Kristian Gustafson

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.

The Bush War to Save the Rhino: Improving Counter-poaching Through Intelligence

Abstract The rhino is going extinct due to poaching at a rate which far outstrips current law enforcement or conservation efforts to halt their decline. A critical aspect of counter-poaching failures to date is an inaccurate view of the nature of poaching as a crime. Rather than demand-side efforts, attacking elusive smuggling networks or expensive technical solutions like drones, this article notes how a quasi-military tactical approach of ‘combat tracking’ offers the best way to protect the species. Based on wide ranging interviews and fieldwork across dozens of parks in southern Africa, it demonstrates how the current restricted range of the rhino, and the rarity of skilled poachers, makes a tactical solution the most effective to date.

Weighing the evidence: the BCISS Iraq HUMINT Analytic Matrix Exercise

Abstract This article examines the Brunel Iraq HUMINT Matrix exercise. The purpose of this approach to intelligence pedagogy is to get participants to think through and work out analytic methods, issues, and potential solutions from first principles and for themselves. Our strategy is to try and fuse training and education learning outcomes, so that students emerge with a technical competence in analytic methods, underpinned by a deeper understanding of the foundations and internal logic shaping those methods. The Iraq Matrix exercise seeks to unpack and examine the nuts and bolts of source evaluation, and to test alternative hypotheses with particular attention to the relationship between the quality of various sources and, the weight of judgements they can or cannot sustain. The ultimate goal is to encourage what is currently fashionably referred to as ‘reflexive practice’, whereby the practitioner reflects critically and self-critically upon how their task works and how they do it, then uses those insights to improve their workplace performance. But not all of our teaching is directed towards practitioners. For those whose aims are scholarly and academic, the aim is to give observers a more visceral understanding of the challenges of the intelligence task they intended to study. Here the intended reflexive practice goal is to encourage an empathy with the workaday challenges facing those in the business of intelligence analysis, and to discourage the observer’s temptation to make facile and simplistic judgements about processes or events.

Early stages in the evolution of covert action governance in the United States, 1951–1961

The U.S. government started to establish a formalised covert action capability only in the late 1940s and early 1950s, in response to the perceived Soviet threat. The difficult process of establishing the first inter-agency management organisation for this new activity, the Psychological Strategy Board, and its successor, the Operational Coordination Board, serves to highlight the peculiar characteristics of covert action and its management. Very little current scholarship deals with inter-agency bodies in the U.S. context, and this article aims to fill this void. The article concludes that while covert action itself remains in the shadows, policy coordination for it must be well-managed at the very centre of government to account for strong policy interests in this activity from other agencies, particularly the Departments of State and Defense. This task is complicated by the nature of U.S. national security architecture and U.S. government culture overall, which poses high structural obstacles to inter-agency cooperation.

Allende's Chile and the inter-American Cold War

Stalinist terror throughout Eastern Europe. The specifics of political and economic development and the dynamics within each Communist party accounted for the variations in themethods, speed, intensity, and timing of both the elite purges andmass repressions. But as the interplay of external and internal motives is analysed, the issue of the mindset of the perpetrators is not explored through the fact that many highand middle-rank East European communists had been deeply affected by the whirlwind of Stalin’s purges in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Several other aspects make this collective work worthwhile. Very interesting differences between national and international, including Russian, historiography are highlighted. The broad definition of terror that underpins the volume provides for depth and nuance of interpretation. Above all, the publication integrates competence achieved through extensive original local researchwithin themainstream of scholarship on the Stalinist period.