World War I and the foundations of American intelligence

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Notes

1. ‘The history of America’s foreign intelligence gathering reaches back to the Revolutionary war. But it wasn’t until World War II that our country’s foreign intelligence activities were coordinated government-wide’. CIA. “Before WWII: A Siloed Approach to Foreign Intelligence.” Accessed January 8, 2023 https://www.cia.gov/legacy/cia-history/

2. On Voska, see Voska and Irwin. Spy and Counter-Spy, 1941.

3. Room 40 was a secretive British intelligence organization. It was located within the directorate of intelligence of the Admiralty. It was tasked with the interception and decryption of German SIGINT. It was responsible for intercepting the infamous Zimmermann Telegram.

4. Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones. Spies We Trust. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, 50–58.

5. ”New Cabinet Plan Bill to be Framed.” Washington Evening Star, January 3 1924. Attorney General Harry Daugherty’s plan to put his protegé Burns in charge of a unified secret service was reported in “Burns Talked of to Succeed Flynn.” New York Times, April 1 1921 and discussed widely in the press. For this information and the references, I am grateful to Douglas M. Charles, who is writing a history of the FBI in two volumes. The historian Robert K. Murray outlined the background to the 1923–4 government reorganization proposals in his book The Harding Era. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1969, 414–6.

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Notes on contributors

Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones

Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones is the author of A Question of Standing: The History of the CIA (OUP, 2022).