British Intelligence Research Articles

The Unresolved Mystery of ELLI

In the 1940s and early 1950s a Soviet KGB1 mole, Kim Philby, indisputably penetrated the heart of MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service espionage arm of British Intelligence. Furthermore, suspicions...

‘The Standard Work in English on the League’ and Its Authorship: Charles Howard Ellis, an Unlikely Australian Internationalist

SUMMARYCharles Howard (‘Dick’) Ellis, born in Sydney in 1895 and a Great War veteran, was working as a journalist in Vienna and Geneva when he wrote one of the most comprehensive books of the time on the League: The Origin, Structure and Working of the League of Nations (1928). Dedicated to the progressive literary figures of the era and showing a particular debt to the writings of the British Labour left, Ellis argued that the internationalism of the age marked a necessary rejection of the anarchic conditions that brought forth the Great War. The League and its associated institutions constituted ‘the first step toward a world society’ that would facilitate the suppression and ultimate removal of the causes of conflict. A remarkable work in itself, this progressive volume was written by a member of British intelligence who had already made a reputation in this sphere and was to go on to hold very senior positions in the 1940s. The question is considered whether the ideas expressed were a product of Ellis's genuine beliefs, or whether they were a mask for his substantive professional role. The circumstances around the writing of this book are also reviewed in an attempt to answer this question, especially given the hitherto accepted scholarly view that Konni Zilliacus of the League Secretariat was the actual author.

‘‘This Secret Town’: British Intelligence, the Special Relationship, and the Vietnam War’

ABSTRACTThis article seeks to revise our understanding of Cold War intelligence as a practice. The conventional view is that Britain's MI6 waged a battle in the shadows consisting of espionage and covert action. However, a number of MI6 officers operated as observers, conducting what we might call ‘intelligence without espionage’. The dual identity of these officers raises important questions about how intelligence operated in the blurred space between traditional diplomacy and human espionage using agents. Using the case of MI6 officers in the British Consulate-General in Hanoi between 1965 and 1972, this article explores how a dual identity provided alternative means of acquiring intelligence within a highly secure state that exhibited remarkable paranoia about foreign spies. Furthermore, the United States lacked diplomatic representation in Hanoi and so the British Consulate provided a remarkable window for Western intelligence on the effect of ‘Operation Rolling Thunder’, Lyndon Johnson's escalating air campaign against North Vietnam. Both Johnson and Harold Wilson were avid readers of this material. Accordingly, in the context of the Cold War intelligence partnership between the UK and US, the consulate in Hanoi was an example of the ‘inverse’ special relationship, in which Britain enjoyed unique value.

Shadowboxing in the Dark: Intelligence and Counter-Terrorism in Northern Ireland

The British experience in Northern Ireland, particularly the fight against the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA), is an oft-cited case study in the counter-insurgency (COIN) spectrum and tome of counter-terrorism studies. It is the totality of the British intelligence experience in Northern Ireland, with its successes and challenges, which make it such a valuable case study from which to draw insight to shape contemporary COIN intelligence-based operations. As the conflict was both prolonged and intensified, a multitude of intelligence units from military and law enforcement evolved specifically to counter the effectiveness of PIRA; and to satisfy the desire of the security establishment to intensify information-gathering activities. This article examines the evolution and development of this security intelligence-driven effort that ultimately had the cumulative effect to wear down PIRA’s military capability through the focused application of a prolonged and lavishly resourced linked intelligence apparatus as an adjunct of a heavy military and police footprint. Nevertheless, despite Northern Ireland being a relatively small geographical area, the eventual containment of PIRA took years to achieve, demonstrating just how difficult it is to address a committed and determined insurgency. This highlights that a successful COIN strategy is arguably best predicated on the need for “patient” as opposed to “decisive” operations.

NAVALNY DRAWN INTO HYBRID WAR

(By Darya Garmonenko. Nezavisimaya gazeta, April 12, 2016, p. 1. Excerpts:) Aleksei Navalny intends to sue VGTRK [All-Russia State Television and Radio Company] for libel. That was the oppositionist’s response to segment broadcast by the channel in which he was accused of working for Hermitage Capital CEO William Browder and Western intelligence services [see article in this section, below]. Experts disagree on why the results of the investigation were published and what their consequences will be. ... Browder was named in the segment as British intelligence agent code-named Solomon. He allegedly recruited Aleksei Navalny, who was given the call sign Freedom. Both of them, the creators of the film claim, are links in Russian network of [Western] secret services officers and representatives of the opposition. VGTRK anchor Dmitry Kiselyov, incidentally, has already said that the channel will defend its position: [Its] journalists have evidence. ... investigation caused stir and split society into two camps. One side argued that there has long been talk about link between Navalny and Western intelligence agencies, while the other pointed to blatant errors in the film.. . . ... Was this response to the publication of the so-called Panama Papers [see Current Digest, Vol. 68, No. 14, pp. 3 - 5] or just another attack on Navalny to keep the general antiopposition campaign rolling? Or perhaps the reason was to create an artificial need to uncover Western clandestine apparatus in our country? last option would ostensibly lead to situation where everyone added to this spy network (which may well include journalists) would automatically come under suspicion for large segments of the Russian population. [Journalists’] investigations, for example, are coming under suspicion. ... Aleksei Mukhin, general director of the Center for Political Information, believes that this is complex game, a component of hybrid war between Russia and the West.. . . ... Nikolai Mironov, head of the Center for Economic and Political Reform, called the film response to the Panama Papers. He is confident that the case is also about the detective interest that Navalny is showing in National Guard head Viktor Zolotov: The film strives to show that all exposes regarding the Russian authorities have been done on the West’s orders. But the response has been asymmetric: Who is [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, and who is Navalny?. . .

David Rees, FRS 1918–2013

David Rees, FRS 1918–2013

Book Review: Confronting the Colonies: British Intelligence and Counterinsurgency by Rory Cormac

Book Review: <i>Confronting the Colonies: British Intelligence and Counterinsurgency</i> by Rory Cormac

Review of On Intelligence: The History of Espionage and the Secret World

John Hughes-Wilson, a retired British Army Intelligence Corps colonel whose career spanned active service in the Falkland Islands and Northern Ireland as well as administrative postings in Whitehall and NATO, is an author whose offerings on military intelligence history fit into the popular writing category. His brief but robust introduction offers no apologies for avoiding “getting completely lost in the thickets of philosophy and Hegelian dialectic” as an academic text might tend to do. Instead, his work adopts a case study approach to explain and analyze the operation of the intelligence apparatus within the context of espionage and the conduct of war.

Kevin Quinlan. The Secret War Between the Wars: MI5 in the 1920s and 1930s. History of British Intelligence. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2014. Pp. 286. $49.95 (cloth).

Kevin Quinlan. The Secret War Between the Wars: MI5 in the 1920s and 1930s. History of British Intelligence. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2014. Pp. 286. $49.95 (cloth).

Geoffrey Vickers and lessons from the Ministry of Economic Warfare for cold war defence intelligence

Geoffrey Vickers is the forgotten man of British intelligence. As the UK’s economic intelligence supremo at the Ministry of Economic Warfare and the Foreign Office between 1941 and 1945, Vickers transformed the craft of economic intelligence in both strategic and operational spheres. In the policy arena he was the driving force behind the economic and industrial planning of civil administration of liberated Europe. Vickers was also an intelligence theorist of the first rank whose legacy survived in his holistic conception of economic intelligence, its centrality to decision-making in peace and war, and the scope and evolution of the Joint Intelligence Bureau and defence intelligence.

British Intelligence and the Fear of a Soviet Attack on Allied Communications

This article considers British intelligence fears about a Soviet attack on Allied communications. It includes a reproduction of a 1959 assessment by the Joint Intelligence Committee focusing on the means of communication across the Atlantic, and the means by which the Soviet Union could interfere or intercept them.

‘One of our Most Valuable Sources of Intelligence’: British Intelligence and the Prisoner of War System in 1944

During the Second World War, secret information derived from enemy prisoners of war (POWs) was a valuable asset to British intelligence. Until 1944, the POW system had expanded from a small interrogation camp in the Tower of London to a multi-step structure with the so-called Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre, United Kingdom (CSDIC(UK)) at its top. The methods employed to collect reliable information included microphones, stool pigeons and different interrogation techniques. The results were read by all services and several ministries which provided a unique insight into German capabilities, intentions and thoughts.

Book Review: Britain and Ireland: Confronting the Colonies: British Intelligence and Counterinsurgency

Book Review: Britain and Ireland: Confronting the Colonies: British Intelligence and Counterinsurgency

Finding the Right Answer

Rapid changes in technology and the democratisation of information capabilities have sparked the concept of ‘War in the Information Age’. Intelligence branches within NATO militaries have been slow to adapt and risk being outpaced. Sean Ryan, a former British military intelligence officer, argues that while some structural changes have occurred, lessons from the Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns about the nature of modern intelligence have not yet been learned, and fundamental changes to the doctrine, training and culture of military intelligence are required.

The MacDonald Discussion Group: A Communist Conspiracy in Britain’s Cold War Film and Theatre Industry—Or MI5’s Honey-Pot?

During the cold war, the British entertainment industry escaped the extent of the anti-communist sentiments that gripped America, but recently released files from MI5 (Britain’s domestic security-intelligence agency) indicate that British intelligence authorities were nonetheless concerned about possible covert communist activity at work in the industry in Britain. This article presents the case of the MacDonald Discussion Group, a private left-wing discussion group operating in London in the early 1950s, designed to appeal to professionals in the film, theatre and architecture industries, attended by actors such as Mai Zetterling, Herbert Lom and Ferdy Mayne. Penetrated from its earliest meetings by MI5, it was viewed with increasing concern as a site of communist indoctrination and potentially of Soviet espionage, and those who attended the group were investigated as potential communist sympathisers by MI5. Despite these investigations, the group's activity never resulted in the sort of influence or growth that MI5 feared, to the extent that it appears that it was actually MI5’s agent who propped-up the group beyond the point when it would have otherwise collapsed. This article therefore analyses MI5’s surveillance of the group, and asks what implications this sort of attention might have had for the careers of those industry figures linked to the group.

Security Intelligence in the Middle East (SIME): Joint Security Intelligence Operations in the Middle East, c. 1939–58

Security Intelligence Middle East (SIME) remains an understudied aspect of British intelligence. In many respects it was a remarkable organization. Its wartime iteration was created in haste, ostensibly as a military body but based upon the Security Service's office in Cairo. It evolved into a truly ‘joint’ unit but culturally was closer to the Security Service (MI5) than either the military or the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). SIME changed dramatically as a result of the end of the Second World War: it became the sole responsibility of MI5; local cooperation between MI5 and MI6 was scaled-down and became the focal point of a broader inter-intelligence service dispute in London; and new nationalist threats caught SIME off-balance and eventually undermined its raison d'être. SIME's contrasting wartime and peacetime iterations provide a useful example of how intelligence agencies respond to external pressures. It also provides a window into wider jurisdictional and constitutional conflicts at the heart of the relationship between MI5 and MI6, both during and after the war. Finally SIME shows practitioners what can be achieved under the right stimulus and what can be lost when that stimulus fades.

BILETA 2014 privacy and digital communications

I would like to discuss modern mass surveillance.Programmes such as PRISM, UPSTREAM collection and TEMPORA run by British and American intelligence agencies are now premised on the fundamental obje...

Rappresentazioni inglesi del terrorismo nord-irlandese: dai complotti al Complotto

Since the end of the Sixties, the so-called Irish Troubles have inspired in Ireland many literary works and films that have been studied at length. Less well known and often analyzed together with the Irish production are those English novels and action movies that exploit a Northern Irish setting, with scarce or no interest for the political facts of the conflict or, according to some critics, with a focused and deliberate use of stereotypes. However, Irish Troubles have recently brought forth in England a series of film and novels showing at the core of the events a conspiracy by the British intelligence. Therefore a fictional genre that in the past has been basically escapist, and often with a reactionary bent, like the thriller and the spy story, may also be seen and used now to denounce the false statements and undermine the official truths of the establishment.

The interrogation of Sándor Radó: geography, communism and espionage between World War Two and the Cold War

This essay uses recently released intelligence files to consider a pivotal episode in the long and eventful career of Alexander (Sándor) Radó (1899–1981), geographer, journalist and Soviet intelligence agent who lived and worked in various European cities before and during World War Two and later became an internationally renowned cartographer during the 1960s and 1970s in his native Hungary. In January 1945, Radó arrived unexpectedly at the British Embassy in Cairo, having apparently escaped from Soviet officials escorting him against his wishes from Paris to Moscow. For the next six months he was detained in Egypt while British intelligence officers investigated his claim to be an innocent geographer drawn unwittingly into the dangerous world of Soviet espionage. This investigation drew attention to a previously unexamined, intensely political form of geographical practice constructed outside the academy in the worlds of publishing and journalism and shaped by the needs of communist propaganda and Soviet espionage. The decision to return Radó to the Soviet Union, following a characteristically ambiguous intervention by MI6 double agent H. A. R. ‘Kim’ Philby, suggests that this style of radical geography, rooted in the cosmopolitan culture of the European inter-war left, was a casualty of the brief transition from the wartime alliance against Nazi Germany to the Cold War division of Europe.

Between Franks and Butler: British Intelligence Lessons from the Gulf War

Lessons for the intelligence community were publicly identified in a 1983 report by Lord Franks and a 2004 report by Lord Butler. However, little is known of the lessons learned during the 20 years between the two. This article draws upon two newly released, previously classified, documents which examine British intelligence lessons from the 1990–91 Gulf War. It provides a previously untold account of the crisis, exclusively from a British intelligence perspective, and presents new evidence that intersects across many intelligence debates. This article also challenges whether identified lessons remained learned and begins to question the wider learning process within the intelligence community.