The Bodleian is the main library of the University of Oxford. Its most famous hub is the large domed building of the Radcliffe Camera. The Bodleianâs centuries-old holdings of knowledge in the physical forms of books, journals and electronic sources cross the Universityâs four academic divisions, its departments and faculties, and its constituent colleges. The filmic and literary backdrop to the intrigues of John le CarrĂ©, the detection of Inspector Morse, the Bodleian is also one locus at the heart of the complex historic and contemporary relationship between universities and the UKâs security and intelligence agencies.
Within view of the Radcliffe Camera is Brasenose College where John Buchan was an undergraduate, years before working for the War Propaganda Bureau, in 1915, the year of The Thirty-Nine Steps (Altenhöner, 2019; Buchan, 2004; Buchan, 2019; Lownie, 2003; National Archives, 2019; Sanders, 1975). Opposite is All Souls, where, from 1957 to 1967, philosopher Isaiah Berlin held the Oxford University Chichele Chair of Social and Political Theory, before becoming the inaugural President of Wolfson College. An Ă©migrĂ© from the Russian Revolution, Isaiah Berlinâs intellectual life intermeshed with political life, including the security and intelligence agencies, variant accounts of which appear in biographies (Ignatieff, 2000). From 1945 to 1946, Berlin served at the British Embassy in Moscow, and in his memoire Personal Impressions describes meeting officials but the highlight of his duties seems to have been meeting with Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova, whom he considered two âwriters of geniusâ (Berlin, 1988: x). As the anonymous 1997 Daily Telegraph obituary writes: âStalin was furious that the meetings had taken place, saying, âI see that our nun [referring to Akhmatova] now receives foreign spiesââ (Telegraph, 1997). In a vein that, as we shall see, characterises the founder of the Bodleian Library, Deighton (2013) rightly designates the academic and intelligence interface of Isaiah Berlinâs life, defining him as a Cold War âdon and diplomatâ. One of the most notable narratives of Berlinâs life draws its title from an epigram of Immanuel Kant: âOut of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever madeâ (Banville, 2013; Berlin, 2013). This perhaps is an apt analogy for the interactions between espionage and the Academy, where we find no straight path, but only a nascent pattern of interactions evidently emergent for centuries.
Look back further, then, to a renowned collection of scholarship, to the early sixteenth century, and you will see a library whose fortunes would be turned by a scholar and a spy. A young undergraduate at Magdalen College (a BA at 18) and Fellow of Merton College (a probationary fellow at the same age), Thomas Bodleyâs (1545â1613) great legacy is the Bodleian Library, since 1604 known by King James 1 decree as âThe Library of the Foundation of Sir Thomas Bodleyâ, and from 1605 thence the Bibliotheca Bodkeiana (Clennell, 2006: 11). Bodley also had a successful political career, at home and abroad, one largely neglected by scholars (cf. Adams, 2011; Clennell, 2002; Trim, 1998). Here, he found royal approval in the diplomatic service of Queen Elizabeth I, between 1585 and 1597, making, according to his briefest of autobiographies, many a âdiplomatic missionâ (Bodley, 2006). Politically focused on the Protestant cause in England and Europe, Bodley is referenced in contemporaneous state papers (Wernham, 1936). Martinâs (2016) Elizabethan Espionage here portrays diplomat Thomas Bodley as a man of Catholic counterintelligence on continental Europe. It was this Thomas Bodley who would save the library named after him and receive a knighthood, as current-day Chiefs of spy agencies do in recognition of public service.
Having married a rich widow whose late husband made a fortune selling pilchards, on Bodleyâs own comfortable retirement he set to further public good. Familiar with the locales where spies and scholars met, Bodley resolved to
set up my staff at the library door in Oxon; being thoroughly persuaded, that in my solitude, and surcease from the Commonwealth affairs, I could not busy myself to better purpose, than by reducing that place (which then in every part lay ruined and waste) to the public use of students. (Bodley, 2006)
The Bodleian Library details a large initial donation of two and a half thousand books, some of Bodleyâs own. With Thomas James appointed librarian, opening on 8 November 1602, the next stage of the story makes Bodley and the library opening distinctive:
In 1610 Bodley entered into an agreement with the Stationersâ Company of London under which a copy of every book published in England and registered at Stationersâ Hall would be deposited in the new library. Although at first the agreement was honoured more in the breach than in the observance, it nevertheless pointed to the future of the library as a comprehensive and ever-expanding collection, different in both size and purpose from the libraries of the colleges. (Bodleian, 2019)
This would ultimately require more building space, and the ever-energetic Bodley set to planning an extension. Dying in 1613, he did not live to see the building works completed, though he would leave an extraordinary legacy.
In terms of the university-security-intelligence nexus, the obvious historic resonance is that a former Oxford student, don, diplomat and spy returns to support the work of a university. The less obvious epistemological parallel lies in his negotiations with the Stationersâ Company, which made Oxfordâs University Library a legal deposit for all published books. Bodley sees the importance of all sources of knowledge, and its systematisation. This sixteenth-century academic arrangement, one might argue, anticipates the indiscriminate breadth of twenty-first-century intelligence gathering (Lowenthal and Clark, 2015).
Much publicised leaks by Julian Assange and Edward Snowden illustrate a modern variant on an old theme on the uses of knowledge gathering for security and intelligence purposes (Betts, 2009; Fidler 2015; Greenwald, 2015; Harding 2014; Johnson, Aldrich, Moran, Barrett, Hastedt, Jervis, Krieger, McDermott, Omand, Phythian and Wark, 2014). These two cases illustrate the expansive frame of security and intelligence of which universities are an important part to which little systematic analysis has been applied. It is illustrative to look at the widespread focus on intelligence gathering for such security purposes to see where and why the Academy is now irrevocably entwined, too, with these same security and intelligence purposes.
Julian Assange, found of WikiLeaks, came to the fore in the light of exposés related to the conduct of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The continued range of documents, some classified, released into the public domain, show fairly unambiguously the extent of a blurring between civilian and military surveillance targeting by states and their agencies (WikiLeaks, 2019). Such developments have themselves spawned a literature on surveillance as a sub-field within security and intelligence studies (Ball, Haggerty and Lyon, 2014), though Foucault (1977, 2009, 2010) had long before analysed the deep state of security and surveillance.
In more proximate terms, then, none of the post-Assange revelations were in fact either new and nor should they have been surprising. Just as Herman and Chomsky (1995), even before 9/11, had observed the determined and integrated public policy efforts of states to âmanufacture consentâ, post-9/11 readers of the California Law Review â to take one erudite example only â would have read an instructive article on the breakdown of public and private intelligence domains in the War on Terror (Michaels, 2008). Michaels writes:
Unable to target or repel terrorists using conventional military tactics and munitions alone, the United States is acutely aware that todayâs pivotal battlefield is an informational one. Teams of U.S. intelligence agents, acting as eavesdroppers, infiltrators, interrogators, and data-miners, must race against the clock to anticipate terroristsâ actions, frustrate their missions, and dismantle their infrastructure. Because the U.S. government does not know the who, what, where, and when of the next terrorist strike, but recognizes that might be hatched on domestic soil, its first step must be to cast a gather all sorts of data points, any one of which might be the clue intelligence agents to prevent another September 11-like catastrophe. In this regard, there is no better ally than the private sector. Its comparative over the government in acquiring vast amounts of potentially useful function both of industryâs unparalleled access to the American intimate affairs-access given by all those who rely on businesses their personal, social, and economic transactions-and of asymmetries insofar as private organizations can at times obtain information more easily and under fewer legal restrictions than the government can when it collects similar information. (Michaels, 2008: 901â902)
Universities have here, in both public and private sectors, long been a part of this knowledge gathering. For those not reading articles in the California Law Review, this long-established partnership of private sector collaboration with the security and intelligence agencies would take a digestible narrative form with a spying scandal showing an ingrained interconnection which had actually been present since long before the Cold War (Betts, 2009; Laville and Wilford, 2012).
So, in 2013, Edward Snowden, a one-time NSA employee, presented to the Guardian newspaper one of the largest leaks of secret information in modern times. It detailed widescale and apparently indiscriminate interception of communication by agencies such as GCHQ and the NSA, revealing mass surveillance across all aspects of society, far beyond security/intelligence-defined targets (Fidler 2015). Johnson et al. (2014) state in plain terms:
âŠthe NSA hired Edward J. Snowden to help with some of its computer work. At the time of his hiring in 2013, Snowden â a 29-year-old high school dropout from suburban Maryland and a former CIA computer specialist â was under contract as a data specialist with the giant defence firm Booz Allen Hamilton. In his short stint with the NSA, Snowden reportedly stole some 1.7 million classified documents from the agencyâs computers. He leaked many of these documents over the next year to American and British journalists, as a protest against what he viewed as improper surveillance methods used by the NSA against American and British citizens. (Johnson et al. 2014: 14)
A 2013 BBC report at the time has former director of GCHQ Sir David Omand (contributor to this volume in a private capacity) stating this as the âmost catastrophic loss to British intelligence everâ (BBC, 2013). Nigel Inkster, former director of operations and intelligence at MI6 (also writing in this volume in a private capacity), was reported as saying that he âagreed with [Omandâs] assessmentâ (BBC, 2013).
Hyperbole predominates in the analysis:
Fundamentally, privacy is being abolished â not eroded, not diminished, not encroached upon, but abolished. And being constructed in its place is a colossal digital new Stasi, driven by a creepy intoxication with what is now technically possible, combined with politiciansâ age-old infatuation with bullying, snooping and creating mountains of bureaucratic prestige for themselves at the expense of the snooped-upon taxpayer. (Bradshaw, 2014)
The constant refrain of surveillance agencies is that the leaks were dangerous components of national security, prospective surveillance justified (generally today) by a pervasive fear of terrorist attack. The leaks have led to the Five Eyes â USA, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand â in terms of intelligence collection policy and practice (Walsh and Miller, 2016). One of the implications, ironically, is a breaking down of publicâprivate and political-security interests. Here, the debate moves âbeyond simplistic notions of privacy vs. security to a more detailed understanding of the policy and ethical dilemmas confronting policymakers and intelligence agenciesâ (Walsh and Miller, 2016: 345).
In an interview with the Guardian to mark the fifth anniversary of the phone-call that began the story that would lead his exile to Hong Kong and then Russia, Snowden attests to the significance of his own actions. Heightening public duty to tell of the permeation of security and intelligence in all our lives, he has bought into the hyperbole: âPeople say nothing has changed: that there is still mass surveillance. That is not how you measure change. Look back before 2013 and look at what has happened since. Everything changedâ (MacAskill and Hern, 2018).
Yet, it is possible that the modern-day drama follows an old storyline. There had, for example, been an earlier email, to Glenn Greenwald, on 1 December 2012. This communication would frame No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveilla...
