Tuesday, March 8, 2011

The Historiography of Science/Tech Meets Espionage/Intelligence

The intersection of two relatively small fields of history is bound to be smaller still. I'm not alone, though! Below are some of the historians working in this field and some of their work. Apologies to anyone I leave off (and please let me know if I do! I'd love to find more work in this area). As a final disclaimer, I'm leaving off plenty of useful, interesting articles and books in the field in order to focus on key historians and their work in this area, rather than any work in the area or any by them. Maybe another post.
Now, in no particular order:

Kristie Macrakis
"(PhD, History of Science, Harvard University, 1989) is a historian of science and of espionage. Her research interests include the politics of techno-science, science in Nazi Germany and Post-War Germany, Cold War espionage including the East German Ministry for State Security. She is currently writing a book on the history of invisible ink from ancient to modern times."

Key works:
Seduced by Secrets: Inside the Stasi's Spy-Tech World (Cambridge, 2008)

East German Foreign Intelligence: Myth, Reality and Controversy (Routledge, 2009)

"Does Effective Espionage Lead to Success in Science and Technology? Lessons from the East German Ministry for State Security." Intelligence & National Security, Vol. 19, No. 1 (2004), pp. 52-77.

"Technophilic hubris and espionage styles during the Cold War." Isis: an international review devoted to the history of science and its cultural influences, Vol. 101, No. 2 (2010), pp. 378-85.
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Paul Maddrell
Lecturer in International History and Intelligence Studies at Prifysgol Aberystwyth University. "Paul Maddrell has taught in the Department since 2002. Prior to that he was a lecturer in the history of international relations at the University of Salford, Manchester. He teaches twentieth-century German and Russian history and the history of intelligence and security. He has been a visiting scholar at the Free University of Berlin and has taught at the Johannes-Gutenberg Universität, Mainz, under the Socrates-Erasmus scheme. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Higher Education Academy." 

Key works:
Spying on Science: Western Intelligence in Divided Germany, 1945-1961. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

"The Scientist Who Came In from the Cold: Heinz Barwich’s Escape from the GDR," Intelligence and National Security (2005), Vol. 20, No. 4, pp. 608-630

"What we have discovered about the Cold War is what we already knew: Julius Mader and the Western secret services during the Cold War," Cold War History, Vol. 5, No. 2 (2005), pp. 235-258

"British-American Scientific Intelligence Collaboration during the Occupation of Germany," Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 15, No. 2 (2000), pp. 74-94

"Operation 'Matchbox' and the Scientific Containment of the USSR," in P. Jackson & J. Siegel (eds.), Intelligence and Statecraft: The Use and Limits of Intelligence in International Society (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2005), pp. 173-206

"Western Intelligence Gathering and the Division of German Science," Cold War International History Project Bulletin, Issue 12/13 (2001), pp. 352-359
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John Krige
"John Krige (PhD, Physical Chemistry, Pretoria, 1965; PhD, Philosophy, Sussex, 1979) was trained as a physical chemist and then did a second PhD at the University of Sussex, specializing in the history and philosophy of science. Thereafter he played a major role in a team that wrote the history of CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, and was the Project Leader of a team that wrote the history of ESA, the European Space Agency (ESA was awarded the Alexandre Koyré medal by the International Academy of the History of Science in 2009 for this project). He was a Research Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy for five years, and directed the Centre de Recherche en Histoire des Sciences et des Techniques at La Villette, Paris from 1996 to 2000. He then took up his current post as the Kranzberg Professor in the School of History, Technology, and Society at Georgia Tech.
...
His research focuses on the production and circulation of knowledge across national borders in the Cold War. He is particularly interested in two sensitive, ‘dual-use’ sciences and technologies of this period, the nuclear and space, where trade offs have to be made between national security and economic competitiveness"

Key works:
American Hegemony and the Postwar Reconstruction of Science in Europe (MIT Press, November 2006).


"The Peaceful Atom as Political Weapon: Euratom as an Instrument of U.S. Foreign Policy in the 1950s," Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 38:1 (2008), 5-44.

"Technology, Foreign Policy and International Collaboration in Space," in Steven Dick and Roger Launius (eds) Critical Issues in History of Spaceflight (Washington DC: NASA-2006-4702, 2006), 239 – 260.

"Atoms for Peace, Scientific Internationalism, and Scientific Intelligence," in J. Krige and K-H. Barth (eds), Global Knowledge Power. Science and Technology in International Affairs, Osiris 21 (2006), 161-181.
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Jeffrey Richelson
Dr. Jeffrey Richelson is a Senior Fellow with the National Security Archive, which is a project any spy and/or modern tech buff should take an interest in.
"He has directed Archive documentation projects on U.S.-China relations, the organization and operations of the U.S. intelligence community, U.S. military space activities, and Presidential national security directives. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Rochester and has taught at the University of Texas and the American University."


Key works:
The Wizards of Langley: inside the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology. Westview Press. 2001.

Spying on the bomb: American nuclear intelligence from Nazi Germany to Iran and North Korea. Norton. 2006

America's space sentinels: DSP satellites and national security University of Kansas Press. 1999.

America's secret eyes in space: the U.S. keyhole spy satellite program. Harper & Row. 1990.

United States strategic reconnaissance: photographic/imaging satellites. Center for International and Strategic Affairs UCLA. 1983.

with William Burr, "Whether to 'Strangle the Baby in the Cradle': The United States and the Chinese Nuclear Program, 1960–64," International Security, Vol. 25, No. 3 (2001) http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/016228800560525
 
"Scientists in Black," Scientific American, (February 1998), pp. 48-55.
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James Bamford
"James Bamford (born September 24, 1946) is an American bestselling author and journalist who writes about United States intelligence agencies, most notably the National Security Agency (NSA). He was raised in Natick, Massachusetts, spent three years in the United States Navy as an intelligence analyst during the Vietnam War, and used the GI Bill to earn his law degree from Suffolk University Law School in Boston."

Key Works:
The Puzzle Palace: Inside the National Security Agency, America's Most Secret Intelligence Organization. Viking Press, 2001.

Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency. Anchor, 2002.
 
The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America. Doubleday, 2008. 


[See the link above for references to his many, many articles in newspapers, magazines, and other locations.]

Science, Spies, and History - An Introduction

First, an introduction.

Why the history of science/technology and the history of espionage/intelligence? They seem like pretty widely disparate fields, and they are. Still, they also have important ties (important, at least, to me). Both fields were dominated by popular writers rather than professional historians until recent decades - which isn't a bad thing, but does deeply shape the type of stories that get told, the audiences addressed, and the extent to which authors build on each other's efforts. Both science/technology and espionage/intelligence are fundamentally about creating useful knowledge out of masses of data, then communicating that knowledge to those who can use it. As such, both are extremely important for modern policy-making, yet both are easily (and often) ignored or distorted by policymakers.

I am a PhD candidate in History at UC Berkeley studying the intersection of the history of espionage and intelligence and the history of science and technology. This blog will be a place to bloviate.

I intend to split posts between 1) my research, and 2) these topics more broadly. Possible posts include drafts for future lectures, paragraphs for future use in papers and presentations, and simple rambling thoughts.