Biography
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.
COINTELPRO was a series of covert and illegal projects actively conducted by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting domestic American political organizations. FBI records show COINTELPRO resources targeted groups and individuals the FBI deemed subversive, including feminist organizations, the Communist Party USA, anti–Vietnam War organizers, activists of 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, independence movements, a variety of organizations that were part of the broader New Left, and white supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and the far-right group 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. Operating under the jurisdiction of the United States Department of Justice, the FBI is also 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.
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.
The Venona project was a United States counterintelligence program initiated during World War II by the United States Army's Signal Intelligence Service and later absorbed by the National Security Agency (NSA), that ran from February 1, 1943, until October 1, 1980. It was intended to decrypt messages transmitted by the intelligence agencies of the Soviet Union. Initiated when the Soviet Union was an ally of the US, the program continued during the Cold War, when the Soviet Union was considered an enemy.
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.
The Church Committee was a US Senate select committee in 1975 that investigated abuses by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), National Security Agency (NSA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Chaired by Idaho Senator Frank Church (D-ID), the committee was part of a series of investigations into intelligence abuses in 1975, dubbed the "Year of Intelligence", including its House counterpart, the Pike Committee, and the presidential Rockefeller Commission. The committee's efforts led to the establishment of the permanent US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
Maurice Hyman Halperin (1906–1995) was an American writer, professor, diplomat, and accused Soviet spy.
Frank Gardiner Wisner was one of the founding officers of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and played a major role in CIA operations throughout the 1950s.
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 and two and a half years before the United States' entry into the war.
The Central Intelligence Agency, known informally as theAgency and historically as thecompany, is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States, officially tasked with gathering, processing, and analyzing national security information from around the world, primarily through the use of human intelligence (HUMINT) and conducting covert action. As a principal member of the United States Intelligence Community (IC), the CIA reports to the Director of National Intelligence and is primarily focused on providing intelligence for the President and Cabinet of the United States. Following the dissolution of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) at the end of World War II, President Harry S. Truman created the Central Intelligence Group under the direction of a Director of Central Intelligence by presidential directive on January 22, 1946, and this group was transformed into the Central Intelligence Agency by implementation of the National Security Act of 1947.
John Elbert Wilkie was an American journalist and Chief of the United States Secret Service from 1898 to 1911.
David Alexander Tetlow Stafford is projects director at Edinburgh University's Centre for the Study of the Two World Wars and Leverhulme Emeritus Professor in the university's School of History, Classics and Archaeology.
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA is a 2007 book by Tim Weiner. Legacy of Ashes is a detailed history of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from its creation after World War II, through the Cold War years and the War on Terror. The book is based on more than 50,000 documents, primarily from the archives of the CIA, and hundreds of interviews with CIA veterans, including ten Directors of Central Intelligence. Legacy of Ashes won the 2007 National Book Award for Nonfiction.
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.
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) who was 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 at its time called Nazi Spies in America. His writings were adapted into the film, Confessions of a Nazi Spy.
Defending Rights & Dissent (DRAD) is a national not-for-profit advocacy organization in the United States, dedicated to defending civil liberties, exposing government repression, and protecting the right of political dissent. DRAD was formed as the merger of the Defending Dissent Foundation (DDF) and the Bill of Rights Defense Committee (BORDC). DRAD is currently active in defending the right to protest, opposing political surveillance, and campaigning against the prosecution of national security whistleblowers.
Eighteen individuals in the United States were indicted on charges of spying for Nazi Germany in 1938. The case resulted in the criminal convictions of Johanna Hoffman, a hairdresser on the SS Europa liner, Enrich Glaser, a soldier based at Mitchel Field, and Otto Voss, an airplane mechanic. The case was named after Guenther Gustave Maria Rumrich, a United States Army sergeant turned deserter who pleaded guilty to espionage and agreed to testify on behalf of the US government. Rumrich was arrested on February 14, 1938, after impersonating Secretary of State Cordell Hull and trying to obtain 35 blank United States passports to deliver to the German government. All four individuals served time in jail, with sentences ranging from two to six years. The case was the first major international spy case for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
