Volume One of the Official History of the Joint Intelligence Committee draws upon a range of released and classified papers to produce the first, authoritative account of the way in which intelligence was used to inform policy. For almost 80 years the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) has been a central player in the secret machinery of the British Government, providing a co-ordinated intelligence service to policy makers, drawing upon the work of the intelligence agencies and Whitehall departments. Since its creation, reports from the JIC have contributed to almost every key foreign policy decision taken by the British Government. This volume covers the evolution of the JIC since 1936 and culminates with its role in the events of Suez in 1956. This book will be of much interest to students of intelligence studies, British politics, international diplomacy, security studies and International Relations in general. Dr Michael S. Goodman is Reader in Intelligence and International Affairs in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. He is author or editor of five previous books, including the Routledge Companion to Intelligence Studies (2013).

For more than half a century, the Joint Intelligence Committee or 'JIC' has been a central component of the British Government's secret machinery. It represents the highest authority in the world of intelligence and acts as a broker between the spy and the policy-maker. From WWII to the War in Iraq, and from the Falklands to the IRA, it has been involved in almost every key foreign policy decision. This book reveals the declassified papers of the JIC, shining a light on the workings of Whitehall's secret world and the vital, previously unknown, role played by intelligence in pivotal events across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The records of the Joint Intelligence Committee, Britain's senior intelligence body, are now being released to the public on the same basis as other official papers. As a result, historians have available a unique archive revealing British thinking at the highest level about the world situation and threats confronting the West in the critical years after World War II. This book, by Sir Percy Cradock - for many years himself Chairman of the JIC as well as the Prime Minister's Foreign Policy Advisor - explores these hitherto top secret records and the interplay of JIC estimates and warnings with British foreign policy decisions over the first 23 years from 1945. He concentrates on the great crises of the Cold War, Berlin, Korea, Suez, Cuba, Vietnam and Czechoslovakia, but also examines some lesser emergencies involving Britain alone, such as Kuwait, confrontation with Indonesia, and Rhodesia. He compares the British organization and performance with the parallel system of US intelligence and the very different machinery of the KGB. In a final chapter he reflects on the intimate relations between intelligence and policy, and how Britain adjusted to a long period of declining power. This study aims to be a valuable addition to historical knowledge and to offer an insight into the development of Western as well as British foreign policy.

President Truman shuttered the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) as an unneeded, wartime-only special operations/quasi-intelligence agency. The State Department, the Navy, and the War Department quickly recognized that a secret information vacuum loomed and urged the creation of something to replace OSS. These previously declassified and released documents present the thoughtful albeit tortuous and contentious creation of CIA, culminating in the National Security Act of 1947. The declassified historic material dissects the twists and turns and displays the considerable political and legal finesse required to assess the many plans, suggestions, maneuvers and actions that ultimately led to the establishment of the Central Intelligence Agency and other national security entities, which included the incorporation of special safeguards to protect civil liberties. Copies of selected intelligence documents and a timeline of miliestones in the creation of the US Intelligence Community from 1941 through 1964 are included in this resource.

This book is the first history of UK economic intelligence and offers a new perspective on the evolution of Britain's national intelligence machinery and how it worked during the Cold War. British economic intelligence has a longer pedigree than the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) and was the vanguard of intelligence coordination in Whitehall, yet it remains a missing field in intelligence studies. This book is the first history of this core government capability and shows how central it was to the post-war evolution of Whitehall's national intelligence machinery. It places special emphasis on the Joint Intelligence Bureau and Defence Intelligence Staff - two vital organisations in the Ministry of Defence underpinning the whole Whitehall intelligence edifice, but almost totally ignored by historians. Intelligence in Whitehall was not conducted in a parallel universe. This contrasts with the conventional wisdom which accepts the uniqueness of intelligence as a government activity and is symbolised by the historical profile of the JIC. The study draws on the official archives to show that the mantra of the existence of a semi-autonomous UK intelligence community cannot be sustained against the historical evidence of government departments using the machinery of government to advance their traditional priorities. Rivalries within and between agencies and departments, and their determination to resist any central encroachment on their authority, emasculated a truly professional multi-skilled capability in Whitehall at the very moment when it was needed to address emerging global economic issues. This book will be of much interest to students of British government and politics, intelligence studies, defence studies, security studies and international relations in general.

With practical experience both of field work and of the intelligence bureaucracy at home and abroad, Stewart examines successes and failures via case studies, considers the limitations and usefulness of the intelligence product, and warns against the tendency to abuse or ignore it when its conclusions do not fit with preconceived ideas.