Strong tackled the significance of the enduring ‘customer (user or consumer)–
producer relationship’ during his analysis of intelligence. He declared that:
The relationship between Intelligence on the one hand, and policy and decision-
making on the other, are of course of crucial importance, and deserve special
mention . . . If the Intelligence officer is to select the significant for study and
comment he must be constantly aware of policy interests and concerns.65
The issue of intelligence ‘requirements’ figured significantly. Further demon-
strating substantial degrees of continuity within the intelligence world over
time, Strong’s conclusion from 1968 overlaps neatly with that expressed in
2006 by a former US Assistant Director of Central Intelligence for Analysis and
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Production, Mark Lowenthal, who reinforced the lesson that intelligence ‘serves
and is subservient to policy’ and that intelligence ‘works best – analytically and
operationally – when tied to clearly understood policy goals’.66
Ultimately, Lewin’s overarching observation concerning Intelligence at the
Top – namely, that: ‘It is impossible to summarise [(all)] the rewarding details
in this book’67 – continues to resonate, to an extent. For Strong’s continued rel-
evance almost thirty years later, in his groundbreaking book published in 1996,
Intelligence Power in Peace and War, Michael Herman cited Strong’s memoirs
(alongside those of former US Directors of Central Intelligence William ‘Bill’
Colby and Admiral Stansfield Turner) as providing useful ‘impressions of man-
agement at the top level’.68 According to his earlier definition, Strong could also
be seen as providing somewhat of an ‘earnest tome’.
Over time, Intelligence at the Top has continued to provide an array of impor-
tant and relevant insights concerning intelligence. In their endurance, these
insights still resonate to a considerable extent today. Indeed, there is a harmoni-
ous overlap between Strong’s insights and those provided more recently by Sir
David Omand.69 Contemporary practitioners and students of intelligence ought
to continue to take note of these lessons.
CONCLUSION
During 1968, a greater degree of ‘liberalisation’ was slowly emerging surround-
ing the subject of intelligence. This trend was also beginning to be reflected
textually. Perhaps some old-age ‘mellowing’ was taking place?70 When generally
exploring the landscape of the historiography of British intelligence studies,
arguably, some notable contributions to the literature were made in 1968. As
this chapter has demonstrated, these are certainly deserving of some further
contemporary analysis.
Both the books explored in this chapter – McLachlan’s Room 39 and Strong’s
Intelligence at the Top – continued the trend of demonstrating that the domain
of defence and military intelligence (MI or MILINT) substantially led the way
for pioneering the ‘serious’ study of intelligence. This was followed shortly
afterwards by signals intelligence (SIGINT) focused tomes. Following common
trends and past continuities – perhaps even, at times, to what might be consid-
ered paradoxical degrees – those contributors helped lead the way.71
Albeit heavily caveated, collectively, these contributions from 1968 could
offer some increased ‘opening-up’ regarding British intelligence. Eroding some
of the barriers constructed by secrecy considerations, this was especially con-
cerning how intelligence operated historically during the Second World War.
Indeed, arguably, that objective was clearly one of the authors’ main intentions.
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Published on the cusp of the 1970s, these books helped to contribute towards
further developments. In short, Strong and McLachlan assisted in paving the
way for others. Other texts that followed included: Strong’s Men of Intelligence
(1970);72 Patrick Beesly’s Very Special Intelligence (1977) and his Room 40
(1982);73 Frederick Winterbotham’s The Ultra Secret (1974); Ronald Lewin’s
Ultra goes to War (1978) and The Other Ultra (1982); and former Bletchley
Park intelligence officer Peter Calvocoressi’s ‘The Value of Enigma’ (1977).74 As
personal to institutional/organisational experience soon showed, some greater
‘openness’, rolling forward on incremental bases, was sufficiently survivable over
time. The exploration of other ‘sensitive’ wartime activities was also facilitated –
for instance, as notably discussed in William Stevenson’s A Man Called Intrepid
(1976), published with a foreword by ‘Intrepid’ (Sir William Stephenson)
himself;75 Professor R. V. Jones’ Most Secret War (1978);76 and M. R. D. Foot and
J. M. Langley’s MI9 (1979).77
It is worth noting the comments of Canadian intelligence scholar Wesley
Wark, who said in 2003: ‘A substantial literature on intelligence did not begin
to emerge until the last quarter of the twentieth century’. According to Wark,
several of the motivations behind the literature were traceable from some dis-
cernible roots:
It was sparked in the beginning by a historical fascination with newly released doc-
umentation on the impact of signals intelligence during World War II, the famous
story of Ultra, and contemporary concerns about intelligence abuses, particularly
in the conduct of covert operations . . .
On intelligence historiography, he remarked:
Since the mid-1970s, the literature on intelligence has grown exponentially and
moved well beyond its original interests. Intelligence now has at least the outlines
of a usable past, with a library of case studies, national histories, and synoptic
studies waiting the reader.78
In essence, the era dating from the 1960s helped contribute towards laying
the foundations for what was to come in the 1970s and beyond. Thanks to the
pioneering efforts of Strong and McLachlan, the year 1968 represents ‘a year to
remember’ for students of the history of British Intelligence.
Notes
1 On the ‘Prague Spring’, see various references: J. L. Gaddis, The Cold War (London:
Penguin/Allen Lane, 2005); T. Judt, Postwar (London: Heinemann, 2005); J. Schell,
The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People (London:
Penguin/Allen Lane, 2003).
2 R. J. Aldrich, The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence
MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd 275 21/02/2013 08:24

(London: John Murray, 2001), p. 627; see, also, ‘revelation-creep’ in K. Jeffery, ‘The
TLS and National Security’, The Times Literary Supplement – TLS, 22 September
2010; C. R. Moran, ‘The Pursuit of Intelligence History: Methods, Sources, and
Trajectories in the United Kingdom’, CIA Studies in Intelligence, 55(2), June 2011, pp.
33–55.
3 N. Atkin, ‘SOE in France: An Account of the Work of the Special Operations Executive
in France, 1940-1944’, The English Historical Review, CXXII(497), 2007, p. 855; see,
also, C. J. Murphy, Security and Special Operations: SOE and MI5 During the Second
World War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
4 Major-General Sir K. Strong, Intelligence at the Top: The Recollections of an
Intelligence Officer (London: Cassell, 1968).
5 D. McLachlan, Room 39: Naval Intelligence in Action 1939–45 (London: Weidenfeld
& Nicolson, 1968).
6 See, for instance, these aspects as discussed in detail later in this chapter; see, also, the
essays in R. Dover and M. S. Goodman (eds), Learning from the Secret Past: Cases in
British Intelligence History (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2011).
7 Aldrich, The Hidden Hand, p. 627; K. Philby, My Silent War (London: MacGibbon &
Kee, 1968); H. Trevor-Roper, The Philby Affair (London: William Kimber, 1968).
8 See C. Pincher, ‘Reflections on a Lifetime of Reporting on Intelligence Affairs’, in
R. Dover and M. S. Goodman (eds), Spinning Intelligence: Why Intelligence Needs
the Media, Why the Media Needs Intelligence (London: Hurst, 2009), p. 160; see, also,
R. J. Aldrich, GCHQ: The Uncensored Story of Britain’s Most Secret Intelligence
Agency (London: HarperPress, 2010), pp. 238–41.
9 Arguably more ‘sensationalist’ in its somewhat swashbuckling narrative style, yet suf-
ficiently ‘serious’ in what it has to communicate, for a non-fiction account on intel-
ligence work around at the time, see, for example, the work of Lieutenant Colonel
O. Pinto in, for example, Spycatcher (London: Panther, 1961 [originally published in
1955]), which is particularly focused on WWII counter-intelligence themes based on
his experiences. For more background on Graham Greene, see, for example, discus-
sion in A. D. M. Svendsen, ‘Painting Rather than Photography: Exploring Spy Fiction
as a Legitimate Source Concerning UK–US Intelligence Co-operation’, Journal of
Transatlantic Studies, 7(1), March 2009, pp. 1–22.
10 R. Lewin, ‘Book Review: Intelligence at the Top . . .’, International Affairs, 45(2), April
1969, pp. 316–17.
11 Lewin, ‘Book Review’, p. 317.
12 Earl L. Mountbatten of Burma, KG, Admiral of the Fleet, ‘Foreword’ to McLachlan,
Room 39: Naval Intelligence in Action 1939–45 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
1968), p. xi.
13 See, also, texts such as M. R. D. Foot’s SOE in France (London: Her Majesty’s
Stationery Office, 1966 [1968]); (perhaps) H. Montgomery Hyde’s Room 3603:
The Incredible True Story of Secret Intelligence Operations During World War II
(Guildford, CT: The Lyons Press/The Globe Pequot Press, 1962), which interestingly
includes a ‘foreword’ by James Bond author Ian Fleming, who also served in the NID
during the Second World War and who was a colleague of McLachlan. This book was
originally published in the UK as The Quiet Canadian: The Secret Service Story of Sir
William Stephenson (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1962). However, see, also, Charles
Howard Ellis’ comment regarding this text in the ‘Historical Note’ of W. Stevenson,
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A Man Called Intrepid: The Secret War (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1976), p. xviii.
Hyde’s contribution could, therefore, be judged more a covert or clandestine ‘offi-
cial history’ – see, also, Richard Aldrich’s comment on UK Prime Minister Harold
Macmillan and other UK Government Ministers’ concerns in his The Hidden Hand,
p. 627.
14 Strong, Intelligence at the Top, p. xi; see, also, C. R. Moran and R. Johnson, ‘Of
Novels, Intelligence and Policymaking – In the Service of Empire: Imperialism and
the British Spy Thriller 1901–1914’, CIA Studies in Intelligence, 54(2), June 2010, pp.
1–22.
15 Strong, Intelligence at the Top, p. xi.
16 For Strong’s full (Military) Service record, see http://www.kcl.ac.uk/lhcma/locreg/
STRONG.shtml.
17 McLachlan, Room 39, pp. xv–vii; for Strong on McLachlan, see Strong, Intelligence at
the Top, p. 222.
18 On McLachlan’s background, see, for instance, Aldrich, The Hidden Hand, p. 159.
19 R. Lewin, ‘Book Review: Intelligence at the Top . . .’, International Affairs, 45(2), April
1969, p. 317.
20 Strong, Intelligence at the Top, pp. xii–iii; McLachlan, Room 39, pp. xv–vi; Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA), ‘A Look Back . . . The Creation of Studies in Intelligence’,
CIA.gov, July 2011; A. W. Dulles, The Craft of Intelligence (New York, NY: Harper &
Row, 1963).
21 See, also, for further practical impact, S. Marrin, Improving Intelligence Analysis:
Bridging the Gap between Scholarship and Practice (London: Routledge/Studies
in Intelligence Series, 2011); see, also, these ‘dynamics’ as discussed in ‘“Poacher”
or “Fellow-Gamekeeper”? Researching Intelligence and Liaison, and Accounting
for Wider General Intelligence Cooperation Trends’, in A. D. M. Svendsen, The
Professionalization of Intelligence Cooperation: Fashioning Method Out of Mayhem
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), Chapter 3.
22 Strong, Intelligence at the Top, p. xii.
23 McLachlan, Room 39, p. xi.
24 McLachlan, Room 39, p. 371; see, also, on similar ‘organisation’ themes, C. Grey,
Decoding Organization: Bletchley Park, Codebreaking and Organization Studies
25 McLachlan, Room 39, p. xiii; for ‘challenges’ defining intelligence, see, for instance,
G. F. Treverton, S. G. Jones, S. Boraz and P. Lipscy, Toward a Theory of Intelligence:
Workshop Report (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2006); M. S. Goodman, ‘Intelligence
Education: Studying and Teaching About Intelligence: The Approach in the United
Kingdom’, CIA Studies in Intelligence, 50(2), 2006; S. A. Taylor, ‘The Role of
Intelligence in National Security’, in A. Collins (ed.), Contemporary Security Studies
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 248–69.
26 McLachlan, Room 39, pp. xiii–iv; see, also, former Deputy Chief of the UK SIS (MI6)
in the 1960s, Sir John Bruce Lockhart’s comment, as quoted in L. Scott, ‘Secret
Intelligence, Covert Action and Clandestine Diplomacy’, Intelligence and National
Security, 19(2), Summer 2004, p. 322; P. H. Hansen, Second to None: US Intelligence
Activities in Northern Europe, 1943–46 (Dordrecht: Republic of Letters, 2011).
27 McLachlan, Room 39, pp. xiv–v (emphasis added).
28 McLachlan, Room 39, p. xv.
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29 McLachlan, Room 39, p. 378.

30 As discussed in the ‘Conclusion’ of this chapter.
31 McLachlan, Room 39, p. xv; see, also, Svendsen, ‘Painting Rather than Photography’,
pp. 1–22.
32 McLachlan, Room 39, p. xiv.
33 McLachlan, Room 39, p. xvi.
34 McLachlan, Room 39, p. xv.
35 McLachlan, Room 39, p. xvii; see, also, M. R. D. Foot, Memories of an SOE Historian
(London: Pen & Sword, 2008).
36 R. E. Bublitz, ‘Review: Room 39 . . .’, Military Affairs, 33(1), April 1969, p. 278.
37 Bublitz, ‘Review: Room 39 . . .’, p. 278.
38 McLachlan, Room 39, p. 368; for an in-depth history of these interactions, see
Aldrich, The Hidden Hand.
39 Bublitz, ‘Review: Room 39 . . .’, p. 278.
40 See, also, R. J. Aldrich, ‘British Intelligence and the Anglo-American “Special
Relationship” during the Cold War’, Review of International Studies, 24, 1998, pp.
331–51; Svendsen, Intelligence Cooperation and the War on Terror: Anglo-American
Security Relations after 9/11; more widely/generally, A. D. M. Svendsen, ‘Exemplary
“Friends and Allies”? Unpacking UK–US Relations in the Early Twenty-First
Century’, Journal of Transatlantic Studies, 9(4), December 2011, pp. 342–61.
41 See, also, as discussed in A. D. M. Svendsen, ‘“Strained” Relations? Evaluating
Contemporary Anglo-American Intelligence and Security Co-operation’, in S. Marsh
and A. Dobson (eds), Contemporary Anglo-American Relations (London: Routledge,
2012); Svendsen, Intelligence Cooperation and the War on Terror, p. 5.
42 M. Herman, Intelligence Services in the Information Age (London: Frank Cass,
2001), p. 197, fn. 9; see, also, R. L. Russell, ‘Achieving All-Source Fusion in the
Intelligence Community’, in L. K. Johnson (ed.), Handbook of Intelligence Studies
(London: Routledge, 2007), Chapter 14; J. Sims, ‘Intelligence to Counter Terror: The
Importance of All-Source Fusion’, Intelligence and National Security, 22(1), February
2007, pp.38–56.
43 ‘British Naval Intelligence Papers, mainly of Donald McLachlan and Patrick Beesly’,
Janus, available at: http://janus.lib.cam.ac.uk.
44 S. Twigge, E. Hampshire and G. Macklin, British Intelligence: Secrets, Spies and
Sources (Kew: The National Archives, 2008), p. 226; for further biographical informa-
tion, including his full career history, see ‘STRONG, Sir Kenneth William Dobson
(1900–1982), Major-General’, Survey of the Papers of Senior UK Defence Personnel,
1900–1975 (King’s College London: Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, 2009).
45 Strong, Intelligence at the Top, p. 241.
46 Strong, Intelligence at the Top, p. xiii.
49 Strong, Intelligence at the Top, pp. 241–2.
50 For later UK intelligence oversight and accountability developments that were not
underway until 1994, see UK Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), Intelligence
Oversight (Norwich: TSO, July 2002); A. Glees, P. H. J. Davies and J. N. L. Morrison,
The Open Side of Secrecy: Britain’s Intelligence and Security Committee (London:
Social Affairs Unit, 2006).
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57 See Chapter 4 in Svendsen, Intelligence Cooperation and the War on Terror, pp.
116–58; J. Doward, ‘Iraq War Inquiry Report Faces Long Delay as Doubts on
Evidence Persist’, The Guardian, 16 October 2011.
59 See, for example, the discussion in Svendsen, Intelligence Cooperation and the War on
Terror, pp. 27–30.
60 Strong, Intelligence at the Top, p. 244; see, also, for example, the work of Stephen Marrin,
including his Improving Intelligence Analysis; Svendsen, The Professionalization of
Intelligence Cooperation.
61 Strong, Intelligence at the Top, pp. 243–4; see, also, Sir Richard Dearlove KCMG
OBE, former Chief (‘C’) of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS/MI6), 1999–
2004, ‘Our Changing Perceptions of National Security’, 2009 Peter Nailor Memorial
Lecture on Defence, Gresham College, London, 25 November 2009.
62 Strong, Intelligence at the Top, p. 245; see, also, C. E. Lindblom, ‘The Science of
“Muddling Through” ’, Public Administration Review, 19 (Spring), 1959, pp. 79–88;
C. E. Lindblom, ‘Still Muddling, Not Yet Through’, Public Administration Review, 39,
1979, pp. 517–26.
63 See the ‘Cambridge Five’ spy’s entries in M. R. D. Foot (selected), Secret Lives: Lifting
the Lid on Worlds of Secret Intelligence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); ‘The
Cambridge Spy Ring’, BBC News, 13 September 1999; P. Knightley, ‘The Cambridge
Spies’, BBC History, 17 February 2011.
66 M. M. Lowenthal, Intelligence: From Secrets to Policy (Washington, DC: CQ Press,
2006), p. xi; M. S. Goodman and Sir D. Omand, ‘Teaching Intelligence Analysts
in the UK. What Analysts Need to Understand: The King’s Intelligence Studies
Programme’, CIA Studies in Intelligence, 52(4), 2008.
67 Lewin, ‘Book Review: Intelligence at the Top . . .’, p. 317.
68 M. Herman, Intelligence Power in Peace and War (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press/Chatham House [Royal Institute of International Affairs], 1996),
p. 394.
69 See, for example, Sir D. Omand, Securing the State (London: Hurst, 2010).
70 See, also, for a prominent retired British military commander’s perspective on intel-
ligence in 1968, Field-Marshal Viscount B. Montgomery of Alamein, A History of
Warfare (London: Collins, 1968), pp. 16–17.
71 See, for example, as reinforced by texts such as Pinto, Spycatcher, and Montgomery
of Alamein, A History of Warfare.
72 Major-General Sir Kenneth Strong, Men of Intelligence: A Study of the Roles and
Decisions of Chiefs of Intelligence from World War I to the Present Day (London:
Cassell, 1970).
73 P. Beesly, Very Special Intelligence: The Story of the Admiralty’s Operational
MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd 279 21/02/2013 08:24

Intelligence Centre 1939–1945 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1977); P. Beesly, Room

40: British Naval Intelligence 1914–18 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1982).
74 F. W. Winterbotham, The Ultra Secret (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974);
R. Lewin, Ultra Goes to War: The Secret Story (London: Hutchinson, 1978); R. Lewin,
The Other Ultra: Codes, Ciphers and the Defeat of Japan (London: Hutchinson, 1982);
P. Calvocoressi, ‘The Value of Enigma’, The Listener, 3 February 1977, pp. 135–6;
P. Calvocoressi, Top Secret Ultra (London: Cassell, 1980); G. Welchman, The Hut
Six Story: Breaking the Enigma Codes (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1982); see, also,
for an official history, F. H. Hinsley, British Intelligence in the Second World War
(London: HMSO, 1979–90); F. H. Hinsley and A. Stripp (eds), Code Breakers: The
Inside Story of Bletchley Park (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
75 Stevenson, A Man Called Intrepid.
76 R. V. Jones, Most Secret War: British Scientific Intelligence 1939–1945 (London:
Hamish Hamilton, 1978).
77 M. R. D. Foot and J. M. Langley, MI9: Escape and Evasion 1939–1945 (London:
Bodley Head, 1979).
78 W. K. Wark, ‘Introduction: “Learning to Live with Intelligence” ’, Intelligence and
National Security, 18(4), Winter 2003, p. 11; see, also, for a ‘subject reader’ volume,
C. Andrew, R. J. Aldrich and W. K. Wark (eds), Secret Intelligence: A Reader (London:
Routledge, 2009); see, also, the discussions undertaken in sources such as, especially,
Goodman, ‘Intelligence Education: Studying and Teaching About Intelligence: The
Approach in the United Kingdom’; Moran, ‘The Pursuit of Intelligence History:
Methods, Sources, and Trajectories in the United Kingdom’.
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Chapter 15
THEIR TRADE IS TREACHERY: A RETROSPECTIVE
Chapman Pincher
After I retired from daily Fleet Street journalism in 1979, aged sixty-five, I moved
home to the quiet West Berkshire village of Kintbury, where I intended to make
the most of the nearby trout-fishing and pheasant-shooting facilities. Though I
expected to continue as a novelist, with occasional journalism, I thought my days
of writing about defence issues and espionage, in particular, were over. Then
on the summery afternoon of 4 September 1980, an unexpected telephone call
plunged me back into the mainstream of treachery, politics and intrigue with
national and international consequences, involving some of the most senior
politicians, civil servants and legal authorities in the land. At the age of ninety-
eight, those consequences are still dominating my investigative efforts.
The call was from Lord (Victor) Rothschild, whom I had known for thirteen
years, speaking from his home in Cambridge. He said that he was being visited
by a friend from overseas, who wished to meet me. When I balked at the distance,
he offered to send a chauffeured car from London to take me to his house for
dinner. Then, he outlined, I would be driven back home the following morning.
I knew that Rothschild had served in the MI5 throughout World War II with
distinction. He was, by both nature and training, a devious person. Indeed, he
was so further warped by his secret service that it was so difficult to get a straight
answer from him, so much so that his biographer and close friend, Kenneth
Rose, called his book Elusive Rothschild. I was, therefore, not surprised by his
cloak-and-dagger manner when, around 8pm, I was ushered into his rather
dark and clinical study, where he was sitting in shirt-sleeves. He passed me a
list of names of known and potential Russian spies, saying that his guest, who,
at that stage, I would know only as ‘Philip’, was prepared to talk about them.
Naturally, I accepted, and my host disappeared, soon to be replaced by a smiling,
blue-eyed man of medium height, with a fringe of white hair, leaning on a
stick.
‘Philip’, who was 64, said that he was seriously ill with a blood-pressure
problem. He also had a more urgent financial difficulty. Having retired from
281
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the MI5, where he had been the scientific expert, he was currently eking out a
pension of only £2,000 year by running a small Arabian horse stud in Tasmania,
where his daughter was already living. Importantly, he claimed to be so per-
turbed by pro-Russian treachery inside the MI5 and its official cover-up that
he was writing a book, to be called The Cancer in Our Midst, in order to expose
it. Having written ten short chapters, he was unable to continue and needed a
professional author to complete it. More urgently, he needed £5,000 to avoid
going bankrupt. In brief, he was prepared to be the first MI5 officer to reveal
its secrets, provided that he received half the proceeds of the book, which, he
believed, could be a bestseller. As an essential part of the deal, his name, which I
soon learned was Peter Wright, was never to be revealed.
I could not resist the lure of what looked like being a major scoop, especially
concerning the ‘Hollis Affair’ – the suspicions that Sir Roger Hollis, the former
Director General of the MI5, had been a spy for the Soviet Union – about which I
had heard allegations. If Wright had convincing evidence, Hollis could have been
the most dangerous traitor in history. So I told him that I was keen to oblige, but
until I knew all of his information and had secured a willing publisher, I would
be unable to assess the risks of my being prosecuted under the Official Secrets
laws. (I was aware that so long as Wright stayed in Australia, he was immune to
prosecution, as he could not be extradited under these laws. So I would be the
author at the sharp end.) Further, I told him that I was not prepared to sign any
document confirming any partnership, either then or ever. Nor would I ever
involve myself directly in the payment of any money to him, as that could lay me
open to a charge of corruption.
He whetted my appetite with a few new names, such as Michael Straight, who,
he revealed, had blown the proven traitor, Anthony Blunt, but was not prepared
to show me the ten chapters, which he had already shown to Lord Rothschild,
and insisted that I would have to visit him in Tasmania and spend up to three
weeks with him, as he had so much to tell me.
Rothschild then reappeared and we explained the situation to him, with
Wright insisting that he must have some assurance that he would get his £5,000
up-front and receive his half-share of the rest of any proceeds. To my astonish-
ment, Rothschild volunteered to set up a small company, to which the publisher
(if one could be found) could pay the £5,000 advance and half of the subsequent
royalties. That way, Wright’s identity and involvement could be held secret from
the publisher and the public, as he was insisting.
We then went into dinner with Lady Rothschild, who I knew as Tess, and
there was no further conversation about the project. Wright did not appear at
breakfast and may even have left after the dinner. What I did not know, until
much later, was that neither Rothschild nor his wife ever communicated with
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Their Trade is Treachery: A Retrospective 283
Wright again. They had made pretence of liking him in front to me, but had
secret reason to hate him.
I left for Australia on 6 October 1980, breaking the journey in Hong Kong,
where I had friends, and arriving in Sydney on 12 October. I flew to Hobart in
Tasmania, where Wright’s wife, Lois, was waiting for me at the airport, ready
to drive me to the small township of Cygnet, where I had been booked into a
modest hotel nearby.
Wright’s home proved to be a wooden shack made from two apple-pickers’
huts set in a former apple orchard, and I could see how, remote from the excit-
ing life that he had formerly led, he had stewed there in the sticks on a miserable
pension, while sitting on information that he knew to be eminently saleable. For
nine days, I listened in wonder and made copious notes, while he poured out the
MI5’s most sacred secrets. I was astonished by the depth of Wright’s knowledge
and his involvement in so many interesting cases, which had provided evidence
of Soviet penetration of the MI5 and MI6. He had entered the MI5 as its Scientific
Adviser in 1955 and had been instrumental in developing ingenious devices for
eavesdropping by radio, especially on foreign embassies. From 1964, he had
specialised in anti-Soviet counter-espionage and had been a founder–member
of the Fluency Committee, which investigated Hollis and other suspects. He had
left the MI5 on retirement in 1976.
I was even more astonished by his determination to tell me secrets for publi-
cation on a scale that I knew to be unprecedented in British history. He began by
showing me his nine chapters – one having been removed by Rothschild – an act
which, I was to realise later, had been of great significance. They were so disap-
pointing, that I decided, with one exception – the Klatt Affair – I would ignore
them. There was nothing whatsoever about the Hollis case, as he had not reached
that far in his narrative. Wright would not let me keep the chapters, because he
was most anxious that nothing should be traceable to him, should I be searched
by customs on my return to London. He also warned me that, if the MI5 got
wind of my visit and I returned with my copious notes in my luggage, they, too,
might be intercepted at customs. So I sent the notes back piecemeal to an address
where they were held for me.
I worked a ten-hour day in Wright’s company and extended my notes when
back at the hotel. He told me many details of the appalling penetration of both
the MI5 and MI6 by British traitors, some of whom, like John Cairncross,
Charles Ellis and Tom Driberg, were unknown as such to the British public. I
realised that, of all his revelations, the most explosive, politically, was the fact
that Sir Roger Hollis, who had worked inside the MI5 for twenty-seven years,
had been so deeply suspected by his own officers of being a Soviet agent that he
had been recalled from retirement to be formally interrogated by the MI5. He
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told me that this had resulted from the findings of the Fluency Committee – a
small joint MI5–MI6 group, which was set up in 1964 (with Hollis’ reluctant
agreement) to investigate security anomalies. Wright stated that Fluency had
concluded that the MI5 had been penetrated by one or more Soviet agents since
the departure of the proven spy, Blunt, and had suggested that ‘the preponder-
ance of probabilities’ pointed to Hollis as the most likely culprit.
Wright said that, in 1969, Fluency had been replaced by a small, permanent
section inside the MI5 called K7, so as to explore penetrations, and that it,
too, had decided that the evidence demanded a hostile interrogation of Hollis,
which had taken place over two days in late 1969. He also told me that in 1974,
during the premiership of Harold Wilson, the Cabinet Office had asked a former
Cabinet Secretary (Lord Trend) to re-examine the evidence against Hollis (who
had died in the previous year) and give his opinion as to whether or not the MI5
had pursued the case properly and reached the right conclusion on the facts
that were available. Wright gave evidence to Trend and told me that he had left
believing that Trend had been convinced that there was a reasonable case for
suspecting that there had been a Soviet spy at high level in the MI5 and that the
evidence extended from the entry of Hollis in 1938 until his departure in 1965.
After nine days, Wright and I were so mentally exhausted, and I had learned
so much, that I decided to end my visit. I had already decided to reject Wright’s
title and to call the book Their Trade is Treachery. That had been the title of an
insider MI5 booklet, which had been written to warn government officials of
the wiles of the Russian Intelligence Service. The authorities had gone to great
lengths to prevent me from publishing parts of it when I had secured a copy. So
it would be satisfying to publish a more entertaining version.
On returning to Kintbury, I wrote the book rapidly, checking facts with other
sources when I could, hopefully, without arousing suspicion. I finished the book
in less than four months. Meanwhile, towards the end of November, I contacted
William Armstrong – the Managing Director of my existing publisher, Sidgwick
& Jackson – who I had previously alerted about the possibility of the project, in
which he had been immediately interested. I gave him a six-page synopsis and,
having read it, he realised that it could be a big seller and was personally prepared
to risk any Official Secrets dangers. He was also prepared to accept the payments
arrangement that had been set up by Rothschild, so that my anonymous source
could quickly be paid his £5,000. However, because the book would obviously
cause a political sensation, he told me that he would have to discuss it with Sir
Charles Forte – the catering industry entrepreneur – who owned Sidgwick &
Jackson. I agreed, as Sir Charles was a particularly close friend of mine, whose
judgement I respected.
As Sir Charles numbered leading politicians, including the Prime Minister,
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Margaret Thatcher and senior Whitehall mandarins among his friends, he was
perturbed by the security, legal and political implications. We discussed his
concerns and then, having seen my synopsis, he decided that he needed profes-
sional advice – in my best interests, as well as in his own. As he happened to be a
golfing friend of Sir Arthur (‘Dickie’) Franks – the Chief of MI6 – he showed him
the synopsis, in order to secure his opinion. Neither I, nor William Armstrong,
knew what he had done.
Sir Arthur was shocked and alerted senior colleagues in both the MI6 and
MI5, but, as he had promised, refrained from naming his source. He then told
Sir Charles that he could not give a worthwhile opinion without seeing the full
text. Sir Charles promised to supply it, but not before he had secured two firm
undertakings from Sir Arthur. First, he secured an assurance that, if there were
objections which prevented publication, neither I nor the publisher would be
at risk of legal action simply for being in possession of the secret information.
Second, Sir Arthur promised that nobody else should ever be told how, and from
whom, he had received the typescript.
On 13 January 1981, I delivered the typescript to Armstrong, who prepared a
copy for Sir Charles, who passed a full copy to Franks in February. Again, neither
I nor Armstrong knew what was happening.
The MI6 made further copies for the MI5, where it caused consternation, for
both the Cabinet Office and for the Treasury Solicitor. As proven by documents
produced in an Australian courtroom in 1986, the crucial advice concerning any
action about Their Trade is Treachery was left to the legal advisers of the MI5,
who decided that there was no point in raising objections about parts of the text,
as the whole book offended the Official Secrets acts, with breaches on almost
every page. Inquiries had quickly convinced the MI5 that Wright had been my
main informant, and, on security grounds, it was judged more expedient to
dismiss the book as speculation (as duly happened), rather than to confirm that
it was from a prime MI5 source, which would have led to damaging admissions.
In the result, it was decided that it was not in the interests of the MI5 or MI6 that
the book should be restrained in any way.
That decision was confirmed at a final meeting at Number 10 Downing Street,
where the Prime Minister, Home Secretary and Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robert
Armstrong (now Lord and no relation to William Armstrong) would have
preferred to see the book suppressed. In fact, all that had been needed was for
Mrs Thatcher to have telephoned her friend, Sir Charles Forte, who would (as
he confirmed to me much later) have rejected the book and advised me against
publication anywhere, in my best interests, as well as the nations. She never had
the opportunity to do that, because, under Franks’ solemn promise, she knew
nothing of Sir Charles’ involvement.
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Sir Charles, therefore, received a message that the book could safely be pub-
lished without deletions and, though ‘very surprised’ by that verdict, passed it on
to Sidgwick & Jackson, who informed me, to my mutual delight. Later, further
revelations exposed another reason why the MI5 legal advisers decided upon
what would prove to be their unfortunate decision. Because of their ignorance
about the source of the script, they assumed that an injunction would be needed
to restrain the book and that I and my publisher would fight it in court. That
would have raised the danger that legal argument might require the identity of
the source to be revealed.
The first public news of Their Trade is Treachery appeared on 23 March 1981
in the Daily Mail, which had bought the serialisation rights. On that day, Sir
Robert Armstrong telephoned my publisher with an urgent request for a copy
of the book, because Mrs Thatcher would be required to make a statement to
Parliament about it. My advice was to supply a copy, if Sir Robert would give
a written guarantee that the government would not prevent its publication. He
immediately agreed to do so. (Five years later, during the so-called Spycatcher
trial in Australia, Sir Robert was to admit that his request had been a deception
to cover up the Government’s possession of the script. While denying that it had
been a lie, he admitted that he had been ‘economical with the truth’ – a phrase
which is now firmly embedded in the language.)
The book, which Sir Robert would later describe in court ‘as a bombshell’,
generated unprecedented publicity and became a bestseller. In Mrs Thatcher’s
brief statement to Parliament, which had been prepared for her, she suggested
that it was all speculation and insinuation on my part, when, in fact, by then, her
advisers had identified Wright as my main source. Further, the book exposed
major new spies, such as John Cairncross and Charles Ellis. It gave new details
of the Philby case and much that was new about Blunt and George Blake. It
also gave the codenames of former secret operations. Most sensitively of all,
especially concerning relations with the US, it revealed the existence of an ultra-
secret operation called Bride (later changed to VENONA), in which coded
Russian messages had been deciphered, leading to the arrest of Klaus Fuchs, the
atom-bomb spy, Maclean and others.
Such disclosures could not possibly have been the result of speculation. Yet, to
make them all appear old and stale, Mrs Thatcher stated that the MI5 investiga-
tions which I described had been undertaken ‘following the defection of Burgess
and Maclean’ in 1951, which was nonsense. She claimed that the security disas-
ters and proven leaks had emanated from Blunt, who had learned them while
gossiping with old colleagues. In particular, she denied my account of the Trend
Report, which I had based on Wright’s statements about it, suggesting that,
instead, Trend had cleared Hollis.
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Until Their Trade is Treachery appeared, there had been no public mention
of the Trend Report. Although it was completed thirty-six years ago, academic
researchers who sought its release are still being told that it must remain secret
‘in the interests of national security’. That its release would be embarrassing
to the authorities was inadvertently revealed in The Authorized History of MI5
published in 2009, which recorded that Prime Minister Wilson wrote on his
copy of the Trend Report: ‘This is very disturbing stuff, even if concluding in
“not proven” verdicts’.1
Two people who read the report, Sir Michael Havers (when Attorney General)
and Lord Chalfont, both told me that all Trend had been able to do, with respect
to Hollis, was to give him the benefit of the doubt. Yet, the Trend Report
remains one of the two reasons for the MI5’s policy of continuing to discredit
the now substantial case against Hollis as a ‘myth’ originating in ‘paranoia’. (The
current strength of the evidence has been exposed in detail in my recent book,
Treachery.)
Mrs Thatcher then undermined her own case by requiring the standing
Security Commission to carry out the first independent inquiry in twenty years
into the efficiency of the safeguards against further penetration of the secret
services by foreign powers. In Parliament, she promised to publish its findings,
but when the Security Commission produced its thick report in May 1982,
she issued only a brief statement, listing many improvements, while referring
to others as too secret to publish. It seemed peculiar that major changes in
the operation of the MI5, MI6 and GCHQ should have resulted from a book
branded as speculation.
Publication of Their Trade is Treachery generated unprecedented media
interest in intelligence affairs and especially in the MI5. Inevitably, most of the
newspapers which had been severely scooped by the Daily Mail made the most
of Mrs Thatcher’s apparent denial.
In 1984, following intensive inquiries, I published a massive, detailed account
of the Soviet espionage effort against the UK and the US, called Too Secret Too
Long, which extended my previous disclosures and would not have been pos-
sible had Their Trade is Treachery been suppressed. Two years later, Wright
published his own account of the MI5’s activities in a book called Spycatcher,
both confirming and extending what I had published and revealing technical
information about the MI5’s ‘bugging and burgling’ activities, which I had
withheld.
Regarding Spycatcher and the devastating problems that it caused the
Government, following the futile attempt to suppress it in an Australian court,
all that needs to be recorded here is that Wright’s legal case for publication was
successfully based on the fact that, having agreed to the publication of Their
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Trade is Treachery, the Government could not prevent the republication of what
was essentially the same information.
Note
1 Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5
(London: Allen Lane, 2009), p. 634.
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Chapter 16
INTELLIGENCE AND ‘OFFICIAL HISTORY’
Christopher Baxter and Keith Jeffery1
The extraordinary expansion of contemporary and historical intelligence studies

since the mid-1970s has been both reflected and stimulated by developments in
government policy, as well as academic initiative.2 On the government side – and
we are confining ourselves here to the situation within the United Kingdom –
there are two main aspects to this. First, there is the commissioning and writing
of ‘Official Histories’; and, second, the release of documents. One rationale for
the UK government’s Official History programme is ‘to provide authoritative
histories in their own right; [and] a reliable secondary source for historians until
all the records are available in The National Archives’.3 We are not, however,
going to discuss in any detail the release of intelligence records – which gained
significant momentum after the Waldegrave Initiative on Open Government of
1993 – or the general writing of Official Histories – about which there is a slim
literature – but, rather, the place of intelligence-related matters in the genre.4
Our aim in this essay is to review the place of intelligence in post-Second World
War Official Histories (and some analogous productions) and the current ‘state
of the art’, as represented by the recent Official (or ‘authorised’) Histories of the
Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS).
Before the 1970s, in the British ‘History of the Second World War’ series,
intelligence matters were generally either passed over in silence or falsified, as
can be illustrated by looking at The War at Sea volumes, published between
1954 and 1961.5 In common with other Official Histories, each volume contains
the statement: ‘The authors of the Military Histories have been given full access
to official documents’6 – a statement which perhaps had more meaning in the
period before the 1967 Public Records Act introduced the thirty-year rule for
most official papers. Nevertheless, the bald term ‘official documents’ is not
defined and carries with it a certain ambiguity.
In his preface, by introducing a definite article, the overall editor of the
military series, J. R. M. Butler, placed slightly more emphasis on the extent of
the permission. ‘To the official United Kingdom records’, he wrote, ‘we have
289
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been allowed full access’.7 As for the specific sources used, Stephen Roskill, in
his preface, stated that the ‘vast majority’ were ‘contained in Admiralty and
Air Ministry papers and other State archives which are certain not to be made
public, at any rate in their complete form, for many years’.8 It is certain that
among these papers was a fair amount of intelligence-related material. It is not
known, however, if Roskill had any access to the records of intelligence agencies
themselves, though it seems highly unlikely that this was the case, or even if he
felt such access would have been necessary to the satisfactory completion of his
history. ‘Full access’ may have applied simply to those materials that he regarded
as central to his endeavour. The point made here – and it is not, perhaps, one that
needs to be stressed to properly sceptical, trained scholars – is that statements
made in Official Histories about access to official records need to be viewed as
critically as any other documentary source.
One of the pleasures (and they are few enough) of reading the military series
volumes is exploring the text, in order to spot instances where the true intel-
ligence story has been glossed over or, you might say, has been historically
enciphered. The contemporary reader can therefore engage in a bit of individual
decoding.9 The War at Sea volumes are an obvious place to start. As a former
Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence, Roskill was well used to intelligence
material, and he was certainly also aware of the ‘Ultra Secret’ and its contri-
bution to Allied success in the Battle of the Atlantic. Yet he had to suppress,
or occlude, that knowledge in his Official History. In July 1945, the Joint
Intelligence Subcommittee (JIC) had issued instructions to official historians
that ‘the fact that such intelligence was available should NEVER be disclosed’.10
In his first volume, for example, referring to 1941, Roskill stressed the impor-
tance of ‘wireless intelligence’ against U-boats, but asserted that it was used only
for direction-finding.11 In a later volume published in 1960, he was slightly more
expansive about the situation in 1943:
Equally important was the fact that Allied intelligence was now working with great
speed and accuracy. . . . Though no details of the methods employed can be given,
a large share of our success can confidently be attributed to the combination of
the intuition of certain experienced individuals with the most modern technical
resources.12
The Official Histories of the war removed all traces of Ultra, in what has been
described as ‘the last deception operation of the Second World War’.13
Stephen Roskill’s predicament, as a writer who was unable to use his knowl-
edge of the ‘Ultra Secret’ to inform his war history, was shared at the highest
level. Even Winston Churchill suffered under the JIC prohibition. In 1948, he
argued to the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Norman Brook, that: ‘he would find it dif-
ficult to complete his memoirs without including some statements “implying
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Intelligence and ‘Official History’ 291
that we were able to break the codes and cyphers of enemy powers” ’.14 But Brook
(backed up by the British intelligence establishment) was unmoved and bluntly
told the ex-Prime Minister that his duty (as was that of the many people who had
served at Bletchley Park) was to maintain ‘complete secrecy’ about the matter,
and, thus, the facts and role of Ultra was suppressed in Churchill’s Second World
War. ‘In this crucial respect’, as David Reynolds has observed, Churchill’s
memoirs ‘fell short of history’.15 Unlike Roskill or Churchill, however, some
historians were able to revise their narratives after the Ultra Secret was revealed
in the mid-1970s by F. W. Winterbotham, among others.16 One such historian
was Peter Calvocoressi, who had worked at Bletchley Park, but, in 1972, was spe-
cifically prohibited from mentioning Ultra in his general history of the Second
World War (even after raising the question at Prime Ministerial level). Thus, like
Roskill and Churchill, he was obliged to write ‘in the full knowledge of certain
things which I might neither mention nor explain’.17
Naturally, the Official Histories which deal with clandestine agencies have
been more forthcoming about secret intelligence matters. In this respect, the
Special Operations Executive (SOE) histories fall into a special category, with
the late M. R. D. Foot’s SOE in France18 proving to be not quite the ‘pilot project’
(or, at least, not immediately so) for further SOE histories that the Cabinet Office
had envisaged in the late 1950s.19 Foot was not given complete access, even to
the papers of SOE (financial documents, for example, were denied him),20 and
he referred only obliquely to the SIS as a whole, as well as its difficult relations
with SOE.21 After the decision in 1992 to release SOE records to the National
Archives, further SOE histories were commissioned, including Foot’s SOE in the
Low Countries,22 in which the SIS is explicitly mentioned. Neither Foot volume
contains a formal statement about access to official records akin to that discussed
above in the previous Second World War volumes.
The key Second World War works, however, are the five volumes by Sir Harry
Hinsley et al., British Intelligence in the Second World War, commissioned in
1971 and published between 1979 and 1990. Each of these volumes contains a
statement about access to sources, though with a small, but distinct difference
from that already quoted: ‘the authors of this, as of other official histories of the
Second World War, have been given free access to official documents’.23 In the
military series volumes, it is ‘full access’; in Hinsley, it is ‘free access’. Is it sig-
nificant that in one series it is ‘full’ but not ‘free’, while in another, it is ‘free’ but
not ‘full’? It might be. Hinsley undoubtedly had readier access (if he wanted to
exploit it) than the military series authors to, what he described as: ‘the domestic
files of the intelligence-collecting bodies, which are’, he added, ‘unlikely ever to
be opened in the Public Record Office’.24
The authors of some more recently completed Official Histories have also
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not only been given access to intelligence records, but have been able to explic-
itly acknowledge this. There is a significant difference in this respect between
volumes one and two of Anthony Farrar-Hockley’s history of the Korean War.
In the bibliography of volume one (published in 1990), he stated that he: ‘had
unrestricted access to the files of all Departments of State and ministries involved
in the events of the Korean War’.25 He provided a list of relevant departments,
which did not include any intelligence agencies. He did observe, however, that
‘some of the documents relating to defence and overseas policy are still with-
held from public view’.26 In volume two (published five years later), he observed
that ‘legislation now permits me to mention that I have also had full access
to the material held by: SIS, Security Service [and] GCHQ’ (the Government
Communications Headquarters).27 The reference to legislation – the statutes
enacted between 1989 and 1994,28 which placed the intelligence agencies on a
statuary basis for the first time – while understandable, seems unnecessarily
coy, since Hinsley had clearly acknowledged the existence of these agencies (and
their records), both during the Second World War and in peacetime, albeit only
explicitly before September 1939.
In perhaps a special category of its own is Sir Brooks Richards’ account of clan-
destine sea operations to occupied Europe and North Africa during the Second
World War. It was first published in a single volume in 1996, with a revised and
expanded two-volume edition in 2004.29 Like Hinsley, Brooks Richards had
personal experience of intelligence and clandestine work and had been involved
in many of the sea operations about which he wrote. A naval officer, he had
served in SOE during the war, ending up as head of its French Section in Algiers.
Following the war, he had a successful career in the diplomatic service, but, in
the mid-1970s, served for a term as security and intelligence coordinator in the
Cabinet Office. In his volumes, he acknowledges the help of Gervase Cowell –
SOE Adviser to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office – ‘in enabling me to
gain access to the essential records on the terms applied to Official Historians’.30
Richards did not specify the precise records that he had used, though they clearly
included material from the SOE archives, which, at the time, was still closed to
the public, though much of it has subsequently been released to the National
Archives. He also covers a large number of SIS operations and may have had
some access to the SIS archives.
At the very start of each of his volumes, Richards follows the form of words
employed by Hinsley – ‘free access to official documents’ – along with a state-
ment (also made by Hinsley and other official historians) that the author ‘alone’
was ‘responsible for the statements made and the views expressed’. But Richards
added further assurance that he, alone, was also responsible ‘for the accuracy of
any information not obtained from official British documents’.31 The emphasis
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– ‘not’ – is in the original and appears to reflect the fact that in the history of
clandestine operations and agencies – more perhaps than in any other specific
area – much relevant material, which the government might not wish to ‘offi-
cially’ admit, is already ‘in the public domain’. Acknowledging and handling this
kind of material (whether in the form of memoir or careful scholarship, as well
as more popular works) can pose a problem for the official historian, who, in
many cases, cannot simply ignore its existence, but whose use of it may be taken
in some way to authenticate or validate it.
Indeed, Sir Lawrence Freedman, in the most recent official campaign history
chronicling the Falklands conflict (published in 2005), trod a very careful line. In
keeping with the increased openness about secret sources, Freedman explicitly
noted his: ‘privileged access to all archive material, including . . . raw intelligence
reports’.32 ‘With regard to intelligence,’ he wrote, ‘a variety of sensitive and
delicate sources were tapped providing materials that contributed at all levels’.
But there were limitations as to how he could use this material, which was then
not much more than twenty years old: ‘Even if I had wanted to do so it would
have been impossible to provide a comprehensive declassified evaluation of the
performance of the intelligence community or even credit many of the contribu-
tors’.33 It led one critic to immediately wonder what had been ‘excised’ by the
Cabinet Office, because, he argued, so much was already available in the ‘public
domain’. However, as one official historian has argued, the ‘“the public domain”
constitutes a great range of contexts, from unsubstantiated assertions in sensa-
tionalist and evanescent publications (what might be called “sub-prime intel-
ligence literature”) to serious and scholarly articles by professional historians’. 34
In one sense, criticism of official historians and the use of intelligence were
moving into a different area. The issue now was no longer whether official histo-
rians were able to draw on intelligence per se, but, moreover, were they revealing
enough? The appetite for revelations was whetted once more in the same year as
the publication of the Official History of the Falklands Campaign, when a study
of intelligence cooperation between Poland and Great Britain during the Second
World War was produced by the ‘Anglo–Polish Historical Committee’, with the
official sanction of both governments. The Prime Minister, Tony Blair, declared
that the committee ‘has had unprecedented access to British Intelligence
archives’.35 It was explained that ‘the UK side of the committee . . . were excep-
tionally granted access to the closed archives of the British Secret Intelligence
Service’.36 This publication is remarkable for the fact that fourteen documents
– thirteen of them in facsimile – are reproduced from the SIS archive.37
Intelligence-sponsored histories by the British government continued a
year later, when, under the auspices of the British Official History series, Gill
Bennett’s biography of Sir Desmond Morton, Churchill’s Man of Mystery, was
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released in 2006. This could not have been contemplated without access to intel-
ligence records. The familiar ‘full access to official documents’ is mentioned at
the start of the volume, and the bibliography contains a specific mention of ‘the
records of the Secret Intelligence Service’. Bennett notes that SIS records ‘are not
released into the public domain’ and adds that ‘no file references or file titles are
given in the text or notes for records that are not available to public inspection’.38
Yet, even here, inconsistencies remain. In 1999, for example, Bennett, in her
government-sanctioned FCO History Note on the 1924 ‘Zinoviev letter’ affair,
in which she had ‘full and unrestricted access to all relevant files, including those
of SIS and the Security Service’, used footnotes with simple referencing, such as
‘SIS files’ and ‘Security Service files’.39
What are we to make, then, of these discrepancies in approaches to intel-
ligence material in Official Histories? Perhaps the major lesson to be drawn is
that it is not possible to impose a one size fits all approach to applying disclosure
rules to the use of intelligence in Official History. Each volume we have men-
tioned hitherto has been written where the environment concerning the release
of secret material has had a different set of constraints. That landscape changed
significantly once more, at the turn of the twenty-first century, when, in 2002,
MI5 and, in 2005, the SIS, commissioned the publication of two authorised
histories (see Figure 12). Here, for the first time, both agencies were willing
to allow two individuals with established academic reputations access to their
archives, although the parameters of each project were markedly different. Keith
Jeffery was commissioned to write a history of the SIS from 1909 to 1949, while
Christopher Andrew’s remit in writing the authorised history of MI5 was to tell
the story from 1909 to 2009.40
Part of the stimulus for the commissioning of these histories was the 2009
centenary of both organisations, which developed from the creation of a ‘Secret
Service Bureau’ in the autumn of 1909. From almost the very start, there were
‘Home’ and ‘Foreign’ departments – the former becoming the Security Service,
with its primarily British domestic responsibilities; the latter becoming the
Secret Intelligence Service, with a brief to acquire foreign intelligence from
foreign sources. While the MI5 history covers the whole of the Service’s first
hundred years (albeit with a necessarily less detailed treatment of the most
recent events), that of the SIS only covers the Agency’s first forty years – a
matter which prompted some comment on publication41 and criticism that, for
example, it spared the Service the pain of retelling the story of the Cambridge spy
ring. When asked about the terminal date of 1949, Sir John Scarlett – the Chief of
the SIS who commissioned the history – said that he chose the date himself, spe-
cifically to ‘allow us to publish a full account which did not omit stories or issues
on grounds of political embarrassment’.42 Kim Philby’s treachery, moreover, is
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by no means belittled in the history.43 Justifying the chosen end date, Sir John
Sawers (Chief of the SIS at the time of publication) argued that 1949 represented
‘a watershed in our professional work with the move to Cold War targets and
techniques’ and asserted that ‘full details of our history after 1949 are still too
sensitive to place in the public domain’.44 In any case, beyond a treatment of the
whole century of its existence (which would inevitably have become extremely
superficial, the more contemporary that it became), it is not clear what other fea-
sible end date might have been chosen, bearing in mind the essential continuity
of much British secret intelligence work throughout the whole forty-year period
of the Cold War, from the late 1940s onwards.
Andrew can justifiably assert that ‘no other of the world’s leading intelli-
gence agencies has given similar access to a historian appointed from outside’.
However, there is a question mark over what exactly Andrew was able to see,
as he, himself, admitted that he had ‘been given virtually [emphasis added]
unrestricted access to the Service’s twentieth-century files as well as to the more
limited number of twenty-first century records I have asked to see’.45 On the
other hand, Jeffery was ‘absolutely confident’ that he had ‘utterly unrestricted
access to the [SIS] archives over its first forty years’.46 The simple answer, with
regard to why Andrew had ‘virtually unrestricted access’ and Jeffery had ‘utterly
unrestricted access’, is to do with the passage of time. The fact that Jeffery’s
history was ending in 1949 made disclosure much easier than would otherwise
have been the case. Andrew, on the other hand, in taking his volume up to 2009,
would have undoubtedly confronted current and still operationally sensitive
issues that could not be revealed or, for that matter, even permit access to rel-
evant records.
In addition to documentary records, Christopher Andrew also gathered
information from serving and retired members of the Security Service.47 For
obvious reasons, Jeffery was less fortunate in this respect, though the help of
a number of retired members of the SIS who had died prior to publication is
acknowledged in his volume.48 For Jeffery, conversations with former intel-
ligence practitioners valuably provided some human colour to supplement the
dry documentary record and illuminated the corporate ‘memory’ and esprit de
corps of the organisation.
The moral of this discussion concerning access to sources is, of course, caveat
lector, especially about any statements made in the ‘preliminary matter’ – the
‘prelims’, as publishers call it – of Official Histories. But do these nuances and
caveats in language invite suspicion on the part of the reader? A reviewer of
Jeffery’s book on Amazon’s website is revealing here. The reviewer, writing
under the pseudonym ‘Antaloorian’, was not prepared to grant the book five
out of five stars: ‘What has cost the book its fifth star though, is the simple
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Figure 12 Professor Keith Jeffery at the launch of MI6: The History of the Secret
Intelligence Service, 1909–1949 (Press Association, PA.9499840)
fact that it is an “official” history and has therefore been written under the
constraints imposed by MI6’.49 Len Scott and Peter Jackson, meanwhile, argue
that: ‘for some academics the Ivory Tower should remain a sanctuary from the
compromises of officialdom and provide a panorama (or, a camera obscura) on
the world outside’.50 Anthony Glees supports such sentiments by forcefully sug-
gesting that it is ‘a strong principle of a free society that the people who write its
own history should be entirely free and unfettered’. ‘I don’t think governments
should write their own history’, Glees maintains, while ‘academics should not
become ambassadors or politicians, or work for the secret service’.51 A review of
both Andrew’s and Jeffery’s prefaces, however, would immediately indicate that
both authors had, at all times, striven to maintain their academic integrity. There
are, anyhow, inherent dangers in becoming, as one critic has charged, a ‘court
historian’.52
The major lesson to draw from our discussion so far is that files are even-
tually released, even those relating to intelligence. One only has to chart the
JIC’s instruction to official historians in July 1945 that the ‘Ultra Secret’ should
‘NEVER’ be disclosed, to the appointment of Professor Harry Hinsley in 1971
to write about that ‘secret’, to the actual release of records from Bletchley Park
into The National Archives at the end of the twentieth century under the ‘HW’
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series. Ultimately, an official historian has to be accountable to the historical

record, for if they sanitised that record now, they would only be making, as one
scholar has observed, ‘whips for their own flogging’.53 It is, nevertheless, the
restrictions placed on what can be published, which represent the most conten-
tious, and perhaps the most critical, aspect of ‘Official History’, sharply distin-
guishing it from other sorts of history. It is notable that Richard J. Aldrich, in his
recent book about the history of GCHQ, felt compelled to subtitle his work The
Uncensored Story of Britain’s Most Secret Intelligence Agency.54 There is a clear
intention here to disassociate himself from the authorised works of, for example,
Andrew and Jeffery.
Nevertheless, since the Second World War, the British Official History series
has been populated by some very distinguished historians indeed, and the label
‘Official History’ has come to represent a kind of quality control signal. They
have been perceived as enterprises, given the time, space and resources to try to
‘get it right’. The result might not always make for very exciting history, but it
should be reliable and authoritative. Official Histories are commissioned; to be
sure, their subjects do not spring fully armed from the head of the historian. The
official historian works to the agenda, the research priorities and the funding
capacity of another party, rather than selecting their own research topic.55 Yet,
in the academic world today, agendas, research priorities and funding capacity
are seldom purely in the hands of the individual scholar, but, in the case of the
official historian, the selection and vetting of the individual concerned could
serve to make him or her appear parti pris with the department concerned.
In fact, the language adopted in the two most recent histories of the MI5 and
the SIS refrained from any mention of the word ‘official’. In the foreword to
Andrew’s Defence of the Realm, Jonathan Evans – the Director General of MI5 –
remarked (among other things) that: ‘this book is not an “official” history within
the terms of the Government programme of research and publication of Official
Histories on a variety of subjects relating to government activity’.56 There was
no reference, either, to the word ‘official’ in Jeffery’s MI6 book. Both books are
‘authorised’, but what does this mean? Indeed, does it mean anything significant
at all? It may simply reflect the fact that each history is a ‘one-off’, independently
commissioned by the department concerned and published by a company who
bid for it, unlike works in the Cabinet Office’s Official History series, formerly
published by Her Majesty’s Stationary Office and currently by Routledge in
their ‘Whitehall History Publishing’ programme. The decision, in the end, for
Jeffery’s book was that it should explicitly be neither one nor the other, though
buried within the preface is a note regarding the citation of sources, which reads
as follows: ‘Since records from the SIS archive are not released into the public
domain, no individual source-references are provided to them. In this case I
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have followed the precedent set by past British official histories’.57 One could
interpret that to mean (if only rather elliptically) that this, too, is an ‘Official
History’. And, although, as R. Gerald Hughes observes, the ‘o’ word for Jeffery’s
book had been given ‘a wide berth’, it would, ‘of course be used as a label in a
casual fashion by readers and commentators alike’.58
As we have seen, the word ‘official’ has all sorts of unfortunate, if not unjus-
tified, connotations. The words of Sir Basil Liddell Hart are often invoked in
this sense, when he allegedly remarked that Sir James Edmonds’ multi-volume
work Military Operations France and Belgium, 1914–1918 was ‘official but not
history’.59 In 1962, Martin Blumenson – Staff Historian at the Office of Chief of
Military History of the US Army – posed the question: ‘can official history be
honest history?’60 He pointed out that critics of Official Histories had argued
that, because they were commissioned by governments, they sometimes had
to ignore pertinent information and ‘it cannot, consequently, meet the tests
of objectivity, balance, and independence of judgment. At best a bland, cau-
tious, diluted version of the truth, official history cannot be honest’.61 He, too,
like Liddell Hart, particularly identified Sir James Edmonds’ work on the First
World War as not ‘honest’, which has widely been described as tendentious, self-
serving and overly protective of the reputation of Sir Douglas Haig. Blumenson,
however, (perhaps understandably, as an ‘official historian’ himself) quotes a
fellow United States army historian Kent Roberts Greenfield’s assertion, that it
was possible to write good Official History if three criteria were met: it must be
written by professional historians; the authors had to have free access to all the
relevant documents; and the end product had to be free from censorship.62
The fact is, however, that the government, no matter how permissive it may
be concerning the freedom of the historian involved to express his or her own
independent judgements, can insist (with the backing of the law under the
Official Secrets Act) on omissions, deletions and redactions from the text. And it
is this that makes Official History different, in kind, to other sorts of history. This
is not to say that ‘censorship’ does not exist in other historical works and that
there are not circumstances in which the historian might self-censor text. For
example, there might be information from personal, medical, financial or legal
records, which it might be inappropriate or unethical to reveal. Considerations
like this may be more acute for the modern or contemporary historian, than
for the medieval one. Distance – personal, as well as chronological – can often
make it easier to reveal some things, and this applies in the realm of security and
intelligence history as much as it does for whatever intimate personal history one
might be exploring. It begs the question as to whether historians necessarily have
an absolute licence – a carte blanche – to publish absolutely anything.63
The onus, so far, has been on exploring the role of the official historian, but
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what is the rationale behind commissioning such histories in the first place?
What does a commissioning department want out of the exercise? There are,
perhaps, a variety of reasons. These could include celebration for a significant
anniversary (such as commemorating a hundred years of the existence of the
SIS and MI5); corporate promotion; ‘lessons learned’; or morale-boosting/esprit
de corps objectives. Both MI5 and the SIS admitted a clear operational motive
that part of their purpose in commissioning the histories was (in the words
of Sir Jonathan Evans, Director General of MI5) to help ‘generate the public
understanding and support that is vital to the Service’s continued success’.64
Both services, however, clearly recognised that any publication which smacked
of corporate-sponsored ‘hack history’ would do more harm than good, and
(consonant with established British ‘Official History’ practice) they commis-
sioned independent professional historians to write the works. Nevertheless, as
far as government-sponsored work is concerned, there is also the suspicion – as
expressed in 2004 by Richard J. Aldrich, specifically with regard to intelligence
history – that as secrecy about Britain’s security and intelligence agencies
began to erode, Whitehall became ‘increasingly convinced that official history
was a useful way of managing the past, offering a judicious mixture of conces-
sion and control’.65 So, there may clearly be understandings and preconcep-
tions about what may or may not be appropriate to include in any particular
volume.
Focusing on the word ‘conception’ is perhaps a convenient place to conclude
– that is, the methodological side of ‘content’, which bears on the historical
approach conventionally taken in Official Histories. Reflecting specifically on
war history, Roberto Rabel – a New Zealand official historian – asserts that:
an assumption has prevailed that the crucial purpose of an official history is to
provide an account of each war experience which can be described as ‘definitive’,
‘comprehensive’ or ‘authoritative’. It is an approach which runs against the domi-
nant currents in the historical profession’s epistemological assumptions over the
last four decades or so.66
It is an argument that merits careful consideration. Official Histories are rarely
the final, definitive word on the topic. We know that all history is interim, and
Official Histories should, therefore, simply be a starting point, a kind of brush-
clearing exercise, a part, only, of the jigsaw, upon which others can build and
which others can use to apply – what Rabel kindly calls – more sophisticated
(and less theoretically impoverished) analyses of the matters concerned. Perhaps
the last word should rest with the Oxford English Dictionary and its definition
of the word ‘official’: ‘4. a. Derived from, or having the sanction of, persons in
office; authorized or supported by a government, organization, etc.; hence (more
widely) authoritative; formally accepted or agreed’.67
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Notes
1 The authors are writing in a personal capacity.
2 For a review of these developments written in 1990, see Keith Jeffery, ‘Intelligence
and Military History: A British Perspective’, in David A. Charters, Marc Milner and
Praeger, 1992).
3 Cabinet Office Histories Openness and Records Unit, The UK Government’s Official
History Programme, October 2006, p. 2.
4 On the release of intelligence documents, see Gill Bennett, ‘Declassification and
Release Policies of the UK’s intelligence Agencies’, Intelligence and National Security,
17(1), March 2002, pp. 21–32. On the subject of Official History and intelligence,
Richard J. Aldrich, ‘Policing the Past: Official History, Secrecy and British Intelligence
Since 1945’, English Historical Review, 119(483), September 2004, pp. 922–53 is
essential reading on this subject. More recently, a special section in Intelligence and
National History was devoted to analysing the impact of the authorised publication
of the history of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) by Keith Jeffery. See R. Gerald
Hughes, Philip Murphy and Philip H. J. Davies, ‘The British Secret Intelligence
Service, 1909–1949’, Intelligence and National Security, 26(5), October 2011, pp.
701–29. See, also, Jeffrey Grey (ed.), The Last Word? Essays on Official History in the
United States and British Commonwealth (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), especially
Grey’s thoughtful introduction, pp. ix–xiii; and Jenny Macleod’s reflections on the
conception and development of British Official Histories in Reconsidering Gallipoli
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 57–65.
5 S. W. Roskill, The War at Sea (London: HMSO, 1954–61).
6 Roskill, The War at Sea, p. ii (in each volume).
7 From J. R. M. Butler (ed.), ‘Preface’, in S. W. Roskill, The War at Sea, vol. 1 (London:
HMSO, 1954–61), p. xv (emphasis added).
8 J. R. M. Butler (ed.), ‘Preface’, in S. W. Roskill, The War at Sea, vol. 1 (London:
HMSO, 1954–61), p. xix (emphasis added).
9 This exercise need not necessarily be restricted to official histories, as a comparison (as
discussed in Keith Jeffery, ‘Intelligence and Military History: A British Perspective’,
in David A. Charters, Marc Milner and J. Brent Wilson (eds), Military History and
the Military Profession (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1992), p. 111) of the 1972 and 1989
editions of Peter Calvocoressi’s Total War (Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1972] 1989)
will reveal. Calvocoressi had worked at Bletchley Park during the war.
10 ‘Use of Special Intelligence by Official Historians’, JIC(45)223(0)Final, 20 July 1945,
CAB 103/288, TNA.
11 Roskill, The War at Sea, vol. 1, pp. 356, 469.
12 The War at Sea, vol. 3, p. 16.
13 Aldrich, ‘Policing the Past’, p. 927.
14 David Reynolds, In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second
World War (London: Allen Lane, 2004), p. 161.
15 Reynolds, In Command of History, pp. 161–3.
16 F. W. Winterbotham, The Ultra Secret (New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1974).
17 Peter Calvocoressi, Guy Wint and John Pritchard, Total War, vol. 1, 2nd edn
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989), p. xvii.
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18 M. R. D. Foot, SOE in France, (London: HMSO, 1966).

20 Foot, SOE in France, Appendix A, ‘Sources (i) Archives’, pp. 449–53.
21 See, for example, Foot, SOE in France, p. 104.
22 M. R. D. Foot, SOE in the Low Countries (London: St Ermin’s, 2001).
23 Hinsley, British Intelligence, vol. 1, p. ii (emphasis added).
24 Hinsley, British Intelligence, vol. 1, p. viii.
25 Anthony Farrar-Hockley, The British Part in the Korean War, vol. 1, A Distant
Obligation (London: HMSO, 1990), p. 469.
26 Farrar-Hockley, The British Part in the Korean War, vol. 1, A Distant Obligation, pp.
469–70.
27 Farrar-Hockley, The British Part in the Korean War, vol. 2, An Honourable Discharge
(London: HMSO, 1995), p. 492.
28 The Security Service Act (1989) and (for GCHQ and SIS) the Intelligence Services Act
(1994).
29 The first edition (which was published by HMSO) is Brooks Richards, Secret Flotillas:
Clandestine Sea Lines to France and French North Africa, 1940–1944 (London:
HMSO, 1996). The second (published by ‘Whitehall History Publishing’, in associa-
tion with Frank Cass) is Brooks Richards, Secret Flotillas (2 volumes), Clandestine
Sea Operations to Brittany, 1940–1944, vol. 1; Clandestine Sea Operations in the
Mediterranean, North Africa and the Adriatic, 1940–1944, vol. 2 (London: Whitehall
History Publishing, 2004).
30 Richards, Secret Flotillas, p. xvi. The same statement appears in the second edition
volumes.
31 Richards, Secret Flotillas, p. vi.
32 Emphasis added; Lawrence Freedman, The Official History of the Falklands Campaign,
vol. 2 (London: Routledge, 2005), p. xxii.
33 Freedman, The Official History of the Falklands Campaign, vol. 2, p. xxiii.
34 See Richard J. Aldrich, ‘“Even Had I Wanted To . . .”: Intelligence and Special
Operations in the Falklands Campaign’, International Relations, 20(3), September
2006, pp. 352–7; Keith Jeffery, MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service,
1909–1949 (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), p. xii.
35 Foreword by Tony Blair in Tessa Stirling, Daria Nałe˛ cz and Tadeusz Dubicki (eds),
Intelligence Co-operation between Poland and Great Britain during World War II, vol.
1, The Report of the Anglo-Polish Historical Committee (London: Valentine Mitchell,
2005), p. xii.
36 Tessa Stirling and Daria Nałe˛ cz, ‘Methodology’, in Tessa Stirling, Daria Nałe˛ cz and
Tadeusz Dubicki (eds), Intelligence Co-operation between Poland and Great Britain
during World War II, vol. 1, The Report of the Anglo-Polish Historical Committee
(London: Valentine Mitchell, 2005), p. xx.
37 Jan Stanisław Ciechanowski (ed.), Intelligence Co-operation between Poland and
Great Britain during World War II, vol. 2, Documents (Warsaw: Naczelna Dyrekcja
Archiwoẃ Pań stwowych, 2005), pp. 945–1033.
38 Gill Bennett, Churchill’s Man of Mystery: Desmond Morton and the World of
Intelligence (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. vi, 383.
39 Gill Bennett, ‘A Most Extraordinary and Mysterious Business’: The Zinoviev Letter of
1924 FCO History Notes No. 14, London, 1999. Public interest in the ‘Zinoviev letter’
MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd 301 21/02/2013 08:24

was provoked by a book drawing on material from the Soviet KGB archives. Nigel
West and Oleg Tsarev, The Crown Jewels: The British Secrets at the Heart of the KGB
Archives (London: HarperCollins, 1998). The affair broke when a letter purporting to
be from the Soviet leader Grigori Zinoviev to the Communist Party of Great Britain
urging them to rouse the British proletariat in advance of armed insurrection and
class war was leaked to the British press and seriously undermined the position of the
Labour government, which was then in power.
40 See Jeffery, MI6 (London: Bloomsbury, 2011; published in the US by Penguin, New
York, as The Secret History of MI6) and Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the
Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (London: Allen Lane, 2009; published in the
US by Knopf, New York, as Defend the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5).
41 See, for example, the review by Jeremy Duns in the Mail on Sunday, 7 November
2010, p. 12.
42 Neil Tweedie, ‘MI6 Has No Room For Mavericks’, Daily Telegraph, 9 May 2011,
p. 21.
43 And is amplified in additional material published in the UK paperback edition, see
pp. 762–8.
44 John Sawers, ‘Foreword’, in Keith Jeffery, MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence
Service, 1909–1949 (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), p. vii.
45 Andrew, Defence of the Realm, p. xxi.
46 Jeffery, MI6, p. x.
47 Andrew, Defence of the Realm, p. xxii, and scattered indications in the source refer-
ence notes.
48 Jeffery, MI6, p. xviii.
49 See http://www.amazon.co.uk/MI6-History-Intelligence-Service-1909-1949/dp/074
7591830/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1335090445&sr=8-1.
50 Len Scott and Peter Jackson, ‘The Study of Intelligence in Theory and Practice’,
Intelligence and National Security, 19(2), Summer 2004, p. 153.
51 Quoted in David Walker, ‘Just How Intelligent?’, The Guardian, 18 February 2003.
52 See Scott and Jackson, ‘The Study of Intelligence in Theory and Practice’, p. 152;
David Walker, ‘Just How Intelligent?’ The Guardian, 18 February 2003. See, also,
Christopher R. Moran, ‘The Pursuit of Intelligence History: Methods, Sources, and
Trajectories in the United Kingdom’, Studies in Intelligence, 55(2), June 2011, pp.
33–55.
53 Moran, ‘Pursuit of Intelligence History’, p. 47.
54 See Richard J. Aldrich, GCHQ: The Uncensored Story of Britain’s Most Secret
Intelligence Agency (London: HarperPress, [2010] 2011).
55 Wording here is based on Bronwyn Dalley, ‘Finding the Common Ground: New
Zealand’s Public History’, in Bronwyn Dalley and Jock Phillips (eds), Going Public:
The Changing Face of New Zealand History (Auckland: Auckland University Press,
2001), p. 24.
56 Andrew, Defence of the Realm, p. xvii.
57 Jeffery, MI6, p. xvi.
58 R. Gerald Hughes, ‘Truth Telling and the Defence of the Realm: History and the
History of the British Secret Intelligence Service’, Intelligence and National Security,
26(5), October 2011, p. 707.
59 See David French, ‘“Official but not History”? Sir James Edmonds and the Official
MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd 302 21/02/2013 08:24

History of the Great War’, The Journal of the Royal United Services Institute for
Defence Studies, 131(1), March 1986, pp. 58–63.
60 Martin Blumenson, ‘Can Official History be Honest History?’, Military Affairs, 26(4),
Fall 1962, p. 153.
61 Blumenson, ‘Can Official History be Honest History?’, p. 153.
62 Blumenson, ‘Can Official History be Honest History?’, pp. 153, 155. See, also, the
discussion in David French, ‘Sir James Edmonds and the Official History: France
and Belgium’, in Brian Bond (ed.), The First World War and British Military History
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 69–86.
63 Another potential consideration for historians writing about contemporary or
near-contemporary events is the possibility of libel. M. R. D. Foot’s SOE in France
provoked a lively public debate involving surviving members of the organisation,
questions in parliament, and a libel suit resulting in the first edition being withdrawn
and replaced with a revised edition in 1968 (see The Times, 29 August 1966, p. 10
(‘“Odette” Libel Claim’); The Times, 29 July 1967, p. 7 (‘Damages for Slur in War
Book’); Mark Seaman, ‘Good Thrillers but Bad History: A Review of Published
Works on the Special Operations Executive’s Work in France During the Second
World War’, in K. G. Robertson (ed.), War, Resistance and Intelligence: Essays in
Honour of M. R. D. Foot (Barnsley: Leo Cooper, 1999), pp. 127–8.
64 Jonathan Evans, ‘Foreword’, in Christopher Andrew, Defence of the Realm: The
Authorized History of MI5 (London: Allen Lane, 2009), p. xv. Sir John Sawers
wrote that: ‘the aim was to increase public understanding of SIS’, see John Sawers,
‘Foreword’, in Keith Jeffery, MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service,
1909–1949 (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), p. vii.
66 Roberto Rabel, ‘War History as Public History: Past and Future’, in Bronwyn Dalley
and Jock Phillips (eds), Going Public: The Changing Face of New Zealand History
(Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2001), p. 64.
67 See http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/130655.
MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd 303 21/02/2013 08:24

INDEX
Note: Illustrations are indicated by page numbers in italics.
9/11 see September 11th attacks The Defence of the Realm, 10, 287, 294,
9/11 Commission Report, 163 295, 296, 297
24 (TV series), 147, 159, 223 For the President’s Eyes Only, 92, 93,
25-Year War, The (Palmer), 99 94–106, 158
39 Steps, The (Buchan), 161 The Missing Dimension, 2, 19, 146, 147,
303 Committee, 66 148
Secret Service, 206–7, 209
A-12 aircraft, 9, 99 Angleton, James J., 156, 176–7
accountability, 70, 72, 271 Arbenz, Jacobo, 67–8, 115–16
Adams, Sam, 99 Archangel aircraft, 9, 99
Addy, Premen, 192 Argentina, 231
Adler, Julius Ochs, 116 Armour Against Fate (Occleshaw), 209
Afghanistan, 104, 105, 177, 185–9, 191–2, Armstrong, Sir Robert, 8, 285, 286
193, 194, 195–6, 197 Armstrong, William, 284, 285
Agee, Philip, 119, 120 Army Security Agency (ASA), 176
Ahern, Thomas, 99 Arrigo, Jean Maria, 226
Albania, 23, 24 ASA see Army Security Agency (ASA)
Alder, Gerald, 186, 192 ASIO see Australian Security Intelligence
Aldrich, Richard J., 11, 19–41, 147, 211, 251, Organisation (ASIO)
263, 296, 299 Australia, 24, 25
Alexander, Matthew, 227–8 Australian Security Intelligence
Algeria, 32, 228 Organisation (ASIO), 25, 26
Algerian War, 228 authenticity, 147, 148, 149–53, 155, 164
Alias (TV series), 147 autobiographies see memoirs
Allen, George W., 99 Avon, Lord see Eden, Anthony, Lord Avon
Allen’s Gangsters in Action (Mader), 27–8,
40 ‘B team’ exercises, 101, 102
Allende, Salvador, 100, 101, 118 Babakhdzhayev, M. A., 195
al-Qaeda, 105, 227–8, 230 Bailey, Frederick, 192
Alsop, Stewart, 113 Baldwin, Hanson W., 29, 115
America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Barthes, Roland, 155–6
Europe (Berghahn), 53–4, 55, 56, 61 Batvinis, Raymond J., 142
Ames, Aldrich, 172–3, 177, 178–9 Baxter, Christopher, 13, 289–99
Andrew, Christopher, 10, 19, 28, 35, 92, 147, Bay of Pigs, 9, 19–21, 31–3, 40, 72, 97, 116,
153, 204 117
304
MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd 304 21/02/2013 08:24

Index 305
Bayly, C. A., 189–90 Brysac, Shareen, 193

Beach, Jim, 12, 202–13 Bublitz, Robert E., 269, 270
Bearing the Cross (Garrow), 141 Buchan, John
Beesly, Patrick The 39 Steps, 161
Room 40, 210, 211, 268, 275 Greenmantle, 187
Very Special Intelligence, 268, 275 Buckmaster, Maurice, 240, 241–3
Belfrage, Cedric, 32–3, 38 Bufacchi, Vittorio, 226
Bell, Mark Sever, 193 Bulgaria, 23, 24
Bennett, Gill, 293–4 Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), 27
Bennett, Ralph, 210–11 Bundy, William P., 81
Berghahn, Volker, 53–4, 55, 56, 61 Bureau, The (Sullivan), 134
Bergner, Thomas see Mader, Julius Burgess, Guy, 174, 177, 286
Berkowitz, Bruce, 105, 106 Burma, 32
Berlin Tunnel operation, 96 Burn After Reading (Coen Brothers), 163
Bernstein, Carl, 67, 118 Bush, George H. W., 102, 104
Best, Anthony, 211 Butler, J. R. M., 289–90
Bicheno, Hugh, 206 Butler, R. A., 240
Bitter Fruit (Kinzer and Schlesinger), Butterfield, Herbert, 246
67–8 Bybee, John, 230
Black, Nicholas, 210
Blair, Tony, 293 Cairncross, John, 174, 283, 286
Blake, George, 286 Calvocoressi, Peter, 275, 291
Bletchley Park, 6–7, 173, 210–11, 275, 291, Cambridge Five, 173–4, 177, 273, 294; see
296; see also Ultra also Blunt, Anthony; Burgess, Guy;
Blumenson, Martin, 298 Cairncross, John; MacLean, Donald;
Blunt, Anthony, 8, 174, 177, 282, 284, 286 Philby, Kim
BND see Bundesnachrictendienst (BND) Caroe, Olaf, 183
Bodington, Nicholas, 238, 240–1 Carter, Jimmy, 103–5
Bond, Brian, 204 Carter, Miranda, 177
Bond, James, 147, 148, 151, 154, 179 Carver, George, 98, 99
Boorstein, Eddie, 32–3 Casey, William, 105, 121
Boss, The (Theoharis and Cox), 138–9 Castro, Fidel, 32, 116, 118
Boucher, Valentine, 254 Catholic Church, 140, 177
Bourne movie series, 150, 163–4 Caute, David, 35
Boxshall, Edwin, 237, 240, 241 CCF see Congress for Cultural Freedom
Boyle, Andrew, 8 (CCF)
Braden, Tom, 48, 51, 113, 118 censorship, 8–9, 13, 31–2, 57, 77–8, 236–46,
Bradley, Omar N., 176 251–60, 298; see also secrecy
brainwashing, 229 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
British Guiana, 72, 73 303 Committee, 66
British Intelligence (Twigge, Hampshire and and Afghanistan, 179
Macklin), 207 and the Cold War, 21–41, 66–9, 73–82,
British Intelligence in the Second World War 95–8, 111–13, 119, 121, 124, 172, 176–9
(Hinsley), 11, 210, 245, 291, 296 and the Congress for Cultural Freedom,
British Military Intelligence (Fergusson), 208, 11, 47–61
209 and covert action, 12, 19, 21, 22–3, 26, 32,
British Military Intelligence (Haswell), 208, 40, 65–83, 95–6, 111–24
209 and covert funding, 11, 47–61, 73, 80, 117
Brook, Sir Norman, 251, 290–1 CREST search tool, 7, 123
Broughton, Lt Col, 254, 255–6, 257 culture of secrecy, 47, 58, 67, 71–2, 112,
Browning, Lesley, 253, 255, 256–7 122
MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd 305 21/02/2013 08:24

and declassification, 7, 11, 47, 65–73, Churchill’s Man of Mystery (Bennett), 293–4
76–83, 97, 122 CIA see Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
domestic operations, 7, 100, 112 CIA, The (Wilford), 58–9
establishment of, 6, 95, 113, 158, 160 CIA in Guatemala (Immerman), 68
‘family jewels’, 69, 100, 101, 102, 103, 118 CIDT see cruel, inhuman or degrading
and the FRUS series, 11, 66–83, 95, 97 treatment (CIDT)
history of, 9, 11–12, 19–41, 47–61, 66–71, cinema see films
90–106, 122 civil liberties, 133, 138, 159
International Operations Division (IOD), Civil Rights movement, 39, 134, 136, 140,
48, 51 141
and interrogation, 229 civil war see Chinese Civil War; Spanish
journalistic accounts of, 19–21, 23, 26, 40, Civil War
115–18, 122–3 Clancy, Tom, 155
and the Kennedy assassination, 37–9, 72 Clandestine Service see National Clandestine
memoirs about, 4, 21–2, 119–21 Service
narcotics trade, links to, 65 Clayton, Anthony, 208
National Clandestine Service, 66, 67 Climate of Treason (Boyle), 8
Office of Policy Coordination, 50–1 Clinton, Bill, 7
Openness Task Force, 72 Cloak and Dollar War, The (Stewart), 11,
Operation CHAOS, 65, 118, 129 22–6, 40
recruitment, 67, 104, 121, 176, 273 Cohen, Warren, 69–70, 77, 83
responses to fictional representations, 150, COINTELPRO, 129, 134, 135, 136–8, 139,
151–2 141
Soviet-inspired writings on, 22–41 COINTELPRO (Perkus), 136, 137
Special Group, 66 Colby, William E., 81, 102, 119, 120, 121,
spying on allies, 29–30 274
and the ‘War on Terror’, 65 Cold War
Central Intelligence and National Security and the CIA, 21–41, 66–9, 73–82, 95–8,
(Ransom), 30–1 111–13, 119, 121, 124, 172, 176–9
Century of Spies (Richelson), 207 Cold War consensus, 113, 114, 117, 119
CHAOS see Operation CHAOS cultural, 21, 26, 47–61
Chalfont, Lord see Jones, Alun, Lord end of, 2, 7, 70, 122, 158
Chalfont and the FBI, 136, 137
Challenging the Secret Government and the Great Game, 183–5
(Olmstead), 103 and Indonesia, 73–82
Chapman, Eddie, 4, 5, 251–2, 255 and Russia, 21–2, 24, 25, 28–9, 31, 35–6,
Charles, Douglas M., 140–1 38–40, 69, 74, 95–8, 100–1, 102, 104–6
Charlton, F. W., 243–4 and the SIS, 27, 97, 172
Cherkashin, Viktor, 178 Cold War consensus, 113, 114, 117, 119
Chicago Tribune, 113 Coleman, Peter, 49–50, 51, 54, 55, 57–8, 60,
Childers, Erskine, 152, 155, 159 61
Chile, 100, 101, 118 Communist Parties
China, 37, 116, 186, 191, 192, 197 American, 34, 35, 36, 134
Chinese Civil War, 116 Australian, 25
Chomsky, Noam, 136 British, 24, 25, 34
Christianity Today, 132 generally, 21, 31, 37
Church, Frank, 103, 118–19 German, 39
Church Committee, 66, 69, 102, 103, Indonesian, 74, 75, 76, 78–9, 80–1
118–19, 162 Congo, 32, 66, 82, 118
Churchill, Sir Winston, 173, 241, 251, 257, Congress (US), 9, 54, 55, 66, 70, 82, 112, 113,
290–1 114–15, 117–19, 122, 131
MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd 306 21/02/2013 08:24

Index 307
Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), 11, Daily Express, 23

47–61 Daily Mail, 244, 286, 287
Connolly, Arthur, 185 de Gaulle, Charles, 13, 30, 238, 239–40, 241
Conrad, Joseph, 154 de Groot, Gerard, 205
Consortium for the Study of Intelligence de Vries, Tity, 59
(CSI), 121 Dearlove, Sir Richard, 91
conspiracy theories, 22, 37–9, 40, 162–3 Decent Interval (Snepp), 4, 119
conspiracy thrillers, 161–4 declassification, 2, 7, 11, 47, 65–73, 76–83,
Conversation, The (Coppola), 161 97, 122, 129, 245, 269, 296
Cook, Fred J., 30, 132–3, 134 Decoding History (Gardner), 211
Cooper, Alfred Duff, 251 DeCoste, Damon Marcel, 156
Cooper, Courtney Ryley, 129–31, 133, 134, Defence of the Realm (Andrew), 10, 287, 294,
138 295, 296, 297
CORONA imagery satellite, 96, 97 Deighton, Len, 155, 156
Countercoup (Roosevelt), 70 DeLillo, Don, 150, 161
Counter-Intelligence Corps (US Army), Delmer, Sefton, 23
28 DeLoach, Cartha, 135
Counterspy magazine, 119 Denmark, 59
covert action Denning, Michael, 154–5, 156
by the CIA, 19, 21, 22–3, 26, 32, 40, 95–6 Deriabin, Peter, 29, 98
definitions of, 111–12 Dericourt, Henri, 238, 243
by the FBI, 136 Deutsch, Arnold, 173–4
representations of, 12, 65–83, 111–24 Diem brothers, 118
and spy fiction, 268 Dilks, David, 2, 19, 146, 147, 148
Covert Action Information Bulletin, 119 Directorate of Operations see National
covert funding, 11, 47–61, 73, 80, 112, Clandestine Service
117 Dirty War, 231
Cowell, Gervase, 292 Dominican Republic, 118
Cowgill, Felix, 177 Donovan, William J., 6, 31, 34, 113, 160, 173
Cox, John Stuart, 138–9 Doolittle, James, 114
Craft of Intelligence (Dulles), 9, 21, 267 Double Cross System, The (Masterman), 255
CREST search tool, 7, 123 Douglas-Home, Sir Alec, 240
Crimea, 187, 188, 209 Driberg, Tom, 283
cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment Dujmovic, Nicholas, 11–12, 90–106, 151–2
(CIDT), 223–5, 232 Dulles, Allen, 19–20, 26–31, 75, 115–16,
Cruikshank, Charles, 245 159, 267
Cruttwell, C. R. M. F., 204 Craft of Intelligence, 9, 21, 267
CSI see Consortium for the Study of Germany’s Underground, 26
Intelligence (CSI) Dulles, John Foster, 76, 77–8, 115, 116
Cuba, 9, 19–21, 30, 31–3, 36, 40, 66, 72, 97, Dunne, Kenneth, 29–30, 31, 40
116, 117, 118, 179
Cuba vs. the CIA (Marzani and Light), 31–2 East Germany, 27
Cuban missile crisis, 36, 72, 97 East India Company, 188, 191
Cullather, Nick, 122 Eastern Europe, 22–3, 24, 26–8, 114, 263; see
cultural Cold War, 21, 26, 47–61 also individual countries
‘Cultural Cold War, The’ (Lasch), 48–9, 54, Eden, Anthony, Lord Avon, 241
57, 60, 61 Edge of Darkness (TV series), 150
cultural theory, 12, 147–8 Edmonds, Sir James, 298
Cunningham, David, 137, 138 Edwards, Bob, 22, 28–30, 31, 40
Cyprus, 100 Edwards, Michael, 192
Czechoslovakia, 24 Egypt, 32
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Eisenhower, Dwight D., 68, 70, 75, 96–7, Foot, M. R. D.

115, 116, 266 MI9, 275
Elias, Ney, 192 SOE in France, 10, 13, 236–46, 263, 269,
Ellis, Charles, 283, 286 291
Elphinstone, Mountstuart, 186 SOE in the Low Countries, 291
Empire News, 256 Foote, Alexander, 22
Encounter magazine, 48, 57, 58, 117 For the President’s Eyes Only (Andrew), 92,
Enemies: A History of the FBI (Weiner), 142 93, 94–106, 158
Enigma device, 173, 275; see also Bletchley Ford, Douglas, 211
Park; Ultra Ford, Gerald, 69, 101–3
European Convention on Human Rights, Ford Foundation, 54–5, 56
223, 224 Foreign Office (UK), 237, 238, 239, 241, 242,
European Court of Human Rights, 224 245, 253–4
European Movement, 28–9 Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS),
Evans, Sir Jonathan, 297, 299 11, 66–83, 95, 97
Evans Brothers Ltd, 253, 256 Forte, Sir Charles, 284–6
Evening Standard, 258 France, 10–11, 13, 24, 30, 203, 228, 236–46
France and Belgium (Bond), 204
Fairfield Foundation, 54, 55, 57 Franks, Sir Arthur, 285
Falklands War, 293 Freedman, Sir Lawrence, 293
‘family jewels’, 69, 100, 101, 102, 103, 118 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), 68,
Farrar-Hockley, Anthony, 292 122, 129, 133, 136, 138
FBI see Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Freedom’s Crusade (Lucas), 51–2, 54–5, 56,
FBI: A History, The (Jeffreys-Jones), 141–2 61
FBI and the Catholic Church (Rosswurm), French, Patrick, 192
140 Friedman, Max Paul, 123–4
FBI Nobody Knows, The (Cook), 132–3, 134 Friendship magazine, 25
FBI Pyramid, The (Felt), 135 FRUS see Foreign Relations of the United
FBI Story (Whitehead), 131–2, 133, 134, States (FRUS)
138 Fuchs, Klaus, 176, 286
FBI’s Obscene File, The (Charles), 140–1 funding see covert funding
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 12, 26,
37, 40, 118, 129–43, 160, 177–9 G-Men, 12, 129, 132, 160
Federal Bureau of Investigation (Lowenthal), Galbraith, John Kenneth, 48, 65
131, 133, 134 Gaps in the Warren Report (Joesten), 38
Feitlowitz, Marguerite, 231 Gardner, Jock, 211
Felt, Mark, 135 Gardner, Meredith, 176
Fergusson, Thomas, 208 Garman, Douglas, 25
Ferris, John, 3, 207, 209, 210–11, 212 Garrison, Jim, 39, 164
fiction see spy fiction Garrow, David J., 141
Field, Noel, 24 Gascoyne-Cecil, Robert, Lord Salisbury,
films, 21, 39, 122, 147, 148, 150, 151, 152, 185–6
155, 160, 161, 162–4 Gates, Robert, 71, 71–2, 105
Finnegan, Terrence, 210 GCHQ see Government Communications
First World War, 141, 187, 209–10, 268, 298 Headquarters (GCHQ)
Flaubert, Gustave, 155 Gehlen, Reinhard, 23, 27
Fleischman, Julius, 54 Geneva Conventions, 230, 254
Fleming, Ian, 152, 154 Gentry, Curt, 139–40
Fluency Committee, 283, 284 Germany, 27, 28, 39, 187, 252, 254, 255
FOIA see Freedom of Information Act Germany’s Underground (Dulles), 26
(FOIA) Gillard, David, 192
MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd 308 21/02/2013 08:24

Index 309
Glading, Percy, 25 Hinsley, Sir Harry, 11, 210, 245, 291, 296
Gladman, Brad, 211 Hiss, Alger, 116
Glees, Anthony, 296 historical theory, 12, 147–9, 157, 161
Glomar Explorer, 101, 102, 103 History of the Great War (Cruttwell), 204
Golitsyn, Anatoli, 176 Hitz, Frederick P., 12, 152, 172–9
Gonzales, Alberto R., 230 Hoblitzelle Foundation, 57
Good Shepherd, The (De Niro), 151–2 Holland see Netherlands
Gorbachev, Mikhail, 105 Hollis, Sir Roger, 8, 13, 282, 283–4, 286–7
Gouzenko, Igor, 22 Hollywood, 105, 113, 150, 160, 163–4; see
Government Communications Headquarters also films
(GCHQ), 7, 264, 287, 292, 296 Hoover, J. Edgar, 12, 40, 129–37, 130,
Graff, Garrett M., 142 138–41, 160
Gramsci, Antonio, 52 Hoover and the Un-Americans (O’Reilly),
Graves, Melissa, 12, 129–43 136–7
Great Game, 12, 152–3, 154, 160, 177, Hoover’s FBI (DeLoach), 135
183–97 Hopkins, Ben, 188–9, 191
Great Game, The (Hitz), 152 Hopkirk, Peter, 187, 193
Greaves, Rose Louise, 192 Hostile Intent (Gustafson), 101
Greece, 73, 231 House, Jonathan, 206
Green, Marshall, 79, 81 How the American Secret Service Works
Greene, Graham, 154, 155, 156, 264 (Joesten), 39
Greenfield, George, 253, 255, 256, 257–8 Hughes, R. Gerald, 92, 298
Greenfield, Kent Roberts, 298 Hughes–Ryan Act, 111–12, 119
Greenmantle (Buchan), 187 Hughes-Wilson, John, 206
Gruson, Sydney, 115–16 human intelligence (HUMINT), 251, 270,
Guatemala, 30, 32, 66, 67–8, 69, 72, 73, 96, 273
115–16, 122 human rights, 223–4
Gubbins, Sir Colin, 243–4 HUMINT see human intelligence
Gudgin, Peter, 206 (HUMINT)
Guevara, Che, 32–3 Hungarian Revolution, 96
Gustafson, Kristian, 101 Hungary, 22–3, 24, 96
Guyana see British Guiana Hunt, H. L., 37
Hutcheon, Linda, 150, 154
Hallowes, Odette, 243–4 Hutchinson, Sir James, 240
Hampshire, Edward, 207
Handel, Michael, 19, 207, 212 Immerman, Richard, 19, 68
Hanssen, Robert, 172–3, 177–9 India, 57, 59–60, 183–97
Haritos-Fatouros, Mika, 231 Indonesia, 66, 72, 73–82
Harris, Stephen, 209 Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), 74, 75,
Harrison, Mark, 205 76, 78–9, 80–1
Haswell, Jock, 208, 209 Ingram, Edward, 187, 192
Hauner, Milan, 187 intelligence, definitions of, 202–3, 268, 272
Havers, Sir Michael, 287 intelligence analysis, 9, 27, 30, 98, 267
hegemony, 52–3 Intelligence and Anglo-American Air Support
Helms, Dick, 31, 32, 36, 100–1 (Gladman), 211
Heritage of Stone (Garrison), 39 Intelligence and National Security, 1, 19, 151,
Herman, Michael, 270, 274 207
Hersh, Seymour, 67, 118 Intelligence and the War Against Japan
Hewitt, Diane, 256 (Aldrich), 211
Hill, Bernard, 254, 256 Intelligence at the Top (Strong), 13, 264–7,
Hines, Jason, 210 271–5
MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd 309 21/02/2013 08:24

intelligence cooperation, 60, 172–9, 266, Kadane, Kathy, 79

267, 270, 273, 293 Kalugin, Oleg, 35–6, 38, 40
Intelligence Corps (British Army), 208–9 Kane, Stephen, 68
Intelligence in War (Keegan), 206 Keay, John, 192
Intelligence Power in Peace and War Keefer, Edward C., 78, 79
(Herman), 274 Keegan, John, 206
intelligence studies, 1–3, 7, 12, 90–106, Keller, William W., 137, 138
121–2, 146–65, 266–7, 268 Kennan, George, 48, 51
Intelligencers, The (Parritt), 208, 209 Kennedy, John F., 21, 32, 36, 37–9, 66, 72,
International Affairs, 265 97–8, 162, 179
International Operations Division (IOD), Kennedy, Robert, 76, 263
48, 51 Kent, Sherman, 147, 267
interrogation, 12–13, 222–32, 251, 252–8 KGB, 28–9, 31, 34, 35–6, 38–40, 98, 105,
Invisible Government (Wise and Ross), 21, 174, 176
70, 117 Khalfin, N. A., 195–6
Iran, 32, 37, 66, 69–70, 72, 82, 83, 96, 103, Khrushchev, Nikita, 98, 179
104, 115 Kim (Kipling), 12, 152–3, 154, 160, 194–6
Iraq 147, 227–8, 272 Kimball, Warren, 70–1
Ireland, 210, 224, 228 King, Martin Luther, Jr, 135, 137, 141, 263
Irish War of Independence, 210 Kinzer, Stephen, 67–8
Islam, 103, 104, 186, 190, 197 Kipling, Rudyard, 183, 184
Italy, 30, 72 Kim, 12, 152–3, 154, 160, 194–6
Knochlein, Fritz, 252–3, 255, 259
J. Edgar Hoover (Gentry), 139–40 Knott, Stephen F., 159
J. Edgar Hoover, Sex, and Crime (Theoharis), Korea see Korean War; North Korea
139 Korean War, 57, 229, 292
Jackson, Peter, 146, 204, 296 Kramer, Mark, 124
James, Lawrence, 189 Kristol, Irving, 48
Jameson, Fredric, 12, 147, 161 Ku Klux Klan, 137
Japan, 66, 72 Kuklinkski, Ryszard, 104–5
Jeffery, Keith, 13, 147, 173, 212, 289–99, 296
Jeffreys-Jones, Rhodri, 92, 138, 141–2 LaCapra, Dominick, 147–8, 153, 161
Jenkins, Dan, 209 Lamb, Alastair, 192
JFK (Stone), 39, 150, 162, 163, 164 Lane, Mark, 39
Joesten, Joachim, 22, 30, 37–9 Langley, J. M., 275
John Bull magazine, 253 Laos, 32, 72
John Paul II, Pope, 105 Lasch, Christopher, 48–9, 54, 57, 60, 61
Johnson, A. Ross, 97 Lasky, Melvin, 48, 51, 58
Johnson, Lyndon B., 39, 65, 66, 73, 81, 98–9, Lawrence & Wishart, 23–4, 25
117–18 Le Carré, John, 12, 152, 154, 155, 161, 175
Johnson, Robert, 12, 154, 183–97 Smiley’s People, 176
Joint Intelligence Subcomittee (JIC), 290–1, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, 150
296 Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, 172, 174
Jolly, Cyril, 258, 260 Le Queux, William, 152, 155, 159
Jones, Alun, Lord Chalfont, 287 Leach, Hugh, 193
Jones, Kevin, 211 leaflet campaigns, 23, 28
Jones, Matthew, 11, 65–83 Leffler, Mel, 72
Jones, R. V., 275 Legacy of Ashes (Weiner), 11–12, 90–106
Josselson, Michael, 55–6, 57 legitimacy, 28, 134, 159
journalism, 4–6, 19–21, 23, 24, 26, 31–2, 40, Levine, Jack, 132–3, 134
65, 79, 115–18, 122–3, 160, 244 Lewin, Ronald, 265, 266, 274, 275
MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd 310 21/02/2013 08:24

Index 311
Liberal Conspiracy, The (Coleman), 49, 51, Masterman, J. C., 255

54, 55, 57–8, 60, 61 Masters of Deceit (Hoover), 132, 133, 136
Liberals and J. Edgar Hoover, The (Keller), Matthew, Sir Theobald, 256, 258
137, 138 Maugham, Somerset, 152, 154, 155, 156–8
Liberty Book Club, 35 Mayaquez incident, 102
Libra (DeLillo), 150 Mechelen Incident, 204
Liddell Hart, Sir Basil, 298 memoirs
Light, Robert, 31–2 about the CIA, 4, 21–2, 119–21
Lomas, Daniel, 13, 251–60 about the FBI, 134–5
London Cage, The (Scotland), 13, 251–60 about the London Cage, 13, 251–60
London District Cage, 13, 251–60 about MI5, 4, 8, 13, 251–2, 281–8
London Reception Centre, 228 about military intelligence, 263–75
Look Over My Shoulder (Helms), 101 Men of Intelligence (Strong), 202, 275
Lowenthal, Mark, 274 Menzies, Sir Stewart, 22
Lowenthal, Max, 131, 133, 134 Merlin Press, 37, 38
Lukács, Georg, 155, 156 Meyer, Karl E., 20–1, 193
Lucas, Scott, 49, 51–2, 54–5, 56, 61 MI5
Luce, Henry, 115 and censorship, 251–2, 281–7
Lumumba, Patrice, 32, 118 and Lawrence & Wishart, 25
memoirs about, 4, 8, 13, 251–2, 281–7
McCarthy, Joseph, 136, 137 official histories of, 9, 13, 289, 294–5, 297,
McCone, John, 97, 99 299
Macdonald, Dwight, 57 surveillance of Gordon Stewart, 25
MacEachin, Douglas, 105 MI6 see Secret Intelligence Service (SIS)
McGarr, Paul, 11, 65–83 MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence
Mackenzie, Sir Compton, 251 Service (Jeffery), 294–6, 297–8
Macklin, Graham, 207 MI9 (Foot and Langley), 275
McLachlan, Donald, 13, 263–70, 274–5 MI11, 254, 255, 257
McLaughlin, John, 91 Miami District Fund, 57
MacLean, Donald, 174, 177, 286 Michelet, Jules, 155
McMahon, Robert J., 77–8 Mighty Wurlitzer, The (Wilford), 58–9
Macmillan, Harold, 6 Military Affairs, 269
Maddrell, Paul, 26–7 military intelligence, 12, 202–13, 274
Mader, Julius, 22, 27–8, 40 Military Intelligence (Gudgin), 206
Maiolo, Joe, 206 Military Intelligence Blunders and Cover-Ups
Malaysia, 79 (Hughes-Wilson), 206
Malcolm, Sir John, 183 Military Operations in France and Belgium
Man Called Intrepid, A (Stevenson), 275 (Edmonds), 298
Man Who Kept the Secrets, The (Powers), 101 Millett, Allan, 204
Man Who Never Was, The (Montague), 251, Missing Dimension, The (Andrew and Dilks),
253, 256 2, 19, 146, 147, 148
Mandate for Change (Eisenhower), 70 Mistry, Kaeten, 12, 111–24
Mangold, Tom, 156 Mitchell, Alan, 253
Manhattan Project, 176 Mitrokhin, Vasily, 38
Mao Zedong, 116 modernism, 156–7
Marchetti, Victor, 119 Mohs, Polly, 210
Marks, John, 119 Montague, Ewan, 251, 253, 256
Marshall Plan, 53, 57 Moorcroft, William, 192
Martens, Robert J., 79, 81 Moran, Christopher, 1–14, 154
Marzani, Carl, 22, 30, 31–7, 38 Morgan, Gerald, 160, 192, 194–5
Marzani & Munsell, 35, 37, 38 Morris, L. P., 186
MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd 311 21/02/2013 08:24

Morton, Sir Desmond, 293–4 Office of Strategic Services (OSS), 6, 26, 27,
Mosaddegh, Mohammad, 32, 70, 115 31–5, 95, 113, 142, 158, 160, 172–3
Most Secret War (Jones), 275 Official and Confidential (Summers), 139
Mott, Norman, 237–8 official histories, 9–11, 13, 21, 66–7, 131–2,
Mountbatten, Louis, 265, 267 173, 236–46, 263, 289–99
Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 122, 162 Official Secrets Act (UK), 237, 251–2, 255,
Murphy, Christopher, 1–14, 236–46 257, 258, 282, 284, 285
Murray, Williamson, 204 Olmstead, Kathryn, 103
My Silent War (Philby), 177, 264 Omand, Sir David, 274
On the Trail of the Assassins (Garrison), 39
narcotics, 65 Operation CHAOS, 65, 118, 129
Nation magazine, 48, 117 Oppenheimer, Robert, 48
National Clandestine Service, 66, 67 O’Reilly, Kenneth, 136–7
National Security Agency (NSA), 29–30 Origins of FBI Counterintelligence (Batvinis),
National Security Archive (NSA), 80, 122 142
National Security Council (NSC), 80, 97, Orwell, George, 28, 159
105, 113–14, 120 OSS see Office of Strategic Services (OSS)
National Student Association (NSA), 117 Oswald, Lee Harvey, 37–9
NATO see North Atlantic Treaty Oswald: Assassin or Fall Guy? (Joesten), 37–9
Organisation (NATO) Other Ultra, The (Lewin), 275
Naval Intelligence Department (NID), 266,
268, 269 Pakistan, 190
Nazism, 23, 27, 28, 31 Pakula, Alan J., 161
Netherlands, 59, 74 Palmer, Bruce, 99
New York Times, 20–1, 23–4, 29, 32, 47, 65, Palmer Raids, 131, 136
67, 69, 70, 77, 79–80, 115–18, 122, 257 Parallax View, The (Pakula), 161
New Yorker, 26 Parritt, Brian, 208, 209
Newbery, Samantha, 12–13, 222–32 Parsons, Douglas, 25
Newsweek, 31, 39 Pearl Harbor, 34, 173
Nicaragua, 105 Peninsular War, 209
NID see Naval Intelligence Department Penkovsky, Oleg, 97–8, 179
(NID) Perkus, Cathy, 136, 137
Nixon, Richard, 65, 100–1, 118, 134, 135 Perlo, Victor, 38–9
No Left Turns (Schott), 135 Persia, 185, 186, 187, 188, 191, 192, 196, 197
North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), Peters, Edward, 223
29–30, 53, 74, 202–3, 254, 269 Philby, Kim, 11, 29, 174–7, 264, 286, 294–5
North Korea, 100 Philby Affair, The (Trevor-Roper), 264
North Vietnam see Vietnam; Vietnam War Philippines, 79
Northern Ireland, 224, 228 Philipsen, Ingeborg, 59
Novick, Peter, 148–9 Pike, Otis, 118
Nowak, Manfred, 224–5 Pike Committee, 69, 102, 103, 118
NSA see National Security Agency (NSA); Pillar, Paul, 91
National Security Archive (NSA); Pincher, Chapman, 5–6, 6, 13, 264, 281–8
National Student Association (NSA) Their Trade is Treachery, 8, 13, 281–8
NSC see National Security Council (NSC) Too Secret Too Long, 287
Nukhovich, E., 195 PKI see Indonesian Communist Party (PKI)
Nyman, Lars-Erik, 192 Poland, 22–3, 24, 70
Politics of Apolitical Culture (Scott-Smith),
O’Callaghan, William, 258 52–3, 54–5, 56, 61
Occleshaw, Michael, 209 Polmar, Norman, 103
Office of Policy Coordination, 50–1 Pooley, Albert, 258
MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd 312 21/02/2013 08:24

Index 313
Pope, Allen, 76 Rockefeller Foundation, 54, 56

Popov spy case, 96 Roman, Howard, 21
Popplewell, Richard, 189 Room 39 (McLachlan), 13, 263–70, 274–5
popular culture, 12, 21, 113, 122, 146–65, Room 40 (Beesly), 210, 211, 268, 275
172–9, 205–6, 223 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 139
Porter, Bernard, 4, 159 Roosevelt, Kermit, 70
Portrait of a Master Spy (Edwards and Roosevelt, Theodore, 129, 131
Dunne), 29–30, 31, 40 Rose, Kenneth, 281
Pottinger, Eldred, 192 Rosenberg, Ethel, 116, 176
Pottinger, George, 192 Rosenberg, Julius, 116, 176
Powers, Richard Gid, 130, 140, 160, 162 Roskill, Stephen, 270, 289–90
Powers, Thomas, 101 Ross, Thomas, 19, 21, 70, 117
Prague Spring, 263 Rosswurm, Steve, 140
press, the see journalism Rostow, Walt, 31, 32
Prisoner, The (TV series), 150 Rothschild, Victor, 281, 282–3
Project AZORIAN (Polmar and White), 103 Royal Central Asian Society (RCAS), 193
Prometheus Book Club, 35 Rubin, Dan, 36
Promise of Eurocommunism, The (Marzani), Rumsfeld, Donald, 230
37 Rush to Judgment (Lane), 39
propaganda, 21–2, 23, 24, 28, 40, 112, 114, Russell, Edward Frederick Langley, 256
133, 136 Russia
Pullin, Eric, 11, 47–61 and the Cold War, 21–2, 24, 25, 28–9, 31,
Pynchon, Thomas, 161 35–6, 38–40, 69, 74, 95–8, 100–1, 102,
104–6
Rabel, Roberto, 299 declassification of documents, 70
race, 141–2; see also Civil Rights movement espionage by, 4, 8, 25, 28–9, 31, 35–6,
radio broadcasting, 23, 28 97–8, 173–4, 176–9, 282–4
Ramparts magazine, 47, 65, 117–18 and the Great Game, 12, 183–92, 193,
Ransom, Harry Howe, 30–1, 147 194–6
RCAS see Royal Central Asian Society and the Second World War, 34, 173–4
(RCAS), 193
Reader’s Digest magazine, 160 Sabin, Margery, 55, 59–60
Reagan, Ronald, 26, 69, 105–6, 112, 122 Salisbury, Lord see Gascoyne-Cecil, Robert,
realism, 153–60 Lord Salisbury
Reality Effect, The (Barthes), 155–6 Sandys, Duncan, 29
recruitment, 67, 104, 121, 173, 176, 178, 191, Sarila, Narendra Singh, 190
273 Saturday Evening Post, 116, 118
RED (Schwentke), 163 Saunders, Frances Stonor, 49–51, 54, 57, 58,
Red Orchestra, 22 60, 61
Red Scares, 131, 137 Sawers, Sir John, 295
regimental histories, 208–9 Sayle, Edward, 159
Reilly, Sir Patrick, 239–40, 242 Scarlett, Sir John, 294
Rejali, Darius, 228 Scarry, Elaine, 224
Reston, James, 23 Schecter, Jerrold, 98
Reynolds, David, 291 Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr, 21, 31, 32, 36, 48, 51
Richards, Sir Brooks, 292–3 Schlesinger, James, 100
Richelson, Jeffrey, 92, 97, 105, 207 Schlesinger, Stephen, 67–8
Riddle of the Sands, The (Childers), 155 Schneider, René, 118
Robbins, Keith, 206 Schott, Joseph L., 135
Rockefeller Brothers Fund, 56 Schwar, Harriet D., 76
Rockefeller Commission, 69, 101, 102, 105 Scotland, Alexander, 13, 251–60
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Scotland Story, The see London Cage, The Secret Service Bureau, 152, 294
(Scotland) Security Service see MI5
Scott, Len, 146, 296 Seligmann, Matthew, 209
Scott-Smith, Giles, 50, 52–3, 54–5, 56, 61 September 11th attacks, 65, 92, 142, 147,
Scourge of the Swastika (Russell), 256 158, 162–3, 222, 225
Seaver, George, 192 Sheffy, Yigal, 209–10
Second World War show trials, 23, 24
Allen Dulles during, 26, 28 Shue, Henry, 226
and the FBI, 141–2 Sidgwick & Jackson, 284, 286
historiography of intelligence during, Simple Heart, A (Flaubert), 155
10–11, 204, 210–11, 236–46, 274–5, SIS see Secret Intelligence Service (SIS)
289–93 Sitnikov, Vasilli, 29
London Cage, 13, 251–9 sleep deprivation, 229, 253
naval intelligence, 266, 268, 290 Sloan Foundation, 56
and official histories, 10–11, 289–93 Smiley’s People (le Carré), 176
and the OSS, 113, 158, 172–3 Smith, Walter Bedell, 23, 26, 273
and Russia, 34, 173–4 Snepp, Frank, 4, 119
and the SIS, 172, 173–5, 292 SOE see Special Operations Executive (SOE)
and the SOE, 10–11, 236, 291, 292 SOE in France (Foot), 10, 13, 236–46, 263,
and Ultra, 7, 210–11, 290–91 269, 291
Second World War (Churchill), 291 SOE in the Low Countries (Foot), 291
secrecy South Vietnam see Vietnam; Vietnam War
culture of in the CIA, 47, 58, 67, 71–2, Soviet bloc see Eastern Europe; Russia
112, 122 Soviet Union see Russia
and funding see covert funding Spain, 28, 34
and historiography, 149, 269, 271, 274–5, Spanish Civil War, 28, 34
290–7 Special Branch (UK police), 25, 252, 256–7,
and interrogation, 227, 251–60 260
and journalism, 4–6 Special Operations Executive (SOE), 10,
lifting of see declassification 236–46, 291, 292
and official histories, 290–97 Spender, Stephen, 48
and operations see covert action spy fiction, 12, 21, 146, 147–65, 172–9, 187,
and public opinion, 112, 117–18, 161–4 194–6, 268
and publication of memoirs, 3–4, 22, spy planes, 9, 19, 27, 96, 97, 99
251–60 Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The (le
see also censorship; covert action; covert Carré), 150
funding; Official Secrets Act (UK) Spy Who Saved the World, The (Schecter and
Secrecy and Power (Powers), 140 Deriabin), 98
Secret Agent, The (Conrad), 154 Spycatcher (Wright), 4, 8, 286, 287–8
Secret Empire (Taubman), 97 Spymaster (Kalugin), 36
Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) Stalin, Joseph, 34, 114, 177
and the Cold War, 27, 97, 172 Stasi, 22, 27
establishment of, 159–60 State Deparment (US), 11, 40, 51, 55, 66–71,
official histories of, 9, 13, 173, 289, 291–6, 72–3, 76–7, 80, 81, 82–3, 101
297–8, 299 Historical Advisory Committee, 68, 69,
and the Second World War, 172, 173–5, 70–1, 72, 73, 77, 83
292 Office of the Historian, 66–8, 70, 72, 73,
and SOE in France, 237, 238, 245 76–7, 79, 82
and Their Trade is Treachery, 283, 285, 287 Stephenson, Sir William, 173, 275
Secret Life, A (Weiser), 105 Stevenson, William, 275
Secret Service (Andrew), 206–7, 209 Stewart, Gordon, 11, 22–6, 40
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Index 315
Stewart, Jules, 193 Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (le Carré), 172,
Stockwell, John, 119 174
Stone, Harlan Fiske, 133 Tonkin Gulf incident, 98, 99
Stone, Oliver: JFK, 39, 150, 162, 163, 164 Too Secret Too Long (Pincher), 287
Straight, Michael, 282 torture, 12–13, 147, 159, 222–32, 243–4,
Strong, Sir Kenneth 252–4
Intelligence at the Top, 13, 264–7, 271–5 totalitarianism, 53, 55
Men of Intelligence, 202, 275 Trask, David, 68
student protest groups, 101, 136, 137 Trend, Sir Burke, 11, 237, 238, 240, 241, 242,
Students for a Democratic Society, 137 244, 284, 287
Studies in Intelligence, 1, 9, 81, 90, 267 Trend Report, 286–7
Study of Communism, A (Hoover), 132 Trevor-Roper, Hugh, 264
Sukarno, President of Indonesia, 74, 75, 78, Trujillo, Rafael, 118
80 Truman, Harry S., 6, 23, 35, 95, 176
Sullivan, William, 132, 134, 135, 141 Tully, Andrew, 19, 21, 40
Sulzberger, Arthur Hays, 116 Turkey, 29, 186, 187
Sulzeberger, C. L., 23 Turner, Stansfield, 103, 104, 274
Summers, Anthony, 139 Twigge, Stephen, 207
Survivor, The (Marzani), 35
Sussman, David, 225 U-2 spy planes, 19, 96, 97
Svendsen, Adam, 13, 263–75 Ukraine, 28
Swinson, Arthur, 192 Ultimate Enemy, The (Wark), 208
Sykes, Sir Percy, 187 Ultra, 6–7, 173, 176, 210–11, 275, 290–1,
Szulc, Tad, 20–1, 32 296; see also Bletchley Park
Ultra and Mediterranean Strategy (Ferris),
Taliban, 179, 230 210–11
Taubman, Philip, 97 Ultra Goes to War (Lewin), 275
Taylor, Stan A., 151 Ultra Secret, The (Winterbotham), 275,
television, 19, 117, 122, 147, 150, 159, 206, 291
223 United Nations Convention Against Torture
Ten Thousand Public Enemies (Cooper), (UNCAT), 224
129–31, 133, 134, 138 Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
terrorism, 158, 222, 225–6; see also 223
September 11th attacks; ‘War on Terror’ Unterberger, Betty, 68
Tet offensive, 98, 99 Urban, Hugh, 149
Text for President X (Marzani), 36 Urban, Mark, 209
Thatcher, Margaret, 8, 285, 286, 287 Ure, John, 193
Their Trade is Treachery (Pincher), 8, 13, USSR see Russia
281–8
Theoharis, Athan G., 138–9 Van Hook, James, 83
There’s Something Happening Here Vengeance of Private Pooley, The (Jolly), 258,
(Cunningham), 137, 138 260
Thomas, Donald, 260 VENONA intercept programme, 176, 286
Thomas, Martin, 196 Verrier, Anthony, 192
Thornton, A. P., 192 Very Special Intelligence (Beesly), 268, 275
Threat Matrix, The (Graff ), 142 Vietnam, 4, 72, 98–9, 100, 101, 102, 117, 118,
Three Days of the Condor (Pollack), 161 119, 140, 162, 263
Tibet, 192, 195 Vietnam War, 4, 72, 98–9, 118, 119, 140, 162,
‘ticking bomb’ scenario, 159, 223, 225–6 263
Time magazine, 115, 117, 160 Village Voice magazine, 118
Times, The, 255 Volkov, Konstantin, 174
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Wade, Stephen, 193 Wielen, Max, 259

Waldegrave Initiative on Open Government, Wilford, Hugh, 51, 58–9, 60
7, 289 Wilkinson, Peter, 237, 238, 241, 245
Waller, Derek, 192 Willmetts, Simon, 12, 146–65
War at Sea, The (Roskill), 289–90 Wilson, Harold, 8, 29, 284, 287
war crimes, 252–3, 256, 257–8, 259 Winterbotham, Frederick, 275, 291
War of Independence (Ireland), 210 Wise, David, 5, 19, 21, 70, 117
War of Independence (US), 3–4 Wisner, Frank, 50–1
War Office (UK), 13, 207, 252, 253–4, 255–9 Wizards of Langley (Richelson), 97
‘War on Terror’, 65, 147, 225, 230–1 Woods, Michael, 117
Wark, Wesley, 148, 153–4, 159, 161, 206, Woodward, Bob, 67, 118
208, 275 Woolsey, James, 72
Warner, Michael, 67, 95 Woolwich Arsenal case, 25
Warren Commission, 163 World News and Views, 24
Washington, George, 3–4, 122, 158 World War I see First World War
Washington Post, 20–1, 24, 65, 70, 79, 117 World War II see Second World War
Waterfield, John, 253–4 Wounded Earth, The (Marzani), 37
Watergate, 100, 101, 118, 119, 129, 162 Wright, Peter
We Can Be Friends (Marzani), 35 Spycatcher, 4, 8, 286, 287–8
Weiner, Tim and Their Trade is Treachery, 282–2
Enemies: A History of the FBI, 142 Wyatt, Christopher, 186–7, 196
Legacy of Ashes, 11–12, 90–106, 91 Wynn, Antony, 187
Weiser, Benjamin, 105
Welch, Richard, 100 Yapp, Malcolm, 185, 190, 191
Wellesley, Arthur, Duke of Wellington, 209 Yapp, Winston, 160
Wentzel, Fritz, 255 Yeltsin, Boris, 71
West Germany, 27, 28, 39, 254 Yom Kippur War, 100, 101
White, Sir Dick, 237 Young, Michael, 238–9
White, Hayden, 12, 147, 148–9, 157–9, 165 Younghusband, Sir Francis, 185, 192, 193
White, Michael, 103
Whitehead, Don, 131–2, 133, 134, 138 Zammito, John, 153
Who Paid the Piper? (Saunders), 49–51, 54, al-Zarqawi, Abu Musab, 228
57, 58, 60, 61 Zegart, Amy, 147
MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd 316 21/02/2013 08:24

Christopher R. Moran and Christopher J. Murphy - Intelligence Studies in Britain and the US_ Historiography since 1945-Edinburgh University Press (2013)

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INTELLIGENCE STUDIES IN BRITAIN

MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd i 21/02/2013 08:23

MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd ii 21/02/2013 08:23

Edited by Christopher R. Moran and

MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd iii 21/02/2013 08:23

Edinburgh University Press Ltd

Typeset in 10.5/13 Minion by

ISBN 978 0 7486 4627 2 (hardback)

The right of the contributors to be identified as authors of this work has

MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd iv 21/02/2013 08:23

The Editors vii

Introduction: Intelligence Studies Now and Then 1

PART I AMERICAN INTELLIGENCE HISTORIOGRAPHY

MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd v 21/02/2013 08:23

6 FBI Historiography: From Leader to Organisation 129

PART II BRITISH INTELLIGENCE HISTORIOGRAPHY

MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd vi 21/02/2013 08:23

Christopher R. Moran is an Assistant Professor of US National Security in the

Christopher J. Murphy is a Lecturer in Intelligence in the School of Humanities,

MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd vii 21/02/2013 08:23

Richard J. Aldrich is Director of the Institute of Advanced Study at the

Christopher Baxter is an Honorary Lecturer in Intelligence History at Queen’s

Jim Beach is Senior Lecturer in Twentieth Century History at the University of

MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd viii 21/02/2013 08:23

Melissa Graves serves as project coordinator and instructor at the University

Frederick P. Hitz is an Adjunct Professor at the Frank Batten School of

Keith Jeffery is Professor of British History at Queen’s University, Belfast, and a

Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones took his history PhD at Cambridge University. He is

MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd ix 21/02/2013 08:23

Robert Johnson is the Director of the Oxford Changing Character of War

Matthew Jones is Professor of Modern History at the University of Nottingham.

Daniel W. B. Lomas is a PhD student at the University of Salford. His doctorate

Paul McGarr is Advanced Research Fellow in the Department of American and

Kaeten Mistry is Lecturer in American History at the University of East

MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd x 21/02/2013 08:23

Samantha Newbery is Lecturer in Contemporary Intelligence Studies in the

Chapman Pincher is a renowned investigative journalist and writer of espionage

Eric Pullin is Assistant Professor of History at Carthage College. He has pub-

Adam D. M. Svendsen (PhD, Warwick) is an intelligence and defence strate-

MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd xi 21/02/2013 08:23

(CMS), Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

Simon Willmetts is a Lecturer in American History and Culture at the University

MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd xii 21/02/2013 08:23

Figure 2 Chapman Pincher with the Queen Mother and former

Figure 3 Cambridge historian Christopher Andrew with his book, The

Figure 4 CIA Director Allen Dulles poses for cameras in Washington,

Figure 7 Philip Agee, the most famous whistle-blower in CIA history,

Figure 8 FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover enjoying the company of Holly

Figure 9 Actress Sissy Spacek waves to the crowd as actor Kevin

MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd xiii 21/02/2013 08:23

Figure 10 Spy novelist John le Carré boards a Pan Am flight to Rome

Figure 11 Cartoon of English writer Rudyard Kipling writing in an

Figure 12 Professor Keith Jeffery at the launch of MI6: The History

MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd xiv 21/02/2013 08:23

MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd xv 21/02/2013 08:23

field encouraged a growth in the literature. Intelligence studies developed into

MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd xvi 21/02/2013 08:23

of officialdom, but also second-rate intellectually. Speaking anonymously (as

MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd xvii 21/02/2013 08:23

MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd xviii 21/02/2013 08:23

MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd xix 21/02/2013 08:23

INTELLIGENCE STUDIES NOW AND THEN

MORAN 9780748646272 PRINT.indd 1 21/02/2013 08:23