Abstract

Processes of decolonization in the context of the Cold War provided enormous opportunities for nationalist figures to parlay insider nationalist knowledge into significant metropolitan influence. This article offers an ‘agent-focused’ rather than ‘agency-focused’ approach to the study of Cold War intelligence competition in Africa’s decolonization through a study of the career of Dennis Phombeah, a Nyasalander by birth and Tanganyikan nationalist figure who came to work for multiple foreign intelligence agencies. While itself a single case study, this article suggest that multiple intelligence agencies placed a high premium on acquiring a basic understanding of the internal politics of newly-independent African countries, which were otherwise rendered deliberately opaque by the states themselves as a common sovereignty-preserving device. Using intelligence records from Britain, Czechoslovakia and Portugal, a picture emerges of cross-rival institutional dependency on informants from the peripheries who were empowered by their years at metropolitan centers, offering a challenging perspective to institutional-focused studies of Cold War intelligence.

摘要

冷战背景下的非殖民化进程为民族主义者提供了巨大的机会，可以将内部民族主义知识转化为重要的大都市影响力。本文通过研究丹尼斯·彭贝（Dennis Phombeah），出生的尼亚萨兰德（Nyasalander）和坦any甘（Kanganyikan）民族主义者这一人物的职业生涯，为研究非洲非殖民化中的冷战情报竞争提供了一种“以代理为重点”而非“以代理为重点”的方法适用于多个外国情报机构。虽然它本身只是一个案例研究，但本文认为，多个情报机构在获得对新独立的非洲国家的内部政治的基本了解方面非常重视，否则，这些国家本身就故意将它们视为不透明的，以维护共同的主权。设备。