The Covert Colour Line

The Racialised Politics of Western State Intelligence

Oliver Kearns

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9780745347301
• eBook ISBN: 9780745347325
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Anarchism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

'What if the biggest failures of intelligence are not the factual errors, but the inbuilt biases that shape what type of information is deemed useful?'-- Lisa Stampnitzky, author of Disciplining Terror

'Ground-breaking... Decodes declassified documents showing the racialized assumptions underlying the use and abuse of intelligence in contemporary Western politics. A must-read'-- Elisabeth Schweiger, Lecturer, University of York

'Your jaw will drop and your heart will break. We urgently need this reckoning with the role of race-thinking in international politics. Lives depend on it'-- Gargi Bhattacharyya, co-author of Empire's Endgame

Repeated intelligence failures in Iraq, Libya, the Middle East, and North Africa have left many critics searching for a smoking gun. Amidst questions of who misread – or manipulated – the intel, a fundamental truth goes unaddressed: Western intelligence is not designed to understand the world. In fact, it cannot.

In The Covert Colour Line, Oliver Kearns shows how catastrophic mistakes made by British and US intelligence services since 9/11 are underpinned by racist assumptions forged in the crucible of the Cold War-era colonial retreat. Understanding this historical context is vital to explaining why anglophone state intelligence cannot grasp the motives of 'adversaries.'

Offering a new way of seeing how intelligence contributes to world inequalities and drawing on a wealth of recently declassified materials, Kearns argues that delusional ideas of 'the non-West' fundamentally shaped the intelligence assessments underpinning the 2003 invasion of Iraq and subsequent interventions.

Oliver Kearns is a research fellow with SPIN, the Secrecy Power and Ignorance Network, at the University of Bristol.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acronyms and Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Ukraine, Iraq, and the failure of intelligence failure
• 1. Whispering geopolitics in a decolonising world
• 2. Dragons and tigers and bears, oh my: The invention of the mirror-image problem
• 3. Getting to know Saddam Hussein
• 4. ‘They buried things in the sand’: The threat of Iraq and the secret of race
• Conclusion: Libya, the Arab Spring, and the success of intelligence failure
• Notes
• Index