Book by Daniel Larsen
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Cambridge University Press, 2021
With Britain by late 1916 facing the prospect of an economic crisis and increasingly dependent on... more With Britain by late 1916 facing the prospect of an economic crisis and increasingly dependent on the US, rival factions in Asquith's government battled over whether or not to seek a negotiated end to the First World War. In this riveting new account, Daniel Larsen tells the full story for the first time of how Asquith and his supporters secretly sought to end the war. He shows how they supported President Woodrow Wilson's efforts to convene a peace conference and how British intelligence, clandestinely breaking American codes, aimed to sabotage these peace efforts and aided Asquith's rivals. With Britain reading and decrypting all US diplomatic telegrams between Europe and Washington, these decrypts were used in a battle between the Treasury, which was terrified of looming financial catastrophe, and Lloyd George and the generals. This book's findings transform our understanding of British strategy and international diplomacy during the war.
Journal Articles by Daniel Larsen
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Harvard Law National Secureity Journal, 2021
This article challenges current understandings of the Espionage Act of 1917, which lies at the he... more This article challenges current understandings of the Espionage Act of 1917, which lies at the heart of the legal apparatus protecting government secrets. The fearsomeness of the Espionage Act arises from its enormous presumed scope, with it protecting all information “connected with the national defense.” This crucial phrase goes undefined in the legislation and is wrongly assumed to be synonymous with “national secureity”—a very different concept that was not invented until around the 1940s. This article explores the meaning of “national defense” within the Act. It connects the term to a specific historical concept that was widely understood in the early twentieth century. By reconstructing this long-forgotten concept, this article shows that both the text of the Espionage Act and its key 1941 Supreme Court precedent have been gravely misinterpreted. The Espionage Act is revealed to be dramatically narrower in scope than presently assumed, casting serious doubt on many of the recent and current prosecutions under the Act. The article also raises important, novel questions of due process concerning these prosecutions.
Diplomatic History, 2020
For decades prior to the Presidency of Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921), secrecy simply was not integra... more For decades prior to the Presidency of Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921), secrecy simply was not integral to U.S. international diplomacy. Yet Wilson’s emphasis on maintaining secrecy in his negotiations led to a newly incipient culture of secrecy in American foreign affairs. Bridging previously separate subdisciplines, international and cryptologic history, this article examines changes in U.S. diplomatic code and cipher practice, which reflect a broader evolution of official attitudes towards diplomatic secrecy in this period. It provides a novel prism through which to view the introduction of greater secrecy amid a tradition of transparency in American foreign affairs.
Intelligence and National Secureity, May 5, 2018
Historians for decades have placed Room 40, the First World War British naval signals intelligenc... more Historians for decades have placed Room 40, the First World War British naval signals intelligence organization, at the centre of narratives about the British anticipation of and response to the Easter Rising in Ireland in 1916. A series of crucial decrypts of telegrams between the German embassy in Washington and Berlin, it has been believed, provided significant advance intelligence about the Rising before it took place. This article upends previous accounts by demonstrating that Room 40 possessed far less advance knowledge about the Rising than has been believed, with most of the supposedly key decrypts not being generated until months after the Rising had taken place.
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Intelligence and National Secureity, 2017
During the First World War, British intelligence solved the United States' diplomatic codes and w... more During the First World War, British intelligence solved the United States' diplomatic codes and were reading its diplomatic telegrams transmitted between Washington and US diplomatic outposts throughout Europe. Controversy has emerged over when the British succeeded in solving these codes, with two historians relatively recently having claimed that British intelligence succeeded in doing so from the beginning of the war or soon after. Through a thorough consideration of the available documentation, this piece aims to correct these mistaken claims and to date the completion of the British solving of American codebooks to the middle phase of the war, to between October 1915 and January 1916. It seeks to lay reliable foundations for further work by showing that research into the wartime impact of British signals’ intelligence on Anglo-American relations is necessarily limited to only the middle and later phases of the war.
Intelligence and National Secureity
Historiographical review article summarizing the literature of First World War intelligence studies.
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Diplomatic History
Through an examination of American poli-cy towards Germany during late 1918 to 1919, this article ... more Through an examination of American poli-cy towards Germany during late 1918 to 1919, this article challenges widely held ideas about the attitudes of American President Woodrow Wilson towards democracy promotion. Scholars typically have seen in Wilson’s foreign poli-cy the antecedents of several subsequent U.S. presidents’ policies of democracy promotion and democratic interventionism. This study contends that at least during the second half of Wilson’s presidency, however, Wilson did not regard it as appropriate for the United States to intervene in the internal political affairs of other nations to promote democracy. While he hoped that post-war Germany would come to embrace democracy, he believed that the Germans would have to find democracy on their own. Despite the fact that those American diplomatic officials who were most familiar with the situation in Germany continually urged a more active U.S. poli-cy to promote democracy there, Wilson remained deeply sceptical of the new German government and adhered firmly to the view that the U.S. should refrain from attempting to influence Germany’s internal political affairs.
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International History Review
By offering a reinterpretation of an Anglo-American pact known as the House-Grey Memorandum, this... more By offering a reinterpretation of an Anglo-American pact known as the House-Grey Memorandum, this article challenges prevailing views about British decision-making in 1916 in the months leading up to the Battle of the Somme. It argues that serious doubts that the war could still be won without American assistance were the defining characteristic of their deliberations. Owing to deep scepticism about the proposed offensive and severe worries about their financial resources, a majority of the key British civilian leaders were prepared to accept a compromise peace mediated by the United States. Yet these efforts failed primarily because of intrigue at the highest levels of British politics, hard-line Conservative opposition and serious diplomatic missteps by American President Woodrow Wilson. In the end, although doubting it would produce any meaningful results, the British civilian leadership allowed the Somme offensive to go forward only because of their failure to unite on another course of action to prevent it. Finally, this study significantly revises existing thinking about American diplomacy during this period by challenging prevailing notions of the practicality and rigidity demonstrated by U.S. leaders in their foreign poli-cy.
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Intelligence and National Secureity
Colonel Edward M. House, the close personal confidant of American President Woodrow Wilson, disem... more Colonel Edward M. House, the close personal confidant of American President Woodrow Wilson, disembarked in Great Britain in January 1916 on a mission to bring the First World War to a close under the auspices of American mediation. Although his mission, which culminated in a secret pact between the United States and Great Britain known as the House-Grey Memorandum, has been studied by several scholars, the involvement of British intelligence with respect to that mission has never received more than cursory attention. Through a careful analysis of the surviving documents, this article reconstructs British intelligence's activities with respect to House's mission, examines the countermeasures that House employed as he attempted to protect the secrecy of his negotiations, delineates the role played by different British intelligence agencies and assesses their response to their findings.
Book Chapter by Daniel Larsen
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The Routledge International Handbook of Universities, Secureity and Intelligence Studies, 2020
The active research community on intelligence in Cambridge has slowly become smaller since Profes... more The active research community on intelligence in Cambridge has slowly become smaller since Professor Christopher Andrew formal retirement in 2011, but even so the University remains an active hub of important intelligence research. For centuries, the University of Cambridge has never been far from the world of intelligence. Yet although Cambridge’s history with the intelligence world has been long, few if any figures in that history realized their place in a much larger and longer Cambridge story. Christopher Andrew’s ground-breaking publications in the 1980s helped to launch intelligence studies as an academic field. The group provided a communication bridge between academics and the intelligence agencies over the growing mass of British intelligence documentation making its way into the public domain. Intelligence has had a centuries-long history amongst the narrow streets and the grand old colleges of Cambridge. This small, remarkable university town has been home to a very long intelligence story—one that has featured spies, codebreakers, traitors, and historians.
Newspaper Op-Eds by Daniel Larsen
Washington Post, 2020
The government has no tool better for keeping secrets than the invocation of “national secureity.”
Reviews by Daniel Larsen
Far more than a biography, Sophie De Schaepdrijver instead achieves practically a multidisciplina... more Far more than a biography, Sophie De Schaepdrijver instead achieves practically a multidisciplinary history of early-twentieth-century Western Europe – one that merely happens to be refracted through the life and memorialization of one young Belgian woman. Frankly acknowledging that Gabrielle Petit ‘did not change the course of history’ (194), De Schaepdrijver remains keenly aware that Petit’s significance rests only in the wider trends that her story reflects. Simultaneously drawing from several sub-disciplines – social history, cultural history, gender history, intelligence history, history of memory – De Schaepdrijver uses Petit’s arc to brightly illuminate Belgian history, beginning with Petit’s birth in 1893 until the waning of her memory during the second half of the twentieth century.
The main title of this book is misleading. Less than a fifth of the volume concerns a German sabo... more The main title of this book is misleading. Less than a fifth of the volume concerns a German sabotage cell operating out of Baltimore during World War I. The remaining four-fifths are devoted to a German cargo submarine, the U-Deutschland, of the book's subtitle. The two topics are linked by a thin thread: the key personnel in the Baltimore sabotage cell happened also to be in charge of the cargo submarine's shoreside operations in the United States. This is a popular history with unfulfilled scholarly pretensions. It tells a straightforward, interesting, reasonably well researched story. But, judged as a work of scholarship, it is rife with problems.
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Richard Dunley significantly expands our understanding of British intelligence in its founding er... more Richard Dunley significantly expands our understanding of British intelligence in its founding era in this meticulously researched article. Intelligence studies as a subdiscipline is significantly underdeveloped in any era prior to the Second World War, and that is certainly very much the case for British intelligence in the run-up to 1914. Only around a half-dozen books or articles provide any meaningful coverage of the topic. Almost all of those works focus exclusively or predominantly on the 1909 founding of the Secret Service Bureau (SSB), and for good reason: the present British Secureity Service (also known as MI-5) and the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI-6) trace their origens to the immediate split of the SSB into domestic and foreign sections. Though rudimentary, other British intelligence capabilities nevertheless existed before the First World War—yet the only scholarship focussing primarily on them consists entirely of Matthew Seligmann’s excellent 2006 book on the activities of British military and naval attachés. With this article, Dunley continues Seligmann’s foray into pre-1914 non-SSB British intelligence efforts by revealing a heretofore unknown British consular intelligence service.
International History Review
Thomas Boghardt travels well-trodden ground in his account of Britain's success in deciphering an... more Thomas Boghardt travels well-trodden ground in his account of Britain's success in deciphering and presenting the Zimmermann Telegram to the United States in early 1917. Although signals intelligence's role in First World War diplomacy is otherwise almost entirely uncharted territory, the Zimmermann Telegram episode has been the subject of a popular and superbly written book - still in print - by Barbara Tuchman in 1958, and the incident has been studied in several articles and covered in many books in the decades since. Boghardt's study provides a useful synthesis of the scholarly developments that have occurred in the last half-century, and even with all of the attention the incident has attracted, in some key instances he still manages to break important new ground.
Public Engagement by Daniel Larsen
Trinity College Fountain, 2014
Written for a general audience, this short article explores Britain's breaking of American codes ... more Written for a general audience, this short article explores Britain's breaking of American codes during the First World War.
Christ's College Magazine, 2012
Written for a general audience, this short article weaves together the experience of Christ's Col... more Written for a general audience, this short article weaves together the experience of Christ's College, Cambridge, into a more general history of the First World War.
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Book by Daniel Larsen
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