Re:

Dodgy dossiers

Steven Kettell, author of Dirty politics? New Labour, British democracy and the invasion of Iraq (London: Zed Books, 2006), argues that New Labour wanted regime change in Iraq before Bush and before 9/11 and that the production of the WMD Dossier was one of the key components of a broader political strategy designed to achieve that aim.(1)

Understanding intelligence

Andrew Defty considers the role of Parliament and Parliamentary Committees in allowing parliamentarians to develop expertise in particular policy areas and questions whether the Intelligence and Security Committee has helped generate a wider parliamentary understanding of intelligence.(2)

Secret histories

A forthcoming official history of the Defence Press and Broadcasting Advisory Committee (3) (the organ responsible for issuing D-Notices) (4) has had its publication delayed following disagreements between its author, Rear-Admiral Nick Wilkinson (former Secretary of the Committee), and Vice-Marshall Air Andrew Marshall (current Secretary of the Committee). Marshall initially objected to the manuscript’s allegedly turgid style and then argued that its coverage should end in 1991 rather than 2004. A compromise was eventually reached and the book now comes to a halt at 1997, its final five chapters, already written, promised for a later edition.(5)

In a separate development, a former member of the Security Service seeking authorisation to publish a book detailing the successes, failures and recruitment techniques of MI5 has been told he can bring a judicial review claim in the High Court after a legal ruling rejected the argument that the Investigatory Powers Tribunal has exclusive jurisdiction to try human rights claims against the intelligence services.(6)

Happy families

The journal Qualitative Inquiry has published a special issue focusing on Harold Lloyd Goodall, Jr.’s book A need to know: the clandestine history of a CIA family (Walnut Creek, California: Left Coast Press, 2006). ‘By locating his narrative within scholarship dedicated to family secrecy and to cultural histories of the cold war and war on terror…[Goodall] connects the long term consequences of growing up in a family marked by secrecy and fear to the long term consequences of a people living under conditions of an enduring war marked by a culture of secrecy and fear.’(7)

The Atomic Curtain

William L. Laurence was The New York Times’ science correspondent during the 1940s. Throughout 1945 he was also employed as a ‘paid consultant’ by the US War Department to produce syndicated news articles commenting favourably on the atomic bomb. Laurence had full access to activities behind what he termed the ‘Atomic Curtain’, although every word he wrote was scrutinised by War Department censors and anything thought to be detrimental, such as the adverse effects of radioactivity, was deleted. His efforts earned him a Pulitzer Prize and the nickname ‘Atomic Bill’.(8)

Academic spooks

Sociologist Daniel Lerner worked as Chief Editor of SHAEF’s Psychological Warfare Division at the end of the Second World War and later as Chief of Intelligence of the Information Control Division, OMGUS.(9) He also wrote the first full analysis and description of psychological warfare techniques used by the Allies against Germany.(10) Umaru Bah examines his theories of development communication research and its involvement in ‘promoting US foreign policy objectives in general, and Cold War propaganda objectives in particular.’(11)

Another academic, psychologist Carl Rogers,also had links to the CIA-funded Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology.(12) Demanchick and Kirschenbaum provide the details ‘in the context of America during the 1950s, Rogers’s academic career, and the mission of the CIA.’(13)

Planning blight

Most local authorities now publish planning applications on their websites. This has worried MI5 who fear that plans detailing potential weak points in new buildings could provide information to those with ‘hostile intent’: ‘These people are bloody clever and we shouldn’t be giving them gifts.’(14)

Countering terrorism

Sir Adrian Fulford, the Judge who presided over the 21/7 trial, comments on how terrorism trials have become more complex in recent years. Criticising politicians – ‘each new serious terrorist incident leads to call for new legislation and new offences’ – he feels that the challenge is to ensure that the current system works with ‘such conspicuous efficiency and effectiveness that is unnecessary to legislate yet further.’(15)

Elsewhere, Dora Kostakopoulou claims that New Labour’s response to post-9/11 terrorism evokes a ‘siege mode of democracy’ and examines in some detail Operation Kratos, the counter-terrorist strategy adopted by ACPO in 2002.(16)

And although we’ve yet to experience a UK equivalent of the Patriot Act (allowing the FBI fairly unhindered access to library records), a recent survey carried out by CILIP (the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals) indicates that libraries are experiencing ‘increased police and security services activity.’(17)

It’s a conspiracy….

‘Our findings call into question current questioning about the function of conspiracy theories. If…[they]…are a means to provide explanations for uncertain events, or are a response to powerlessness, then it is surprising that people are not prepared to accept that they have been influenced by them.’(18) Not too surprising, I would suggest, given the negative press that conspiracy theories regularly receive.

David Kelly – more questions

According to a flight summary obtained by Lobster contributor Garrick Alder under the Freedom of Information Act, a police helicopter fitted with thermal-imaging equipment failed to locate David Kelly’s body despite being flown over the exact spot where it was later found. Thames Valley Police responded by saying ‘Everything we have to say on the matter is fully documented and is a matter of public record. We have no further comment to make.’(19)

Kelly’s former colleague, Mai Pederson, does have more to say, however, revealing that in the months up to his death, Kelly’s right hand grip was so weak from an injury to his elbow that he was unable to use it for any task requiring a modicum of strength. ‘[He] would have had to have been a contortionist to kill himself the way they claim…’(20)

At the toss of a COIN

The publication of a new counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine manual in 2006 (21) was seen by some as an indication that the US military was finally coming to understand the problems it had helped create in Iraq and Afghanistan. Not so, according to a recent RAND study. ‘An examination of COIN doctrine and operations in the 1960s reveals that operations seldom matched written doctrine. Instead of winning hearts and minds, improving civil-military relations, conducting small-unit operations, and gathering intelligence, most Vietnam War commanders and units attempted to defeat the insurgency through large-scale operations and over-whelming firepower. Modern US COIN operations in Afghanistan and Iraq demonstrate a similar preference for high-intensity war-fare and a similar inability to adapt technologically and mentally to the requirements of COIN.’ (22) Always happy to offer advice, RAND has also put forward some recommendations for future counterinsurgency operations, based on the US’s Iraq experiences.(23)

Notes

1. Steven Kettell, ‘Who’s afraid of Saddam Hussein? Re-examining the “September Dossier” affair’, Contemporary British History, 22 (3), September 2008, pp. 407-426. See also the recent decision of the Information Commissioner on the Cabinet Office’s refusal to release drafts of the dossier at <http://www.ico.gov.uk/upload/documents/decisionnotices/2008/fs_50098388.pdf >
2. Andrew Defty, ‘Educating Parliamentarians about intelligence: the role of the British Intelligence and Security Committee’, Parliamentary Affairs, 61 (4), October 2008, pp. 621-641. Defty’s book on IRD’s early years was reviewed in Lobster 55.
3. Nick Wilkinson, Secrecy and the media: the official history of the D-Notice system. Due to be published by Routledge next April, it will trace the development of D-Notices ‘from nineteenth-century colonial campaigns, through two World Wars, to modern operations and counter-terrorism….Examples are drawn from media, political and official sources (some not yet open), and cover not only Defence (including Special Forces), but also the activities of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ.’
4. <http://www.dnotice.org.uk >
5. David Sharrock, ‘D-notice slapped on MoD’s history of censorship, Secrecy and the media, after spat over “turgid” writing’, The Times, 24 October 2008; Jack Lefley, ‘MOD censors its censor’s history for being boring’, The Evening Standard, 24 October 2008.
6. Anon., ‘Former spy wins first round of “son of Spycatcher” book publication battle’, Solicitors’ Journal, 152 (29), 22 July 2008, p. 5; Anon., ‘Tribunal does not have exclusive jurisdiction’, The Times, 5 August 2008. (A transcript of the judgement can be found here: <www.doughtystreet.co.uk/files/A%20v%20B%2_Final_.pdf >. See also Alex Bailin, ‘The last Cold War statute’, The Criminal Law Review, (8), August 2008, pp. 625-631, in which the author argues that the 1989 Official Secrets Act is ‘now being used in order to shield the Government from embarrassment rather than genuinely protect national security and public safety.’
7. Qualitative Inquiry, 14 (7), October 2008.
8. Beverley Ann Deepe Keever, ‘Top secret: censoring the first rough drafts of atomic-bomb history’, Media History, 14 (2), 2008, pp. 185-204.
9. Office of Military Government, United States – responsible for the post-war administration of the US Army controlled areas of Germany and Berlin.
10. Psychological warfare against Nazi Germany: the Sykewar Campaign, D-Day to VE-Day, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1971).
11. Umaru Bah, ‘Daniel Lerner, cold war propaganda and US development communication research: an historical critique’, Journal of Third World Studies, 25 (1) Spring 2008, pp. 183-198.
12. For more on the Society see Patricia Greenfield, ‘CIA’s behavior caper’, APA Monitor, December 1977, pp. 1, 10-11. <http://www.cia-on-campus.org/social/behavior.html >
13. Stephen P. Demanchick and Howard Kirschenbaum, ‘Carl Rogers and the CIA’, Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 48 (1), (Winter 2008) pp. 6-31
14. Richard Vaughan, ‘MI5 asks architects to keep plans secret’, The Architects’ Journal, 227 (23), 12 June 2008, p. 5. <www.architectsjournal.co.uk/news/dailynews/2008/06/mi5_asks_architects_to_keep_plans_secret.html >
15. Adrian Fulford, ‘How have things changed since the IRA trials?’, Medicine, Science and the Law, 48 (3), July 2008, pp. 185-188. The same issue also includes an article on terrorism from a forensic scientist’s point of view, Cliff Todd, ‘Terrorist trials – then and now’, pp. 188-190.
16. Dora Kostakopoulou, ‘How to do things with security post 9/11’, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 28 (2), Summer 2008, pp. 317-342. Background information on Operation Kratos can be found here: <www.met.police.uk/docs/kratos_briefing.pdf >
17. CILIP survey on police, surveillance and libraries, June 2008<www.cilip.org.uk/NR/rdonlyres/5D5E95C2-513C-48F2-BD2E-6B97DAC65AEA/0/CILIPPSLSurveyresultspublicjul08.pdf >For more on the impact of the ‘War on Terror’ on UK libraries, see John Pateman, ‘Libraries and liberty’, Public Library Journal, 23 (30), Autumn 2008, pp. 30-32.
18. Karen M. Douglas and Robbie M. Sutton, ‘The hidden impact of conspiracy theories: perceived and actual influence of theories surrounding the death of Princess Diana’, The Journal of Social Psychology, 148 (2), April 2008, pp. 210 – 222. For an account of attempted media manipulation of the masses see James Thomas, ‘From people power to mass hysteria: media and popular reactions to the death of Princess Diana’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 11 (3), 2008, pp. 362-376.
19. Miles Goslett, ‘Why did a heat-seeking helicopter fly over the exact spot where David Kelly’s body was found – and detect nothing?’, Mail on Sunday, 24 August 2008; Giles Sheldrick, ‘Police “failed to find scientist”’, Oxford Mail, 24 August 2008.
20. Sharon Churcher, ‘David’s right hand was so weak he couldn’t cut steak…’, Mail on Sunday, 31 August 2008.
21. US Army and Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency Field Manual, <www.usgcoin.org/library/doctrine/COIN-FM3-24.pdf >
22. Austin Long, Doctrine of eternal recurrence: the US military and counterinsurgency doctrine, 1960-1970 and 2003-2006, RAND Counterinsurgency Study, Paper 6. <www.rand.org/pubs/occasional_papers/2008/RAND_OP200.pdf>. See also Nora Bensahel and others, After Saddam: prewar planning and the occupation of Iraq <www.rand. or/pubs/monographs/2008/RAND_MG642.pdf > [Note: related reports/papers are available here <http://www.rand.org/pubs/occasional_papers/2008/RAND_OP200.pdf>]
23. Bruce R. Pirnie and Edward O’Connell, Rand: Counterinsurgency in Iraq (2003—2006) (RAND Counterinsurgency Study, Volume 2 <http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/2008/RAND_MG595.3.pdf>)