Cold War Intelligence Research Articles

British surveillance of postwar Soviet radio jamming: US–UK intelligence relations and interference detection at BBC Tatsfield, 1948-1949

ABSTRACT Following World War II, the BBC, better known for radio programme broadcasts, continued its long-standing work of radio spectrum surveillance at the specialized receiving and measurement facility located at Tatsfield. Both before and after Soviet jamming of US and British Russian-language broadcasts escalated in April 1949, Tatsfield catalogued the technical characteristics of jamming signals. BBC engineers, experienced in interpreting types and sources of radio interference, issued fortnightly summaries with interpretations of these technical observations. US intelligence agencies knew of Tatsfield’s findings, but differing perspectives in Washington and London resulted in divergent responses to the technical intelligence data. With rising tensions in wider Anglo-American intelligence relations, fueled by the Soviet weapons program and security breaches, such differences presaged separate approaches to Soviet communications threats. US agencies received greatly increased funding, while the BBC’s budget struggles persisted. Even so, interference detection was a high-water mark in Britain’s early Cold War intelligence work.

Early Cold War intelligence paper mills: the case of the Association of Hungarian Veterans

ABSTRACT During the early Cold War, it was difficult for American intelligence to penetrate the Iron Curtain but a potential solution soon arose: émigré intelligence groups such as the Magyar Harcosok Bajtársi Közössége (MHBK) or ‘Association of Hungarian Veterans’. This group, however, turned out to be an intelligence ‘paper mill’. Attempts at trans-Atlantic cooperation with the MHBK and similar groups failed as they lost most of their good sources and were penetrated by communist security services. By the mid-1950s, US intelligence cut these groups off, took over their good sources, and established a source registry to prevent recurrence of the problem.

<i>Das unsichtbare Visier</i> – A 1970s Cold War Intelligence TV Series as a Fantasy of International and Intranational Empowerment; or, How East Germany Saved the World and West Germans Too

This article addresses a franchise of intelligence films in the former Communist East Germany. Under the general title Das unsichtbare Visier—The Invisible Visor—they were produced for television and very popular. In general, the Cold War East produced a rich array of its own intelligence heroes, which cannot be reduced to mere derivatives of Western models. Yet there were commonalities and interactions across Cold War divides. One of these common features that Visier shared with many intelligence films globally was the depiction of abroad as both an “invisible front” of dangers and temptations and an exciting realm of adventure and consumption. Visier could not but also be a fantasy about East German citizens encountering, withstanding, and also enjoying the dangers and temptations of the Western Cold War Other. This included their facing two peculiar challenges: a degree of international mobility unlike anything the vast majority of ordinary East Germans could experience and the West’s consumerism. Visier addressed both these issues through what we could describe as an essentially playful—and dis-playful—practical cosmopolitanism. A careful look reveals Visier as a rich artifact of Cold War popular culture, with complex messages. The image of the heroic East German agent included a running comment of compensatory wish fulfillment. Here were ideal East German citizens doing their duty and yet also getting a fair slice of the capitalist good life abroad that most of their compatriots could not reach. They also consistently punched above their weight vicariously for East Germany as a whole. Like Britain’s James Bond, these were agents of an at-best middling power doing major things in the world at large. And finally, perhaps most satisfyingly of all, they turned into gentle, benevolent guardian angels of hapless West German cousins, neatly reversing West Germany’s claims of superiority.

The Black Sea Coast as a Landscape of Cold War Intelligence

The Black Sea Coast as a Landscape of Cold War Intelligence

A Nuclear Generator of Clouds: Accidents and Radioactive Contamination Identified on Declassified Satellite Photographs in the Mayak Chemical Combine, Southern Urals

The Mayak Chemical Combine was one of the most secretive places in the Soviet Union. It was built in the southern Urals, close to Kyshtym. The facility produced weapons-grade plutonium and other radioactive isotopes for the Soviet nuclear military programme. Fugitives from behind the Iron Curtain mentioned the site, usually due to accidents and peculiar, unexplained observations. Such reports were often treated in the West as exaggerated or fictional, as they spoke of large-scale disasters, deportations and vast landscape transformations. This paper aims to present the research potential of declassified Cold War intelligence records for archaeological landscape studies of off-limits military sites. To outline a somewhat broader perspective, I will combine those sources with contemporary historical knowledge and modern remote sensing data. The analysis will be focused on the Central Intelligence Agency [CIA] satellite imagery (CORONA and GAMBIT) from the 1960s to the beginning of the 1970s. The discussed sources recorded outcomes of nuclear disasters, hundreds of square kilometres of uninhabited wasteland, abandoned villages, disappearing lakes, dying forests, diverted rivers, and other features related to this clandestine plutonium facility.

Eyes on target: ‘Stay-behind’ forces during the Cold War

This article examines the concept of ‘stay-behind’ as a war-fighting tactic used by North Atlantic Treaty Organization to maximize its defensive efforts against a possible Soviet onslaught during the Cold War. It outlines how the concept developed, describes the military and clandestine units involved and what the division of tasks was between them, the way they operated, and how North Atlantic Treaty Organization was involved in coordinating these efforts. By providing a holistic look at military and clandestine stay-behind doctrine, it fills a gap in Cold War intelligence research.

“The Secret Lives of Dennis Phombeah: Decolonization, the Cold War, and African Political Intelligence, 1953–1974”

Processes of decolonization in the context of the Cold War provided enormous opportunities for nationalist figures to parlay insider nationalist knowledge into significant metropolitan influence. This article offers an ‘agent-focused’ rather than ‘agency-focused’ approach to the study of Cold War intelligence competition in Africa’s decolonization through a study of the career of Dennis Phombeah, a Nyasalander by birth and Tanganyikan nationalist figure who came to work for multiple foreign intelligence agencies. While itself a single case study, this article suggest that multiple intelligence agencies placed a high premium on acquiring a basic understanding of the internal politics of newly-independent African countries, which were otherwise rendered deliberately opaque by the states themselves as a common sovereignty-preserving device. Using intelligence records from Britain, Czechoslovakia and Portugal, a picture emerges of cross-rival institutional dependency on informants from the peripheries who were empowered by their years at metropolitan centers, offering a challenging perspective to institutional-focused studies of Cold War intelligence.

The World War II and Early Cold War Intelligence Careers of U.S. Ambassador Robert Strausz-Hupé

A highly talented, Vienna-born immigrant, Robert Strausz came alone to the United States in late October 1923 at the age of 20, but returned to Europe five years later in 1928 to visit his mother a...

Spying through a Glass Darkly: American Espionage against the Soviet Union, 1945–1946

Scholars must treat archival material about or from the intelligence community carefully. It may reveal, obscure, or muddle—or all three. This collaborative work by David Alvarez and the late Eduard Mark mines new material, reinterprets early Cold War intelligence history, and provides new fodder for debates over the Cold War's origins. In a precise and detailed account, Alvarez and Mark examine U.S. intelligence operations against the Soviet Union from the final months of World War II through 1947. While they note that much is known about the early Cold War, the intelligence aspects to this period are neither well understood by Cold War scholars nor well covered by intelligence historians. This work aims to be the first substantive review of U.S. efforts against the Soviets based on a careful examination of recently declassified materials. The book consists of six substantive chapters and a conclusion. The authors first detail the history of U.S. intelligence during World War II and at its end. Then they explain the limited knowledge the U.S. possessed about the Soviet Union and the hesitant steps taken to acquire new information; the Soviets did not become a priority collection target until spring 1946. The bulk of Spying through a Glass Darkly is a systematic examination of efforts by U.S. officials, deliberate or inadvertent, successful or spectacularly not, to learn about Soviet capabilities and intentions toward Eastern and Central Europe. Alvarez and Mark provide the first full explanation of the Strategic Services Unit (SSU), which succeeded the wartime Office of Strategic Services until absorbed into the new Central Intelligence Group in 1946. They built upon extensive use of raw operational materials from the Office of Strategic Services files, among other intelligence materials at the National Archives.

Deception Declassified: The Social Organisation of Cover Storying in a Secret Intelligence Operation

This article asks why and how governments keep secrets from publics, journalists and politicians using the strategy of ‘cover storying’. To develop a theory of cover storying, insights are drawn from political sociologies of state secrecy and from recent sociological examinations of secrecy and deception in organisations. This theory is illustrated by analysing Cobra Mist, a secretive and deceptive Anglo-American Cold War intelligence operation. Examining recently declassified documents, this article develops a framework for the analysis of five interrelated narrative conditions that shape social processes of cover storying: correspondence; plausibility; accountability; constraint; and durability. In conclusion this article reflects on the broader implications of this analysis for contemporary state and organisational theories and understandings of secrecy.

‘‘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.

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.

The Oxford Handbook of the Cold War

Consisting of 34 essays by an equal number of scholarly experts from around the globe, The Oxford Handbook of the Cold War should prove an invaluable resource for specialists and students alike. The essays explore a wide range of topics. Eschewing a standard chronological approach, editors Richard H. Immerman and Petra Goedde have organized the volume around geographical and thematic topics. Every major region of the world is covered, as is almost every conceivable topic—from the standard ones (geopolitics, economics, the nuclear revolution) to those that have become fashionable more recently (race, gender and women's rights, the environment, transnationalism, globalization, and the religious Cold War, among them).One of the book's many strengths is that the contributors do not speak with a single voice. Rather, they represent a diversity of viewpoints and perspectives, including an opening essay by Akira Iriye that takes a contrarian stance, arguing for the relative unimportance of the Cold War compared to other global developments during the twentieth century's second half—such as globalization and the emergence of a human rights regime. The authors have positioned the volume, in their words, “at the intersection of boundaries that divide many cold war histories and historians” (p. 3). Yet three guiding precepts run through the various chapters. First, many of the individual authors stress the global dimensions of the Cold War, emphasizing the agency of small states as well as non-state actors, thus moving well beyond the traditional concentration on superpower relations. Second, the essays taken together help overcome the tendency to separate the political, economic, ideological, and cultural spheres as distinct; the inextricable links between those spheres emerge clearly here. Third, many of the essayists highlight the tight connections between domestic and international developments, showing how the Cold War was influenced by and in turn influenced domestic forces.As with any edited collection, some essays stand out for their freshness and analytical rigor. Naoko Shibusawa's essay on “Ideology, Culture, and the Cold War,” for example, provides the most concise and sophisticated explication I have yet seen of that important subject. She regards ideologies of race, gender, and maturity as mutually reinforcing “notions of modernity” that shaped U.S. and Soviet attitudes and policies, and portrays the Cold War as a struggle between “competing exceptionalist claims” emanating from Moscow as well as Washington (pp. 39, 41). Cary Fraser, in his contribution on “Decolonization and the Cold War,” offers an equally provocative and persuasive explication of that critical historical phenomenon. “Decolonization,” he writes, “was thus project, process, and outcome of the search for a replacement for the quest for North Atlantic hegemony that had shaped the imperialism that preceded 1945 and the bipolar vision of the leaders of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Warsaw Pact that emerged after 1945” (pp. 471472). John Prados's outstanding synthesis of “Cold War Intelligence History” and Vladislav Zubok's explication of the intersection between power and culture in Soviet strategy also deserve to be singled out for commendation. Among the regional essays, the contributions on the Middle East, by Salim Yaqub; South Asia, by Andrew J. Rotter; and Japan, by Antony Best, are especially noteworthy. Campbell Craig's masterful, succinct essay on the role of nuclear weapons in the Cold War also stands out.Other essays prove more descriptive than analytical, and a few border on the superficial, including the entries on geopolitics, on Africa, on international institutions, and on economics.Yet the volume contains far more strong essays than weak ones. Overall, the collection stands as a magnificent achievement. Its breadth and its helpful bibliographical aids alone make this a must-have volume. The Oxford Handbook of the Cold War belongs on the bookshelf of every serious scholar of the Cold War.

Intelligence in the Cold War

This paper asserts that Cold War intelligence was essentially military intelligence. It provides a personal perspective on the UK Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS) and how Cold War intelligence was influenced by the experiences of individuals in the Second World War. It reviews little-studied aspects of the US–UK intelligence relationship, the NATO intelligence dimension, and the British Commanders'-in-Chief Mission to the Soviet Forces in (East) Germany (BRIXMIS), effectively legitimate spies in uniform. It concludes with some reflections on the changes the end of the Cold War brought to the work of the DIS.

Cold War Intelligence: The Secret War Between the U.S. and the USSR, 1945-1991

Cold War Intelligence: The Secret War Between the U.S. and the USSR, 1945-1991

The Pinprick Approach: Whitehall’s Top-Secret Anti-Communist Committee and the Evolution of British Covert Action Strategy

This article examines Great Britain’s approach to covert action during the formative years of British Cold War intelligence operations, 1950–1951. Rather than shy away from such activity in the wake of the failure in Albania in the late 1940s, the British increased the number of operations they pursued. This was the start of a coherent strategy regarding covert activity that can be conceptualized as the “pinprick” approach. The strategy was overseen by a highly secretive Whitehall body, the Official Committee on Communism, which in effect became the government’s covert action committee. This article uses the commission’s recently declassified papers for the first time to assess the merits of this approach.

Cold War Intelligence: The Secret War between the U.S. and the USSR, 1945-1991

Cold War Intelligence: The Secret War between the U.S. and the USSR, 1945-1991

Covert Action in the Cold War: U.S. Policy, Intelligence, and CIA Operations

This book is a critique of covert operations run by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from its creation in 1947 to the death of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. Its author, James Callanan, has taught at a cluster of universities in the northeast of England and dedicates his work to “the pioneers of America's cold war intelligence community.” He describes the CIA’s conservative counterintelligence chief James Angleton as having been “prescient” about the communist menace and sees the agency's early dirty tricks in Italy as both necessary and successful (p. 6). Callanan brings an acute critical mind to the study of his subject. He opens with a discussion of intelligence theory and historiography, and he offers a typography of covert action: defensive (blocking Soviet subversion), offensive (destabilizing unwanted regimes), and preventive (preemptive moves to exclude Soviet influence from the “third world”) (p. 4). He contributes to the debate about whether the CIA ever operated without presidential authorization, offering the idea that the agency may have been on occasion “anticipatory” of presidential policy. He further suggests that difficulties may have arisen in periods of presidential “interregnum” (p. 9). His main example for this argument is the 1961 assassination of the Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba. Callanan sees the assassination as a setback to the plans of President-elect Kennedy, which he believes to have been “scuttled by the machinations of the CIA” (p. 148).

Locating Agency

IntroductionThe world is on fire. Societies all over the world struggle incessantly and aggressively over the control of information to shape commonly held understandings of the present and the meaning to be derived from the past. These constructions and reconstructions have the potential to both legitimate and operate in opposition to structures of domination and injustice. Such dynamics feature regularly in the mass media. Consider the following:* Scholarly access to the world's largest Holocaust archives- the International Tracing Service (ITS)-had, until recently, been denied for over sixty years. This is remarkable given that these files were likely to reveal the names of unknown victims and shed new light on the structure and administration of forced labor and extermination camps.* Japan's ongoing struggles to remove from its high school textbooks long acknowledged responsibility for major war crimes committed by the Imperial Army during World War II.* How political considerations regularly confound attempts in the U.S. to formally recognize the Armenian genocide of the early twentieth century. Turkey continues to forcefully deny its responsibility for this genocide, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, and uses its geostrategic importance to the U.S. to defeat recognition.* Key portions of Serbia's military archives from the Bosnian war were withheld from the International Court of Justice, leading several insiders to comment that such secrecy helped to absolve Serbia from charges of genocide and exempt it from monetary reparations.* Access to Bulgaria's cold war intelligence archives was contested amidst charges that they would identify current political and business leaders as collaborators with the communist era security services.* Brown University recently mined its archives as part of an effort to investigate its historical culpability in slavery and the slave trade. It launched a series of public events to stimulate discussion on institutional responses to the relationship between the present and past injustices.* In 2006, a U.S. National Archives audit found that up to one-third of 25,000 documents secretly removed from public access at its facilities since 1999 were inappropriately re-classified by various agencies.What is striking from these examples is not isolated to their profound nature. Equally remarkable is their ordinariness. A myriad of similar struggles could have easily been highlighted. The intersection among archives, professional ethics, archival praxis, the agency of individual archivists, and struggles for social justice is constantly at play across the globe. In such settings, archives and archivists can serve as instruments for sustaining, undermining, and challenging power and injustice. Yet, normative discussions of archival ethics largely evade these issues, and the promulgation of professional codes of ethics provides little value for understanding and reacting to these complexities.Given these evasions, this paper examines how voices within disciplines external to archives have engaged their own professional ethics as a means for illuminating these deeper issues. It notes how they have done so by recognizing and acknowledging professional ethics as a terrain far more complex and difficult than normative constructions allow. Although I point to this problematizing of professional ethics witnessed in anthropology, sociology, business, medicine, bioethics, philosophy, communications, history, post modernism and even the maturing ethics practitioners profession, I do not offer their insights as direct analogies to archival contexts per se. Instead, I contend that these literatures and discourses can assist the archival profession in deepening and enriching its construction and reconstruction of professional ethics. This knowledge and insight is organized along a number of key themes: professionalism; professional codes of ethics; professional and individual psychological connectedness; historically informed analyses, and strivings towards social justice, which is given sustained treatment. …

Seduced by Secrets: Inside the Stasi’s Spy-Tech World (review)

Reviewed by: Seduced by Secrets: Inside the Stasi’s Spy-Tech World John Laprise (bio) Seduced by Secrets: Inside the Stasi’s Spy-Tech World. By Kristie Macrakis. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. xix+37. $28. Because technological innovation was a primary sphere of conflict between the superpowers during the cold war, the defense, consumer, and industrial technologies of the “other side” were highly prized commodities. Histories of cold war intelligence are uncommon due to their political sensitivity and the general shortage of information. Frequently, historians are compelled to approach their object of inquiry obliquely, as does James Bamford in his histories of the National Security Agency over the past quarter-century and William E. Burroughs in his 1988 history of U.S. photo reconnaissance satellites. Yet others such as preeminent cryptological historian David Kahn [End Page 723] have been able to examine information from the records of the losing side, as is the case in his Hitler’s Spies (1978). Now, Kristie Macrakis has successfully followed this latter pattern in examining East German intelligence by looking at the records of the Stasi, the intelligence arm of the East German government. She makes the case that the Stasi aggressively sought to acquire technology from the West and employ it to solve its own technological problems. Her extensive archival research reveals that the East’s economic and industrial weakness as well as the East German government’s own bureaucratic problems hampered its mission to acquire Western technology and undermined its ability to employ information and technology it did acquire. The first half of the book follows the actions of various Stasi officers as they desperately sought to insinuate themselves into West German industry, and the actions of the Stasi bureaucracy as it sought to manage its intelligence gathering and state security missions. They communicated their intelligence acquisitions back to East Germany through a variety of means, including special inks and microfilm. One of Macrakis’s most striking findings is the breadth of the technologies sought by the Stasi—chemical processes, computer specifications, and telecommunications technologies—and the relative ease with which it acquired sensitive information from the West. While the Stasi proved adept at the acquisition of Western technologies, however, it proved to be largely unable to make use of the acquired information. Microcircuitry design was of limited value because the East lacked the prowess to apply the information to its own industrial processes. The West also limited the East’s industrial effectiveness by means of trade restrictions on high-tech exports, restrictions it continued to tighten even as the cold war drew to a close. Some Stasi officers were left behind as the iron curtain fell, while others were persuaded to cooperate for romantic, economic, or ideological reasons. In the second half of the book, Macrakis provides a fascinating view inside the spy technology of the Stasi: concealed minicameras, invisible ink, radioactive tracking systems. In one chapter she explores the Stasi’s use of olfactory tracking and the creation of “smell jars” containing olfactory samples that allowed specially trained dogs to track down individuals from whom samples had been previously obtained, even after a period of years. Macrakis based her research on numerous interviews with former Stasi officers—some living as private citizens and others who were captured and imprisoned for espionage—and she also made effective use of archival materials. Taken together, these sources have allowed her to paint a rich picture of the Stasi’s quest for Western technologies and its struggles to make use of acquired information. Seduced by Secrets offers a revealing look at the difficult-to-observe history of a modern intelligence agency. It provides scholars with an insightful analysis and a new perspective for thinking [End Page 724] about the relationship of technology and the cold war by demonstrating the rich possibilities available to scholars exploring Eastern Bloc resources. John Laprise John Laprise will be a visiting associate professor at Northwestern University’s Doha, Qatar, campus. His dissertation examines the interrelationship between the adoption of information policy in the White House during the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations. Copyright © 2009 The Society for the History of Technology