About Tom Griffin
Intelligence history profiles with a focus on the US, UK and Ireland.
Cold War Intelligence
In 2022, I published my first book, State-Private Networks and Intelligence Theory: From Cold War Liberalism and Intelligence Theory, in the Routledge Studies in Intelligence series.
The book traced the roots of the Iraq War to a hawkish coalition which developed, inside and outside the US intelligence community, in opposition to détente in the 1970s. I focused largely on one element of that coalition, tracing the origins of neoconservatism to the CIA’s allies among anti-communists in the labour movement.
Here, I want to build on some of the other themes in the book, examining the internal politics of Western intelligence services from the Cold War to the War on Terror.
Key themes will be the legacy and international impact of James Angleton’s approach to counterintelligence, counterinsurgency in the British empire, and domestic counter-subversion in the UK.