Everyday secrecy: Oral history and the social life of a top-secret weapons research establishment during the Cold War

Abstract

Despite the welcome turn within security studies towards a more material- and practice-oriented understanding of state secrecy, the ways in which security actors experience, practise and negotiate secrecy in their everyday work lives has been rather overlooked. To counter this neglect the article calls for attention to everyday secrecy. Focusing on a former top-secret weapons research facility in the UK called Orford Ness, it uses oral history to give an account of ex-employees’ memories, experiences and practices concerning secrecy. Such a focus reveals that subjects make sense of procedures and rules of secrecy in ways that are sometimes surprising and unexpected. Ultimately this perspective emphasizes that secrecy is not just what governments and organizations prescribe and proscribe; it is also shaped by subjects who negotiate these rules. Everyday secrecy matters: as a perspective it shows that secrecy is not simply imposed by states and organizations from ‘above’; it is also made from ‘below’, albeit very asymmetrically.

Strategic ignorance and the legitimation of remote warfare: The Hawija bombardments

“…In fact, in going beyond denial and secrecy to trace ignorance, our analysis is a reminder that it is not just the ‘im/plausible deniability’ of covert action that demands scrutiny but also the covert human costs of overt action (Cormac and Aldrich, 2018). Our argument extends what Walters (2020: 61, 60) has called the ‘new secrecy research’ that reflects a turn towards secrecy as a ‘field of power relations that merits theoretical scrutiny’. Bringing in ignorance in this field adds a new thread to what Toom (2020) has theorized as ‘ontologically dirty knots’, a notion that allows us to analyse events that – like the Srebrenica genocide in Toom’s analysis and the Hawija bombardment in ours – are defined by the denial, secrecy and controversy that come with disputed ‘body counts’.…”

Locating infrastructural agency: Computer protocols at the finance/security nexus

“…Critical security studies are familiar with how Know-Your-Customer (KYC) protocols specify proper conduct for financial institutions, like banks, to identify and share information on their clients in supporting growing international Anti-Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism (AML/CFT) efforts since the 1980s (Amicelle, 2011; Lagerwaard, 2020; Marlin-Bennett, 2016). Growing attention within critical security studies has been given to secrecy protocols specifying standards to maintain confined communication of information and/or the anonymity of those transmitting it (Bosma et al, 2020; Walters, 2020). Technologies, human practices and sociotechnical relations all play crucial roles in the (re)formation of these protocols.…”

I kalla krigets spår. Hot, våld och beskydd som kulturarv

“…På forskningsinstitutet RAND fanns exempelvis många nivåer över "Top secret", och tillgång till det allra hemligaste Nato materialet klassificerades som "Cosmic" (Brodie 2011: 650). Samtidigt som toppkategorierna förlänar hög status, pekar forskare på att säker hetspolitiska och militära hemlighetssystem tenderar att bli ogenom trängliga även för dem som arbetar i organisationerna, och lika mycket präglas av internt hemlighållande som av att undanhålla yttervärlden information (Walters 2020). Till hemlighetens natur hör ju att man inte får reda på varför man får eller inte får en viss säkerhetsklass.…”