Christian Schläpfer cs548@cam.ac.uk - University of Cambridge

BRITISH INTELLIGENCE IN THE EARLY COLD WAR
Christian Schläpfer
cs548@cam.ac.uk
Essays should be approximately 3,000 words in length. If you have any questions or would like to arrange
a supervision, please email me.
Answer ONE of the questions. If you wish to suggest your own question, please check with me
beforehand.
- How serious was the Communist threat in Britain and how was it countered
- ‘There was no McCarthyism in Britain’. Discuss.
- How did the British government and MI5 react to the discovery of the Atom Spies
Reading List
This list is by no means exhaustive. Feel free to go beyond the suggested list. Also check online
journals like Intelligence and National Security and resources such as JSTOR.
Richard Aldrich, The hidden hand: Britain, America and Cold War secret intelligence (London,
2001)
Andrew, Christopher, For the President’s eyes only: Secret intelligence and the American
presidency from Washington to Bush (London, 1996)
Andrew, Christopher, Her Majesty’s Secret Service: the making of the British intelligence
community (London, 1985)
Andrew, Christopher, The Mitrokhin archive: the KGB in Europe and the West (London, 2000)
Beckett, Francis, Enemy within: The rise and fall of the British Communist Party (London, 1995)
Caute, David, The great fear: The anti-communist purge under Truman and Eisenhower
(London, 1978)
Haynes, John E and Klehr, Harvey, VENONA: Decoding Soviet espionage in America (London
and New Haven, 1999)
Hennessy, Peter, The secret state: Whitehall and the Cold War (London, 2002)
Klehr, Harvey, Haynes, John E and Firsov, Fridrikh I, Secret world of American communism
(New Haven and London, 1995)
Thurlow, Richard, The secret state: British internal security in the twentieth century (Oxford,
1994)

Calder Walton, ‘British intelligence and threats to national security, c. 1941-1951’ (unpublished
PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 2007)
West, Nigel and Tsarev, Oleg, The Crown Jewels: The British secrets exposed by the KGB
archives (London, 1998)