Simon Willmetts

Update on National Archives at College Park - AHA Many AHA members have expressed alarm about a post on the National Archives website regarding restricted access to Archives II in College Park, Maryland. In a message on X (formerly Twitter), which we...

Many AHA members have expressed alarm about a posting by the National Archives about access restrictions at Archives II. In a message on X (formerly Twitter), the Archives has clarified that research rooms will remain open to the public. 🗃️(1/2)

Resources for Federal Historians - AHA The American Historical Association supports historians employed by the federal government. We appreciate the important work they do every day to preserve, chronicle, and interpret American history. T...

The AHA recognizes that our colleagues in the federal government are facing unprecedented workforce reductions & has compiled resources in support, & are offering one year of free membership in the AHA to former employees of the federal govt. who have been terminated or resigned since January 20. 🗃️

Trump officials cite ‘new intelligence’ to back president’s claims of success in strikes on Iran Tulsi Gabbard and the CIA director say Iran’s nuclear sites were ‘destroyed’, amid reports of White House efforts to limit sharing of classified information with Congress

And Ye Shall Know the Trump, and the Trump Shall Set You Free - www.theguardian.com/world/2025/j...

Cold War Civil Rights A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the YearHow the fight for civil rights in America became an important front in the Cold War

It's the official publication day for the 25th anniversary edition of Cold War Civil Rights!! New preface sets it in the context of the contemporary global Black Lives Matter movement.
press.princeton.edu/books/paperb...

Excited to announce my forthcoming collection on Spies, Culture and Society edited with Constant Hijzen. It develops ideas about the "cultural turn" in intelligence studies, bringing together leading scholars on intel + culture. More info to follow. Publication in early 2026!

The obvious delusion of this statement aside, I’ve begun to notice Trump’s frequent use of the “going to” future tense, and this had me wondering why politicians use this particular construction, and whether it is an inherently deceptive communication style. So I asked ChatGPT:

Duke Press is having a flash sale for the next 48 hours!!! With the code FLASH50 you can get 50% off my book Police and the Empire City. The book explores how explicit considerations of race, panic over immigrant crime, and military counterinsurgency shaped the modern police department in the US.

Thanks! I like your podcast!

This is how the money goes round…. Great infographic on how CIA distributed funds via front organizations:

Possibly the best file name I’ve ever found in an archive:

Errand into the Wilderness of Mirrors Reveals the previous underexplored influence of religious thought in building the foundations of the CIA. Michael Graziano’s intriguing book fuses two landmark titles in American history: Perry Miller’s Errand into the Wilderness (1956), about the religious worldview of the early Massachusetts colonists, and David Martin’s Wilderness of Mirrors (1980), about the dangers and delusions inherent to the Central Intelligence Agency. Fittingly, Errand into the Wilderness of Mirrors investigates the dangers and delusions that ensued from the religious worldview of the early molders of the Central Intelligence Agency. Graziano argues that the religious approach to intelligence by key OSS and CIA figures like “Wild” Bill Donovan and Edward Lansdale was an essential, and overlooked, factor in establishing the agency’s concerns, methods, and understandings of the world. In a practical sense, this was because the Roman Catholic Church already had global networks of people and safe places that American agents could use to their advantage. But more tellingly, Graziano shows, American intelligence officers were overly inclined to view powerful religions and religious figures through the frameworks of Catholicism. As Graziano makes clear, these misconceptions often led to tragedy and disaster on an international scale. By braiding the development of the modern intelligence agency with the story of postwar American religion, Errand into the Wilderness of Mirrors delivers a provocative new look at a secret driver of one of the major engines of American power.

New addition

Book: Errand into the Wilderness of Mirrors: Religion and the History of the CIA by Michael Graziano (published 01-07-2023)

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/E/bo80657461.html

It was a privilege to be among such esteemed company as part of this H-Diplo roundtable on Hugh Wilford’s “The CIA: An Imperial History”. As I argue here, it’s a book that can help us to rethink intelligence history: issforum.org/roundtables/...

Technical and cultural barriers to leveraging U.S. intelligence to evaluate national level strategies and plans This paper explores the role of U.S. intelligence in assessing the effectiveness of national-level strategies and plans. A high-speed information environment may require a more dynamic, continuous ...

New article titled "Technical and cultural barriers to leveraging U.S. intelligence to evaluate national level strategies and plans" by Cathryn Quantic Thurston published in the journal Intelligence and National Security, here:
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Allies Assess What Intelligence They Can Still Share With Trump Washington’s loose lips and closer ties to Moscow could unravel Western cooperation.

“Like a couple still appearing together in public while awaiting the formality of a divorce, CIA officers abroad will still have friendly meetings with their liaison partners, but they will know that the basis of the relationship in trust has gone.” foreignpolicy.com/2025/02/27/t...

A Look Inside China's Army of Citizen Spies A top former US intelligence expert pulls back the covers of Beijing’s espionage juggernaut

Very pleased to have NYT Pulitzer winner Jane Perlez now contributing to SpyTalk. A top former US intelligence expert pulls back the covers of Beijing’s espionage juggernaut www.spytalk.co/p/a-look-ins...

Clearly!

Adventures of a Ukrainian intelligence officer: www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

From the archive: Truman’s Secretary of Defence James Forrestal: “The word ‘security’ ought to be stricken from the language and the word ‘risk’ substituted… The great danger in any country is for people to believe that there is anything absolute about security.”

Intelligence Studies Section Panels at ISA2025 Intelligence Studies Section Panels at ISA2025

Upcoming Intelligence Studies Section Panels at ISA2025...2-5 March 2025 in Chicago, IL. Details here: www.academia.edu/127731336/In...

Aaaaah the difficulties of managing academic egos in the intelligence business….

General Donovan’s speech at the final gathering of OSS employees: “We have come to the end of an unusual experiment… to determine whether a group of Americans constituting a cross section of racial origins, of abilities, temperaments and talents could meet and risk an encounter with the… enemy.”

From the archive: A CIA button. Just remember to take it off when you go undercover….

MI5 lied to courts to defend handling of violent neo-Nazi agent In an unprecedented humiliation, the security service apologises for “inaccurate” evidence.

www.bbc.com/news/article...

But isn’t this an increasingly outdated way of understanding how intelligence services make sense of the data they collect? Do androids dream of electronic intelligence targets, and if they do, how does this change our understanding of privacy and surveillance in a digital age?

In the wake of the Snowden affair intelligence services often defended bulk data collection by arguing, essentially, that although they store a bunch of data, most of it isn’t looked at by humans, and therefore no privacy violations have taken place.

Do androids dream of electronic intelligence targets? Intelligence services often define surveillance and intelligence collection as the moment at which a human analyst retrieves a particular piece of information. But these days increasingly “sentient” machines are tasked with making sense of data.

1/4: New publication from me on how artificial intelligence will reshape the work of intelligence agencies, and transform our understanding in the process. A big shout out to the editors of this fantastic new collection that rethinks privacy in the 21st Century.

Cold War CIA Spies: The Quiet Americans Book Review Explore the lives of CIA spies in The Quiet Americans, a gripping look at espionage during the Cold War. Book review inside.

These men wanted to make the world better. But the Cold War was messy. Not everything went as planned. The book shows how ideals meet reality.
#TrueHistory #SpyTales

Great to see Elliot Higgins talking to our students at Leiden University!

A Brotherhood of Spies Book Review: Monte Reel’s Espionage Tale A Brotherhood of Spies book review Monte Reel explores Cold War espionage, the U-2 spy plane, and the CIA’s secret intelligence operations.

Spy planes. Secrets. The Cold War. 📖 A Brotherhood of Spies by Monte Reel tells the true story of the U-2 spy plane and the CIA. #ColdWar #SpyBooks
https://smpl.is/a1u0x