Politics and the History of British Intelligence in the Second World War, 1969–1990

In The Concept of Law, H.L.A. Hart argued that one of two 'minimum conditions necessary and sufficient for the existence of a legal system' was that 'its rules of recognition specifying the criteria of legal validity and its rules of change and adjudication must be effectively accepted as common public standards of official behaviour by its officials'. Those rules, his 'secondary rules', form a crucial part of Hart's theory that the way to understand law is as the union of primary and secondary rules. This paper sets out to test that claim as a matter of empirical fact. If one asks UK officials what they think the UK's rules of recognition, change and adjudication are, and whether they accept them as common public standards, what do they say? Instead of interviewing judges, whose official views are readily accessible in their judgments, we concentrated on high non-judicial officials - senior civil servants, including former Cabinet Secretaries, military officers, including former Chiefs of the Defence Staff, chief constables and chief executives of local authorities. A series of recent examples of UK constitutional rules coming under stress were put to interviewees, in particular the request by Admiral Sir Michael Boyce at the cusp of the Second Iraq War for authoritative advice on the legality of the war. Interviewees discussed their understanding of how one identified legal rules, how legal rules changed and how they were settled if there was disagreement. We found some consensus but also a great deal of divergence. We also found, at least in the Civil Service, a degree of willingness to defy the courts entirely incompatible with the existence of any straightforward Hartian 'internal point of view' towards the law, at least as the courts understand it. But we also found evidence not so much for lawlessness within the UK government as for the existence of a separate legal system, centering on the figure of the Attorney-General. One way of interpreting our evidence is that there is not just one British constitution, but three, one built around the perspective of the courts, one around the perspective of the Government and around the perspective of Parliament.

Dutch society takes pride in its egalitarian character, and political and administrative officeholders are neither separated off nor placed on a pedestal. This general attitude originates in the predominantly middle‐class nature of Dutch society, in which the idea of formal incorporation of top civil servants in a separate class of administrative personnel is foreign; however, at the same time, there is a striving for unity in the national administration. The issue of tension between unity and fragmentation forces an assessment in this chapter of current developments in the higher civil service in comparison with the situation as it existed from the Second World War up to the early 1990s, with the emphasis on developments in the past two decades in which the most important event was the formation of a Senior Public Service (the Algemene Bestuursdienst, or ABD) after 1 July 1995. The first main section of the chapter (section II) examines what is meant by a ‘senior civil service’ in the Dutch context, where even the creation of the ABD does not provide a conclusive answer, since there are many senior civil servants outside it. In order to address this issue, the characteristics of the Dutch personnel management system are examined, and a brief outline given of the ABD and of the number of top civil servants working at central government level in the period 1976–1995. Section III turns to the political–administrative organization and the consultative structures at the top of the central government departments, and discusses the structure of the ABD, while section IV discusses the political affiliation (politicization) of top civil servants, and section V looks at functional mobility at the top, with special attention to the functional motives for creating the ABD. Finally, the social political structure of the civil service is reviewed, with sections on social (VI) and educational (VII) background.

Readers of this journal might ask why there is a need to dedicate an entire issue to the study of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), the organization famously tasked by Churchill to ‘set Europ...

Irish Neutrality in WorldWar II: aReview Essay Timothy J. White and Andrew J.Riley Department of Political Science, Xavier University, Cincinnati, USA Brian Girvin, The Emergency: neutral Ireland 1939-45. London: Macmillan, 2006. Eunan O'Halpin, Spying on Ireland: British intelligence and Irish neutrality during the Second World War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Michael Kennedy, Guarding neutral Ireland: the coast watching service and military intelligence, 1939-1945. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2008. Clair Wills, That neutral island: a cultural history of Ireland during the Second World War. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2007. World War II was one of the defining events of the twentieth century. In this conflict, theAllies are typically seen as the heroic champions of freedom against the evil tyranny of theAxis powers. This narrative has brought into question Irish neutrality during the Emergency. How is one tomake sense of neutrality during a war that seemed to hold such high moral claims and seemed to compel everyone to take a stand? What could have motivated the Irish tomaintain their neutrality throughout thewar in the face of constant pressure to abandon it? In the 1970s and 1980s there were a number of books thateither defended or attacked Ireland's neutrality in World War II, primarily in the context of the Cold War.1 More recently, there have been several books and articles that assessed Ireland's neutrality policy, but few have provided in-depth cultural or political analysis of the Emergency.2 Roberts has ^arolle J. Carter, The shamrock and the swastika (Palo Alto, 1977); John P. Duggan, Neutral Irelandand theThirdReich (Dublin, 1985);T. Ryle Dwyer, ?rush neutrality and theUSA, 1939-47 (Dublin, 1977); T. Ryle Dwyer, Strained relations: Ireland at peace and the USA at war (Totawa, NJ, 1988); Joseph T. O'Carroll, Ireland in the war years (New York, 1975); Trevor C. Salmon, Unneutral Ireland: an ambivalent and unique security policy (Oxford, 1989); Bernard Share, The Emergency: neutral Ireland, 1939-45 (Dublin, 1978). 2R?isin Doherty, Ireland, neutrality, and European security integration (Aldershot, 2002), 32-42; Thomas E. Hachey,The rhetoric and reality of Irishneutrality'. New Hibernian Review 6 (2) (2002), 26-43: 31-5; Neil G. Jesse, 'Contemporary Irish neutrality: still a singular stance'. New Hibernian Review 11(1) (2007), 74-95: 75-8; DermotKeogh andMervynO'Driscoll, Ireland in WorldWar Two: Diplomacy and survival (Cork, 2004); John A. Murphy, Trish neutrality in historical perspective', in Brian Girvin and Geoffrey Roberts (eds), Ireland and the Second World War: politics, society and remembrance(Dublin,2000), 9-23; MartinQuigley,A spy inIreland (Dublin, 1999);EunanO'Halpin, Defending Ireland: the Irish Tree State and its enemies since 1922 (Oxford. 1999); Eunan O'Halpin, 4Irish neutrality in the Second World War', in Neville Wylie (ed.), European neutrals and non belligerants during the Second World War (Cambridge, 2002), 283-303: Ben Tonra, Global citizen and European republic (Manchester, 2006), 153-5. Authors' e-mail: white@xavier.edu Irish Studies in international Affairs, Vol. 19 (2008). 143-150. 144 Irish Studies in International Affairs suggested thatwhile Fisk provided the best account of Irish neutrality during World War II, what was needed was a new narrative to explain the 'complexities, contradictions, and ambivalences' of this policy.3 A new set of books has been published regarding various aspects of the Emergency. Brian Girvin, Eunan O'Halpin, Michael Kennedy, and Clair Wills have taken advantage of recently released archives to re-evaluate Irish wartime neutrality. These authors have approached this task from markedly divergent paths?Wills focusing on culture, Girvin on the political context, O'Halpin on British intelligence and Kennedy on coastal security. They provide well-written, thoroughly researched and nuanced accounts of Irish neutrality during the war. One can ascertain themost complete understanding of neutrality during the Emergency by combining the cultural, political, military and diplomatic insights these books offer. Wills and Girvin agree on the political context that gave rise to the policy of neutrality, but theydiverge in their views toward de Valera and the Irish government. Wills portrays de Valera as realistic and pragmatic in his approach to neutrality, noting thathe recognised that Ireland was a small nation thathad no business in the game of power politics and that Ireland had...

Established in 1932, Tatung Academy (大同學院) was like a training institute for officials of the puppet government ”Manchukuo” (「滿洲國」) . Only those who passed the national examination for senior civil servants, as stipulated by the 1938 Decree for Civil Servants (文官令) , could enrolled into Tatung Academy. The training period ranged from 6 to 12 months, followed by a year of internship.Tatung Academy offered great attraction to Taiwanese during the Japanese colonial era. First, career opportunities in the colonial government were scarcely available for local Taiwanese who suffered unfavorable treatment. On the contrary, Manchukuo as an ”emerging state” was in desperate need of talents with jobs that promised high salaries. In its first phase of establishment, Tatung Academy recruited mainly Taiwanese and Korean graduates from Japanese universities and technical schools. From 1933 to 1945, there were 25 Taiwanese graduating from Tatung Academy. The majority of enrollees in the second phase were Manchurian and Han graduates from high schools in Manchuria. During the seven years of this phase, there were four Taiwanese graduates. With the new system introduced in the second phase, the Academy took in mainly those who passed the promotion examination of senior civil servants and there was only one Taiwanese graduate. All 29 Taiwanese graduates eventually became senior officials in the Manchukuo government. After the Second World War, with the exception of one being dead and another opting to stay in the Mainland, all the remaining 26 graduates returned to Taiwan. However, their former service in the puppet regime posed obstacles for their being qualified for national and local examinations and their becoming civil servants in the Republic of China. Worse still, their previous years of service were not counted. Despite the initial setback upon their return to Taiwan, the capability and competence of these graduates coupled with their ”Manchurian experience” eventually earned them both opportunities and status in post-war Taiwan.The academics had devoted much attention to the Taiwanese involved in anti-Japanese organizations in Chongqing (重慶), showing little interest in these elites from Taiwan who had served in Manchukuo and their ”Manchurian experience”. Comparatively, materials on the related history were also scarce. With reference to the Manchukuo Empire Official Gazette (《滿洲國政府公報》) and interview records, this study explores the establishment of Tatung Academy and its changing role after the promulgation of the Decree for Civil Servants in Manchukuo. Moreover, the reasons for the exodus of talents from Taiwan to Manchukuo, their experience, their return after World War II and their subsequent adaptations are also examined to shed light on this rather unique history of Taiwanese elites.

Since the 1980s the British civil service has undergone what amounts to a perpetual revolution (Bogdanor 2003) as both Conservative and Labour politicians have sought to make it more responsive and effective in the delivery of [their] programmes. Moreover, this period of unrelenting reform is set to continue as the Conservative-Liberal Democratic coalition aims to reduce the financial deficit by cutting public spending. Currently, there are approximately half a million civil servants, with numbers in administrative, that is support and front line services, and executive or managerial grades split roughly 50–50. Senior civil servants account for only 1% of the total (Office of National Statistics 2010) but their influence on the civil service culture and the arrangements by which Britain is governed is considerable. Hence the focus of this chapter is on these higher level positions and their relationship with politicians. The most senior civil servant has, since 1981, also been Cabinet Secretary, the title by which he (and so far they have all been men) is usually known. In this capacity, he advises the prime minister and the Cabinet on issues of policy, as well as on the conventions, precedents, powers and limitations of ministerial office. He thus has a close relationship with senior ministers and a pivotal position within government. As Head of the Home (as opposed to the Diplomatic) Civil Service he is also the glue which holds the civil service together, as well as its protector and chief spokesperson, a role which, from time to time, puts him in the spotlight.1 KeywordsCivil ServantMinisterial ResponsibilityOpposition PartiSelect CommitteeMinisterial DirectionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

This book is the official history of British Cabinet Secretaries, the most senior civil servants in UK government, from the post-war period up to 2002. In December 1916 Maurice Hankey sat at the Cabinet table to take the first official record of Cabinet decisions. Prior to this there had been no formal Cabinet agenda and no record of Cabinet decisions. Using authoritative government papers, some of which have not yet been released for public scrutiny, this book tells the story of Hankey’s post-war successors as they advised British Prime Ministers and recorded Cabinet’s crucial decisions as the country struggled through the exhaustion that followed World War II, grappled with a weak economy that could not support its world ambitions, saw the end of the post-war economic and social consensus and faced the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers symbol of Western dominance. It looks at events through the eyes of politically neutral senior civil servants, the mandarins of Britain. It shows how the dramatic foreshortening of timescales and global news have complicated the working lives of those who daily face the deluge of potentially destabilising events – the skills required to see dangers and opportunities around corners, when to calm things down and when to accelerate action; why secrecy is endemic when government comes close to losing control or when political ambition threatens self-destruction. This book will be of great interest to students of British politics, British history and British government.

In this article we explore the specifics of career and recruitment channels for the senior civil servants (SCS) in Russian federal ministries using methods of document analysis, content analysis of the websites, comparative biographical analysis, regression-correlation and factor analysis. We introduce the concept of the SCS in the Russian practice. We hypothese the recruitment methods and the relationship between the type of career of the SCS and the effectiveness of the ministries, based on a sample of 381 biographies of the active SCS. We show that career bureaucrats and technocrats prevail among the SCS, but the share of political appointees in the ministerial corps is high. The SCS can be refered to as elite of the society by their characteristics. The SCS layer is heterogeneous, and the predominance of the command principle of the SCS recruitment was not confirmed. The ministries, headed by career bureaucrats, successfully implement public programs; the dynamics of development in the sectors they lead are higher. We propose to create in Russia a Service of Senior Civil Servants with the functions of selecting and evaluating the SCS.

This article provides a systematic analysis of post-war government policy towards the history of secret services. It focuses particularly upon the problem of preserving secrecy and argues that official history was an instrument through which government sought to address public pressure for the release information, while also extending a degree of control. It shows how the authorities enjoyed some initial success in cloaking the most significant wartime activities, including signals intelligence and organised strategic deception. However, this secrecy was eventually eroded by ‘insiders’, armed with privileged information and near-immunity from prosecution under the Official Secrets Act. Once the existence of these secret activities had seeped into the public domain, officials were increasingly inclined to deploy official accounts of intelligence successes during the Second World War in order to offset some the more embarrassing debacles of the Cold War. These included the story of treachery by the double-agent Kim Philby which received wide publicity in the late 1960s. The article argues that there is substantial evidence of policy-learning in the matter of official history, explicable in part by the presence of officials who handled similar issues over long periods of time. This was exemplified by Burke Trend, Cabinet Secretary to Prime Ministers Harold Wilson and then Edward Heath. It is suggested that secret services have always enjoyed an adversarial relationship with historical researchers. However, official history, although bringing its own difficulties, offered government a middle way and an opportunity of making a positive response to the problems of policing the past.

Primary sources available in British and Israeli archives (first and foremost – the Public Record Office) allow serious study of the British intelligence apparatus in the Middle East and its contribution to the military operations and diplomatic-political process there, prior to and during the First World War. Yet, existing knowledge focuses on military intelligence, as documentation on the Secret Service and the Security Service (both in the form of EMSIB) as well as on army and naval signal intelligence operations in the region is barely available – destroyed or still classified. Examination of hitherto unexplored foreign depositories may serve as an indirect approach to overcome this paucity of material, owing to the close wartime cooperation between British, French, Russian and Italian intelligence on the Ottoman Empire.

شهدت الحرب العالمية الثانية صراع وتنافس بين المعسکرين المتحاربين (الحلفاء – المحور) ليس فقط على مستوى القتال، واستخدام أحدث الأسلحة والتقنيات الحربية الحديثة في حينها، ولکن أيضا على مستوى استخدام الدعاية والإعلام وجمع المعلومات الاستخباراتية واستغلالها. فقد کان هناک صراع خفي بين أجهزة الاستخبارات البريطانية والألمانية والإيطالية کلا يحاول کشف خطط وأسلحة عدوه لإحراز نصر عليه. ولقد برعت الاستخبارات البريطانية ((MI6 في هذا المجال واستعدت حتى قبيل اندلاع الحرب لزرع الجواسيس، وجمع أکبر قدر ممکن من المعلومات الاستخباراتية عن ألمانيا وإيطاليا ودول الحياد، وأنشأت مع اندلاع الحرب إدارات استخباراتية جديدة لمواکبة التطورات اللاحقة لها. ونظرا لأهمية منطقة الشرق الأوسط الاستراتيجية لبريطانيا لموقعها الجغرافي، ولکونها مصدرا لمدها بالنفط، فقد حرصت بريطانيا على حماية مصالحها فيها والحول دون وقوعها في يد الألمان والإيطاليين، وأنشأت من أجل هذا وحدة استخباراتية خاصة بمنطقة الشرق الأوسط سميت بـ مرکز استخبارات الشرق الأوسط واتخذت من مصر مقرا لهذا المرکز. وتمثلت مهام هذا المرکز في جمع المعلومات الاستخباراتية عن بلدان الشرق الأوسط ومد الحکومة البريطانية والقيادة العسکرية البريطانية المتواجدة في القاهرة بها، ونشر الجواسيس داخل بلدان المنطقة وتتبع العملاء لدول المحور وحماية النفط وغيرها الکثير من المهام. ولقد نجح هذا المرکز بالتنسيق مع فروع الاستخبارات البريطانية الأخرى في إمداد القيادة السياسية والعسکرية للحلفاء بما تحتاجه من معلومات استخباراتية على کافة المستويات العسکرية والسياسية والاقتصادية وهو ما أسهم في النهاية في إحراز النصر على دول المحور. Abstract: The Second World War saw conflict and rivalry between the two combat camps (Allies - Axis) not only at the level of combat and the use of the latest weapons and modern military techniques at that time manner but also at the level of the use of propaganda and information, intelligence gathering and exploited. There was a hidden conflict between British, German, and Italian intelligence agencies, both of them were trying to uncover their enemy plans and weapons to win the victory. British intelligence (MI6) was distinguished in this area, and even before the war, it prepared to plant spies, gather as much intelligence as possible about Germany, Italy and neutral countries, and with the outbreak of the war, the establishment of new intelligence services to keep pace with subsequent developments. Because of the strategic importance of the Middle East to Britain because of its geographical location and because it is a source of oil supplies, Britain was keen to protect its interests and prevent it from falling into the hands of Germans and Italians. It established a special intelligence unit for the Middle East, called the Middle East Intelligence Center, based in Egypt. The mission of the center was to gather intelligence on Middle Eastern countries and provide them with the British government and British military leadership in Cairo, deploy spies within the countries of the region, track down agents of the Axis powers, protect oil and many other tasks. In coordination with other British intelligence branches, the Center provided the Allied political and military leadership with the intelligence it needed at all levels - military, political, and economic - which ultimately contributed to the victory over the Axis powers.

In the course of attempts by the Thatcher administration to restrain the publication of Spycatcher, the memoirs of a former member of the security and intelligence services, the United Kingdom’s most senior civil servant, the Cabinet Secretary, was subjected to several days of intense cross-examination before Justice Powell in New South Wales and in the High Court in London. Sir Robert Armstrong’s testimony ranged across the recent history of government reactions to the proposed publication of sensitive information by former members of the security services and has since become a significant piece in the jigsaw of the British constitution.

In the course of attempts by the Thatcher administration to restrain the publication of Spycatcher, the memoirs of a former member of the security and intelligence services, the United Kingdom’s most senior civil servant, the Cabinet Secretary, was subjected to several days of intense cross-examination before Justice Powell in New South Wales and in the High Court in London. Sir Robert Armstrong’s testimony ranged across the recent history of government reactions to the proposed publication of sensitive information by former members of the security services and has since become a significant piece in the jigsaw of the British constitution.

This article offers results of a comparative case study into how pressures from the media translate into the involvement of senior civil servants (SCSs) in media management and how this is reflected in differentiated ways in politico-administrative relationships. It offers tentative explanations for these differences through the lens of ‘public service bargains’. Based upon a qualitative analysis of documents and 62 interviews with SCSs and advisers in Denmark, Sweden and the UK, the research found that: (i) media management, in some countries, generates an extension and an amplification of the normative expectations towards SCSs’ involvement in media management; (ii) this is accompanied by a revitalisation of the reflections from SCSs to balance their responsiveness to the minister with anonymity and neutrality when involved in media management; (iii) an extensive formal politicisation seems to curb pressures on SCSs’ anonymity and neutrality and their involvement in media management. These findings improve our knowledge of SCSs’ involvement in media management by raising crucial questions about the political neutrality of administrators, tendencies towards politicised governance and (more) interventionist political staffers – amid intensified pressures from the media on governments.

Journal Article British intelligence in the Second World War. Vol. 5: Strategic deception Get access British intelligence in the Second World War. Vol. 5: Strategic deception. By Michael Howard. Norwich: HMSO. 1990. 271pp. Index. £12.95. ISBN 0 11 630954 7. Nigel Clive Nigel Clive Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 67, Issue 2, April 1991, Pages 349–350, https://doi.org/10.2307/2620883 Published: 01 April 1991