Strictly Confidential Anthropology

Anthropological interest in secrecy and silence – and related aspects such as lying, knowledge, memory, and forgetting – has been long and precarious. Through what may be called personal anthropology, in this article, I describe both private and professional anthropological experiences including family memories, fieldwork sites, and academic practices. By recalling state socialist ideology, censorship, and family secrets, I illustrate how citizens have relied on each other in order to counter state hegemony. I highlight how surveillance in Romania expressly encouraged my informants as well as the secret police to engage in mutual intelligence and observation tactics as evasive tactics. Building on these strategies, I argue that academic life is not immune to secrecy, silence and covert action. I introduce an anthropologist who worked for the Hungarian secret police, and consider how academic life continues to rely on covert programs and an institutionalized hierarchy to promote and maintain its structures and interests.

Cyber Espionage

The ubiquity of information technology augurs a new golden age of espionage. Intelligence is the use of deceptive means for strategic ends. It encompasses the collection of secrets, analysis and decision support, covert action and influence, and counterintelligence. Modern computational networks expand the opportunities for all these types of intelligence, for new types of actors to engage in intelligence activities, and for almost anyone or anything to become intelligence targets. Yet large-scale information systems also amplify the classic ethical, operational, and strategic challenges associated with intelligence. Many of the policy controversies associated with cybersecurity, for instance, are not simply novelties of the Internet age, but rather are symptomatic of the uneasy relationship between counterintelligence and democracy. Understanding the technology used for cyber intrusion may be necessary for understanding cyber conflict, but it is not sufficient for comprehending its strategic ends and limits: it is further necessary to understand the political logic of intelligence.

Intelligence and Grand Strategy

This chapter explores the relationship between intelligence and grand strategy. The first section discusses how intelligence informs grand strategy, and describes several factors that limit its influence. The second section introduces the concept of an intelligence posture, which describes how states build and operate their intelligence services. A state’s intelligence posture reflects its choices about how to collect information, how to prioritize what it collects, and whether to employ covert action abroad. These choices depend on the state’s broader approach to national security. Grand strategy guides key decisions about spying and sabotage, just as it provides the logical basis for the use of force. The chapter illustrates this idea by sketching intelligence postures for three grand strategies: restraint, liberal internationalism, and primacy.

The Oxford Handbook of Grand Strategy

Grand Strategy is a state’s “theory of victory,” explaining how the state will utilize its diverse means to advance and achieve national ends. A clearly articulated, well-defined, and relatively stable grand strategy is supposed to allow the ship of state to steer a steady course through the roiling seas of global politics. However, the obstacles to formulating and implementing grand strategy are, by all accounts, imposing. The Oxford Handbook of Grand Strategy addresses the conceptual and historical foundations, production, evolution, and future of grand strategy from a wide range of standpoints. It seven constituent sections present and critically examine the history of grand strategy, including beyond the West; six distinct theoretical approaches to the subject; the sources of grand strategy, ranging from geography and technology to domestic politics to individual psychology and culture; the instruments of grand strategy’s implementation, from military to economic to covert action; political actors’, including non-state actors’, grand strategic choices; the debatable merits of grand strategy, relative to alternatives; and the future of grand strategy, in light of challenges ranging from political polarization to technological change to aging populations. The result is a field-defining, interdisciplinary, and comparative text that will be a key resource for years to come.

Covert Action and Grand Strategy

Throughout history, covert action has been a critically important instrument used by states to achieve their strategic aims without the use of military force. This chapter explores the little-known role that covert action played during the rise of the United States from the American Revolution to the First World War, as well their use by Great Britain and Germany to influence US foreign policy after the United States had become a great power. The chapter explores how covert operations aided US efforts to expand across North America and European covert missions to block America’s rise through exploiting divisions within US society and derailing American plans to expand its borders to the Pacific Ocean. The chapter then explores how prior to the First World War, Britain and Germany used covert psychological operations to sway American opinion to their respective sides. Once war broke out, these operations intensified as Britain sought to convince the United States to enter the conflict as their ally while German operations sought to encourage American neutrality. Once America entered the war, Germany switched to sabotaging American operations to derail US war production. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the future of covert action in the digital age and the role of cyberattacks in light of the Russian attack on the 2016 US presidential election.

An unfinished battle: George C. Marshall and intelligence in the early Cold War

This article deals with the influence of Gen. George C. Marshall on the foundation of the US intelligence community after the Second World War. It argues that his uneven achievements demonstrate how the ceaseless wrangling within the Truman administration undermined the crafting of a coherent intelligence policy. Despite his bureaucratic skills and prominent positions, Marshall struggled to achieve his ends on matters like signals intelligence, covert action, or relations between the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency. Yet he crafted an enduring vision of how intelligence should supplement US national security policy that remained potent throughout the Cold War and beyond.

What constitutes successful covert action? Evaluating unacknowledged interventionism in foreign affairs

Covert action has long been a controversial tool of international relations. However, there is remarkably little public understanding about whether it works and, more fundamentally, about what constitutes success in this shadowy arena of state activity. This article distills competing criteria of success and examines how covert actions become perceived as successes. We develop a conceptual model of covert action success as a social construct and illustrate it through the case of ‘the golden age of CIA operations’. The socially constructed nature of success has important implications not just for evaluating covert actions but also for using, and defending against, them.