African Intelligence Services

This book argues for making African intelligence services front-and-center in studies about historical and contemporary African security. As the first academic anthology on the subject, it brings together a group of international scholars and intelligence practitioners to understand African intelligence services’ post-colonial and contemporary challenges. The book’s eleven chapters survey a diverse collection of countries and provides readers with histories of understudied African intelligence services. The volume examines the intelligence services’ objectives, operations, leaderships, international partners and legal frameworks. The chapters also highlight different methodologies and sources to further scholarly research about African intelligence.

Bringing together a group of international scholars, The Handbook of African Intelligence Cultures provides the first review of intelligence cultures in every African country. It explores how intelligence cultures are influenced by a range of factors, including past and present societal, governmental and international dynamics. In doing so, the book examines the state’s role, civil society and foreign relations in shaping African countries’ intelligence norms, activities and oversight. It also explores the role intelligence services and cultures play in government and civil society.

This book is the first full history of South African intelligence and provides a detailed examination of the various stages in the evolution of South Africa’s intelligence organizations and structures. Covering the apartheid period of 1948-90, the transition from apartheid to democracy of 1990-94, and the post-apartheid period of new intelligence dispensation from 1994-2005, this book examines not only the apartheid government’s intelligence dispensation and operations, but also those of the African National Congress, and its partner, the South African Communist Party (ANC/SACP) – as well as those of other liberation movements and the ‘independent homelands’ under the apartheid system. Examining the civilian, military and police intelligence structures and operations in all periods, as well as the extraordinarily complicated apartheid government’s security bureaucracy (or 'securocracy') and its structures and units, the book discusses how South Africa’s Cold War ‘position’ influenced its relationships with various other world powers, especially where intelligence co-operation came to bear. It outlines South Africa’s regional relationships and concerns – the foremost being its activities in South-West Africa (Namibia) and its relationship with Rhodesia through 1980. Finally, it examines the various legislative and other governance bases for the existence and operations of South Africa’s intelligence structures – in all periods – and the influences that such activities as the Rivonia Trial (at one end of the history) or the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (at the other end) had on the evolution of these intelligence questions throughout South Africa’s modern history. This book will be of great interest to all students of South African politics, intelligence studies and international politics in general.

Very little has been written about the South African secret intelligence, but revelations to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the new culture of confessions now make that possible. James Sanders has gathered classified documents and interviewed ex-operatives since 1997 and has pieced together an extraordinary, unsavoury picture of the Intelligence Service, both inside South Africa and overseas. He reveals evidence of state-sponsored murder not only to intimidate the ANC but also to allow hard men within the police and the armed forces to let off steam. He reveals that Republican political candidates in the US were assisted in elections against anti-Apartheid Democrats. He shows that South Africa supplied Argentina with weapons during the Falklands War and that Harold Wilson's surprising outbursts, when he claimed that South African intelligence agents were trying to bring down his government, were based on hard evidence. At operational level, South African Intelligence had intimate links with counterparts in the CIA, British Intelligence, and other agencies worldwide. Apartheid's Friends not only provides an insight into a dark area of South Africa's past, it is also an important contribution to the international history of secret service.

A revelatory history of how postcolonial African Independence movements were systematically undermined by one nation above all: the US. In 1958 in Accra, Ghana, the Hands Off Africa conference brought together the leading figures of African independence in a public show of political strength and purpose. Led by the charismatic Kwame Nkrumah, who had just won Ghana’s independence, his determined call for Pan-Africanism was heeded by young, idealistic leaders across the continent and by African Americans seeking civil rights at home. Yet, a moment that signified a new era of African freedom simultaneously marked a new era of foreign intervention and control. In White Malice, Susan Williams unearths the covert operations pursued by the CIA from Ghana to the Congo to the UN in an effort to frustrate and deny Africa’s new generation of nationalist leaders. This dramatically upends the conventional belief that the African nations failed to establish effective, democratic states on their own accord. As the old European powers moved out, the US moved in. Drawing on original research, recently declassified documents, and told through an engaging narrative, Williams introduces readers to idealistic African leaders and to the secret agents, ambassadors, and even presidents who deliberately worked against them, forever altering the future of a continent.

'Empires of Intelligence' argues that colonial control in British and French empires depended on an elabroate security apparatus. Thomas shows the crucial role of intelligence gathering in maintaining imperial control in the years before decolonization.

The edited volume examines contemporary intelligence and tradecraft in Africa. The work offers a timely and empirically grounded account of African intelligence. It provides a multi-contributor narrative that explains contemporary dynamics without discounting historical and external influences, as well as explaining systemic dynamics borne by African agency. The volume features chapters on different issues and themes in intelligence studies, which include but are not limited to intelligence politicization, covert operations and subversion during political transitions, institutionalizing intelligence in post-conflict states, intelligence and counterterrorism, financial intelligence and complex crimes, intelligence professionalization, media and intelligence, intelligence humanization, environmental intelligence, and others. The volume is geographically representative and features case studies from the five regions of Africa: North Africa (the Maghreb), East Africa (or Horn of), Central Africa, West Africa, and Southern Africa. Without following a specific theoretical orientation, the book also aims to start a conversation around the prospects for a theory for African intelligence, with the various chapters paying attention to the political, social, and economic nuances that have a bearing on contemporary intelligence in Africa. This book will be of great interest to students of intelligence studies, African politics, security studies, and IR.

President Truman shuttered the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) as an unneeded, wartime-only special operations/quasi-intelligence agency. The State Department, the Navy, and the War Department quickly recognized that a secret information vacuum loomed and urged the creation of something to replace OSS. These previously declassified and released documents present the thoughtful albeit tortuous and contentious creation of CIA, culminating in the National Security Act of 1947. The declassified historic material dissects the twists and turns and displays the considerable political and legal finesse required to assess the many plans, suggestions, maneuvers and actions that ultimately led to the establishment of the Central Intelligence Agency and other national security entities, which included the incorporation of special safeguards to protect civil liberties. Copies of selected intelligence documents and a timeline of miliestones in the creation of the US Intelligence Community from 1941 through 1964 are included in this resource.