British Secret Service Research Articles

James Bond and Modesty Blaise: Comparing Ian Fleming's and Peter O'Donnell's Literary Creations

The creation of Peter O’Donnell’s Modesty Blaise strip cartoon (1963–2001) and book series (1965–1996) took place during – and under the undeniable influence of – the "Bondmania" that swept the world in the 1960s. Still, as a strong, independent, and sexually liberated female hero, Modesty Blaise was in many ways quite new to the early 1960s. Regardless of this, however, she was regarded as a “feminine answer to James Bond”, and this view continues to echo in the writings of many contemporary critics and academics. Comparing Ian Fleming’s original Bond stories and O’Donnell’s books, this article will discuss and question the validity of seeing Modesty Blaise and her world as "derivatives" of Bond. The article pays special attention to the similarities and differences in the skillsets, life histories, and personalities of James Bond, Modesty Blaise, and her trusted companion in arms, Willie Garvin. It also explores the nature of the operations that Bond and Blaise and Garvin undertake; the former as an agent of the British Secret Service, the latter two as independently wealthy "freelancers" or "vigilantes". A closely related issue is the way in which the chiefs of British Intelligence, Fleming’s M and O’Donnell’s Sir Gerald Tarrant, are portrayed in and figure into the narratives. Although Fleming’s influence is clearly present in the first Modesty Blaise stories, the article will argue that the Modesty Blaise and James Bond series have many more dissimilarities than similarities and that the former merits increased academic attention in its own right.

Bejli poslednji put među Srbima – poseta Nišu decembra 1944. godine i njene posledice

The paper reveals an attempt by a British mission to visit a part of the Serbian territory in December 1944. The fundamental purpose of the mission was to evaluate the situation in the wake of military operations in the Trepčamining complex in Kosovo and Metohija, with British interests in mind. Up until the 1941 April War, Britain’s Trepča Mines Ltd. held a majority stake in the Trepča lead and zinc mine.The observation operation was guided by Colonel William Bailey, head of the economic department of the British Mission in Sofia. Bailey, who as a prominent member of the British secret service SOE (Special Operations Executive) spent most of the war (1942-1944) leading or advising the British military mission to the Yugoslav Army in the Homeland (JVuO), was stationed with General Dragoljub Mihailović. Before the war, Bailey had worked as a mining engineer at Trepča.An extensive report on this mission, which was a joint British-Soviet effort classified as top secret, sheds new light not only on the situation in Niš and its surroundings in the days following the liberation in 1944, but also on the conduct of high-ranking Partisan officers. The mission actually ended before it began: a Partisan commissioner, Vasilije Smajević, following orders from the “highest authorities,” commanded the Allies to leave the Serbian territory without delay, threatening with arrest. The documents used in this paper are stored by the National Archives of the United Kingdom (TNA) in London.

“Who the Hell Are You?”

Tom Stoppard is an outstanding playwright, embellishing his plays with scientific and philosophical approaches and presenting complicated, mysterious plots to the reader. He bases the plot of his postmodern play, Hapgood (1988), on quantum theory and draws an analogy between Werner Heisenberg’s principle of indeterminism, termed “The Uncertainty Principle”, and international espionage. Thus, he constructs the complicated relationship between the particle and the whole throughout the play to depict the relativistic and deceptive relationship between sex and gender. Focusing on the title character of the play, the present study proposes that the play represents the fluid and indeterminate nature of gender and identity within the context of espionage and indeterminism. Hapgood, who is a mother, a lover and a successful master agent in a man-dominated British secret service, navigates between “masculinity” and “femininity” during a day. Moreover, she metamorphoses into her twin, who is entirely different from her, except for their identical faces, to entrap the mole in the office. The study consults Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity and fluidity to indicate the unpredictable and uncertain nature of ‘gender identity’, which formulates itself through performances in social relations and trespasses the heterosexual matrix. It juxtaposes the Butlerian approach with the Uncertainty Principle in quantum theory pertaining to the confusing relationship between gender, the body and identity. The Butlerian analysis of the play reveals that particularly the modern way of life makes women transgress the Cartesian dichotomies of sex/gender, masculine/feminine and man/woman through the fluidity of their roles even during a single day and makes it difficult to find out who is really who.

The Improbable Heroine: Lela Karayanni and the British Secret Services in World War II Greece by Stylianos Perrakis (review)

The Improbable Heroine: Lela Karayanni and the British Secret Services in World War II Greece by Stylianos Perrakis (review)

British Secret Services’ Political Agency and the Intelligence Intervention in the Russian North in 1918-1919

In modern conditions the range of use of intelligence in politics is expanding. Today, experts single out intelligence operations as a separate kind of informational confrontation, on a par with the cybernetic and psychological struggle. In international conflicts, the goals are more and more often achieved not through direct military influence, but using alternative forms: sabotage, economic, diplomatic, etc. One of the widespread areas of secret services’ activity appears to be the interference into the development of the political systems of sovereign states. Thus, nowadays on a par with military interventions there are economic, diplomatic, ideological, intelligence, etc. interventions. This circumstance significantly complicates both the detection of foreign interventions and realization of countermeasures. It is especially difficult to solve these tasks in a situation of reconnaissance/intelligence intervention carried out by the secret services, whose activities are, as a rule, autonomous and entirely based on the use of unofficial methods and techniques, quite often associated with violation of the law. Moreover, as far as the choice of a interventional course by the government mostly depends on the information on the development of the situation provided by various departments, a misestimation is possible due to high level of bias in the work of intelligence-analytical services. In this perspective, studying the experience of past interventions largely reveals the most dangerous for the state forms of external interference. Account of this experience is a necessary condition for the formation of ability of society to resist disorganization and the crisis of statehood.

British Special Services in Interdepartmental Contradictions in the Beginning of the 20<sup>th</sup> Century

In modern conditions, the problem of the objectivity of decisions taken by politicians is acute, due to the fact that responsible persons often lack reliable information. Since the beginning of the 20thcentury, the receipt and interpretation of this information has been within the competence of intelligence agencies, therefore, the success of military-political operations often depends on the effectiveness of their work and the quality of their interaction with other departments. The hypothesis of the study is that, under certain conditions, the ability of special services to influence the politicaldecision-making process is often associated not only with the effectiveness of analytical work, but more with the ability to overcome the resistance of other government agencies seeking to monopolize information channels in the government. The example of the secret services of the British Empire in this respect is valuable as far as the victory in the Great War made the apparatus of this state an object of interest of some other countries, which wanted to bring the level of efficiency and working principles of their security structures in line with the British. Accordingly, not only the advantages of the British secret services, but also their shortcomings, manifested, among other things, in the bias of assessments and distortion of the content of intelligence reports, became widespread in the world.

The Last Slave Ships: New York and the End of the Middle Passage

The Last Slave Ships: New York and the End of the Middle Passage

An Absence of Modesty: The Male/Female Dichotomy in Modesty Blaise

This article examines the figure of Modesty Blaise as an action heroine in the canon of British espionage texts. It argues that the character and her stories offer multiple, liminal spaces for investigating and challenging ideas about gender, nation and class. It also addresses the current landscape of action-adventure films at a time when there are increased calls for more female-centric vehicles and gender-blind casting. While the gender politics of the Modesty Blaise franchise make for fascinating analysis, they are also played out against a backdrop of global politics. This can be seen in the first of the novels – simply entitled Modesty Blaise (1965) – and to some extent in Joseph Losey's loose adaptation of the book in 1966. Modesty's employment by the British secret service coincides with the dismantling of the British Empire, and the negotiation of gender identity that is a recurring theme in the stories intersects with the post-imperial, post-colonial concerns that dominated geopolitics at the time the original texts were released.

Zabor ou Les psaumes by Kamel Daoud

married, Tomás’s schooling will take him to Oxford for a doctoral degree in foreign languages. A stellar student, whose learning of Spanish and English began naturally at home in Madrid, Tomás soon becomes an admired polyglot by his professors at Oxford. Upon graduation, because of his great ability to speak many languages and imitate many accents, he is recruited by the British secret service and thus begins his life as an underground agent. As is the case with many of Marías’s protagonists, Tomás, or Tom, is an individual of many identities. Truly multicultural and multilingual, he can claim more than one place of belonging while also being perfectly capable of feeling at ease in more than one cultural setting. Such a trait proves to be useful for his job, although he is never free to reveal his many identities or his whereabouts to his wife; instead, he is forced to create many masks for himself in order to justify his long periods away from home. As a result, identity and deceit take center stage in this narrative along with other recurring topics in Marías’s fiction. Case in point are the trials and tribulations of love and marriage and, more importantly, the hidden secrets each individual carries during his or her lifetime. At the same time, Berta Isla is a subtle reflection on the nature of fiction and the novel’s ability to serve as a tool to explore the many nuances of human nature. Marías’s intense, sentimentally charged narrative seems to underscore that only the art of the novel is capable of making visible facets of the human condition that seem invisible to the common eye. Moreover, literature is the only tool available for unveiling what lies dormant in our most hidden emotions and our many masks and desires. An ambitious work filled with mysterious and sublime moments, Berta Isla is a rich and complex novel and can be regarded as some of Javier Marías’s best storytelling to date. César Ferreira University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Kamel Daoud Zabor ou Les psaumes Arles, France. Actes Sud. 2017. 328 pages. “Writing is the only effective ruse against death. People have tried prayer, drugs, magic, endelessly repeated verses, or immobility, but I believe I am the only one who found an answer: writing.” Thus begins Kamel Daoud’s second novel, Zabor ou Les psaumes, in which a social outcast in an isolated village finds his purpose in life by staving off other people’s deaths through his writing. After years of being shunned by his father and his half-brothers, Zabor finds himself at the center of a family drama when his father is sick and dying. Should he try to save the father who long ago repudiated his mother and banished Zabor to an isolated house? Should he use his skill as a writer to help those who despise him and the texts he produces? This allegorical novel draws on several sources, including One Thousand and One Nights, with storytelling as both a framing device and a temporary respite from decay and death. Throughout the narrative, numerous flashbacks allow Zabor, the pathetic and strangely misshapen son, who brought only shame to his father, to tell both his story and that of his family: his father the prosperous butcher, with his flocks of sheep; his repudiated (and now dead) mother; the unmarried aunt who shares his status as an outcast; and his half-brothers, who long to take over the dying father’s business. Zabor mostly spends his days sleeping and his nights roaming the village. Occasionally, he is called upon by neighbors who normally avoid him to write a story that will delay the death of a family member. Useless as a worker, unable to marry and have children, Zabor’s only interests seem to be collecting books and writing texts that are incomprehensible to most of the villagers. Normally, they only treat Zabor with pity or disgust, unless of course they need his seemingly magical writing skills, which have prolonged the lives of many. Kamel Daoud’s debut novel, Meursault, contre-enquête (Actes Sud, 2014), has a...

The Small Wars Theory and the Activities of British Secret Services in the Russian North in 1918

The Small Wars Theory and the Activities of British Secret Services in the Russian North in 1918

The Boy Doctor of Empire: Malaria and Mobility in Kipling's Kim.

The Boy Doctor of Empire: Malaria and Mobility in Kipling’s Kim Jessica Howell (bio) Rudyard Kipling’s 1901 novel Kim depicts an Anglo-Indian boy who serves both as a Tibetan lama’s disciple and as a spy for the British Raj. As he travels through India, Kim treats the ill and is in turn cared for by others when he falls sick. These episodes of sickness and healing lend insight into Kim’s nascent sources of colonial authority and influence the structure of the narrative. Specifically, Kim’s repeated experiences with malarial fever punctuate a cyclical plot development. Rather than focusing on the eponymous character curing malaria, the novel instead provides a model of adaptation to the disease. Kim’s white body has been “seasoned” by fever, and this both reflects and contributes to his intimate knowledge of India. Kim first meets the lama in Lahore, and decides to accompany him on a quest to find the River of the Arrow, the river of enlightenment. Though Kim adopts the identity of a Buddhist “chela” (disciple) during their initial travels, his white Irish heritage is soon discovered and he is sent to be educated as a “sahib” at St. Xavier’s boarding school in Lucknow. Meanwhile, he also receives training from Anglo as well as Indian members of the British Secret Service, such as Mahbub Ali, Hurree Babu, Colonel Creighton, and Lurgan Sahib. After his schooling is complete, Kim reassumes the identity of chela, but now also gathers information for the Raj. He steers the lama’s quest towards the northern hill country of India in order to assist Hurree Babu in the “Great Game” of Britain’s cold war with Russia. He and Babu successfully sabotage the fact-finding mission of two spies, one Russian and one French. Rather than following a direct course, however, both Kim’s travels and the novel’s development wander, crossing and re-crossing geographic and cultural borders. The cyclical structure of Kim [End Page 158] illustrates that narrative forms can be associated with and adaptable to shifts in conceptions of disease, in this case malaria. Kim’s ability to treat malaria is central to the book’s unfolding plot. The Buddhist lama believes that Kim obtained medical knowledge through the course of his formal schooling, but Kim was also tutored in how to apply this knowledge in order to gain Indian subjects’ trust by Lurgan Sahib, who taught him the “names and properties of many native drugs, as well as the runes proper to recite” when he administers them.1 Such training is explicitly a tool of colonial power, allowing Kim to assume the useful disguise of an itinerant healer or apothecary. “[M]ore to the point” are Lurgan’s lessons on how Kim should care for “his own body” and cure fever in himself and others. Medical knowledge clearly is key to a colonist’s survival (143). The book assumes that Kim has been and will be sick during the course of his travels. Kim successfully begins his role as an imperial spy by curing a “fever fit.” As he and the lama first depart from Lucknow, a Punjabi farmer, referred to as the “Jat,” approaches Kim with a plea to heal the man’s son. Kim proudly performs medical learnedness, aware of being watched by both the lama and the anxious father as he conducts an “abstracted, brow-puckered search through the tabloid bottles, with a pause here and there for thought and a muttered invocation between whiles” (159). Kim concludes by giving the man quinine tablets and meat lozenges in order to counteract the boy’s malaria and malnutrition. The quinine and meat lozenges are tools of colonial medicine, in that Kim is able to deploy more potent remedies than rural Indians would have had access to at this time in order to gain trust and admiration from his observers. Yet the application of these remedies is made possible through Kim’s first-hand experience of local illnesses: “It was as much as Kim could remember of his own treatment in a bout of autumn malaria—if you except the patter he added to impress the lama” (159). Disease...

Skyfall, James Bond's Resurrection, and 21st-Century Anglo-American Imperial Nostalgia

This article provides readers with an ideological critique of the latest James Bond installment, Skyfall. The author argues that the director of the film, Sam Mendes, has succeeded in creating a highly popular movie by tapping into societal desires for Anglo-American imperial nostalgia. Several characters in the movie, including Bond and M, suffer falls from grace that parallel the loss of British imperial power, but in the end, both Bond and the empire are resurrected when they return to the old and true ways of dealing with cyberterrorist dangers. The 2012 release of Skyfall became a part of the British pageantry that swirled around the London Olympics and the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, and the nostalgic imperialism of this latest Bond film allowed Anglo-American audiences to celebrate Britain's continued relevance and the need for MI6, the British Secret Service.

M is for mother: Skyfall’s Kleinian phantasies of maternal destruction

Abstract In the Bond film Skyfall (2012), director Sam Mendes offers an interpretation of gothic horror that explores 007’s maternal ambivalence. Exploiting the genre’s tropes of the persecutory double, psychotic son, and monstrous feminine/mother, the film provides a ‘working through’ of the oedipal terror that is so redolent of the gothic. Taking as a reference point the work of Freudian theorist Melanie Klein, Skyfall can be seen as presenting ‘M’ (Judi Dench) as the Kleinian ‘bad mother’, one half of the ‘split’ that the infant conceptualizes to explain the inadequacy of the mother in meeting his needs, phantasizing his revenge in terms of oral aggression. Bond (Daniel Craig) and villain Silva (Javier Bardem) are each victims of exploitation by the British secret services – and by extension the figural mother M. For Silva this means being given up to the Chinese government for torture and likely death. It is this previous act of maternal mistreatment that serves to ‘explain’ his (sexual) perversity, i.e. renunciation of the phallic, which includes his perverse attachment to M (other). Silva serves as 007’s shadowy counterpart – as well as cautionary tale – in granting the phantastical wish-fulfilment of both sons: revenge upon the mother.

The Art of Betrayal: The Secret History of MI6, Life and Death in the British Secret Service. By Gordon Corera. New York, NY: Pegasus Books, 2013.

The Art of Betrayal: The Secret History of MI6, Life and Death in the British Secret Service. By Gordon Corera. New York, NY: Pegasus Books, 2013.

Otto Peters, au-delà de 20 portraits

Ulrich Bernath and Thomas Hulsmann, Question 1: Otto, your book “Against the Tide. Critics of Digitalisation. Warners, Sceptics, Scaremongers, Apocalypticists. 20 Portraits” was published in June 2013. Also in June 2013 the first disclosures of Edward Snowden were published by The Guardian. Up to that point, probably for most of us the qualitative and quantitative dimension of worldwide surveillance and intelligence practices of the American as well as the British secret services had been uni...

Bond. James Bond. A Statistical Look at Cinema's Most Famous Spy

In 1953, the literary world was introduced to the fictional British Secret Service agent James Bond, a.k.a. 007. The character was conceived by author Ian Fleming, who drew upon some of his experie...

Whitehall wiring: The Communications-Electronics Security Group and the struggle for secure speech

Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) enjoys two main roles, signals intelligence and communications security. We know a great deal about signals intelligence but far less about the defensive security side of its activities. This article traces the development and growth of Britain’s communications security establishment as an unknown fourth British secret service during the 1950s and 1960s. This body was the antecedent of the Communications-Electronics Security Group (CESG), the UK's current National Technical Authority. This article focuses on one of the key communications security challenges faced by Whitehall over the last half century, the struggle to achieve secure speech. The lessons to be drawn are that ambitious “big bang” technical projects with requirements specified years ahead are a recipe for failure. Incremental enhancements that draw on commercial solutions are more sustainable and permit adaptation.

Reviews

Lawrence Peskin responds: The Robertses are right to be perplexed. I confused Edward Bancroft with Thomas Barclay in my notes on Samuel F. Bemis, “British Secret Service and the French-American Alliance,” an article I had recently read for a different project. I apologize to the Robertses, readers of the AHR, and Thomas Barclay's memory for the error.

Reviews

To the Editors: We are extremely honored that the AHR reviewed our book Thomas Barclay (1728–1793): Consul in France, Diplomat in Barbary (AHR, February 2010, 222–223). And we thank Lawrence A. Peskin for his judicious and thoughtful review. However, one of his statements perplexes us. Referring to Barclay, Professor Peskin writes that “Samuel Flagg Bemis suggested that he may have been a British secret agent during the American Revolution, a charge that Roberts and Roberts find unconvincing.” Nowhere in our study of Barclay's life and career do we write, nor in our research did we find, anything to suggest that Bemis or anyone else ever thought Barclay “may have been a British secret agent.” The works by Bemis that we consulted—“British Secret Service and the French-American Alliance,” AHR 29, no. 3 (April 1924): 474–495; “Secret Intelligence, 1777: Two Documents,” Huntington Library Quarterly 24, no. 3 (May 1961): 233–249; Pinckney's Treaty: America's Advantage from Europe's Distress, 1783–1800 (1960); and The Diplomacy of the American Revolution (1957)—have no mention of Barclay. In The American Secretaries of State and Their Diplomacy (1963), Bemis does give “our” Thomas Barclay a few lines, but in the Guide to the Diplomatic History of the United States, 1775–1921 (1963), he confuses American consul and diplomat Barclay (1728–1793) with the New York–born Loyalist of the same name (1753–1830) who served as British consul-general for over twenty years, a Bemis confusion we mention in our introduction (pp. 18–19). Perhaps Professor Peskin was misled by that or by our discussion (p. 336 n. 16) of Bemis's suggestion that William Carmichael may have been a British secret agent.

Die Gestapo nach 1945--Konflikte, Karrieren, Konstruktionen

The Gestapo is still the ultimate symbol of the totalitarian police state. Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Andrej Angrick have now published an anthology in which fifteen established authors examine the biographies of Gestapo members. In their introduction the editors thoroughly recapitulate the findings of the latest research, but also attend to the more general questions of how postwar societies dealt with the legacy of National Socialism and the political changes that have taken place between 1945 and today. This is followed by seventeen essays, arranged into three chapters, according to subject. Chapter 1 provides an overview of postwar careers. Those who—at least officially—accepted the new democracy and adapted to the new situation were usually able to integrate into German postwar society. Thousands of others fled the country. Using documents that have only recently been uncovered, Gerald Steinacher investigates the infamous ‘Rattenlinie’, the escape route through the Alps and Italy that was used by Nazi criminals to flee to South America, especially to Chile, where Martin Cüpper keeps track of Walther Rauff, to arrive at an understanding of how a mass murderer managed to spend his remaining years in exile despite a number of requests for extradition. Stephen Tyas describes how the British secret service spared a high ranking official of the Reich Main Security Office in order to obtain information on the Soviet Union. Stephan Linck looks into the postwar careers of police commissioners who graduated from the leadership school of the security police. Many of them filled high-ranking positions in the West German criminal investigation departments and Federal Criminal Police Office. Furthermore, high-ranking officials were often able to escape prosecution for having participated in deportations, as Bernhard Brunner demonstrates using the example of the commanding officers of the security police in occupied France. While many Nazi criminals made themselves comfortable in West Germany during the phase of the ‘economic miracle’, as Jacek Andrezej Młynarczyk points out, it took the German judiciary decades to prosecute the Nazi crimes. Although exceptional, there were also cases where the perpetrator himself felt guilt and remorse, as David M. Mintert illustrates.