Download or read book MI5 at War 1909 1918 written by Chris Northcott and published by Tattered Flag. This book was released on 2015-06-19 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The years 1909-1918 can be regarded as formative for MI5, an era in which it developed from a small counterespionage bureau into an established security intelligence agency. MI5 had two main roles during this period; counterespionage, and advising the War Office on how to deal with the police and the civilian population, particularly foreign nationals in Britain. Using hitherto neglected documents from official archives, this study examines how MI5 foiled the spies of the Kaiser during the First World War, paying particular attention to the preventive measures the organization instituted to frustrate espionage and how its investigations to cure espionage were conducted. In so doing, intelligence specialist, Chris Northcott, also delivers an appreciation of how MI5 saw its work as being divided between preventive measures and investigative work, providing an informative and intriguing insight into MI5s development during its first ten years. MI5 began as a one-man affair in 1909, tasked with the limited remit of ascertaining the extent of German espionage in Britain amidst an uncertain future. By the armistice MI5s role had expanded considerably and it had begun to develop into an established security intelligence agency, with hundreds of personnel spread over six branches covering the investigation of espionage, records, ports and travelers and alien workers at home and overseas. This book offers an original and important contribution to our knowledge of the origins of Britains security services. In using the example of MI5s contest against German spies during the First World War era, it forms a groundbreaking study of counterespionage strategy and tactics, and it poses the stimulating question of how to measure the effectiveness of a counterespionage agency. It also sets out probably the most detailed description of MI5s organizational structure available.
Download or read book Children at War 1914 1918 written by Vivien Newman and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2019-03-30 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of We Also Served examines what life was like for children during World War I. For most British readers, the phrase “children during the war” conjures up images of the evacuees of the Second World War. Somehow, surprisingly, the children of the Great War have been largely and unjustifiably overlooked. However, this book takes readers to the heart of the Children’s War 1914-1918. The age range covered, from birth to 17 years, as well as the richness of children’s own writings and the breadth of English, French, and German primary and secondary sources, allows readers to experience wartime childhood and adolescence from multiple, multi-national standpoints. These include: British infants in the nursery; German children at school; French and Belgian youngsters living with the enemy in their occupied homelands; Australian girls and boys knitting socks for General Birdwood, (Commander-in-Chief of the Australian Imperial Force); Girl Guides working for MI5; youthful Ukrainian/Canadians wrongfully interned; German children held as prisoners of war in Siberia; teenage deckhands on the Lusitania; not to mention the rebellious underage Cossack girl who served throughout the war on the Eastern Front, as well as the youngest living recipient of the VC. At times humorous, at others terrifying, this book totally alters perceptions of what it was like to be young in the First World War. Readers will marvel at children’s courage, ingenuity, patriotism, and pacifism, and wholeheartedly agree with the child who stated, “What was done to us was wrong.”
Download or read book Germany s Covert War in the Middle East written by Curt Prüfer and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-12-11 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ultimately these cross purposes brought disaster, pulling a fatally weak and woefully unprepared Ottoman state into a global war, and unleashing vicious, internal ethnic repression that brought it defeat and dismemberment. The diaries and official reports of German spy and propagandist Curt Prufer - translated here into English in their entirety for the first time - chronicle the complexities of the fragile Ottoman-German alliance from the perspective of a participant. Much like fellow soldier-scholar T.E. Lawrence, Prufer and his colleagues tried to steal the loyalties of the Muslim subjects of the opposing sides. The book explores these episodes of sabotage, subversion and subterfuge - from managing spies to preparing for the attack on the Suez Canal in 1915 - and in the process sheds light onto the ways World War I played out across the Middle East. Complemented throughout by in-depth and meticulously researched footnotes, this primary source collection is an invaluable addition to the extant corpus of late Ottoman and World War I historical documents.
Download or read book A Liberal Chronicle in Peace and War written by Cameron Hazlehurst and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-07-03 with total page 597 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jack Pease was at the heart of the British Liberal government from 1908 to 1915, holding the position of Chief Whip through two general elections, and a member of the Cabinet confronting domestic tumult, international tensions, and war. Pease was an unassuming participant in the deliberations of a unique gathering of political talent. His journals as President of the Board of Education from 1911 to the formation of the coalition ministry in 1915 are a closely observed, unvarnished record of what he saw and heard in Downing St and Westminster: constitutional and Home Rule crises, industrial conflict, electoral reform, women's suffrage controversies, struggles over budgets, naval estimates, and foreign policy. Despite his Quaker beliefs, Pease committed to supporting war against Germany, and his troubled conscience is laid bare in letters to his wife and friends. Replete with intimate portraits of his revered chief H. H. Asquith and the Prime Minister's social circle, the journals also provide evocative observations of the contest of ideas, arguments, and moods of prominent contemporaries, especially David Lloyd George as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Winston Churchill as Home Secretary then First Lord of the Admiralty, and Lord Kitchener as Secretary of State for War. Pease's candid accounts, augmented by the diaries and letters of others privy to Cabinet policy secrets and personal rivalries, reveal the stories not told in the Prime Minister's reports to the King. Together with the editors' biographical introduction, extensive explanatory commentaries, and bibliographical guidance, Pease's text provides a uniquely comprehensive understanding of Asquith's Liberal government in peace and war.
Download or read book Suffragism and the Great War written by Vivien Newman and published by Casemate Publishers. This book was released on 2018-05-30 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Join Dr Vivien Newman, arm in arm, with some of the formidable women of the pre-First World War suffrage and anti-suffrage movements as, on the declaration of war, they turn their considerable skills, honed over 50 years of active campaigning, to both support of the war and the pursuit of peace.Get to know how these women could bend politicians' wills to their own, challenge and break the many role-norms of contemporary patriarchal society, raise hundreds of thousands of pounds in voluntary contributions and help convince the US public to join the Allied Cause.This book explodes many myths, including the simplistic idea that it was women's war service alone which led to their partial enfranchisement in 1918 as some form of reward from a grateful nation.Vivien Newman reveals a social tapestry which is both complex and infinitely fascinating, one of old friendships broken and new ones formed, shifting alliances and bitter rivalries, of loyalties and even betrayals.
Download or read book The Beautiful Spy written by David Tremain and published by The History Press. This book was released on 2019-04-05 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In September 1940 a beautiful young woman arrived by seaplane and rubber dinghy on the shores of Scotland accompanied by two men – one of Germany's many attempt to penetrate British defences and infiltrate spies into the UK. This seems to be one of the few established facts in the otherwise mysterious tale of Vera Eriksen. Even the origins of the woman described as 'the most beautiful spy' remain hazy, as does her ultimate fate. David Tremain delves into the archives, and in doing so begins to reveal glimpses of her fascinating life story: her career as a dancer in Paris; a tumultuous and violent dalliance with a White Russian officer of uncertain identity; her time in England with the Duchesse de Château-Thierry, an Abwehr agent; the suspicious and untimely death of her husband, and a rumoured pregnancy. The Beautiful Spy also grapples with perhaps the biggest mystery of all: what happened to Vera after she was released by the British?
Download or read book Spies Spin and the Fourth Estate written by Lashmar Paul Lashmar and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-02 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Combining his expertise as a national security correspondent and research academic, Paul Lashmar reveals how and why the media became more critical in its reporting of the Secret State. He explores a series of major case studies including Snowden, WikiLeaks, Spycatcher, rendition and torture, and MI5's vetting of the BBC - most of which he reported on as they happened. He discusses the issues that news coverage raises for democracy and gives you a deeper understanding of how intelligence and the media function, interact and fit into structures of power and knowledge.
Download or read book The Venlo Sting written by Norman Ridley and published by Casemate. This book was released on 2022-12-01 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "I would recommend the book to intelligence practitioners, scholars, and other persons interested in World War II intelligence history." —Michael Nady, American Intelligence Journal On 9 November 1939, two unsuspecting British agents of the Special Intelligence Services walked into a trap set by German Spymaster Reinhard Heydrich. Believing that they were meeting a dissident German general for talks about helping German military opposition to bring down Hitler and end the war, they were instead taken captive in the Dutch village of Venlo and whisked away to Germany for interrogation by the Gestapo. The incident was a huge embarrassment for the Dutch government and provided the Germans with significant intelligence about SIS operations throughout Europe. The incident itself was an intelligence catastrophe but it also acts as a prism through which a number of other important narrative strands pass. Fundamental to the subterfuge perpetrated at Venlo were unsubstantiated but insistent rumours of high-ranking German generals plotting to overthrow the Nazi regime from within. After the humiliation suffered when Hitler tore up the Munich Agreement, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was anxious to see just how much truth there was in these stories; keen to rehabilitate his reputation through one last effort to find a peaceful rapprochement with Germany. When Franz Fischer, a small-time petty crook and agent provocateur, persuaded British SIS operatives in the Netherlands that he could act as a go-between for the British government with disaffected German generals, the German Security chief Reinhard Heydrich stepped in and quietly took control of the operation. Heydrich’s boss, head of the Gestapo Heinrich Himmler, was anxious to explore the possibility of peace negotiations with Britain and saw an opportunity to exploit the situation for his personal benefit. On the day before a crucial meeting of conspirators and British agents on the Dutch-German border, a bomb exploded in the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich in the exact spot where Hitler had stood to deliver a speech only minutes earlier. The perpetrator was quickly arrested, and Hitler demanded that Himmler find evidence to show that the two events were intimately connected—the British agents were snatched hours later. While the world was coming to terms with the fearsome power of German military might the British intelligence capability in northern Europe was consigned to the dustbin in the sleepy Dutch town of Venlo. This first full account of the Venlo incident explores the wider context of this German intelligence coup, and its consequences.
Download or read book Reading Hitler s Mind written by Norman Ridley and published by Frontline Books. This book was released on 2022-07-20 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most strongly associated with Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, it is often stated that Britain’s policy of appeasement was instituted in the 1930s in the hope of avoiding war with Hitler’s Nazi Germany. At the time, appeasement was viewed by many as a popular and seemingly pragmatic policy. In this book the author sets out to show how appeasement was not a naïve attempt to secure a lasting peace by resolving German grievances, but a means of buying time for rearmament. By the middle of the 1930s, British policy was based on the presumption that the balance of power had already dramatically shifted in Germany’s favour. It was felt that Britain, chiefly for economic reasons, was unable to restore the balance, and that extensive concessions to Germany would not satisfy Hitler, whose aggressive policies intensified the already high risk of war.. The only realistic option, and one that was clearly adopted by Neville Chamberlain, was to try to influence the timing of the inevitable military confrontation and, in the meantime, pursue a steady and economically sustainable program of rearmament. Appeasement would ‘buy’ that time for the British government. Crucially this strategy required continuously updated and accurate information about the strength, current and future, of the German armed forces, especially the Luftwaffe, and an understanding of their military strategy. Piercing the Nazis’ veil of secrecy was vital if the intelligence services were to build up a true picture of the extent of German rearmament and the purposes to which it might be put. The many agents, codebreakers, and counter-espionage personnel played a vital role in maximising the benefits that appeasement provided – even as war clouds continued to gather. These individuals were increasingly handed greater responsibility in a bid to inform British statesmen now scrambling to prepare for a catastrophic confrontation with Germany. In Reading Hitler’s Mind, Norman Ridley reveals the remarkable efforts made by the tiny, underfunded and often side-lined British intelligence services as they sought to inform those whose role it was to make decisions upon which the wheels of history turned.
Download or read book Studies in Intelligence written by and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Michael Collins and the Anglo Irish War written by J. B. E. Hittle and published by Potomac Books, Inc.. This book was released on 2011-10-01 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As leader of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and then the Irish Republican Army (IRA), Michael Collins developed a bold, new strategy to use against the British administration of Ireland in the early twentieth century. His goal was to attack its well-established system of spies and informers, wear down British forces with a sustained guerrilla campaign, and force a political settlement that would lead to a free Irish Republic. Michael Collins and the Anglo-Irish War reveals that the success of the Irish insurgency was not just a measure of Collins’s revolutionary genius, as has often been claimed. British miscalculations, overconfidence, and a failure to mount a sustained professional intelligence effort to neutralize the IRA contributed to Britain’s defeat. Although Britain possessed the world’s most professional secret service, the British intelligence community underwent a politically driven and ill-advised reorganization in early 1919, at the very moment that Collins and the IRA were going on the offensive. Once Collins neutralized the local colonial spy service, the British had no choice but to import professional secret service agents. But Britain’s wholesale reorganization of its domestic counterintelligence capability sidelined its most effective countersubversive agency, MI5, leaving the job of intelligence management in Ireland to Special Branch civilians and a contingent of quickly trained army case officers, neither group being equipped—or inclined—to mount a coordinated intelligence effort against the insurgents. Britain’s appointment of a national intelligence director for home affairs in 1919—just as the Irish revolutionary parliament published its Declaration of Independence—was the decisive factor leading to Britain’s disarray against the IRA. By the time the War Office reorganized its intelligence effort against Collins in mid-1920, it was too late to reverse the ascendancy of the IRA. Michael Collins and the Anglo-Irish War takes a fresh approach to the subject, presenting it as a case study in intelligence management under conditions of a broader counterinsurgency campaign. The lessons learned from this disastrous episode have stark relevance for contemporary national security managers and warfighters currently engaged in the war on terrorism.
Download or read book Triplex written by Nigel West and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2009-09-22 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reveals the nature and extent of the damage done to the British intelligence establishment during the Second World War by the 'Cambridge Five' spy ring: Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross.
Download or read book The Security Service 1908 1945 written by John Court Curry and published by Public Record Office Publications. This book was released on 1999 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This history of M.I.5 remained Top Secret for over 50 years. It is now revealed and includes details of British intelligence's many coups from World War II.
Download or read book The Records of the War Office and Related Departments 1660 1964 written by Michael Roper and published by Public Record Office Publications. This book was released on 1998 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This guide covers the period from the Restoration of Charles II to the establishment of the Ministry of Defence in 1964. It includes the records of the Board of Ordnance, military intelligence and military aviation.
Download or read book Empire of Secrets written by Calder Walton and published by ABRAMS. This book was released on 2014-10-29 with total page 461 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The renowned espionage historian offers “a gripping account of British intelligence during the last days of empire” (The Daily Telegraph). Drawing on a wealth of newly declassified records and hitherto overlooked personal papers, intelligence expert Calder Walton offers a compelling and authoritative history of Britain’s espionage activities after World War II. A major addition to intelligence literature, this is the first book to utilize records from the Foreign Office’s secret archive, which contains some of the darkest and most shameful secrets from the last days of Britain’s empire. Working clandestinely, MI5 operatives helped to prop up newly independent states across the globe against a ceaseless campaign of Communist subversion. Though the CIA is often assumed to be the principal actor against the Soviet Union through the Cold War, Britain plays a key role through its so-called “special relationship” with the United States. In Empire of Secrets, Walton sheds new light on everything from violent counterinsurgencies fought by British forces in the jungles of Malaya and Kenya, to urban warfare campaigns conducted in Palestine and the Arabian Peninsula. The stories here have chilling contemporary resonance, detailing the use and abuse of intelligence by governments that oversaw state-sanctioned terrorism, wartime rendition, and “enhanced” interrogation. “An important and highly original account of postwar British intelligence.” —The Wall Street Journal
Download or read book Historical Dictionary of British Intelligence written by Nigel West and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2014-02-18 with total page 787 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: British Intelligence is the oldest, most experienced organization of its kind in the world, the unseen hand behind so many world events, and glamorized by James Bond. Despite the change in role, from a global power controlling an Empire that covered much of the world, to a mere partner in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union, the country’s famed security and intelligence apparatus continues largely intact, and recognized as “punching above its weight.” Feared by the Soviets, admired and trusted by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), British Intelligence has provided the hidden dimension to the conduct of domestic and foreign policy, with the added mystique of Whitehall secrecy, a shroud that for years protected the identities of the shadowy figures who recruited the sources, broke the codes, and caught the spies. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of the British Intelligence covers the history through a chronology, an introductory essay, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 1,000 cross-referenced entries on specific operations, spies and their handlers, the moles and defectors, top leaders, and main organizations. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the British Intelligence.
Download or read book The History and Practice of the Political Police in Britain written by Tony Bunyan and published by London : Friedmann. This book was released on 1976 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
