Overview

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Requisites

Exclusion

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Learning activities

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Learning outcomes

1.
Gained an understanding of the impact of intelligence, espionage and counter-espionage activities on key historical events of the twentieth century.
2.
Increased their appreciation of the contingency of historical development. Threshold Learning Outcomes for History:
3.
Demonstrate an understanding of at least one period or culture of the past
4.
Identify and interpret a wide variety of secondary and primary materials
5.
Examine historical issues by undertaking research according to the methodological and ethical conventions of the discipline
6.
Analyse historical evidence, scholarship and changing representations of the past
7.
Construct an evidence-based argument or narrative in audio, digital, oral, visual or written form

Assessments

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Additional information

Unit content:Spying has often been seen, like war itself, as the conduct of politics by other means. The aim of this unit is to examine this idea by exploring a range of historical eras and events when espionage and secret intelligence have played an important role. Despite the dismissive attitude of many historians towards the role of intelligence agencies and agents in the past, this unit takes seriously the never-ending need of governments to obtain information on their enemies (and indeed on their friends). How have governments obtained this information? How have they interpreted and responded to it? How have they tried to defend their own secrets? And most importantly, how has secret intelligence influenced history? Underlying the unit as a whole is a crucial ethical question: to what lengths may a state a go in order to preserve itself? Key topics include: • The 19th century origins of the ‘secret world’ • The First World War: classic espionage; birth of the ‘black chambers’ • Intelligence failures: the Second World War: Operation Barbarossa, Pearl Harbor • Signals intelligence, codebreaking and the Second World War: the Ultra secret • Cold War spies: the Cambridge Five • Cold War SIGINT: Venona • The ‘intelligence cycle’ and the problems of analysis • The evolution and organisation of the main intelligence communities: CIA, NSA, KGB, MI5, MI6, Mossad, etc.