Chapter five evaluates the impacts of Irish republican military campaigns in Britain, from the conclusion of the 1916 Rising to the conclusion of the War of Independence in July 1921. It profiles the political languages and cultures of Irish republican militants in British centres; investigates the I.R.B.’s involvement in the post-war British arms trade with criminal gangs and Communists; and assesses the political, cultural, and social impacts of I.R.A. campaigns in Britain, from provincial Scotland to metropolitan London. ‘British’ I.R.B. sections, under the direction of Michael Collins, were integrated into a specialist, interconnected arms system designed to sustain the republican arsenal in Ireland. Their ‘circulation of weapons’, this chapter establishes, underpinned Collins’ war against the Dublin Metropolitan Police in 1919 and 1920. Between 1920 and 1921, meanwhile, British-based I.R.A. Volunteers carried out attacks in major English urban centres. This research establishes the influence of I.R.A. G.H.Q. over the campaign and the strategic ‘logic’ underpinning I.R.A. attacks in British centres. British political leaders at Downing Street, this chapter submits, judged I.R.A. attacks in Britain as a significant part of the wider republican military campaign in the months leading to the Truce.

This chapter focuses on the experience of Hong Kong refugees in Macau. It addresses the role the British consulate in Macau played in refugee management and intelligence networks, explaining how the enclave was an important base and a connecting node for British operations. This chapter argues that Macau played an important supportive role to many in and from Hong Kong from late 1941 to the end of the war. It allowed for escapees to reach unoccupied China, for a great number of refugees to receive assistance, for intelligence to be gathered and for resistance activities to be coordinated. The chapter highlights the significant experience of colonial transplantation that allowed the British to keep a foothold in South China and facilitated the reoccupation of Hong Kong.

This chapter studies the interaction between human rights lawyers and activists and political policing in China. While coercion is key to authoritarian governance, coercive and repressive measures in and of themselves do not produce regime resilience and deliver orders, compliance, and effective governance that is commonly observed in China. This chapter examines the systemic use of “soft repression,” which is preventive and preemptive in nature, characterized by surveillance, early intervention, and political persuasion. The process is informal and interactive i nwhich the Chinese political policing systems bring government pressure and other non-state forces to bear on target groups and individuals to achieve compliance. Subtle intimidation, consent under duress, relational repression, and voluntary detention, all hallmarks of China’s political policing, which is referred to as coercive political persuasion, have worked to constrain legitimate advocacy without frequently resorting to direct violence or blatant violation of legal rules.

Chapter 4 traces the wartime emergence of undermining rules within Guatemala’s customs apparatus by the Moreno Network. It analyzes how the Moreno Network was forged by an elite clique of military intelligence officers granted extraordinary discretion while infiltrating the state apparatus to combat Guatemala’s insurgent groups in the 1970s and 1980s. Amid the heightened sense of threat, this counterinsurgent elite introduced a series of predatory institutional arrangements to capture customs revenues. The chapter also examines how the illicit customs procedures were enforced by the Moreno Network, both through the use of violent and nonviolent coercion and through the co-optation of security forces and other state agencies.

Chapter 8 examines the survival of the undermining rules within Guatemala’s customs apparatus from the discovery of the Moreno Network in 1996 to the uncovering of La Línea in 2015. Specifically, it discusses the series of reforms implemented by the Arzú government in the aftermath of the Moreno Network revelations to curb customs fraud and contraband, including (1) the expulsions of high-ranking security officials implicated in the scheme, (2) the restructuring of Guatemala’s port system, and (3) the creation of a new fiscal apparatus in the form of the Superintendent of Tax Administration (SAT). The chapter then evaluates how the undermining rules in customs outlasted these sweeping reforms, illustrating how the wartime distributional coalition, while largely displaced from the state sphere, penetrated new semi- and extra-state spaces like political party channels and private port concessions.

Chapter 5 examines the wartime origins of undermining rules governing extrajudicial killing by Guatemala’s National Police (PN). It argues that the development of such procedures is rooted in the specialization of the police force and the broad discretion granted to concentrated groups of police elites amid the late 1960s period of perceived threat escalation. Specifically, with the creation of highly insulated elite investigative units like the Detective Corps [Cuerpo de Detectives], previous extralegal violence waged by right-wing death squads was institutionalized as routine state activity. The new rules were sanctioned by top military intelligence officials, who devised clear procedures for how to frame the resulting killings to the public.

The introduction takes us to Paris in December 1947, where rumors of a communist uprising circulated amidst nationwide strikes fomented by the French Communist Party. President Harry Truman was deeply troubled by the unrest; journalists Joseph and Steward Alsop suggested it was because of the intelligence reports crossing his desk—"he was daily confronted with the facts.” This chapter explains the book’s focus on that intelligence and makes three interlocking arguments: that the intelligence on France was actually deeply contested by U.S. intelligence officers, that a vast web of informants in France and its empire influenced this intelligence to suit their interests, and finally, that the intelligence pointing to an imminent and existential communist threat was overblown, part of a campaign to encourage American intervention in French affairs, with implications for Franco-American relations for the rest of the century. This study seeks to internationalize intelligence and incorporate it into the study of U.S. foreign relations. In doing so, it deploys the diplomatic record alongside previously untapped intelligence reporting, thus illuminating new findings out of American and French archives. Likewise, it borrows key insights from recent interventions in U.S. foreign relations, namely the global, transimperial, and emotional turns in the field.

The conclusion argues that U.S. analysis on France reveals the complex relationship between intelligence and the formulation of American foreign policy in the early Cold War. It contends that a transnational and at times transimperial web of French factions and informants was largely responsible for shaping these views through their frequent informal and formal exchanges with American diplomats and intelligence officials, and they did so with their own political agendas and interests in mind. Through their U.S. contacts, they directly contested images of France, demonstrated legitimacy and outmaneuvered rivals, and played a fundamental role in shaping American perceptions and policy. This chapter also shows that the narrative of French weakness and communist intrigue began to unravel under the scrutiny of analysts who understood its provenance and questioned its basis. In fact, there were a myriad of other explanations for seemingly nefarious communist activity in France, ones for which emotionally driven and depleted observers failed to account.

This chapter details the cracks in the consensus that began to emerge as tension boiled over in France with the expulsion of the PCF from the governing coalition and the communist-directed strikes that paralyzed the nation at the end of the year. Italian, Spanish and French intelligence, US embassy officials in Paris, U.S. military intelligence, and Central Intelligence Group current intelligence reports kept up the drumbeat, warning of growing anti-Americanism, communist power grabs and the PCF’s role in a larger, global communist conspiracy. Their analysis formed the core of the intelligence sent to President Truman and his senior advisors. However darkly uniform the analysis of the preceding year had been, some French officials, experts in the Office of Intelligence and Research (OIR) and a few mid-level analysts in the CIA expressed growing concern about the type and quality of intelligence. OIR analysts who complained that some CIA officials failed to account for French agency raised one of the most serious shortcomings of American analysis. Beyond their entreaties for American aid, French sources also played a role in the development of U.S. interference in France and its pro-colonial turn.

This chapter depicts France on the eve of Liberation as various factions jockeyed for legitimacy and rightful claim to lead France once Paris was free again. It reveals a debate within US government circles about the accuracy of the entrenched image of France at the onset of the Cold War as decadent and teetering toward revolution. In exchanges with the White House, State Department and military intelligence, right-leaning French sources, including familiar military, intelligence, political and industrial figures, bolstered this view. French contacts in the Resistance meanwhile shaped Office of Strategic Services analysis that France was a strong, worthy ally. Thus France became a contested idea with warring factions in both capitals, as well as the far reaches of the French empire, seeking to influence US policy.

The chapter introduces Churchill’s army career between 1895 and 1900, but does so from an important new perspective: using his exploits in Cuba, India, the Sudan and South Africa to explore the origins of his lifelong interest in intelligence and clandestine operations. It argues that his first foray overseas to Cuba was in the ‘well-established tradition of the British amateur spy’ but that he maintained his interest in military intelligence thereafter through the connections he made to support his writing and journalism on the Indian north-west frontier, while attached to Kitchener’s expedition in the Sudan and later as a war correspondent and then soldier in South Africa. The author looks at the intelligence lessons that Churchill learned, including the power of guerrilla insurrection, the importance of properly resourced intelligence services, the comparative roles of the civil and military intelligence arms and the need for a managed relationship with the press.