Spying on Friends: British Assessments of French Security, 1945–50

The emergence of intelligence studies as a distinctive branch of international history has provided many new insights into the nature of international affairs during the past thirty years. Certain aspects of intelligence, however, remain largely overlooked. One such area, which is the focus of this article, is that of bureaucratic security: how a state ensures the security of the information that it holds and how it disseminates this information throughout its bureaucracies and with its allies. Whilst this may appear as a mundane avenue for investigation, this piece demonstrates that bureaucratic security issues had an impact on ‘high-level’ political decisions during the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), adversely affected relations between the United Kingdom and France, and created additional problems surrounding the emergence of an integrated military framework within the NATO alliance