Landscapes of Secrecy: The CIA in History, Fiction and Memory
The Pursuit of Intelligence History: Methods, Sources, and Trajectories in the United Kingdom
The Pursuit of Intelligence History: Methods, Sources, and Trajectories in the United Kingdom by Christopher R. Moran.
This article is an overview of the history of the academic study of intelligence in the United Kingdom since 1945, a time marked by three distinctive periods of historiography. Each, labelled here as Absence, Emergence and Efflorescence, has contained unique themes and approaches to intelligence history as it has been practiced in Britain.
Testing Audio
‘Momzilla’ email. Family dog ‘traumatised’.
On Fri, Jul 1, 2011 at 3:22 PM, Timothy Robarts wrote:
In addition to the following email, Mrs. Bourne said Miss Withers’ behaviour had been so rude that it had left the family dog, Bomber, ‘traumatised, depressed and anxious’. It is said that the dog spent the whole weekend in his kennel with his front paws over his eyes, so shocked was he at young Heidi’s uncouth behaviour. ‘Bomber’ may well be checking into a psychiatric hospital for several weeks in order to allow him to recover from this deeply disturbing experience.
This is the full email from Mrs Bourne (aka. ‘Momzilla’) to Miss Heidi Withers, her prospective step-daughter-in-law.
“It is high time someone explained to you about good manners. Yours are obvious by their absence and I feel sorry for you.
Unfortunately for Freddie, he has fallen in love with you and Freddie being Freddie, I gather it is not easy to reason with him or yet encourage him to consider how he might be able to help you.
It may just be possible to get through to you though. I do hope so.
Your behaviour on your visit to Devon during April was staggering in its uncouthness and lack of grace.
Unfortunately, this was not the first example of bad manners I have experienced from you.
If you want to be accepted by the wider Bourne family I suggest you take some guidance from experts with utmost haste.
There are plenty of finishing schools around. You would be an ideal candidate for the Ladette to Lady television series.
Please, for your own good, for Freddie’s sake and for your future involvement with the Bourne family, do something as soon as possible.
Here are a few examples of your lack of manners:
When you are a guest in another’s house, you do not declare what you will and will not eat – unless you are positively allergic to something.
You do not remark that you do not have enough food.
You do not start before everyone else.
You do not take additional helpings without being invited to by your host.
When a guest in another’s house, you do not lie in bed until late morning in households that rise early – you fall in line with house norms.
There are plenty of finishing schools around. You would be an ideal candidate for the Ladette to Lady television series.
You should never ever insult the family you are about to join at any time and most definitely not in public. I gather you passed this off as a joke but the reaction in the pub was one of shock, not laughter.
I have no idea whether you wrote to thank [your future sister-in-law] for the weekend but you should have hand-written a card to her.
You should have hand-written a card to me. You have never written to thank me when you have stayed at Houndspool.
[Your future sister-in-law] has quite the most exquisite manners of anyone I have ever come across. You would do well to follow her example.
You regularly draw attention to yourself. Perhaps you should ask yourself why.
It is tragic that you have diabetes. However, you aren’t the only young person in the world who is a diabetic.
I know quite a few young people who have this condition, one of whom is getting married in June. I have never heard her discuss her condition.
She quietly gets on with it. She doesn’t like being diabetic. Who would? You do not need to regale everyone with the details of your condition or use it as an excuse to draw attention to yourself. It is vulgar.
As a diabetic of long standing you must be acutely aware of the need to prepare yourself for extraordinary eventualities, the walk to Mothecombe beach being an example.
You are experienced enough to have prepared yourself appropriately.
No-one gets married in a castle unless they own it. It is brash, celebrity style behaviour.
I understand your parents are unable to contribute very much towards the cost of your wedding. (There is nothing wrong with that except that convention is such that one might presume they would have saved over the years for their daughters’ marriages.)
If this is the case, it would be most ladylike and gracious to lower your sights and have a modest wedding as befits both your incomes.
One could be accused of thinking that Heidi Withers must be patting herself on the back for having caught a most eligible young man. I pity Freddie.
Intelligence section – ‘Skylark’
http://www.robarts.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=2
You MUST REGISTER before accessing the ‘Skylark’ section.
Robarts.com ‘Skylark’ recordings.
This email is intended to provide a guide to a new development to what the Robarts.com website has to offer. The MP3 audio files which can be found within the ‘Skylark’ section of the ‘Intelligence History’ Forum on this website are recordings of a series of telephone conversations between the Robarts.com Website Manager in London and a book author in New York City. These conversations have been recorded and posted to the website in the course of the past six weeks since the end of the first week of May 2011. They were made with the knowledge and the full cooperation of the book author himself. The book author approached the Website Manager of Robarts.com by email with a request to provide him with a Forum for him to publish an audio update to his memoirs of his World War Two experiences which had been published as a hard copy book in the mid nineteen-nineties. Please read the website Blog section for more detailed information on how this is being achieved and how it will be developed in future.
These audio recordings are intended to provide anyone who is interested in listening to a book author being interviewed about and being able freely to discuss his own background as a writer and historian as well as his own interest in writing the book which is being reviewed. It is to be hoped that this One-on-One Audio Download (Skylark) facility will be able to be developed so that the Robarts.com website will be able to provide more interviews with more book authors and more detailed information about their books.
Robarts.com Blog – Please read introductory Notes.
Robarts.com Forum – Please Register as indicated.
Intelligence History – Listen to ‘Skylark’ recordings.
Web Conferencing – Email Website Manager.
Twitter – For additional postings.
TIMOTHY ROBARTS.
Email – tim@robarts.com
309 – Beta Test List – February 2011.
ATTENTION – Beta Test List – February 2011 (20 members).
Full Name: 309 – Beta Test List – February 2011.
The purpose of this email is to introduce a well-chosen group of people to the concept of the one-on-one audio download. This is the result of a recently recorded telephone conversation or series of recorded telephone conversations between the author of the book which is under discussion and the Website Moderator of the Robarts.com website where these recordings will be found in an appropriately labeled section.
The presence of the Website Moderator is intended to represent the member or members of the reading public who may wish to pose questions to the author about the background to the writing of the book itself, about aspects of the book which the author has chosen not to include and about further plans which the author may have in mind to publish in future. It is to be hoped that these recordings will provide an author’s loyal reading public with an insight into that deep pool of inspiration which brought the book into existence in the first place.
These recordings have been made with the cooperation, the approval and the full permission of the book author who is being interviewed. The recordings remain unedited in order to preserve the essential spontaneity of the author’s view of his own published work. The most recent recording will be found in the attachment to this email. This and all other previous recordings are to be found in the appropriate section of the Robarts.com website. They can be accessed by registration into the Discussion Forum and clicking on the section in ‘Intelligence History’ which is labeled ‘Skylark’. All questions or helpful suggestions should be addressed as follows – websitemoderator@robarts.com . All such emails will be acknowledged and will be acted upon immediately.
It may well be possible to develop this website into a web conferencing facility which will allow single individuals or groups of people within the reading public to communicate with the book author and with each other online by voice as well as by text. These web conference recordings will be archived and stored for the benefit of an interested student of the book which is under discussion.
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‘Skylark’ Audiofile #01 – 18 May 2011 17:56 (London GMT.)
The attachment to this email contains the first reading of this excellent book which I have now completed. It is taken from the first pages which were published several years ago. At the moment, the work which I have done and which I fully intend to continue to do will add nothing to what was published. What we will have here will be simply an audio version of what was written about wartime experiences and recollections of more than sixty years ago. The great contribution to this work and what will make it a unique and absolutely fascinating publishing event will be the subsequent verbal contribution which can be made in a series of recorded and archived telephone interviews as the reader goes through each section of the book. This will provide the opportunity to add completely up-to-date comments and recollections to the existing written work. It will be made more valuable by being in the words and voice of the original author. This will be especially true in respect of the many photographs and detailed diagrams which are to be found within the book itself. This exercise will transform this wartime militray autobiography into an online information resource about intelligence gathering activities which were carried out by Allied forces in Europe between the date of the Normandy Landings in June 1944 and the German surrender in May 1945. It will provide a permanent record of the activities of Allied military intelligence personnel during the Second Front of WW2 and of how the Second Front contributed to the succesful outcome of WW2. This will be described in the original words and the voice of an actual member of the Allied forces who were involved in the conflict.
I have seen this done recently in a televised interview with John Le Carre and also in a videotaped interview with Charles Cumming which was released as a video podcast on his website. Both presentations were very effectively done. Both were about published works about the history and the work of people who are involved or who have been involved in the ‘intelligence’ community. They indicate that there does seem to be an audience, possibly a market for an author to be able to provide his reading ‘public’ with a verbal voiceover to accompany his written work. I need hardly add that Ian Fleming who I regard as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century did exactly what you and I are proposing to do. Fleming served in Naval Intelligence throughout WW2. He had a very ‘good war’ as they used to say and after the end of the War, he left the Royal Navy and decided to write a thriller. He could not repeat his wartime experiences as if they had been from his own memories of the War for security reasons. So he reinvented himself as Commander James Bond RN. in order to allow himself to be impersonated by the character of Bond. The James Bond books only attracted the almost cult following during the early nineteen-sixties when the books were made into movies and the character of James Bond was transformed into a ‘real-life’ cut-out by Sean Connery and Roger Moore. Other good actors were also involved and the character of James Bond is now part of international movie history. Who knows? Project Skylark may well become a screenplay and subsequently be made into a movie if it ever finds its way into the right hands. Ian Fleming personally approved of Sean Connery being offered the part of James Bond in the first movie to be made of one of his books. Who comes to mind as a potential ‘cut out’ for the original Skylark?
I believe that the ‘voiceover’ will make this book a really valuable piece of wartime publishing history and one which many other intelligence authors and historians will wish to emulate. The world will have the original author to thank for this development. It will have been made possible by his generous determination to contribute to the popularity of the book which had been written several years previously that it has become possible to do this now. With the help of modern communications technology and those who know how to adapt this technology to this Project, it will be possible to complete it at very little inconvenience to those involved, including to the original author and very economically indeed. We can take this Project stage-by-stage until we come to the end of the book and we can then publish the whole work on my website. Alternatively, we can publish what we are producing in sections again using the resources of my website which I am willing to make available for the purpose of this interesting exercise.
We can complete the most important part of this project by reading the book chapter-by-chapter into a digital recorder and then emailing the recordings to the original author in the USA. I can then telephone him at his home or in his office and we can make a digital recording of the telephone conversation here in London which can in turn be made available to the reading ‘public’ and all of the intelligence authors and historians who will be encouraged to take an interest by receiving an email which will request them to do so. Once a significant number of people indicate that there is some interest in the work which we have been doing, we can invite them into an online web conference which can also be recorded and which the original author can take part in if he wishes to do so. I think that this could well become a new development of the international publishing industry in years to come. Author interviews on videotape online, on television and in the form of movies are already a proven method of promoting written published material and I see no reason why we cannot do the same thing with this book. By distributing this work to the intelligence writers, authors and historians who are now on my email distribution list, we should be able to obtain a peer review of the work being made available. We should also be able to draw attention to this new approach to a published book and to see if it will be able to be taken further in the international online publishing industry. What I have in mind would not necessarily be limited to books in English. Web conferencing and online publishing facilities are also available on my website.
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Every effort is made by the Website Moderator to maintain the quality of this Mailing List / Blog / Discussion Group / Newsfeed Forum. In the event that some people who are receiving emails from this list do not wish to continue to do so for whatever reason, it would be greatly appreciated by the Website Moderator if those who do NOT wish to continue to receive emails from this List would please send an email to ‘tim@robarts.com’ with the message “Please remove me from this List”. It will be done immediately and without question.
Website Moderator.
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Robarts.com Network and Audio Newsfeed.
LIVING RECORDED ‘INTELLIGENCE’ HISTORY BY ONLINE TELEPHONE INTERVIEW.
The Robarts.com website is about to develop an audiofile / podcasting facility. This website must become much more interactive and it must offer more in the way of communications facilities for those who wish to take an interest in the subject or subjects which are under consideration. It will be possible to make or to receive a telephone call which may be a one-on-one conversation or it may well include several people in a telephone conference type telephone conversation who are all discussing the same subject. The telephone conversation will be stored and archived online. It will be available for anyone who wishes to listen to the conversation to do so by accessing the audiofile online. It will function as a live audio blog library archive. Recent updates could be made accessible via Twitter as well as being highlighted by email broadcasting to the email distribution list which is stored in the Robarts.com computer files and which has so far managed to encourage a fairly low level of interest in what the various sections of the Robarts.com website has to offer as an information resource.
This approach is being developed as a result of an approach which was received recently from a WW2 veteran who had received an email from the Website Moderator of the Robarts.com website which had been intended to draw his attention to an online Intelligence conference which is due to be held in the USA. later this year. Although he was not really interested in the Intelligence conference itself, he did suggest that we could both get together online and by telephone to help him to publish his memoirs and detailed recollections of his experiences of the wartime years of the first half of the nineteen-forties during the invasion of Occupied Europe following the Normandy Landings in June 1944.
The format of this exercise in international data collection would be for the Website Moderator to telephone the WW2 veteran in the USA. from his office in London in the United Kingdom. This would provide the veteran with an opportunity to dictate his memoirs over the telephone by conducting a telephone interview with the Website Moderator which would be recorded in MP3 format and then made available to anyone who wished to listen to it by accessing the appropriate section of the Robarts.com website. This approach could also be adapted to encourage people all over the World to share genealogical background information which might well otherwise have remained hidden. This approach has achieved some degree of success within the past twelve months when a series of telephone conversations between Mel Gibson and the lady who is the mother of their child were published for anyone with access to the World Wide Web to listen to if they wished to do so.
The ‘Intelligence History’ section of the Robarts.com website is intended to provide ‘intelligence’ historians and writers with a forum for the exchange of information and ideas within their own community to enable them to produce well-informed and thoroughly researched works which are of historical interest to members of the general public and other academics. This should relieve such ‘intelligence’ writers of the necessity of writing books on the subject which are either overly sensational and not entirely convincing or which portrays the subject in a way which often seems very depressing, being concerned only with the treacherous, even murderous personalities of the people involved in the business.
An online video of a meeting between the author of the book and a suitably qualified reviewer of the book is now not uncommon. It serves as a useful background for anyone who is going to buy and hopefully to read the book itself.
Timothy ROBARTS
Mobile – 07799 775262
Email – tim@robarts.com