Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones (born 28 July 1942) is professor of American history emeritus and an honorary fellow in History at the University of Edinburgh (School of History, Classics and Archaeology), Scotland. He is an authority on American intelligence history, having written two American intelligence history surveys and studies of the CIA and FBI. He has also written books on women and American foreign policy, America and the Vietnam War, and American labor history.[1]
Jeffreys-Jones was born in Carmarthen and grew up speaking Welsh in Harlech. Having moved to Harlech at a young age, he attended Ysgol Ardudwy, the local comprehensive school. He attended the University College of Wales at Aberystwyth (now Aberystwyth University), taking a B.A. in 1963. During 1964-65 he pursued graduate study at the University of Michigan and, during 1965–66, at Harvard University. In 1967 Jeffreys-Jones took his PhD in American history at Cambridge University in England.[2] He stated in 2020:
I originally approached American history after following a left wing trajectory that billed the United States as arch-conservative, arch-capitalist, and hostile to democratic socialism and world peace.[1]
He taught as a tutor of history at Harvard's Kirkland House, at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge University, and for the Transport and General Workers Union before becoming a lecturer in history at the University of Edinburgh in 1967. After rising through the academic ranks as a lecturer and reader, in 1997 he became the university's second professor of American history, or its first exclusive professor of American history, given that in 1965 George "Sam" Shepperson had become "Professor of Commonwealth and American History." During his career, Jeffreys-Jones held visiting appointments, including: a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Charles Warren Center for the Study of American History at Harvard (1971–72); a Stipendiary at the JFK Institut für Nordamerikastudien, Berlin, Germany; and a Canadian Commonwealth Fellowship and visiting professor at the University of Toronto.[3] Jeffreys-Jones has directed postgraduate students, master's and doctoral. Jeffreys-Jones was one of the founders of the Scottish Association for the Study of America.
Jeffreys-Jones began his scholarly pursuits examining the issue of violence in American industry during the Progressive Era, including the use of private detective agencies in labor disputes. Building on his work involving private detectives who collected intelligence for big business, Jeffreys-Jones then shifted his focus during the late 1970s to examine American secret intelligence, a time when the field began to blossom with the release of historical records and revelations of American intelligence agencies' activities. Jeffreys-Jones published an historical survey examining the development of American intelligence from the establishment of the Secret Service in the 19th century to the CIA in the 20th. This was followed by one of the first academic histories of the CIA at a time when most studies were undocumented, a book examining American intelligence and exaggeration, and a history of the FBI in which Jeffreys-Jones traced its origins to the 19th century and the federal government's pursuit of the Ku Klux Klan.
More recent books by Jeffreys-Jones traced the history of British-American intelligence cooperation and the recent rise of European Union intelligence, and analyzed the achievements of the American left since 1900. The latter book was the winner of the Neustadt Prize for the best British book on American politics published in 2013. His next two books were about the history of surveillance in the US and the UK, and about the 1938 Nazi spy ring in America. His latest work, A Question of Standing, brings the history of the CIA up to 2022, making a case for the importance of analysts. According to Mark White in BBC History Magazine (1 September 2022), it has ‘a perspective that is both balanced and compelling’.
"What Burleson and Orwell Overlooked: Private Security Provision in the United States and the United Kingdom." In: Private Security and Modern States: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, edited by David Churchill, Dolores Janiewski and Pieter Leloup (London: Routledge, 2020), pp.214–31.
“J. Edgar Hoover.” In: The Federal Bureau of Investigation: History, Powers, and Controversies of the FBI, edited by Douglas M. Charles (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2022), pp.221–28.
Articles (since 2015)
"The Death of a Myth: How Socialism and the Left Succeeded in America." Reviews in American History, vol. 43 (June 2015), pp.281–87.
"Inter-Allied Commando Intelligence and Security Training in Gwynedd: The Coates Memoir," Intelligence and National Security, vol. 30, no. 4 (August 2015), pp.545–59.
"State Surveillance is More Ethical than Private-Sector Intrusions," Wired (January/February 2016), p.97.
"Antecedents and Memory as Factors in the Creation of the CIA," Diplomatic History, vol. 40, no. 1 (January 2016), pp.140–54.
"A Forgotten Scandal: How the Nazi Spy Case Affected American Neutrality and German Diplomatic Opinion." Passport: The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Review (September 2020). pp.45–48.
Freedman, Lawrence D. Review of A Question of Standing: The History of the CIA, in Foreign Affairs, 101 (November/December 2022), pp.194–5.
Daskal, Jennifer. "Public and Private Eyes" Foreign Affairs. (Nov/Dec 2017), 96#6, pp 139–143; review of We Know All About You.
Morello, John, "We Know All About You: The Story of Surveillance in Britain and America. By Rhodri Jeffreys‐Jones, " History (Jan 2020) 105#364, pp 173–175.
O'Reilly, Kenneth. review of The FBI: A History, in American Historical Review (June, 2008), p.865.
"Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones." Gale Literature: Contemporary Authors (Gale, 2018). online
COINTELPRO was a series of covert and illegal projects conducted between 1956 and 1971 by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting American political organizations that the FBI perceived as subversive. Groups and individuals targeted by the FBI included feminist organizations, the Communist Party USA, anti-Vietnam War organizers, activists in the civil rights and Black power movements, environmentalist and animal rights organizations, the American Indian Movement (AIM), Chicano and Mexican-American groups like the Brown Berets and the United Farm Workers, and independence movements. Although the program primarily focused on organizations that were part of the broader New Left, they also targeted white supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and the National States' Rights Party.
Espionage, spying, or intelligence gathering is the act of obtaining secret or confidential information (intelligence). A person who commits espionage is called an espionage agent or spy. Any individual or spy ring, in the service of a government, company, criminal organization, or independent operation, can commit espionage. The practice is clandestine, as it is by definition unwelcome. In some circumstances, it may be a legal tool of law enforcement and in others, it may be illegal and punishable by law.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the domestic intelligence and security service of the United States and its principal federal law enforcement agency. An agency of the United States Department of Justice, the FBI is a member of the U.S. Intelligence Community and reports to both the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence. A leading U.S. counterterrorism, counterintelligence, and criminal investigative organization, the FBI has jurisdiction over violations of more than 200 categories of federal crimes.
The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was an intelligence agency of the United States during World War II. The OSS was formed as an agency of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) to coordinate espionage activities behind enemy lines for all branches of the United States Armed Forces. Other OSS functions included the use of propaganda, subversion, and post-war planning.
An intelligence agency is a government agency responsible for the collection, analysis, and exploitation of information in support of law enforcement, national security, military, public safety, and foreign policy objectives.
Allen Welsh Dulles was an American lawyer who was the first civilian Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), and its longest serving director. As head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the early Cold War, he oversaw the 1953 Iranian coup d'état, the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état, the Lockheed U-2 aircraft program, the Project MKUltra mind control program, and the Bay of Pigs Invasion in 1961. As a result of the failed invasion of Cuba, Dulles was fired by President John F. Kennedy.
Aldrich Hazen Ames is an American former CIA counterintelligence officer who was convicted of espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union and Russia in 1994. He is serving a life sentence, without the possibility of parole, in the Federal Correctional Institution in Terre Haute, Indiana. Ames was known to have compromised more highly classified CIA assets than any other officer until Robert Hanssen, who was arrested seven years later in 2001.
Clyde Anderson Tolson was the second-ranking official of the FBI from 1930 until 1972, from 1947 titled Associate Director, primarily responsible for personnel and discipline. He was the protégé and long-time top deputy of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.
Intelligence assessment, or simply intel, is the development of behavior forecasts or recommended courses of action to the leadership of an organisation, based on wide ranges of available overt and covert information (intelligence). Assessments develop in response to leadership declaration requirements to inform decision-making. Assessment may be executed on behalf of a state, military or commercial organisation with ranges of information sources available to each.
Cedric Henning Belfrage was an English film critic, journalist, writer and political activist. He is best remembered as a co-founder of the radical US weekly National Guardian. Later Belfrage was referenced as a Soviet agent in the US intelligence Venona project, although it appears he had been working for British Security Co-ordination as a double agent.
Elizabeth Terrill Bentley was an American NKVD spymaster, who was recruited from within the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). She served the Soviet Union as the primary handler of multiple highly placed moles within both the United States Federal Government and the Office of Strategic Services from 1938 to 1945. She defected by contacting the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and debriefing about her espionage activities.
Confessions of a Nazi Spy is a 1939 American spy political thriller film directed by Anatole Litvak for Warner Bros. It was the first explicitly anti-Nazi film to be produced by a major Hollywood studio, being released in May 1939, four months before the beginning of World War II in Europe, and two and a half years before the United States' official entry into the war.
Stanley Graze was an economist from New York City. He graduated from and lectured at the City College of New York and had a master's degree from Columbia University. He was employed by various Wall Street firms, the State Department, and the United Nations. He was alleged to have been a Soviet spy based on a transcription of the Gorsky Memo.
David Alexander Tetlow Stafford was projects director at Edinburgh University's Centre for the Study of the Two World Wars and is Leverhulme Emeritus Professor in the university's School of History, Classics and Archaeology.
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David Harold Price is an American anthropologist. He studied anthropology at Evergreen State College, the University of Chicago and the University of Florida and is a professor of anthropology at St. Martin's University in Lacey, Washington.
Spying, as well as other intelligence assessment, has existed since ancient history. In the 1980s scholars characterized foreign intelligence as "the missing dimension" of historical scholarship." Since then a largely popular and scholarly literature has emerged. Special attention has been paid to World War II, as well as the Cold War era (1947–1989) that was a favorite for novelists and filmmakers.
Jessie Jordan was a Scottish hairdresser who was found guilty of spying for the German Abwehr on the eve of World War II. She had married again after her German husband died fighting for Germany, before she became a spy in Scotland. She was imprisoned and deported to Germany after the war ended.
Leon George Turrou was an American special agent and translator with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) tasked with leading an investigation that located and interrogated Nazi German spies within the United States. He also became the author of a popular book called Nazi Spies in America. His writings were adapted into the 1939 film Confessions of a Nazi Spy.
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