The CIA remained a fixture at the heart of Indian civil debate throughout the 1980s. To the very end of the Cold War, the political fortunes of Indira Gandhi, and her son, and successor, Rajiv Gandhi, were intertwined with a series of espionage scandals in which, almost inevitably, the CIA figured prominently. This chapter examines the Reagan administration’s reliance of the CIA as a cold war foreign policy tool and its difficulties in securing Indian support to counter what officials in Washington perceived to be an alarming and unacceptable expansion in Soviet disinformation activity in the subcontinent. It explores the assassinations of Indira and Rajiv Gandhi and how these two tragic events came to be connected by South Asians with the Agency and its earlier CIA involvement in subversion and political assassination in the Global South. As the Cold War approached its end, and Hindu nationalism, rampant corruption, and political violence gripped India, the chapter considers why national powerbrokers in the subcontinent were once again unable to resist urging citizens to ‘look the other way’ and attribute the country’s troubles to a ubiquitous foreign hand?

Spying in South Asia’s conclusion addresses the impact of the end of the Cold War, and the onset of a ‘war on terror’, on British and American intelligence relationships with India. It explores the rationale behind Indian governments’ softening of anti-CIA rhetoric from the mid-1980s, and the implications for New Delhi’s intelligence agencies of the precipitous collapse of the USSR, and the abrupt conclusion of the Cold War. It assesses factors underlying the post-Cold War recovery of Western secret services from the position of public pariahs in India to that of New Delhi’s principal partners in intelligence and security matters. In 1947, as the Cold War dawned and the newly independent subcontinent confronted formidable threats to its stability and security, New Delhi turned to London and Washington for covert support. Some half-a-century later, after decades of what might best be described as circumscribed cooperation compromised by conflict and conspiracism, the intelligence services of India, the United Kingdom, and the United States, once more found compelling reasons to put their differences aside, and work together as close partners in a new secret war.

From the nineteenth century to the twenty-first century, British espionage fiction documents relations between the UK and its European neighbours. In many countries, spying was conducted under the auspices of the Foreign Office, albeit at arm’s length. From the 1920s until 1968, British spies often worked in Passport Control Offices, which were attached to consulates in Europe and around the world. These spies, however, did not hold diplomatic status. In novels such as The Riddle of the Sands (1903), The Secret Agent (1907), The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), A Small Town in Germany (1968), and A Perfect Spy (1986), amateur and professional spies take diplomatic cover or work in tandem with government officials. More often than not, early spy fiction presumes that European interests are inimical to British sovereignty and security. In The Riddle of the Sands, Germans plan to invade England. In The Thirty-Nine Steps, continental Europeans foment an assassination plot against the Greek Prime Minister to instigate a war. Although Cold War alignments and membership in the European Union change this dynamic, Britons remain suspicious of European motives. In this regard, British spy fiction asks the same question in different historical contexts: in what ways are Britons European, or not?

Chapter 8 looks at the general rules which apply to the means and methods of warfare, and what kinds of weapons have been prohibited or restricted under IHL. The general principles governing how warfare is conducted are explained – the prohibitions on causing unnecessary suffering and superfluous injury, and on indiscriminate means and methods. The chapter examines a number of particular weapons, such as dum-dum bullets, mines and booby-traps, weapons that leave non-detectable fragments in the human body, incendiary weapons, blinding laser weapons, cluster munitions and chemical and biological weapons. Chapter 8 also looks at the problem of explosive remnants of war being left in the conflict zone, as well as a number of means and methods which have been the focus of much attention but whose legality is highly contested, including nuclear weapons, white phosphorus, depleted uranium munitions, cyberwarfare, drone warfare and targeted killings. The chapter also explains prohibited methods of warfare such as ordering ‘no quarter’, perfidy, siege and pillage, along with the particular rules relating to belligerent reprisals, mercenaries, espionage and autonomous weapons.

Often regarded as the oldest surviving work on strategy, the Sun Tzu text has influence in many quarters today. This study organizes Sun Tzu’s ideas under fourteen thematic headings. It also clarifies Sun Tzu’s limitations and blind spots. Building on Brigadier General Samuel B. Griffith, USMC (Ret.)’s translation, this study analyzes Sun Tzu from three standpoints: Sun Tzu (1), Sun Tzu’s ideas in their original Warring States Chinese context; Sun Tzu (2), Sun Tzu’s ideas applied to warfare in a military sense in other times and places; Sun Tzu (3), generalizations of those ideas, including to cyber warfare and other twenty-first-century strategic competitions. Whereas Sun Tzu (1) analysis addresses ways in which the text is a product of its times, intertwined with traditional Chinese cultural milieux, Sun Tzu (2) and (3) analyses, often building on analogical thinking, map universalistic aspects of Sun Tzu’s insights into war and conflict, strategy, logistics, information, intelligence, and espionage. Those analyses also identify ways in which Sun Tzu’s thinking has relevance to gaining strategic advantage in twenty-first-century conflicts.

Often regarded as the oldest surviving work on strategy, the Sun Tzu text has influence in many quarters today. This study organizes Sun Tzu’s ideas under fourteen thematic headings. It also clarifies Sun Tzu’s limitations and blind spots. Building on Brigadier General Samuel B. Griffith, USMC (Ret.)’s translation, this study analyzes Sun Tzu from three standpoints: Sun Tzu (1), Sun Tzu’s ideas in their original Warring States Chinese context; Sun Tzu (2), Sun Tzu’s ideas applied to warfare in a military sense in other times and places; Sun Tzu (3), generalizations of those ideas, including to cyber warfare and other twenty-first-century strategic competitions. Whereas Sun Tzu (1) analysis addresses ways in which the text is a product of its times, intertwined with traditional Chinese cultural milieux, Sun Tzu (2) and (3) analyses, often building on analogical thinking, map universalistic aspects of Sun Tzu’s insights into war and conflict, strategy, logistics, information, intelligence, and espionage. Those analyses also identify ways in which Sun Tzu’s thinking has relevance to gaining strategic advantage in twenty-first-century conflicts.

Following the previous discussion of popular performance forms, this chapter examines the ways in which popular war-time melodramas drew on both existing traditions within British theatre and on the kinds of social debates which prevailed before the war and were transformed by it. The chapter also considers how genres such as the sketch or the one act play, circulating in music halls, in revues and at wartime charity fund-raisers, like melodramas, adapted to and reflected the changing and gendered experience of wartime conditions. These dramas often represented topical events - such as espionage - and explored contemporary anxieties - especially around gender and domestic life in war-time - whilst capitalising on the popularity of pre-existing dramatic forms.

This chapter discusses the collaboratively written First Part of Sir John Oldcastle (1599) as a response to Shakespeare’s irreverent transformation of the eponymous Lollard martyr into Falstaff. Oldcastle restores the Lollard martyr to his heroic stature and is therefore often read in terms of a moderate, that is, politically loyal and conformist form of Puritanism. However, the play arguably, in its representation of nonconformity and a conditional form of political obedience, is more radical than is usually assumed and voices a nuanced challenge to royal supremacy over the Church of England. As this chapter further suggests, the play’s nonconformist ethos therefore also contributes to a more ambivalent conception of theatricality than the one embodied by Shakespeare’s Falstaff, a conception of theatricality that is defined by a self-reflexive distrust in the space between seeming and being.

This chapter explores the Italian threats to French authority in the areas that fell within the remit of the Italian armistice and how French officials tackled them at a local level. Italian threats included encroachments on French sovereignty, Fascist propaganda and attempts to undermine French colonial rule. A further potential threat came from the large Italian communities living in France and French North Africa. French responses were complex and multi-layered, with local French authorities sometimes adopting different approaches to those advocated by Vichy. Where Italian actions clashed with Vichy’s defence of France’s colonies or its policies on Jews, the French authorities invited intervention from Berlin. However, as French attentions turned once again towards exploiting the rifts within the Axis, the response from Berlin showed that the strategy of seeking assistance from the Germans was to be no panacea.

How did Dar es Salaam became a ‘Cold War city’ in Africa? This chapter sets out the principles which informed the basis of Julius Nyerere’s engagement with the outside world – a set of foreign policy coordinates which remained remarkably consistent. It then shows how a violent revolution in the Zanzibar archipelago pushed Tanganyika into a hasty union with the islands, while an army mutiny in Dar es Salaam exposed the fragility of Nyerere’s government. A series of foreign policy crises with major Western states followed. Meanwhile, Tanzania reached out to the socialist world and developed close connections with China. By the mid-1960s, Dar es Salaam had attracted the attention of the Cold War world. The remainder of the chapter then demonstrates how a ‘Cold War political culture’ became inscribed into Dar es Salaam’s public sphere and concrete spaces. Propaganda, rumour, and espionage were major preoccupations of the Tanzanian government.

This chapter provides an assessment of the shifting terrain of 1960s-era political radicalism through an analysis of Sam Greenlee’s novel The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1969/1973). It argues that the novel employs and challenges recognizable Civil Rights and Black Power discourses of social change to destabilize institutionalized racism and socio-economic discrimination and to begin to imagine untested paths to resistance. The chapter also considers how Greenlee uses espionage to reconfigure familiar political ideals and modes of leadership and to explore how the imagined integration of the CIA becomes a device for critiquing employment discrimination and the state’s half-hearted deployment of affirmative action. It closes by showing how spy training and spycraft offer Greenlee opportunities to rethink the connections among gender, sexuality, and revolution, while additionally illustrating how heterosexual masculinity dominates the space of the revolutionary. Through the frame of espionage, Greenlee reimagines Black identity and activism.

Chapter 5, “Information Wars,” is the opening case study of four intelligentsia-built resistance systems, which consider how the intelligentsia responded to Nazi persecution with projects bent on maintaining national traditions and rebuilding a Polish state. It examines the one that undergirds the rest: underground information creation and trafficking that kept the elite connected and funneled news into and out of the city. In response to the closure of Polish-language press, radio bookstores, and libraries, a number of educated Poles created an underground world of secret newsletters and journals to keep the city informed about occupier behavior and the circumstances of the wider war. This project involved entangled networks of individuals who were brutally punished if caught, and the work of writing, editing, couriering, and reading underground press initiated many Varsovians into anti-Nazi “conspiracies.” Information sourced in the occupied city was not merely for local consumption but was painstakingly smuggled out by a sprawling network of Polish and international couriers toting encrypted information to the states of the Grand Alliance. This chapter argues that the ability of Poles in Warsaw to counter Nazi propaganda narratives with their own information was essential to all later successful opposition.