Search Results

The introduction describes the main thrust of the essays included in the collection and the project of the book taken as a whole. An overview of the development of European states system in the twentieth century is sketched out as the editors describe the focuses of subsequent essays and highlight concurrences between authors. One recurring theme, which the editors here mention, is the damaging impact of high politics on the processes of gathering and analyzing secret intelligence. All of the chapters highlight the critical importance of prevailing circumstances in which intelligence operates including technology; the form of government and subsequently, the nature of decision-making; ideological and cultural pressures on the collation of analysis of information; financial limitations; and the deadweight of tradition. A thorough understanding of these myriad factors requires interdisciplinary expertise, the editors argue, thus the varied backgrounds and disciplines of the authors included in the collection.

In this chapter, Jonathan Haslam demonstrates that in Stalin’s Russia, the vision of intelligence grew out of very recent revolutionary experience and operations against the counterrevolution. These circumstances created an atmosphere in which human intelligence (humint) was nearly always privileged over signals/communication intelligence (sigint/comint)—to the detriment of the Soviet Union’s security. Without an advanced deciphering apparatus in place, Haslam demonstrates how this prejudice for human intelligence emerged despite Stalin’s distrust of secret agents. Stalin’s skepticism of his human intel combined with a crippling deficiency in cryptanalysis at a time when cryptographic traffic was growing exponentially, became the Achilles’ heel of the régime.

This chapter addresses a non-linear signal archaeology that connects Cold War architectures to current politics of global surveillance. In the wake of the NSA/PRISM/Snowden revelations in June 2013, it was discovered that Britain still has a “secret listening post” in the heart of Berlin. The story about Britain’s involvement in Berlin is indicative of some continuities in the Cold War narratives that persist, and some media technological practices that never disappeared: from the Teufelsberg listening post in Berlin to the current NSA culture, we are forced to admit the significance of what Thomas Elsaesser referred to as the S/M perversion of cinematic media: the centrality of technical media in Surveillance and Military. Indeed, excavating “signal architecture archaeologies” means looking at those non-human spaces built for signals – a preparation for the war conducted over signals, or what nowadays is referred to as “cyberwar”. This theme haunts the abandoned buildings and remnants of the Cold War like Teufelsberg, which is approached poetically as a haunted signal space: the ghosts that characterise military architectures are not dead souls of humans, but the non-human pings of massive infrastructures of signal processing.