Fighting for relevance: Economic intelligence and special operations executive in Spain, 1943–1945
This article examines the work of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in Spain during the latter part of the Second World War. Unlike SOE's broad mandate to sow dissent and disarray in occupied countries, in Spain agents were forbidden from any involvement in direct action and sabotage. Diplomatic concerns, namely the maintenance of Spanish neutrality in the war, overrode all other strategic issues in Iberia. SOE agents and leaders in Madrid, therefore, attempted to create a different role for themselves. Drawing on files released in the Public Record Office in 1998, the article highlights SOE's limited success in the effort to establish for itself a part in the Allied strategic and diplomatic campaign against German wolfram smuggling. Success proved fleeting, however, and SOE's ultimate failure, in the face of hostility from the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), to prove its usefulness beyond the wolfram campaign, would lead to its withdrawal from Spain. The story of the SOE in Spain represents, on a small scale, the failure of the organization to find a niche in the British intelligence community after the Second World War.
Introduction: Special Operations Executive – New Approaches and Perspectives
Readers of this journal might ask why there is a need to dedicate an entire issue to the study of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), the organization famously tasked by Churchill to ‘set Europe ablaze’ by means of sabotage and subversion. The answer would partly lie, I suggest, in the influence exercised by SOE in the history of ‘special’, or covert operations, over the last 60 years and in its role in shaping our understanding of this phenomenon. Despite falling out of favour in the final years of the Cold War, there has been something of a renaissance in the use of covert operations in international politics in recent years, not least those undertaken as part of the present ‘war on terror’. The vocabulary might be slightly different – with ‘regime change’ being the most popular of the current buzz-words – but the objectives, and even some of the techniques, have a distinctly older pedigree. An appreciation of SOE’s fortunes over the course of the Second World War has never been as relevant as it is today. There are, however, important academic reasons for wishing to consider anew the history of SOE. The study of SOE has undergone something of a transformation over the last few years. This is partly due to the passage of time and the ‘maturing’ process that takes place whenever any sizeable archival holding is released into the public domain. It is now over ten years since the first SOE files were deposited at the National Archives at Kew, London, and with the arrival of SOE’s personnel files, this process is now substantially complete. Quite naturally, the years immediately following the release saw historians rush to answer some of the abiding mysteries that clung to the name of SOE and which had steadfastly resisted attempts at explanation over the previous 50 years. Many of these studies, though necessarily cherry-picking at the archive, were remarkably good and earn their place in any respectable military history library. Nevertheless, it is only relatively recently that historians – and for the moment I exclude SOE’s ‘official’ historians – have been able to subject the archive to sustained academic research and complete long-term research projects on aspects of SOE’s wartime activities. It is no coincidence that three of the contributors to this collection, Roderick Bailey, T.C. Wales and Christopher Murphy, have all recently completed, or are about to complete, doctoral theses on SOE topics. More established historians – foremost amongst these E.D.R. Harrison, Mark Seaman and David Stafford – have also seized the
The Colours and Dresses of Racism in America
The monograph argues that American racism has two colours (white and black), not one; and that each racism dresses itself not in one clothing, but in four: (1) “Minimal” negative, when one race considers another race inferior to itself in degree, but not in nature; (2) “Maximal” negative, when one race regards another as inherently inferior; (3) “Minimal” positive, when one race elevates another race to a superior status in degree, but not in nature; and (4) “Maximal” positive, when one race believes that the other race is genetically superior. The monograph maintains that the needs of capitalism created black slavery; that black slavery produced white racism as a justification for black slavery; and that black racism is a backlash of white racism. The monograph concludes that the abolition of black slavery and the civil rights movement destroyed the social and political ground for white and black racism, while the modern development of capitalism is demolishing their economic and intellectual ground.