Anthony Glees

Intelligence Studies, Universities and Security.

ABSTRACT This article offers a critical assessment of academic intelligence studies in higher education. It argues that universities (and academics) should value this subject far more highly than they currently do. Doing so will enhance better public understanding of an increasingly important and unique device in modern governance. It will also improve the quality of intelligence activity by raising awareness of both good and bad practice, encourage lawfulness by means of public understanding and so defending a vital public service from ill-informed attacks in today’s conflicted world. This, rather than training potential officers, should be the primary purpose of intelligence studies.

Intelligence, Iraq and the limits of legislative accountability during political crisis

This article argues that there is an inherent tension in legislative intelligence oversight bodies between their responsibility to the voters who elect them and their political parties who select them to run for office. At a time of acute political crisis, the partisan interests of the legislators who sit on oversight bodies may override their other responsibilities. This can result in distorted and misleading investigations and reports. This hypothesis is examined against the evidence of precisely such a mode of failure in both the British and American legislative inquiries into intelligence on Iraqi ‘weapons of mass destruction’. The authors conclude that any effective oversight must include a range of parallel legislative, judicial, executive and independent mechanisms to try and minimize the inherent weaknesses in each oversight model.

What Brexit means for British and European intelligence agencies

ABSTRACT This article argues that continued security and intelligence cooperation with the EU27 is of such importance to the UK that in any rational scenario it is inconceivable it will not continue post-Brexit. Britain will have to quit multiple security and intelligence sharing EU bodies but must hope to be readmitted in line with the prime minister’s speech of 17 January 2017. It takes issue with the line put by a small number of former security officials that the EU27 contribute nothing to our security, or the wrong statement that Europol, in particular, is not an EU institution so need not be given up, giving much weight to the statement by the Home Secretary (Mrs. May) on 25 April 2016 outlining the security gains of EU membership.

International Terrorism: The Neglected Domestic Dimension

This article argues that the concept of ‘international terrorism’ provides a useful means of understanding one of the major security threats now facing the global community. We suggest that the validity of the concept has generated a sensible twin-track intelligence-led security strategy linking domestic with external activity and is an approach well designed to contain the virulence of international terrorism.

John C. Schmeidel, Stasi: Shield and Sword of the Party

the OUP catalogue). But although most reviewers are positive, there are some who find Wright’s approach dubious. The attempt to link the phrase ‘Iron Curtain’ with such a wide variety of contexts can lead to confusion. A highly critical review by Charles King in an issue of the Times Literary Supplement in April 2008 asserts that this ‘overlong account starts down avenues and then reverses, winds its way through the most recondite and antiquarian territory and spends too much time identifying every shrub without giving the reader a sense of the forest as a whole’. Further criticism can be made of the way the digressions reach into so many nooks and crannies. For example, does it really matter that the chairman of the British delegation to Russia in 1920 was ‘portly’ (p.132)? By way of contrast, the fascinating collection of Iron Curtain cartoons contained in the book – including some of the most famous by Low – receive no real analysis. This is also the case with regard to the familiar 1946 cartoon (by Illingworth) of Churchill literally peeking under an iron theatre curtain dividing Europe, and which is marked ‘No admission. By order. Joe’ (p.378). And given his love of the extended development of metaphor, it is strange that Wright does not consider the ‘safety’ aspect of the ‘iron curtain’ in its transfer from theatre to international politics. For those who like their history full of cross-references across an enormous range of topics and contexts, with digressions, diversions and snippets of admittedly often fascinating information, as well as broad-ranging and frequently telling explorations of the use of metaphor in the actuality and analysis of politics and history, this book will be as pleasurable to read as so many enthusiastic reviewers suggest. Noel Malcolm concludes his review: ‘It all adds up to a most enjoyable performance, but don’t blame yourself too harshly when you discover you have almost completely lost the plot’. But for those who prefer their history tightly structured and self-evidently clear and single-minded in theme, purpose and argument, the performance in Wright’s theatre, with or without safety curtains, may seem less satisfactory.