In the late 1920s, Soviet intelligence launched an effort to learn the tradecraft of foreign secret services. Among the key facilitators of this process was Konstantin Zvonariov, a Latvian communist and senior Red Army intelligence officer. Focusing on the World War I experience of German human intelligence, he was able to draw useful lessons for his organization and the entire Soviet intelligence community. His intellectual enterprise was only superficially noticed by the historiography of the Russian special services. This article aims to fill this gap. It examines Zvonariov's detailed study of the organization and activities of German HUMINT and speculates on whether his work was able to influence Soviet intelligence theory and practice in the 1930s and beyond. The article suggests further scholarly exploration of Zvonariov's legacy in the Soviet and post-Soviet Russian intelligence communities.
Based on a review of the correspondence between Swedish diplomats in the Baltic States and the Swedish Foreign Ministry for the years 1938–1940, the purpose of this article is, firstly, to elaborate a framework for the analysis of intelligence reporting in times of crisis, secondly, to investigate how the Swedish diplomats in the Baltic States went about to report intelligence, and thirdly, to try to reconstruct how the Swedes coped with the volatile conditions characteristic of these years. The article concludes that the period can be divided into four phases, each marked by their respective conditions for intelligence reporting, and that despite shifts to the Swedes' access to different types of sources, they were still able to compensate for the loss of certain sources – most notably, among the Baltic political and governmental elites – and keep Stockholm updated with developments. Their effort in this regard arguably adds a new dimension to prevailing understandings of Sweden's interwar Baltic policy.
This article is the first academic work exploring the evolution of wireless monitoring capabilities (COMINT) in India's Intelligence Bureau (IB) between 1959 and 1968. Until 1968, the IB was India's foreign intelligence agency and experienced its biggest failure in providing estimates for the 1962 Sino-Indian war. B.N. Mullik, the then IB chief, argued that the availability of foreign exchange was directly responsible for determining the COMINT capabilities prior to, and after the war. Consulting recently declassified governmental documents, this article contests this claim and highlights that bureaucratic politics played an impactful role. It reveals that pre-war weaknesses were a result of bureaucratic lethargy among some individuals and factionalism within the IB. In the post-war period, even though foreign exchange became available, bureaucratic battles continued and compelled the IB to explore domestic and in-house alternatives to imports. Therefore, the article offers fresh insights into the history of India's intelligence by exploring a hitherto unexplored domain.
Domestic politics and the conditions of the Total War led the Ottoman ruling elite to expand the workload of the Intelligence Section of the Ottoman General Staff during the First World War. Originally established as a military intelligence organization, the Second Branch dealt with foreign intelligence, but became increasingly involved in domestic security, propaganda, and censorship during 1914–18. This article examines the variety of tasks of the Second Branch. It introduces the practice of reporting and disseminating intelligence within and beyond the Ottoman armed forces. By doing so, the article aims to explain organizational change in military intelligence under wartime conditions.
