The Covert Colour Line: The Racialised Politics of Western State Intelligence

‘What if the biggest failures of intelligence are not the factual errors but the inbuilt biases that shape what type of information is deemed useful?’–Lisa Stampnitzky, author of Disciplining Terror

‘Ground-breaking ... Decodes declassified documents showing the racialized assumptions underlying the use and abuse of intelligence in contemporary Western politics. A must-read’–Elisabeth Schweiger, Lecturer, University of York

‘Your jaw will drop and your heart will break. We urgently need this reckoning with the role of race-thinking in international politics. Lives depend on it’–Gargi Bhattacharyya, co-author of Empire’s Endgame

Repeated intelligence failures in Iraq, Libya, and across the Middle East and North Africa have left many critics searching for a smoking gun. Amidst questions of who misread – or manipulated – the intel, a fundamental truth goes unaddressed: Western intelligence is not designed to understand the world. In fact, it cannot.

In The Covert Colour Line, Oliver Kearns shows how catastrophic mistakes made by British and US intelligence services since 9/11 are underpinned by racist assumptions forged in the crucible of the Cold War-era colonial retreat. Understanding this historical context is vital to explaining why anglophone state intelligence is unable to grasp the motives of ‘adversaries.'

Oliver Kearns is a research fellow with SPIN, the Secrecy Power and Ignorance Network, at the University of Bristol, UK. He studies how state secrecy, from drone strikes to spy radio frequencies, shapes the legitimation of violence. He also writes experimental electronic music.