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.
Operational Use and Cryptanalysis of the Kryha Cipher Machine
Abstract The Kryha machine was introduced in 1924 and continued to be marketed into the 1950s. The cryptologic literature surveyed for this article includes descriptions of various models of the machine and methods of attacking it, but relatively little has been written about its operational use. This article reviews both published and archival material, and provides some examples of actual use and cryptanalysis from the period immediately before and during the Second World War.
French film theory and criticism : a history/anthology, 1907-1939
These two volumes examine a significant but previously neglected moment in French cultural history: the emergence of French film theory and criticism before the essays of Andr Bazin. Richard Abel has devised an organizational scheme of six nearly symmetrical periods that serve to "bite into" the discursive flow of early French writing on the cinema. Each of the periods is discussed in a separate and extensive historical introduction, with convincing explications of the various concepts current at the time. In each instance, Abel goes on to provide a complementary anthology of selected texts in translation. Amounting to a portable archive, these anthologies make available a rich selection of nearly one hundred and fifty important texts, most of them never before published in English.