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Domestic terrorist groups that operate within and against democracies are not composed of people who are identically motivated or psychologically similar. Democracies, by their very nature, provide effective and legitimate channels for change and dissent. Therefore, when they are faced with internal terrorist threats it is axiomatic that those who are making the threats have motives other than promoting political, social, or economic change. Research has shown that most domestic groups include at least three types of personalities, a paranoid type, and antisocial type and an inadequate. Each has its strength and weakness. Each plays a role in the groups' ability to function. To more effectively engage and eliminate a terrorist group, it behooves law enforcement to more closely examine and categorize the group membership and approach the weak link using the methods suggested in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While there are some signs of change in the right direction, there is still a great need for the ICRC to “open the windows” … On the whole, the ICRC seems to have blurred the differences between the discretion which their work requires and an obsession with needless secrecy. The Cold War years presented various challenges to the ICRC. Under concerted criticism not only from communist but also from certain western democratic circles, the ICRC staved off unwanted changes in its composition and mandate mainly through its performance in various conflicts – in Palestine and Hungary, for example. It also played its traditional role in helping to further develop international humanitarian law. By the middle of the Cold War, the organization was engaged broadly in complex ways not only in the Global South but also in Europe – not only in “developing areas” but also in Greece and Northern Ireland. There was clearly a need for its traditional roles during the Cold War, even if the ICRC was slow to anticipate some needed changes at headquarters as well as in the field. Its controversial performance in the conflict in Nigeria during 1967–70 led to important changes in Geneva. There were other opportunities for striking change, as in response to the 1975 Tansley Report on the Re-appraisal of the Red Cross, or at the 1974–77 diplomatic conference that produced two protocols additional to the 1949 Geneva Conventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We're admired – we've won three Nobel Peace Prices – but we're not liked. The Al Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington of 11 September 2001, which killed almost 3,000 Americans, changed much in the United States and the world – and also changed a great deal for the ICRC. The attacks themselves were a frontal assault on established humanitarian principles, being a form of total war that disdained universally endorsed norms against attacking civilians. The attacks therefore led to another round in the long struggle to get unconventional forces to observe conventional humanitarian limits. The ICRC repeatedly condemned these and related attacks, as in Madrid in 2004 when almost 200 civilians were killed by bombs hidden in trains by Islamic radicals. But the organization was also to find itself engaged in persistent friction with the United States and its allies. Washington and its friends, like Britain, in their fervent zest to wage “war” against terrorism, sometimes also resorted to a type of total war that disdained traditional legal and humanitarian restraints. Even some initial supporters of the George W. Bush Administration's foreign policy recognized the dangers of seeing the American nation as an especially good people whose government, when attacked, should not be bound by complicating rules of law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the second half of the reign of Charles II the world of espionage and conspiracy continued to be as perplexing for the government as in the first half. The ‘problem’ of Catholicism also began to loom, to explode in the Popish Plot of 1678. There were a number of men employed as spies by the regime in this period and while it is not possible to trace all of their careers here, lengthy case studies are given of two of the most notable and complex individuals who enlisted as covert soldiers in the regime's espionage wars: Thomas Blood and John Scott. Sir Joseph Williamson, who came to know Thomas Blood quite well, noted on the day after Blood's attempt on the Crown Jewels that it was ‘one of the strangest any story can tell’. There is no doubt that Thomas Blood was the nonpareil of the seventeenth-century spy, rebel and adventurer. There is no-one quite like Blood in the Restoration regime's service, or for that matter out of it. He was distinctive in many ways, but most of all his is the only fully rounded figure of a spy in the period we can uncover. The others involved in the Restoration regime's intelligence system remain at heart shadowy figures. With Blood, however, we have a man whose thoughts we can actually penetrate through his own personal writings. Yet in spite of this there are great mysteries both concerning the man and his career. Notorious in his day, he was also adept in covering his tracks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1660s were a time of trial for the Stuart regime. Rumours of republican conspiracies were rife, trouble was expected and four actual risings took place, in London in 1661, in Dublin and in the north of England in 1663 and in Scotland in 1666. The regime also had a problem with the exile community in the Netherlands which increased as it drifted into a war with the Dutch. To survive in the clandestine side of government and to counter its many problems the Stuart regime was forced to develop the use of spies and informers to penetrate and betray any potential plot and gain secret knowledge of foreign affairs. In the following pages it has been possible to trace the careers of some of the men who were used by the regime for this work. The history of the alleged Tonge Plot of 1662 has long been a contentious one. Two sides to the argument which emerged over the break-up of this supposed design exist. The first viewpoint has it that the scheme was at least partly genuine and that minor figures who were arrested, convicted and executed were part of a more general and nation-wide scheme. The second view, however, was that the plot had little validity outside the fevered and greedy imaginations of a group of agents provocateurs, who were mainly concerned to exploit the situation as much as they could; moreover that what emerged was then taken up by a rattled government, who ruthlessly exploited it in parliament and sent a group of, comparatively, innocent, and certainly misguided, men to a bloody death for its own purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the espionage world of Restoration politics the infantry were those men, and even the occasional woman, who were members of what Clarendon had once called the ‘ignominious tribe’ – the spies. Any intelligence system in the period, whatever its other sources of information, was ultimately dependent upon men and women actually going out to gather information on the ground. It was such people who would perform the dangerous tasks which otherwise could not be carried out. It was the spy who would take the ‘ruffian's wage’, to mix with the ‘hired slaves, bravos and common stabbers, Nose-slitters [and] alley-lurking villains’. They became a necessary, but often double-edged asset to the political and diplomatic life of any regime. They were essential because the late-seventeenth-century world was both physically and mentally a large place for its occupants, and factors of time and distance played a significant part in seventeenth-century government as well as in international politics. Instantaneous communication, other than face to face, was impossible. It took days, sometimes weeks, to communicate by letter, even if one allowed for human or natural intervention. Furthermore in places otherwise out of reach, or in places where no government officer could go openly, it was necessary to have ‘eyes’ to do so. This, as well as the need to counter subversive activity, and to prevent the interference of foreign government in domestic affairs, made the trade of the spy essential if not respectable and in such a world, especially one prone to violence, war and conflict, the trade of the spy could also thrive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The heart of the Restoration regime's intelligence system from 1660 to 1685 lay within the office of the Secretaries of State. In particular from 1662 to 1674 the most significant work in this area was undertaken within the office of Sir Henry Bennet, Earl of Arlington, where the control of intelligence fell to Sir Joseph Williamson. In a period of great turmoil the Secretary of State's office concerned itself with the Stuart regime's security. Many of the precedents taken from the former republican regimes were re-established under Williamson's control and in turn they passed to his successors in the secretaryship, the Earl of Sunderland, Sir Leoline Jenkins and Charles Middleton. In the context of the threats which faced the regime intelligence and espionage work was an important area for the secretariat as we shall see. As the office developed, the general trend was for increasing centralisation and the creation of a government system of intelligence and espionage activities. The development of the office of Secretary of State within the administration surrounding the monarch was a slow process. The office emerged from the shadow of the post of personal secretary to the king, but by the mid seventeenth century it had become established as a high office of state; although in political terms it still fluctuated in power. To a great degree it was the man who made the office rather than the office the man. The secretaryship undoubtedly found difficulty in divorcing itself from its roots and its relationship to the monarch was both its potential strength and its weakness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Restoration government could only govern the provinces with the assistance of the local community, in the shape of its county officers, and even then the process was often a ‘combination of sticks and carrots’. The extensive and important work undertaken on the county community has increased both our knowledge of how this relationship came about as well as how it worked in practice, but one area which has been generally neglected has been the question of intelligence work in the local arena. It is the purpose of this chapter to explore some aspects of this area of local government in the Restoration period, particularly in the north of England. We can say at the outset that many local officers were involved in intelligence work. Directives from the centre may often have given contradictory signals about the persecution as well as the prosecution of radicals and dissenters, but an underlying theme in the period was the encouragement of local officials to uncover as wide a variety of information and intelligence as possible in order to comprehend, as well as direct, public opinion at the county level. From such sources vital insights into the mood of the people could be obtained, local responses to government policy could be assessed and with luck moulded to the central government's needs. The maintenance of security and order was a further consideration. Indeed Andrew Coleby has noted that the Restoration regime's primary concern in the early 1660s was to prevent politically inspired unrest at the local level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his secret paper, ‘A Brief Discourse Concerning the Nature and Reason of Intelligence’, written during the course of the reign of William III, Sir Samuel Morland, who had served the regimes of both Oliver Cromwell and Charles II in the secret dealings of government, attempted to capture the rationale and philosophy behind the Restoration regime's intelligence system. The foundation of the philosophy which Morland outlined was clarity itself. His view was that all mankind possessed a fallen nature and thus was unable to be held to anything in political life if his vital interests, his survival and need for power, were threatened, Morland's political man was ‘governed wholly by politick maxims’ and while this was most visible in the relations between nation-states such tendencies were equally visible in the relationship between government and people. In such relationships the sanctions laid down by religion had little effect, for men merely paid lip service to keeping the ‘most sacred promise[s] & solemn agreements’, which were as ‘easily broke[n] as Sampson's cords’. In such a philosophy nothing could be ruled out that gave an advantage to ‘political man’. As the ruler mistrusted his neighbour in international politics so he should also mistrust his own people. Given this situation it was beholden upon the ruler to discover and assess the ‘tempers of his own subjects’ as well as ‘the first ferments of all factions; in order to manage the ‘lopping men of so many different parties & the Heroes of the populace’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]