From The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence by Richard J. Aldrich, The Overlook Press, N.Y. 2001
Historians of Secret Service and their Enemies
“It is imperative that the fact that such intelligence was available [ULTRA] should NEVER be disclosed.” British Chiefs of Staff, 31 July 1945
The story of modern secret service offers us a clear warning. Governments are not only adept in hiding substantial secrets, they are quick to offer their own carefully packaged versions of the past. The end of the Second World War was quickly followed by a litany of secret service stories, often concerning the Special Operations Executive or SOE, Britain’s wartime sabotage organization, which suggested that now the war was over its stories of clandestine activity could be told. Innumerable figures who had worked with SOE or its American sister service, the Office of Strategic Services, sat down to write their memoirs. This was misleading since some of the most important aspects of the conflict with Germany remained hidden. Only in the 1970s, three decades after the end of the war, did the story of Ultra and Bletchley Park–the effort which defeated the German Enigma cipher machine–burst upon a surprised world. Thereafter much of the strategic history of the Second World War had to be rewritten. One of its most important aspects, the fact that the intentions of the Axis had been largely transparent to the Allies, had been methodically airbrushed from thirty years of historical writing.
This was a carefully orchestrated process. Before the end of the war, Britain’s most senior intelligence official, Victor Cavendish-Bentinck, cousin of the Duke of Portland and Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee or JIC, turned his mind to the problem of the management of the past. British records were certainly not a threat. Many would be burned at the end of the war and others would remain under lock and key for decades. But unfortunately, in the summer of 1944, with the invasion of France under way, Italian, Japanese and German records were spilling out into the open from embassies and headquarters in the chaos of Axis retreat. Initially this haemorrhage of enemy secret papers did not seem to worry him:
“I expect that all we will need to do will be to send half a dozen people out to see that the right archives are being sealed and placed under guard and that the proper scrutiny measures are taken, after which it will probably be necessary to have one person keeping an eye on this business who could go around from time to time, and see that the proper security measures are being taken and that our interests are being looked after until research students and historians get to work on a job that will probably occupy the rest of their lives or the period until the next war, whichever may be the shortest.”
But his complacency was short lived. Gradually, it dawned no the authorities that some of the most hidden aspects of the war were now in danger of seeping into the public domain. If Allied and Axis materials were compared side-by-side, the some of the most innermost secrets of the war–the successes of Ultra and the remarkable efforts of secret deception teams that helped to mask the D-Day invasion–might soon be revealed.
GCHQ, the new post-war name given to the organization Bletchley Park, was foremost in pressing for the tightest secrecy. The breaking of enemy codes and ciphers, known as signals intelligence or sigint, was, in its view, best hidden for ever. The mysteries of sigint had to be protected for use against ‘future enemies’, who were already massing on the horizon in 1945. There were also potential problems with the German acceptance of defeat. GCHQ argued that, if it became known that the Allies had been using Ultra to read Hitler’s Enigma communications, the Germans were likely to use it as an excuse to say that they were ‘not well and fairly beaten’. The dangerous but attractive myths of ‘defeat by betrayal’ that had circulated in Germany in 1918 might surface once more.
By July 1945 the London Signals Intelligence Board, Britain’s highest sigint authority, had convened a special committee to examine the problem of how to handle history and historians. They were the first to suggest what became the standard White hall remedy. Simply to lock these secrets up was not enough and positive information-control was probably required. The public would soon demand a detailed and authoritative narrative of the war and something substantial had to be put in place. First, official historians should be recruited and indoctrinated into Ultra and then ordered not to ‘betray’ it in their writings. Secondly, a further body had to be created to review their work and also to sanitize the memoirs of senior figures.
Strategic deception was also a hot subject which the secret services wished to see hidden for ever. Sir David Petrie, the head of MI5, kept various Allied neutrals who knew too much, including Spaniards and Swedes. in detention and incommunicado from their embassies beyond the end of the war in Europe. This was to gain time to figure out how MI5 could seal the secret of the Allied manipulation of the German secret service, the Abwehr, as a conduit for British deception. A detailed history of deception was written by Roger Hesketh, an experienced deception planner, but this was for in-house consultation by those who were tasked to keep the art of strategic deception alive for future contingencies. No mention of deception and the turning of German agents by MI5 was permitted in the public history that emerged prior to 1972.
By the end of July 1945 the leading lights of British intelligence were increasingly worried about the complexity of the history problem. They were beginning to recognize the scale of the project before them. Large areas of the past would have to be controlled if important secret methods were to be protected and embarrassments avoided. It would need a concerted program for the management of history equivalent to a wartime deception operation itself. The problem was passed on to the Joint Intelligence Committee. On the last day of July 1945 the JIC considered the problem of ‘The Use of Special Intelligence by Historians’ and warned the Chiefs of Staff that these things ‘should NEVER be disclosed.’ But sealing this subject, even for a few years, seemed almost impossible. As GCHQ had already realized, when intelligent historians got busy, ‘the comparing of the German and British documents is bound to arose suspicion in their minds that we succeeded in reading the enemy ciphers.’ What would tip them off was the speed of Allied reactions to Axis moves. London and Washington had based most of their strategy and operations upon masses of information that ‘could not have been received agents or means slower than Special Intelligence.’
There was nothing for it but to ‘indoctrinate’ some historians into the secret and ask them to work with the authorities on official accounts in order to disguise it. The tens of thousands who had worked on Ultra and deception would also have to be bound by an iron code of secrecy. Retiring Ministers, generals and diplomats would have to be exhorted to remove all mention of these things in their memoirs. Meanwhile the official history programme would become the last deception operation of the Second World War, with the objective of covering the tracks of sigint and of deception itself. These measures were quickly coordinated with the Americans. (pp. 1-2)
Katharine Gun: Ten years on what happened to the woman who revealed dirty tricks on the UN Iraq war vote?
Ten years ago, a young Mandarin specialist at GCHQ, the government’s surveillance centre in Cheltenham, did something extraordinary. Katharine Gun, a shy and studious 28-year-old who spent her days listening in to obscure Chinese intercepts, decided to tell the world about a secret plan by the US government to spy on the United Nations.
She had received an email in her inbox asking her and her colleagues to help in a vast intelligence “surge” designed to secure a UN resolution tosend troops into Iraq. She was horrified and leaked the email to theObserver. As a result of the story the paper published 10 years ago this weekend, she was arrested, lost her job and faced trial under the Official Secrets Act.
The memo from Frank Koza, chief of staff at the “regional targets” section of the National Security Agency, GCHQ’s sister organisation in the US, remains shocking in its implications for British sovereignty. Koza was in effect issuing a direct order to the employees of a UK security agency to gather “the whole gamut of information that could give US policymakers an edge in obtaining results favourable to US goals or to head off surprises”. This included a particular focus on the “swing nations” on the security council, Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Bulgaria and Guinea, “as well as extra focus on Pakistan UN matters”.
The story went around the world and the leak electrified the international debate during the weeks of diplomatic deadlock. Most directly, it bolstered opposition to the US position from Chilean and Mexican diplomats weary of American “dirty tricks”. The same countries demanded immediate answers from the British government about its involvement in the spying. With the operation blown, the chances of George W Bush and Tony Blair getting the consensus for a direct UN mandate for war were now near zero.
For the Observer too, it was a story full of risks. The paper had taken the controversial decision to back intervention in Iraq. Yet here was a story that had the capacity to derail the war altogether. It remains entirely to the credit of Roger Alton, at the time the paper’s editor, that he stuck with the story, despite its potential implications.
Gun had hoped the leak would prick the conscience of the British public, large sections of which were already taking to the streets in opposition to the war. Surely, she thought, when people realised that the UK was being asked to collaborate in an operation to find out personal information that could be used to blackmail UN delegates, they would be outraged and the UK government would halt its slide into war. She failed.
A decade on, sitting in a cafe in Cheltenham, not far from GCHQ, I asked her if she still stood by what she had done. “Still no regrets,” she said. “But the more I think about what happened, the more angry and frustrated I get about the fact that nobody acted on intelligence. The more we find out that in fact the million-person march was a real cause of worry for Downing Street and for Blair personally, it makes you think we were so close and yet so far.”
Since 2003, my life and Gun’s have continued to cross from time to time. As one of the journalists who broke the story, I feel a certain responsibility for how things have turned out. Gun sacrificed so much when she decided to leak and has worked only intermittently since. Throughout her own court case, what only a few knew was that she was also fighting for the right of her husband, who is from Turkey, to remain in the UK. She now has a four-year-old daughter who she is bringing up in Turkey.
Times have often been tough, not least because of the itinerant life she has chosen for herself. “Financially it’s the toughest,” she said. “But that’s partly my own fault because I haven’t aggressively pursued a career. Because I’m not ambitious it’s not paramount for me to find myself in a high-paid job. Right now my priorities are to ensure I am there for my daughter.”
Now there is the possibility that Gun’s singular life will be made into a movie. A script has been doing the rounds in Hollywood for five years. It is written by Sara and Gregory Bernstein, a California-based husband-and-wife writing partnership who have worked with British director Jonathan Lynn. Everyone involved assumed the project had run into the dust, but then it appeared on the Black List, a Hollywood website for unmade film scripts, which has featured Slumdog Millionaire and The King’s Speech in the past. There it was spotted by Debs Paterson, director of the critically acclaimed Africa United, who met Katharine Gun last week with a view to making the film of her life.
Gun was visiting friends and family in Cheltenham when I talked to her, with the strain obvious on her face but still looking much younger than her 38 years. I don’t think I’ve ever met a more determined character and she remained utterly convinced of the justice of her cause: “There’s nothing subsequent to the invasion that makes me think it was the right decision made by Bush and Blair.” However, she is not without disappointment about how little obvious difference she made.
“I never aligned myself specifically with the anti-war movement. But I talk to people and there does seem to be a sense of failure that, despite all the campaigning and all the marching and all the protesting and everything they did, it made not a ha’porth of difference. And that’s quite a depressing place to find yourself in when you feel so strongly and passionately about something.”
As for her own story, she recognises that 10 years on it scarcely registers with the public. I sensed a slight flash of anger as she said: “It’s not even a footnote in the history of Iraq.” But she said she would still be prepared to give evidence to the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war. “There seems to be this blasé attitude – the spying goes on, everyone does it and so it’s nothing to get all hot under the collar about. But this specific instance is the ugly truth of what goes on.”
Although the story made headlines around the world at the time of the leak and later at the time of her trial, which collapsed after the prosecution withdrew its evidence, it remains largely missing from the official narratives of the build-up to the Iraq war.
Jack Straw, then the foreign secretary, has not been challenged on whether he authorised the operation to go ahead, although it is almost certain that he did.
Gun said that the UK government still had some explaining to do: “I think there need to be more questions asked about whether they responded to that request, why they felt it was within their scope of work to respond to that sort of request, and what is the manner of the relationship between UK politics and US politics.
It was almost as if that request was asking for someone within their own nation to do this work; it wasn’t asking another completely independent state for co-operation.”
The risks Gun took in revealing the UN email’s existence were huge. By printing off the memo, putting it in her handbag and taking it home, she was already committing a serious breach of the Official Secrets Act.
In leaking it to the Observer, she was also doing something unprecedented in the history of espionage. Not only was the cable the most sensitive ever to be disclosed on either side of the Atlantic, it was also unique in its timing. Most whistleblowers leak after the event to expose perceived wrongdoing. Gun disclosed details of the spying operation as it was happening to stop something she viewed as terrible happening in the future.
As the title of the film script suggests, she was “The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War”. Daniel Ellsberg, the celebrated American whistleblower who leaked the Pentagon Papers about the build-up to the war in Vietnam,described it as “the most important and courageous leak I have ever seen”.He added: “No one else – including myself – has ever done what Katharine Gun did: tell secret truths at personal risk, before an imminent war, in time, possibly, to avert it.”
As it was, a second UN resolution directly to authorise war against Iraq never materialised and air strikes began on 19 March 2003. Katharine Gun did not stop the war, but was it all entirely in vain? It is probably still too early to tell.
In a Democracy Now! U.S. exclusive, two former intelligence officials from Britain and Denmark discuss why they blew the whistle on their governments in relation to the war in Iraq. Katharine Gun is a former British employee who leaked details of a secret U.S. spy operation on UN Security Council members in the run-up to the Iraq invasion. Major Frank Grevil is a former military intelligence officer from Denmark who was fired for leaking classified reports that showed no weapons of massdestruction would be found in Iraq. He currently faces charges for breaching the country’s official information law. [includes rush transcript]
In the build-up to the invasion of Iraq, the British newspaper The Observer exposed a highly secret and aggressive surveillance operation directed at United Nations Security Council members by the U.S. ahead of the vote on Iraq.
The Observer obtained a top-secret NSA memorandum that outlined a surveillance operation involves intercepting home andoffice telephone calls and emails of UN delegates focusing “the whole gamut of information that could give U.S. policymakers an edge in obtaining results favorable to U.S. goals or to head off surprises.”
The target of the surveillance were the so-called “Middle Six” delegations, including Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Mexico, Guinea and Pakistan, who could swing a Security Council vote on Iraq.
In a story that has received almost no media coverage in the U.S., the former British intelligenceemployee who leaked the memo, Katharine Gun, faced up to two years in prison for violating the Official Secrets Act before charges were lifted.
In her first appearance in the United States, Katharine Gunn joins us from Washington DC today where she is attending a gathering of whistleblowers organized by perhaps the country’s best whistleblower, Daniel Ellsberg.
In 1971, Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times and the Washington Post. The 7,000 page document exposed the true story behind U.S. decision making in the Vietnam War. He was charged with 12 felony counts posing a possible sentence of 115 years. The charges were dismissed in 1973 on grounds of governmental misconduct against him.
Also attending the whistleblowers gathering is Major Frank Grevil, a former military intelligenceofficer from Denmark who was fired for leaking classified reports that showed no weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq. He currently faces charges for breaching the country”s official information law. He also joins us from Washington DC.
- Katharine Gun , former British employee who leaked details of a secret US spy operation on UN Security Council members in the run-up to the Iraq invasion. In February spy charges against her were dropped.
- Major Frank Grevil , former military intelligence officer from Denmark who was fired for leaking classified reports that showed no weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq. He currently faces charges for breaching the country’s official information law.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: In her first appearance in the United States, Katharine Gun joins us from Washington, D.C., where she’s attending a gathering of whistleblowers organized by perhaps the country’s best known whistleblower, Daniel Ellsberg. In 1971, Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times and The Washington Post. The 7,000-page document exposed the true story behind the U.S. decision-making in Vietnam. He was charged with 12 felony counts, posing a possible sentence of 115 years. The charges were dismissed in 1973 on grounds of governmental misconduct against him. Also attending the whistleblowers gathering is Major Frank Grevil, a former military intelligence officer from Denmark who was fired for leaking classified reports that showed no weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq. He currently faces charges for breaching the country’s official information law. He also joins us from Washington D.C. today. We welcome you both to Democracy Now! I want to begin with Katharine Gun. If you could briefly tell us, though we have covered this story, unlike most of the U.S. press, about what you did, about where you were working, how you got the information about what the U.S. and Britain were doing around spying on U.N. Security Council members.
KATHARINE GUN: Hi, Amy. Well, first, can I just say that I am still covered by the Official Secrets Act, and I will be until my deathbed. So, I’m not about to jeopardize myself again. But, I was working for Government Communication Headquarters in the U.K., which is the equivalent to N.S.A. here in the U.S., and I was a Chinese linguist at the time, and this email crossed my desk in my in-box in January of 2003. At that time, as we all know, it was a crucial time for the U.N. in its decision-making process as to whether or not a resolution was needed with regard to Iraq and its alleged weapons of mass destruction. So, when I saw this email asking GCHQ’s help to bug the six swing nations to gather a vote for war with Iraq, I was very angry at first and very saddened that it had come to this, and that despite all of the talk from both Tony Blair and George Bush about how important it was to get the U.N. on board and to legitimize any kind of aggression, that they were actually going around it in such a low-handed manner. I decided that the risk to my career was minute compared to the upcoming war in Iraq and the best thing to do for me was to leak this information to the press so that everybody else could have the information, and hopefully it could avert this disastrous course of events that have occurred.
AMY GOODMAN: And ultimately, you faced trial. What exactly was the sentence you faced, and what did you think before you did this about the penalty?
KATHARINE GUN: Well, the maximum sentence is two years. I don’t think anybody has actually served more than six months for the breach of Official Secrets Act, but they didn’t in fact charge me straight away. I was arrested on suspicion of breach of Official Secrets Act in March 2003, but they didn’t charge me until November. Now, the in-between months, I was bailed and re-bailed, and my life was on standstill. I was in limbo. It was a difficult time for me and my family, because we just did not know what the future held for us. As it turned out in November they decided to charge me, and we were all pretty astounded by that decision, because we knew that so many people supported my action, and the result of their charging me in November was that in February of this year, they were forced to drop it, because my defense team requested the full legal advice from Britain’s attorney general, Lord Goldsmith and they refused to hand this over, so they either had something to hide or they felt that they were on a losing battle.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn now to Major Frank Grevil, a Danish case. The Danish prime minister telling parliament that government intelligence suggested Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and that this justified Danish involvement in the war. Then two Danish journalists ran a story in one of Denmark’s largest newspapers that there had in fact been no credible evidence that Iraq had possessed such weapons. The journalists’ source turned out to be a Danish military intelligence officer, Major Frank Grevil, who said he had written some of the intelligence assessments himself. He was fired for passing secret documents to the media, and the prime minister denied misleading the parliament. Frank Grevil now joins us as well in the Washington studio. Can you tell us your story, how you assessed that there were no wmds, and why you decided to pass this information on?
MAJOR FRANK GREVIL: Hi, Amy. Well, to make it short, it all started back in August of 2002 when we were prompted to provide reports and we did so continuously afterwards. Reports on Iraq. And at that time we realized — I mean, I was a member of a small group dealing with wmd. We realized that we had virtually no sources of our own so that we had to rely entirely on U.S. and U.K. information, and that would be final reports, intelligence estimates issued and then handed to us, so that what we did then was virtually [inaudible]. It continued all the way until the Danish parliament passed the law on the 19th of March 2003 to join the so-called Coalition of the Willing, and the parliament in my opinion at that time didn’t receive the information it needed to make a sound decision. I waited to react until about one year later, that was in January or February of this year when I saw that there was an ongoing debate in the Danish parliament where the opposition was in vain trying all the time to get hold on at least some of the documents that the government had that were not at that time presented to the parliament, and I couldn’t as a democratic citizen live with the fact that the government was withholding crucial documents. So, finally, I decided to make contact to these journalists who wanted to see some hard facts, hard evidence, before they would run a story on it. I only had had a few days to decide whether I would hand out the documents or not, and finally, I did.
AMY GOODMAN: And Major Frank Grevil, what do you face right now? You are going to trial?
MAJOR FRANK GREVIL: Yes. My trial is scheduled to start next month. The verdict is expected on November 2. Actually, I face up to two years imprisonment. I don’t expect it to get such a harsh treatment. Actually, there’s a loophole stating that if the information leaked is vital to the interest of the public, I could actually go scott free. So, I’m not quite certain what will happen, but the good thing is that this is only the first court hearing. There is still the possibility of making an appeal to the next level court, and in my case, I will also see it as a possibility to go to the Supreme Court.
AMY GOODMAN: You are now in Washington, along with Katharine Gun. Do you have a message for government employees perhaps, people in Washington, around the issue of whistleblowing in the U.S. government?
MAJOR FRANK GREVIL: Well, as a non-U.S. citizen, I cannot make an appeal directly to U.S. government employees to reveal whatever information they have, but I can only say that I’m going to do that at home, and I strongly support the U.S. movement, the U.S. network of former whistleblowers or former employees in their efforts to convince present employees to give away whatever they have.
AMY GOODMAN: Katharine Gun, we just have 15 seconds. I ask you the same question about a message you have to government employees, perhaps, or others in this country?
KATHARINE GUN: Yeah, well, like Frank, as a non-U.S. citizen, I cannot advocate or pressure people to do anything. All I can say is that you have to live with your conscience at the end of your life, and it’s the only thing that you have that belongs to yourself and nobody else. So, I would just say always follow conscience.
AMY GOODMAN: Katharine Gun and Major Frank Grevil, I want to thank you for being with us.
Reviews of The Hidden Hand
Aldrich has certainly dug deep. The result is a masterly history of the British intelligence effort during the first two decades of the cold war, and its interaction with that of America. It is not only extraordinarily well researched and judicious, but also lively and full of fascinating detail … This is a story that needs to be told. Aldrich makes clear that, while these activities had more than their fair share of fruitcakes and adventurers, many of those involved believed that they were on the front line of freedom’s defences.
Alan Judd in The Sunday Telegraph 1 July 2001 >
…a major contribution to the history of the second half of the 20th century … Subjects include early Anglo-US tensions over issues that might have made the Cold War hot, attitudes towards assassinations, Whitehall battles for control of the intelligence community, the bugging of embassies and offices, how defectors were treated in Moscow, the success of the Berlin Tunnel (and other tunnels, unidentified), CIA funding of the European Movement and the value of secret service in terms of its contribution to transparency.
George Walden in The Evening Standard 23 July 2001 >
From riveting case-histories of individual operations to the furious intrigues of the transatlantic intelligence community , from the unsung role of the low-level agent to the evolution of electronic espionage – everything is here … Aldrich has a gift for conveying a sense of living history, combing colourful detail of this or that episode with the grand strategies that drove the intelligence men.
Cal McCrystal in The Financial Times 1 July 2001 >
What makes Aldrich’s book so delightful is its abundance of marvellous anecdote … Miles Copeland, the CIA’s new station chief in Cairo at the time of the Suez crisis, had little time for US ambassadors and was a bit of a cowboy. As station chief in Syria in 1950 Copeland was blamed for a series of army coups that “eventually led to an increasingly pro-Soviet dictatorship”. He was moved to Cairo after a wild party during which guns were fired through the ceiling. Indeed, an Aldrich sub-theme is the extent to which British and American secret agents frequently unnerved their own governments more than the regimes they were supposed to monitor subvert or liberate.
John Crossland in The Independent on Sunday 1 July 2001 >
The first full account of the shadowy war by proxy which dominated the post-1945 world. It is unauthorised history at its most incisive … In Aldrich’s most dramatic discovery, the retiring Director of British Naval Intelligence disclosed to Churchill’s government that the Americans “had gone ahead to prepare for an inevitable clash of arms with the Soviet Union fixed for mid or late 1952”. Vice Admiral Eric Longley-Cook warned, “it is doubtful whether, in year’s time the US will be able to control the Frankenstein’s monster which they are creating. There is a definitive risk of the USA becoming involved in a preventative war against Russia, however firmly their Nato allies object”.
Donald Cameron Watt in The Literary Review July 2001 >
Intelligence, subversion, hidden propaganda, counter-intelligence, and deception – all are different aspects of the same game. And intelligence nowadays includes not only the human intelligence-gatherer, but also the photographic; the interception and breaking of the communications systems of other governments and agencies; and the reading of electronic signals by which missiles can be guided. Where once the spy crouched behind a bush with a deerstalker hat, now he listens to electronic signals, reads satellite photographs and analyses traces left on infrared photographs … It is a truly remarkable work, showing how the culture of secret warfare rose and then waned after reaching its peak in the early Sixties.
Raymond Seitz in The Times 4 July 2001 >
… a superlative record of Anglo-American intelligence collection, co-operation and competition from the final days of the Second World war to the mid 1960s … His conclusion is that the history of the Cold War is like an iceberg, with the bulky mass submerged in the deep. The whole truth may never be known but this book throws a strong light.
Max Hastings in The Sunday Telegraph ‘Books of the Year’ 2 December 2001
The Hidden Hand by Richard Aldrich (John Murray) is as good an account of Cold War Intelligence between 1945 and 1962 as we are likely to get for some time.
John Booth in Tribune 11 January 2002 >
Some books are so good they make the imagination leap. The Hidden Hand, Richard Aldrich’s meticulously factual account of British and American spookery … is hugely impressive. Amid the flim flam and froth that passes for so much political writing this is the real stuff.
David Ellwood in History Today May 2002 >
Aldrich’s book is an outstanding achievement of research, synthesis and clear exposition. There are no major aspects of the Cold War, of British external policy and Anglo-American relations down to the end of Empire which remain unchanged by his findings.
Raymond Garthoff in Political Science Quarterly Summer 2002>
This is a substantial work in content as well as size. The role of intelligence activities and assessments in the cold war is only beginning to get the attention it deserves, and this detailed volume makes a real contribution … Among the conclusions, the author finds the “hidden hand” of Anglo-American co-operation in the field of intelligence, and especially the British contribution, to have been a major factor in the development and maintenance of the overall special relationship between the two counties…
The particular value of Aldrich’s study is the detailed review of intelligence activities based on the available record. The record is, needless to note, incomplete, but Aldrich has mined declassified UK and US materials assiduously, as well as other archival sources, personals papers and published accounts. Among other things he presents the first extensive account of the covert American funding of the movement for European unity…
The hidden hand of covert intelligence operations represented a crucial dimension of policy and policy implementation for waging the cold war below the threshold of real war. Aldrich’s contribution is in showing in impressive detail how the United Kingdom and the United States, mainly in collaboration, worked to carry out that policy.
Richard Crockatt in International Affairs Autumn 2002 >
This is a monumental book, not only in size but in intellectual scope and achievement. Those (including the present reviewer) who have written Cold War history without reference to secret intelligence will have no excuse for doing so in the future. There remain questions about precisely what weight to ascribe to secret intelligence in the larger scheme of things, but Aldrich makes an unassailable case for regarding it as integral to the history of the Cold War in both the domestic and foreign spheres. He is one of a small group of historians who are helping to re-write the history of the Cold War for the point of view of intelligence. Indeed on of Aldrich’s most striking conclusions is that the secret services ‘accelerated the transformation of the Cold War from an old-fashioned conflict between states into a subversive conflict between societies’.
The hidden hand covers the ‘golden age’ of secret intelligence from 1941 until around 1963 at which point a rash of spy scandals led to an ‘era of exposure’ which complicated the life of intelligence services. Aldrich covers all the fields of intelligence – human, signals, photographic, electronic, etc. – and has an enviable grasp of the organizational complexities … Undoubtedly, the most important conclusion Aldrich draws is that it was ‘intelligence power’ which allowed Britain to ‘punch above its weight’ in the international arena after 1945. Indeed the special relationship owed more to intelligence than any other field, with the possible exception of atomic co-operation.
Peter Jackson in Twentieth Century British History Autumn 2003 >
The best writing about intelligence analyses secret services as both tools of policy and political agents in their won right. Richard Aldrich does this admirably in bothIntelligence and the War Against Japan and The Hidden Hand which make a major contribution to our understanding of both the role of intelligence in British and American policy since 1939 and the nature of the cold war. Aldrich has set a new standard of excellence for historians interested in the study of intelligence and international relations.
For Aldrich, intelligence is much more than a mere tool of policy, it is a window into the aims and assumptions that shape policy making at every level. Both books demonstrate the degree to which intelligence not only informed policy, but also played an increasing role in shaping the character of international relations in the second half of the twentieth century … The result is a very sophisticated analytical approach that will push the study of intelligence forward as an important component in the political and cultural history of twentieth century international relations.
Jerome Elie in the SAIS Review Spring 2004 >
James Bond symbolizes the popular appeal of any story related to the intelligence services. Yet, until recently, this interest had not been matched by academic publications. As Professor Richard J. Aldrich rightly asserts in his book, The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and the Cold War Secret Intelligence, “only a minority of scholars has yet attempted to integrate secret service with international history.” By addressing this issue in the context of Anglo-American relations from June 1941 to the end of 1963, this brilliant book fills two major gaps of international relations historiography. Indeed being one of the first serious and well-documented scholarly assessments of the impact of secret services on the Cold war, this study is also a major contribution to the history of the so-called “Special Relationship”. By shedding light on “the ‘Missing Dimension’ of history”, Aldrich also focuses on an understudied themes of Anglo-American relations – the intelligence field.