Spies! What a great title! I could feel the ground shift within the first few pages of Calder Walton’s blockbuster accounting of the twentieth century “epic intelligence war between east and west.” Cold War historiography is again on the move and Walton, who is the assistant director of the Belfer Center’s Applied History Project, at…
Tag: espionage
H-Diplo | RJISSF Commentary III-2 on Marc Trachtenberg, “Operation Farewell and the Siberian Pipeline Explosion”
It is a treat to read something, anything, that Marc Trachtenberg writes. The reasons go beyond the originality and authority of his substantive contributions to international history and international relations. Trachtenberg focused on European foreign relations before shifting to the United States, and, as is well known, trained in history and a titan in the…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 15-50 on Macrakis, Nothing is Beyond Our Reach
This is, admittedly, a difficult introduction to write. It is difficult not only because Kristie Macrakis’s final work, Nothing is Beyond Our Reach: America’s Techno-Spy Empire elicited complicated responses from the reviewers in this roundtable. No, this introduction is particularly difficult because I find myself unable to divorce from the discussion my own personal experiences…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Review Essay 69: Bolsinger on Sims, Decision Advantage
In Decision Advantage, political scientist and former intelligence practitioner Jennifer E. Sims argues that intelligence activities have played a greater role in history than is generally acknowledged. Rather than adopting standard definitions of intelligence as stealing secrets or simply “what intelligence agencies do,” Sims defines it as competitive purposeful learning and an outgrowth of normal…
Forum 4 on “An INS Special Forum: Implications of the Snowden Leaks”
From the very beginning of the nation’s history, intelligence has been set aside as a conspicuous exception to James Madison’s advocacy of checks-and-balances, spelled out in his Federalist Paper No. 51. The ‘auxiliary precautions’ that this key participant at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 (and later America’s fourth President) — the safeguards he had helped…