‘Invisible Government’ and Intelligence Crusaders: Three Cold War Espionage Biographies

Peter Grose, Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994. 641 pp. $51.00 (cloth).

Oleg Kalugin, Spy Master: My 32 Years in Intelligence and Espionage Against the West. London: Smith Gryphon, 1995. 375 pp. $19.95 (paper).

Oleg Gordievsky, Next Stop Execution. London: Macmillan, 1995. 404 pp. No price given.     

‘Never a Machine for Propaganda’? The Australian-American Fulbright Program and Australia's Cold War

Abstract

Some overlap in personnel between the Australian-American Fulbright board and those advising Menzies on anti-communist legislation and the 1951 referendum, including former Chief Justice J. G. Latham, raises questions about the politicisation of the Fulbright program over this period. A careful reconstruction of the Australian scheme's founding years reveals, however, that the program resisted becoming a simple instrument of Cold War foreign policy. This was thanks to careful groundwork laid by Evatt's Department of External Affairs, ensuring a measure of independence to the Australian board, and board member Latham's strategic defence of the program's educational goals when pressures were felt.     

Disciplining technology: Electronic reliability,Cold‐War military culture and the topside ionogram

Abstract

This essay explores the relationship between cold‐war military electronics and the material culture of space science. Focusing on the world's first ionospheric research satellite, designed and built by the Canadian Defence Research Telecommunications Establishment at the height of the Cold War, it seeks to situate the practices and beliefs that underwrote the reliability of this instrument within more profound changes in electronics and electrical engineering during the 1950s. Rather than invoke a monolithic culture of reliability to explain the work of satellite technicians and engineers, this investigation identifies instead two principle approaches to the question of reliability in cold‐war electronics, their origin in the shortcomings of industrial electronics after the Second World War, as well as the place of the satellite project within them. By concentrating our attention on the conceptual and technical dimensions of electronic reliability, radier than on more traditional aspects of solid‐state research and industrial innovation, we can understand how technicians and engineers, developing weapons systems and scientific instruments alike, struggled to understand and use operationally and cognitively unstable electronic devices, and what these struggles suggest about the complex material and social legacy of the Cold War.     

Something to Compete with ‘Gunsmoke’: ‘The Big Picture’ Television series and selling a ‘modern,progressive and forward thinking’ Army to Cold War America

Airing from 1951 until 1971, ‘The Big Picture’ was the United States Army’s primary means of marketing itself to the U.S. public, particularly between the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Drawing for the first time on archival records concerning the show’s production, this paper documents how information officers sought to escape the stock-footage straightjacket embedded in the show’s origins and showcase an Atomic Age Army standing sentry at the Cold War’s ramparts. Ultimately, they fought dual losing battles against parsimonious budgets and public indifference, while their insistence on content control hampered potential exposure in more appealing prime-time entertainment programmes.     

‘History Has Begun a New Chapter’: US Political-Opinion Journals and the Outbreak of the Korean War

In the pages of the United States’ leading political-opinion journals, different ideological camps had very different answers to the issues raised by the outbreak of war in Korea in the summer of 1950. Left liberals placed a great deal of blame for the outbreak of war on South Korean President Syngman Rhee, while conservatives and hawkish liberals used the occasion to lambast President Truman and Secretary of State Acheson. Hawkish liberals welcomed the possibility of a global showdown with Communism, while conservatives disapproved of US intervention in Korea for reasons both political and constitutional. In sum, the debate that dominated the pages of US opinion journals in the first weeks and months of the Korean War was both heated and robust, and exposes the ideological fault lines of the early cold war. To wit, hawkish liberals held positions that anticipated the birth of neoconservatism some two decades later. And conservative voices utilised their newfound platforms in The Freeman and The American Mercury to attack the Truman administration on a whole host of foreign-policy issues, revealing in greater detail than has previously been shown the role that international affairs played in the birth of the New American Right.     

‘Mightier Than Marx’: Hassoldt Davis and American Cold War Politics in Postwar Ivory Coast

ABSTRACT

Using the travels of Hassoldt Davis in Ivory Coast to explore the global Cold War in French West Africa in the 1950s, this article argues that the main line of confrontation in the postwar era did not always pit Americans against Russians. In many instances, the struggle for the mind and soul of Africans was between the Americans and the French. The study highlights the role of everyday technology in the expansion of the American informal empire. By focusing on Davis and the significance of low-tech artifacts, the article suggests that in our scrutiny of Cold War science/technology, we need to supplement the study of the various production regimes of consumer goods with a comparable research on consumption and how they mediated the daily battles of the era. Such approach not only underscores the historical reality of the ‘social life of things’, but also gives agency to non-state actors as both users of Cold War technoscience and as participants in the politics that informed its mobilization on the world stage. Besides bringing Francophone Africa in the historiography of US–Africa relations, the article demonstrates a convergence of vision among American consular agents, US transnational corporations and an idiosyncratic travel writer.     

Aligning the Non-Aligned: a re-interpretation of why and how Sweden was granted access to US military materiel in the early Cold War, 1948–1952

The article argues that previous research into how Sweden came to be eligible to purchase armaments in the United States in the early Cold War has misread the historical evidence. Instead of there being a change in US policy in early 1950, as has been argued by several Cold War scholars, this article states that it was the incremental changes of Sweden’s security policy that eventually made the US government view the Swedes as possible non-aligned allies in the Cold War. The difference is crucial. The Swedish adherence to the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (CoCom) embargo is a critical factor when trying to understand the perceived change in the US policy, because this was a confirmation of the Swedish consent to US hegemony in Western Europe. Furthermore, this article argues that, contrary to what prior research has assumed, it was never part of US policy to get Sweden to join the North Atlantic Treaty (NAT or NATO later). The evidence for assuming that this was ever a US policy objective is simply lacking. The article thus presents a much needed re-evaluation of US–Swedish security relations during the late 1940s and early 1950s.     

‘Brushing up your empire’: Dominion and colonial propaganda on the BBC's home services, 1939–45

The paper will investigate the growing importance in the late nineteenth century of civic identity in helping nurture a sense of ‘local patriotism’ during an imperial crisis. In doing so it will challenge recent studies that suggest working-class patriotism was a ‘top-down phenomenon’ or simply a devotion to nationhood and empire cultivated by state institutions and imperialist mass commercial leisure. This study will adopt a more nuanced approach and argue that working-class patriotism characteristically prioritised local identity over the national. In contrasting three English communities during the Boer War, it will be argued that, by the end of the nineteenth century, changes in the local press, the development of civic identity and a growth of a popular local patriotism became fused, at key moments, with grand imperial adventures. Viewed within this context, the great desire to celebrate the volunteers was not so much an example of successful state hegemony but more an amplification of local patriotism within an imperial setting.     

‘Fighters without guns’: humanitarianism and military action in the aftermath of the Second World War

Abstract

This paper makes a contribution to the debate about the interplay between military action and humanitarian aid. It takes on the case study of post-World War Two Europe and in particular the activity carried out by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), which offers a useful key for highlighting the entanglements between relief and reconstruction projects. It is from this perspective that the interaction between humanitarianism and military undertakings also acquires a special meaning, which recalls both the development of the international aid regime and the post-war history of Western countries. The matter will be addressed from two points of view. First to be analysed is the set of agreements stipulated by UNRRA and military authorities, for the zones under Allied administration after the liberation, but also with respect to specific areas of intervention, like the Displaced Persons Operations. The terms of the official agreements allow the delineation of the tasks actually assigned to the agency by the United Nations and the role of control and protection reserved for military organizations. Based on the formal agreements, it is already possible to reconstruct a vision of relief understood as the result of the inextricably linked action of military and humanitarian actors. Next, the interplay between different interpretations of activities to help civilians affected by the war will be examined. This section will focus on the personnel deployed by UNRRA, on their origins, and on duties they are called on to fulfil. People with extensive experience in the welfare sector were a substantial part of the personnel, but a significant number of UNRRA employees came from military ranks. This essay, therefore, has a twofold objective. It analyses the normative and institutional frame that shaped relief work in Liberated Europe. At the same time, it aims to uncover competition and cooperation between military and humanitarian actors in the field. The aim is to highlight how the co-construction of the aid operations between military and civilian personnel that occurred during the second post-war period followed a series of complex, nonlinear paths that conditioned the development of the humanitarian regime from within.     

‘The Danger is Two-Fold’: Decolonisation and Cold War in Anti-Communist Asia, 1955–7

This article examines the intersection between the Cold War and decolonisation in anti-Communist Asia in the 1950s. Drawing on the papers of former South Korean President Syngman Rhee housed at Yonsei University, the article explores both the motivations behind as well as the constraints upon South Korea's efforts to cultivate a military alliance in what it called ‘Free Asia’. Articulating some of the concrete political differences between South Korea and its potential partners in Asia, the article argues that Rhee's hardline views of the Cold War were interwoven with his ambivalence about Japan's reintegration in the post-war world. As a result of this intersection between the Cold War and decolonisation, the South Korean President was unable to achieve consensus with the rest of anti-Communist Asia. In exploring this chapter of South Korean diplomacy, the article calls on Cold War diplomatic history to integrate non-Communist Asia and for the historiography of decolonisation to investigate the legacies of Japan's empire in post-war Asia. It also suggests that scholars ought to reflect more deeply on the interrelationship between the Cold War and decolonisation.     

‘A statement against the totalitarian countries of Europe’: human rights and the early Cold War

This article discusses scholarly views on the rise of the human rights paradigm. Based on a case study of the Netherlands it argues that the appeal of human rights cannot simply be attributed to the memory of the Holocaust, or the rise of post-war generations disillusioned with traditional ideologies in the 1960s and especially, the 1970s. Instead, it proposes that human rights primarily owe their popularity to the ideological contest of the Early Cold War, even though means to convey the message all over the world were only available in the decades that followed.     

The ‘superman’ solution: ‘Super soldiers’ and ‘superheroes’ in the United States military

Current US military research focused on the development of pharmacological ‘super soldiers’ – soldiers enhanced through a variety of pharmaceuticals and biomedical technologies to perform far beyond what unenhanced soldiers can do – draws from and often mimics popular or pop-cultural conceptions of the superhero. These biomedical and pharmacological interventions pose profound ethical problems and possibilities that are solved – in part – by imagining the new US super soldier as a superhero. Drugging soldiers to enhance their ability to fight and survive is a frightening proposition, and one that makes people uncomfortable; the solution is to imagine them as superheroes – as positive representations of the enhanced soldier on the side of good, somehow contained and controllable and fundamentally safe and unfrightening.     

Review Article: ‘Managing’ Women in War and Peace

UTE DANIEL.The War from Within: German Working-Class Women in the First World War, trans. Margaret Ries. Oxford and New York: Berg, 1997. Pp. xii, 343. $18.50 (us), paper; DEBORAH THOM. Nice Girls and Rude Girls: Women Workers in World War I. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 1998; dist. New York: St Martin's Press. Pp. xvi, 224. $59.50 (us); FRANCES H. EARLY. A World without War: How US Feminists and Pacifists Resisted World War I. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1997. Pp. xxi, 265. $22.95 (us), paper, LUCY NOAKES. War and the British: Gender, Memory, and National Identity. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 1998; dist. New York: St Martin's Press. Pp. vi, 218. $59.50 (us); JANE SLAUGHTER. Women and the Italian Resistance, 1943–1945. Denver: Arden Press, 1997. Pp. xx, 171. $22.50 (us), paper; DALIA OFER and LENORE J. WEITZMAN, eds., Women in the Holocaust. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998. Pp. vii, 402. $30.00 (us).     

Navigating uncertainty: The interplay of ‘magical football’ and ‘football magic’ in Cameroonian football

Cameroon's Indomitable Lions (a nickname for the Cameroon national football team) are renowned for their ‘magical football’, a term that embodies their extraordinary performances. This article delves into the intertwining concepts of ‘magical football’ and ‘football magic’, seeking to understand how these elements contribute to the Lions’ success. The study reviews historical instances of the Lions’ participation in the Africa Cup of Nations and FIFA World Cup competitions, analyzing how natural football abilities interweave with supernatural enhancement to influence game outcomes. The findings suggest that talent alone does not guarantee victory, and the uncertainty of elements beyond our rational comprehension can significantly impact the game.     

Bayle’s political doctrine: a proposal to articulate tolerance and sovereignty

ABSTRACT

For most interpreters of the philosopher from Rotterdam, his political doctrine is solely a consequence of his religious and moral doctrines, and so an image of Bayle as a political philosopher is not usually presented. To my mind, however, only by analyzing his political doctrine can the extent of his religious proposal be understood. In this article, I intend to show that both the Baylean criticism of popular sovereignty and his rejection of the right of resistance are analyses that are indissociable from the Baylean doctrine of tolerance. The protection of individual freedom of conscience and the defense of a multi-confessional state model, tolerant regarding religious minorities, can only be articulated as historical reality if they rest on the political doctrine of indivisible sovereignty and on the strictest separation between political obedience and religious membership.