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This chapter explores the ways in which Russian elites sought to find a unifying idea and national identity for Russians after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Instead of forging a positive national idea, Putinism sought to create national unity by identifying enemies, both inside the country and externally. The West became the existential enemy for conservatives in the Kremlin, and liberal forces inside Russia were labelled a ‘fifth column’. This enemy discourse created a short-lived “Crimean consensus” after the annexation of Crimea in 2014, but this common feeling soon faded. After two decades of Putinism, the friend-enemy discourse no longer united Russians nor overcame deep-rooted social, political and economic cleavages in society.

On May 20, a group led by Charles Maxwell-Knight raided the flat of Tyler G. Kent, a code and cipher clerk in the United States Embassy. Herschel V. Johnson, the Counsellor, agreed to the waiving of Kent's diplomatic immunity, being assured that any proceedings would be in camera. Waiver was confirmed by Ambassador Joseph Kennedy and, after the arrest, by the State Department. Since his arrival on October 5, 1939, Kent had been strongly suspected of espionage; the Stockholm police had reported to Military Intelligence Section 5 on Ludwig Mathias, a naturalised Swede of German extraction thought to be a Gestapo agent. This chapter focuses on the trial of Kent and the existence of a Fifth Column, that is, a number of individuals who were, with some element of organisation, clandestinely assisting the enemy, in Britain. So far as the British Union was concerned, the number of their members involved in this Fifth Column was tiny.

This chapter examines the collision between Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 182 and a Cessna plane on September 25, 1978 over San Diego, and how it led to a further deterioration in the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization's (PATCO) already strained relationship with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) under Jimmy Carter's administration. It also considers how the San Diego tragedy destabilized PATCO's leadership and sent the union stumbling in a new—and ultimately fatal—direction. The chapter first looks at the international familiarization flight debacle that left PATCO reeling in the late summer of 1978 before turning to the rise of the “Fifth Column” movement in the western states. Finally, it discusses Congress's failure to enact legislation that might have improved the bargaining power of PATCO and other federal sector unions.

The year 2015 saw historic levels of refugee movements out of Syria, Iraq, and North Africa to Europe, which coincided chronologically with terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino. The Republican presidential nomination campaign singled out refugees from Syria and Iraq as existential threats, and the “Islamophobia Industry” mainstreamed an anti-Muslim discourse in the presidential primary, naming Arab refugees as a potential fifth column, leading to the passage of the American Security Against Foreign Enemies Act (HR 4038). The seismic sociopolitical shifts of 2015 shaped the experience of belonging among Iraqi refugee youths. Iraqi youths employed multiple strategies in confronting the disturbing ways in which they were being profiled in the public arena. One important strategy was in calling attention to a counternarrative—the proactive and positive ways that the local Muslim and Arab community was reaching out across cultural and religious barriers to mobilize against hate.

This chapter argues that 9/11 did not constitute a dramatic departure from either the U.S. or the European prior stance on the immigration–terrorism nexus. Instead, it suggests that 9/11 marked an intensification of prior policies and that the securitization of immigration policies is the product of a long-term process dating from the mid-1980s. In other words, the connection between terrorism, other criminal activities, and immigration had been constructed in Europe and in the United States before 9/11. This trend was reinforced in the 1990s by the militarization of border controls, coupled with the reclassification of a wide range of activities as national security problems (such as drug trafficking, illegal immigration, and migrant delinquency). This chapter examines the gradual convergence of immigration policies and counterterrorism measures before 9/11 and assesses the current securitization of immigration that uses traditional rhetorical arguments based on two interrelated dimensions: suspicion toward foreign-born people who are perceived as potential members of a “fifth column,” and the classification of those crossing a border as criminals.

President Roosevelt and Mayor La Guardia were forced to grapple more directly with the problem of home defense during 1940, an election year. Several forces came together to force the issue onto the national agenda. Hitler’s victories across much of Western Europe prompted some liberal internationalists to warn that the United States would become extremely vulnerable if Britain were to fall. FDR’s Division of State and Local Cooperation had little authority to impose home defense policies on states and cities. Numerous mayors complained that the states were bypassing their home defense needs and lobbied the Roosevelt administration to establish a federal, nationwide home defense program. As fears of attack on the United States soared in some quarters, a slow consensus began to form among many liberals that home defense of some sort was going to become an important program in the age of total war.

This chapter explores the database of conspiracy claims in order to lay the groundwork for the analysis in future chapters. It begins by describing how the database was created and presenting an overview of its contents, including simple graphs showing where conspiracies (supposedly) take place, the nationalities of the accusers, and the identities of the perpetrators. To give a sense of the stories the claims tell, it homes in on three narrative elements of conspiracy—goals, actions, and logics—and provides examples. Finally, it breaks down the data according to combinations of accusers and perpetrators. Perusing the conspiracy claims reveals how they emerge from quotidian political realities, but in a milieu pervaded by intrigue, insecurity, and uncertainty. These claims tell a story—actually, several—about politics, but revolve around two questions: Who is doing what to whom and what do the perpetrators hope to accomplish?

This chapter returns to the main role expected of the war correspondents- to report the fighting at first-hand. It is interesting to contrast the achievements of correspondents like William Munday, Thomas Healy, Wilfred Burchett, Darrell Berrigan and Jack Belden in making dramatic reports direct from the battlefield (Pegu and Yenangyaung in particular) with the failure of the earlier correspondents to do so. This was facilitated by challenges to the censorship that the correspondents made, and the growing government recognition that a more liberal approach to censorship would actually be beneficial to the overall war effort. Other issues covered are: correspondents’ coverage of the involvement of the Chinese Army; civilian casualties from Japanese bombing and so-called fifth column activities.

The first Smith Act trial originated, in part, in the personal histories of the defendants. The ties between certain members of Teamsters Local 544-AFL and the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) shaped their union militancy and made them targets of government concern as early as the mid-1930s. The political history of the Smith Act’s passage also informed the background to the case. Chapter 1 examines both of these elements. It explores the militant backgrounds of several of the defendants, which were expressed during the 1934 Teamsters strikes in Minneapolis, the 1938 creation of Local 544’s Union Defense Guard, and the 1939 Works Progress Administration (WPA) strike. It also explores the changing national political landscape of the late 1930s and early 1940s, when the country became gripped by a growing fear of fifth column subversion and a “little red scare” that resulted in passage of the Smith Act (sponsored by Congressman Howard Smith).

This chapter discusses perceptions of Moscow’s ‘fifth column’ in the Irish state. While the communist party amounted to little more than an insignificant cult, not all communists declared themselves openly. Significantly, other political strands, particularly the IRA, were seen to be susceptible to communist manipulation. During the Cold War this gave rise to exaggerated fears about communism and its agents. Dublin officials co-operated with the British, and the Americans, in combating communists and their left-wing republican allies. In Northern Ireland, the Communist Party (CPNI) remained extremely weak, but retained influence of some significance within trade union officialdom. And, in Britain, the Connolly Association attempted to organise Irish exiles under the tutelage of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). The US embassy in Dublin was sensitive to any suggestion of communist activity; Irish and American officials placed intelligence co-operation on a formal footing in 1954.

This chapter looks at the much-criticized role of the Governor of Burma, Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith, who took over in May 1941. Although the correspondents were restrained in their criticisms of the governor while the campaign was progressing, some of them did not hold back in their later books, which were subject to much less censorship. The focus of criticism was on civil defense arrangements in Rangoon, on Dorman-Smith’s supposed influence on military strategy, on his failure to implement martial law in the city, and to recognize the extent of Burmese “fifth column” activity. It is argued that some of these criticisms resulted from the slowness to establish an effective public relations set-up in Burma. This left the journalists without proper information of the progress of the war and antagonized some of them by restricting their movements and strictly censoring their dispatches. This meant that there was a failure to explain the Government of Burma’s case effectively until after the retreat was over.