Christopher Andrew

Intelligence, International Relations and 'Under-theorisation'

This article submits that the conceptual framework within which intelligence is studied must continue to evolve and adapt to the new conditions of the early twenty-first century. As more intelligence and intelligence related material than ever before enters the public domain, scholars of international relations must take greater account study of the role of intelligence. Despite its obvious importance to the course of the Cold War, for example, most accounts of the Cold War tend to ignore or downplay the importance of signals intelligence in particular. Intelligence, moreover, is all but absent in most contemporary international relations theory. The essay argues that intelligence should be placed closer to the centre of new interpretations of both the course of the Cold War and of the political dynamics of authoritarian states.

Intelligence and international relations in the early Cold War

Almost no historian of the Second World War nowadays fails to acknowledge the important role of signals intelligence (SIGINT). By contrast, most histories of postwar international relations omit – without explanation – all reference to SIGINT. Neglect of this and other aspects of intelligence has significantly distorted the study of the Cold War. A new generation of scholars, however, has begun to challenge this neglect. The article seeks to show how recent research on intelligence is changing our understanding of the early Cold War.

The Entente Cordiale

EVEN at the beginning of 1903 there were still occasional reminders of the animosity towards England which had been widespread in France at the beginning of the Boer War. On 23 January, for example, Reuter reported that successful English exhibitors at the Paris Exhibition of 1900 had still not received their medals: ‘Unfortunately, the engraver to whom the work was entrusted was an ardent pro-Boer, and every time he saw on the lists an English looking name, he coolly put his pen through it’. For the most part, however, the passions that had prevailed at the turn of the century had by now largely subsided. During Chamberlain’s much-publicised visit to South Africa early in 1903, Lavino, the new Times correspondent in Paris, reported that ‘it would be vain to seek in any of the more respectable newspapers a trace of that vituperation without which his very name was but two years ago seldom pronounced on the continent’. This, Lavino believed, was ‘a significant sign of the times, inasmuch as it corresponds with a tendency on the part of many French politicians to return to a more reasonable and just estimate of the old ally of their country’.1 In England the mood of public opinion had changed even more than in France.

VI. France and the Making of the Entente Cordiale

The significance of the Entente Cordiale has often been disguised both by its own emotive title and by the subsequent development of Anglo-French relations. Vincent Auriol claimed on its fiftieth anniversary that ‘the convention of 8 April 1904 embodied the agreement of our two peoples on the necessity of safeguarding the spiritual values of which we were the common trustees’. Edens interpretation on the same occasion was more prosaic and more accurate. ‘At the time when it was concluded’, he told the Commons, ‘the Entente Cordiale did not represent some great surge of public opinion on either side of the Channel. It was in fact an instrument of political policy at the time, calculated to attempt to remove the differences which had long complicated Anglo-French relations in Egypt and Morocco.’ The solution to these differences which was suggested to the English government by the French foreign minister, Theophile Delcasse, in July 1903, and which formed the basis of the agreement signed nine months later, was the barter of Egypt for Morocco. In all that has been written on the Entente Cordiale neither the origin of this barter nor the steps by which it became the foundation for the diplomatic reconciliation of France and England have ever been explained.

The other hidden hand: Soviet and Cuban intelligence in Allende’s Chile

Abstract The role of Soviet and Cuban covert activities in Allende’s Chile has not been given sufficient consideration. This paper outlines the significant actions that the KGB and the Cuban DGI undertook there, showing that both organizations played important roles in both operating directly against the CIA and by supporting local actors. The results of their efforts, however, may have been negative to Allende’s coalition by focusing on factional or ideological interests. A broad array of sources is brought together to shed light on this historical gap. The result is a new paradigm in which we can consider this dramatic period.

Intelligence in the Cold War

Intelligence is probably the least understood aspect of the Cold War, sometimes sensationalised, often ignored. It is also the only profession in which a fictional character is far better known than any real practitioner, alive or dead. Cold War intelligence was, of course, not usually as exciting as the career of James Bond. Like all forms of information, the impact of intelligence is more often gradual than dramatic – though it does from time to time suddenly produce such spectacular revelations as the Soviet acquisition of the plans of the first US atomic bomb or the Soviet construction of missile sites in Cuba in 1962. Sometimes intelligence adds information of real importance to what is available from more conventional sources. Sometimes it adds little or nothing. But, whether intelligence is used, abused or simply ignored, historians of the Cold War can never afford to disregard it. The many studies of policy-making in East and West which fail to take intelligence into account are at best incomplete, at worst distorted. Signals intelligence (SIGINT) The starting point for any attempt to assess the role of intelligence during the Cold War is to recognise how much we still do not know. Signals intelligence is perhaps the prime example. Though SIGINT was far more voluminous than intelligence from human sources (HUMINT), it is still entirely absent from most histories of the Cold War. At the end of the Second World War, GCHQ (the British SIGINT agency) wanted to keep secret indefinitely the wartime ULTRA intelligence derived from breaking the German Enigma and other high-grade enemy ciphers but expected the secret to be uncovered within a few years.

For the President's Eyes Only: Secret Intelligence and the American Presidency from Washington to Bush.

A thorough and revealing examination of how American presidents from Washington to Bush have used or misused secret intelligence--by the coauthor of the highly acclaimed KGB: The Inside Story.

Anglo-American-Soviet Intelligence Relations

No aspect of the Grand Alliance was more remarkable than the performance of, and the relationships between, its intelligence communities. Britain and the United States learned more about their enemies than any power had ever known before in any war. The Soviet Union was less well-informed about its enemies, but had better intelligence about Britain and the United States than any power had previously possessed about its wartime allies.