In World War I, Room 40 cryptographers intercepted German cable and radio messages. Britain had a start on America in both world wars. The problem was evident in the vital realm of codebreaking. The special intelligence relationship has nevertheless been problematic from its beginning, and I would argue that since the 1960s the difficulties have become more acute. Senior figures in the UK intelligence community still cling to the SIR like a dog with a favourite old bone. After the Cold War, too, the notion of the special relationship survives, and that includes its intelligence dimension. For example, in the Spanish-American War of 1898, Britain gave material assistance to the US Secret Service when it broke up Spain’s spy ring centred in Montreal, while in World War I, the English novelist Somerset Maugham spied on Bolshevik Russia and received half his salary in dollars. and the USA had had a special intelligence relationship before 1946. With the future of individual agencies uncertain, the prospects for liaison were not bright, either – you can’t have a special relationship without the other.īut while the Cold War may have had a unifying effect on American and British intelligence, it was not the quintessential cement. In the U.K., for example, MI5 seized control of Northern Ireland security and the war against serious organized crime. The intelligence agencies cast about for new missions in the period between the collapse of European communism and the emergence of the international terrorist threat. Moynihan led a serious campaign for the abolition of the CIA. In fact, the future of British and American intelligence agencies, whether or not they cooperated, did look bleak for a while in the 1990s. He discreetly made no mention of the special relationship’s intelligence dimension on that occasion, but he was an intelligence enthusiast, and its inclusion was implicit.ĭoes the iron curtain context of the Churchill’s rhetoric mean that the special relationship was a distinctly Cold War phenomenon? That would have ominous implications for the health of the relationship post- Cold War. Churchill introduced the term ‘special relationship’ in his Fulton, Missouri speech of 1946, in which he announced that an ‘iron curtain’ had descended across Europe. The concept of the SIR originated with Winston Churchill, even if the practices of the SIR predated his years as prime minister. The British-American intelligence relationship was the dominant example of international trust and cooperation in matters of espionage in the twentieth century, and we know it as the special intelligence relationship, an intelligence relationship like none other on the planet. It argues that the SIR rose and then fell, and that the key to partial redemption may be found in Britain’s relationship with the European Union (EU).Ĭooperation has been a prominent feature of secret intelligence – it allows the pooling of efforts and resources. It questions the assumption that the SIR was a Cold War phenomenon, and considers the implications of the Brexit debate. Note: The short story Neil MacAdam was dramatized for the stage in 1941 by Paulo Braga as O Fruito Proibido.This contribution examines the history and present-day status of a phenomenon long held dear by those who govern the United Kingdom – the special intelligence relationship (SIR) with the United States. When Maugham was about to depart for Europe and the time came for them to part ways, Ah King surprised the author by bursting into tears (having shown little sign of emotion previously on the journey), leading Maugham to dedicate the volume to him. Ah King, a twenty-year old man, accompanied him for six months.
In the preface to the collection, Maugham recounts how he engaged a servant in Singapore to assist him in his travels. The short stories collected in both volumes had appeared previously in magazines. Like The Casuarina Tree, Ah King was loosely based on Maugham's experiences traveling with his companion Gerald Haxton in the region for six months in 1921 and four months in 1925. The book was published in French translation as La Femme dans la Jungle (1935) and in Spanish as Ah King, mi criado china (1946). It was first published by the UK publishing house, Heinemann, in September 1933 the first American edition was published on November 8 of the same year by Doubleday Doran, New York. Ah King is a collection of short stories set in the Federated Malay States and elsewhere in Southeast Asia during the 1920s by W.