Everyday Diplomacy: UKUSA Intelligence Cooperation and Geopolitical Assemblages

This article offers an alternative to civilizational thinking in geopolitics and international relations predicated on assemblage theory. Building on literature in political geography and elsewhere about everyday practices that produce state effects, this article theorizes the existence of transnational geopolitical assemblages that incorporate foreign policy apparatuses of multiple states. Everyday material and discursive circulations make up these assemblages, serving as conduits of affect that produce an emergent agency. To demonstrate this claim, I outline a genealogy of the UKUSA alliance, an assemblage of intelligence communities in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. I then trace the circulation of materialities and affects—at the scales of individual subjects, technological systems of mediation, and transnational processes of foreign policy formation. In doing so, I offer a bottom-up process of assemblage that produces the emergent phenomena that proponents of civilizational thinking mistakenly attribute to macroscaled factors, such as culture.

the United States and United Kingdom (Canada, Australia, and New Zealand also participate) as an assemblage of circulating materialities and affects that enable a collective agency to emerge alongside, but incorporating, the state.
This collective agency is a ghostly presence in theories of international relations, which emphasize rationality in foreign policy formation while insufficiently understanding the embodied and material contexts in which policy is made and enacted (Vucetic 2011). Crucially, these material relations not only enable policy to be carried out but also serve as affective conduits shaping subsequent foreign policy formation. In short, the collective agency emergent from intelligence cooperation ensures not only that participating governments can do more in the international realm (a pooling of resources) but also that they are affected by events rippling through the wider transnational assemblage. The foreign policy apparatuses of the UKUSA states do not make rational decisions on the basis of their national interest; rather, the cognitive sensemaking of their interests is shaped through participation in UKUSA. This transnational assemblage of bodies, satellites, computers, cables, drones, microwave transmitters, undercover agents, and so on is a kind of everyday diplomacy that, in conjunction with other discursive and material connections between foreign policy apparatuses, enables emergent agencies to reshape global politics. These emergent agencies have been largely imperceptible because of the embedded statism (Taylor 1996) of our own geopolitical sensibilities.
In the literature review, I begin by highlighting several attempts by international relations scholars to engage in civilizational thinking. These have been attempts to pin down the ghost in state-centric theories of international relations; namely, that a range of collective agencies above the state are constantly emerging and can be felt, like a poltergeist, providing a nudge that is empirically felt. In contrast, I highlight recent literature in political geography, political science, and political theory emphasizing the role of everyday practices in producing state effects. I advance this literature by emphasizing the everyday diplomacies and circulations that mangle (Pickering 1995) together state foreign policy apparatuses into these collective agencies, often mistaken for civilizations. A consideration of how these assemblages form and how they act back on participating governments is juxtaposed with the literature on intelligence cooperation, identifying an institutionalist bias in the latter that this article seeks to correct.
Following a brief discussion of methodology, the article turns to an historical account of the UKUSA assemblage, first tracing its genealogy and then documenting the ways in which circulating materialities and affects-at the scales of individual subjects, technological systems of mediation, and finally transnational processes of foreign policy formation-produce a collective agency that can be discerned. The article concludes with two points. First, the literature on intelligence cooperation can productively take up assemblage thought to problematize the institutions, policies, and decisions that serve as the basis for most studies in that field. Second, although critical geopolitics has effectively deconstructed civilizational discourses, it generally has not attempted to construct an alternative account. Therefore, research is needed to trace the impact of everyday diplomacies, to be attentive to the role of materiality and affect in producing our geopolitical world.

Literature Review Civilizational Thinking and Macroinfluences on International Affairs
Civilizational thinking has a long pedigree, both in international relations and in wider academic thought. Jackson (1999), reviewing the resurgence of civilizational thinking in international relations (e.g., Gress 1998), noted the heterogeneity of these approaches: "Some authors prefer to talk about the impact of civilizational loyalties on the foreign policies of states, while others concentrate on how the values and practices of a given civilization impact economic growth and personal liberty" (142). Some authors asserted an ontological realism to civilizations, whereas others see them as the outcome of social processes (and, therefore, the result of stable, if fluid, relations).
If theorizing the West as a civilization gained renewed salience during the Cold War (Neumann 1996), its awkward fusion with Huntington's (1996) global civilizational schema received an invigorating jolt from the events of 11 September 2001. Although the West remains a relevant geopolitical discourse, Huntington's theory has fallen out of favor with Western elites, as it was alienating to potential allies. Taking its place is another civilizational construct: the Anglosphere.
Pointing both to past race-based nomenclature such as the white dominions and the Anglo-Saxon world as well as to post-World War II attempts to maintain cooperation between the United States and the British Empire (see Hugill [1993] on the unity of the Anglo-American empires), the term nevertheless has cropped up in more recent times. Recent proponents such as Anglo-American historian Robert Conquest (1999) and U.S. businessman and consultant James C. Bennett (2004) attribute this revival to the network ontology of the Internet, which has intensified the connections among English-speaking countries and also among Englishspeaking communities in otherwise non-Anglophone states. Nevertheless, it is the Anglo-American "special relationship" that serves as the key historical and contemporary axis. According to Megoran (2010): [Bennett] imbues his putative Anglosphere with a messianic political mission. If the nineteenth century was a "British Century" that abolished slavery, and the twentieth an "American Century" that ended totalitarianism, then the twenty-first may be the "Anglosphere century" that can abolish ''singularity", or the habit that states have of acting alone. (188) It is in this mode-thinking singularity-that the Anglosphere has been taken up by international relations scholars. Vucetic (2010, 28) conducted statistical analysis of U.S.-led interventions (1950-2001) and found that "when push comes to shove, the Englishspeaking peoples tend to flock together." Culture is here the unseen apparition explaining the motion on the geopolitical Ouija board.
Civilization and culture are thus a theoretical strategy to buttress an ontology of singularity against one of fragmentation and relationality. In the next section, I argue that attempts to understand these macroscaled phenomena instead need to focus on the small, the micro, and the baroque to understand their emergence.

Assemblage and Transnational Bodies Politic
Over the past decade, political geography has generally abandoned its fixation on the state in favor of a focus on everyday practices, in part a response to criticisms coming from feminist and popular geopolitics (Dowler and Sharp 2001;Hyndman 2004;Dittmer and Dodds 2008). This move to defy this historical (and often imperialist) preoccupation with the state has produced many insights into how the local, the national, and the global are entwined in ways unpredictable if one looks only at macroscaled phenomena (e.g., Pain and Smith 2008;Kuus 2010;Harker 2011).
The crucial role of microscaled practices in the production of "larger" entities has been used to rethink our theorizations of the state (Mitchell 1991;Painter 2006). This opens up the state-nonstate binary in multiple dimensions, such as the divide between official elements of the state assemblage (e.g., government ministers, passports, or judges) and the private elements that are nevertheless crucial to the performance of state-ness (e.g., voters, taxpayers, and civics textbooks) or the divide between legitimate states and other polities exhibiting state-like qualities (McConnell 2009;Jeffrey 2013).
Historically the nation-state has often been problematically considered as a body politic, but Protevi (2009) reappropriated the term to refer to assemblages of embodied subjects and the material objects that empower them. Human bodies are affected by participation in these assemblages; this background hum of flux and flow shapes the way we develop over a lifetime. Bodies politic can range from short-lived assemblages such as a phone conversation to more institutionalized assemblages such as a state. Bodies politic are, by virtue of their openness to the world, constantly buffeted by affects that generally work to habituate political behavior but also potentially shock those systems into new patterns of action (DeLanda 2006). Protevi (2009) schematized this concept by differentiating between first-and second-order bodies politic. First-order bodies politic are individual human subjects. Through this category, Protevi theorized our embodied cognitive sense-making, from how we perceive social categories like race and gender to how various material flows (food, media, etc.) impact our embodied political responses. Second-order bodies politic entail an assemblage of people engaged in collective affective cognition. Bodies politic cannot be understood chronologically (individuals first, who then compose groups-as in social contract theory). Rather, first-and second-order bodies politic are engaged in synchronic emergence; they are all becoming together.
Bodies politic enable us to consider politics as occurring across a range of sites and over multiple temporalities (Dittmer 2014;Squire 2015). Whereas traditional diplomatic relations and their institutionalization in international organizations are an obvious and well-studied form of assemblage (Armstrong 1998), I wish to highlight a different type of relation between state apparatuses: one focused on everyday diplomacies that tie states together in a more intensive way. Barry (2001, 11) foregrounded the "centrality of photography, television, and satellite surveillance technologies in the conduct of international relations." These technologies are conduits for affective circulation. For example, the White House Situation Room is a famous example of a networked site defined by its technological ability to tap into affects from faraway places. These affects shape the political cognition of not only the president but also his staff, albeit refracted through their differentiated bodies (Colls 2012). Consequently, the political cognition of a second-order body politic (the United States) is also affected. This is because affects are embodied but also more than that; they are not reducible to the subsequent ways that they make humans "feel." Affects circulate within entirely nonhuman systems, which can produce self-organizing systems on their own. Affect is the force inherent to a specific relation, which transforms properties into capabilities. Therefore, it is not just people who are affected and affecting but also things, institutions, and more diffuse assemblages as well. This interface between the human and nonhuman elements of an assemblage requires close attention to the technical. Barry (2001) argued that the connectivity of international relations relies on a harmonization of the technical practices of governmentality. In traditional diplomacy, this harmonization is known as protocol, but the concept can be carried into everyday diplomacies as well. This might be theorized, following Protevi, as the inculcation of embodied bureaucratic (and other) habits that can be applied anywhere within the larger diplomatic assemblage (Kuus 2013). Equally, they might be material forms that enable disparate state apparatuses to connect-the equivalent of a power adapter for tourists who want to charge their phone.
Thus far, bodies politic have been discussed in rather teleological fashion, as if these everyday diplomacies were inevitable results of self-organization. Although all systems have the potential for change immanent within them, it need not occur. Humans in particular, although composed as political subjects through processes of assemblage, are unique in that they have a degree of reflexivity and can rework their bodies politic through techniques of the self (Connolly 2002). This raises a traditional concern of international relations-that of political and economic interests and their role in structuring outcomes. Following McFarlane (2011), I argue that the national interest is always multiple and contradictory, produced through a series of materialized transnational assemblages (embassies, nongovernmental organizations, think tanks, media networks, lobbying groups, etc.) that interact with one another and hold stable-for a time-a confused consensus (see Woodward 2014). Indeed, the national interest is nowhere near as stable as the physical geography some see as its origin (Kaplan 2012). As McFarlane (2011) puts it, assemblage thought seeks to describe the labour through which relations are held together and how novelty emerges through interactions, and aims to identify the potential for those relations to be otherwise. Political economies and structures emerge as relational products assembled through multiple routes, actors, histories, contingencies, resources, socio-materialities and power relations.  The creation of bodies politic, and their subsequent affects and effects, are not determined by structuring forces such as political economy or geography (either physical or cultural). They are highly contingent, with general patterns emerging that are subject to nonlinear change.

Intelligence Cooperation
The literature in geography has rarely touched on intelligence matters. Several papers have examined the historical role of the discipline in intelligence work, or vice versa (Heffernan 1996(Heffernan , 2000Clout and Gosme 2003;Crampton, Roberts, and Poorthuis 2014). The work of Barnes (2006) is particularly salient given his deployment of actor-network theory. Still, all are concerned with stand-alone intelligence, rather than intelligence cooperation.
The literature on cooperation from the field of intelligence studies can be characterized as falling into three broad categories. The first category, and perhaps the most crucial, is fundamentally descriptive in nature. These studies are crucial because of the secretive subject matter; in this more than most fields, the object of study is explicitly in a black box beyond reach. Therefore, basic facts must be pieced together through examination of archives and leaked documents, often in collaborative fashion, prior to any kind of deeper analysis. Works in this vein examine intelligence cooperation as part of the broader UK-U.S. "special relationship" (Dumbrell 2009;Wallace and Phillips 2009) or trace the institutional histories of the Canadian (Rudner 2001) or Australian (Andrew 1989) SIGINT agencies, which are inextricably linked to UKUSA cooperation. Perhaps most impressive in describing these agencies is Richelson and Ball (1990), which details each of the UKUSA agencies in intricate-but totally atheoretical-detail.
The second category is work that frames intelligence cooperation through rational choice theory (often implicitly). The term defining this literature is quid pro quo, a term used by practitioners to describe the framing of intelligence cooperation through a bartering of information (Sims 2006). At the more descriptive end of this literature is Westerfield (1996), who argued that the United States exchanges SIGINT for locally nuanced, difficult to obtain human intelligence. Lefebvre (2003) and Rudner (2004) each analyzed tensions in intelligence cooperation resulting from geopolitical dynamics. Clough (2004) provided a complex analysis offering several models of collaboration, varying in several dimensions. These works all conceptualize intelligence liaison as a rational exchange of information in which everyone is better for the exchange but with future exchange contingent on it remaining in the national interest.
A few works move past rational choice theory to consider how intelligence cooperation fits with the various theories dominant in international relations or liberal political philosophy (Aldrich 2004;Svendsen 2008;Munton 2009). This is the smallest category, although it must be said that the fuzzy border between rational choice theory and international relations realism makes classification of these works ambiguous.
This literature was critiqued by Gaddis (1989) as disconnected from wider scholarship. Aldrich (2002, 138) argues that "even ten years later, few could argue with [Gaddis's] observation that some of the work in the area of intelligence studies is the equivalent of 'military buffism'-a kind of secret service trainspotting." This distresses me less than the institutionalist assumptions at the heart of the literature; it is assumed that intelligence agencies are rational actors and are able to make decisions about collaboration that are then subject to analysis.
The theoretical orientation of this article is quite different than this literature, in that it focuses not on institutions but on their internal and external relations. Barry (2001, 46) noted that "[d]uring the cold war, the absence of connections between Nato and the Warsaw Pact created the conditions within which an enormous level of anxiety could develop around the imagined technological superiority of one or the other." By highlighting the power of (dis)connection to generate and circulate embodied affects, Barry highlighted the role of Protevi's affective sense-making in the Cold War context, demonstrating the synchronic emergence of first-and second-order bodies politic. As Ahmed (2004, 128) put it, "It is the very failure of affect to be located in a subject or object that allows it to generate the surfaces of collective bodies." The Cold War divide between NATO and the Warsaw Pact was not absolute; indeed, the Cold War itself must be understood as a body politic of a sort. One role performed by the intelligence services during the Cold War was to provide a relation between the two sides: "Both sides were offered some reassurance against the possibility that its enemies were planning a surprise attack. . . . Collectively, these operations calmed everyone's fears, and their most substantial benefits might be measured through greater stability and the perpetuation of an uneasy peace" (Aldrich 2010, 175). So although NATO and the Warsaw Pact can each be understood as a higher order body politic, linked together through the materialization of many relations (including intelligence cooperation), they were equally hitched together through other relations (including spying on one another).

Methodology
This research is primarily based on archival research in the National Archives of the United Kingdom and the National Security Archive at George Washington University, as well as documents made available by the National Security Agency. The 2010 declassification of documents on both sides of the Atlantic acknowledged the UKUSA alliance, although secondary literature (some speculative, some well-informed) has been available since the late 1980s. Review of these primary and secondary sources has been combined with interviews with retired senior intelligence officials from the United Kingdom and United States. These present-day interviews, combined with an examination of documents leaked in the Snowden affair, provide insight into the evolution of the UKUSA alliance beyond the horizon of declassification.

The Evolution of UKUSA Antecedents and Institutionalization
The identification of a singular starting point for an assemblage is impossible; rather, the emergence of its collective agency is the result of a range of processes, taking place at different temporalities. For UKUSA, one such process can be dated to 5 September 1940, when the British government suggested that collaboration pick up where it had left off following World War I (Aldrich 2010), proposing an exchange of full information on German, Italian, and Japanese code and cryptographic information (Early papers n.d.). They further proposed a continuous exchange of radio intercepts. At this point the United States agreed to the former but rejected the latter; it is notable that this collaboration predates the U.S. entry to the war. An agreement to exchange diplomatic traffic would wait until well after Pearl Harbor (15 January 1943).
UKUSA can also be seen to emerge from the bottom-up process of collaboration in the field. It is here, if anywhere, that the common language contributes to the emergence of UKUSA-not as a macroscaled cultural force but as an affective predisposition to communication. British and U.S. forces in the field often shared intelligence when beneficial. Initial resistance by the U.S. Navy to the governmental negotiations came not because they did not want to collaborate but because they preferred the less formal status quo: While in effect we actually collaborate on all technical matters, we are not bound by any agreement to do so. For example, although we have agreed to supply all recoveries we have not promised to supply our methods in making recoveries. (An agreement 1943, 2) Similarly, the Office of Strategic Services (forerunner to the CIA) had regular liaison with British intelligence in Southeast Asia for the entire duration of the war (George 1946). Of course, neither top-down nor bottom-up collaboration would have occurred without the war, and the end of the war could just as easily have led to the dissolution of the assemblage as it did in World War I.
Two factors set in train the UKUSA agreement. First, growing concern over Soviet behavior in the war's endgame sparked suspicion in both London and Washington. Even before the war was over, Anglo-American TICOM (target intelligence) squads of intelligence analysts were dispatched to "liberate" German encryption equipment and cryptographers to contribute to the new SIGINT target: the Soviet Union (Aldrich 2010). A similar effort was undertaken in the Pacific, although in this case Britain and the United States each recovered material from their newly (re)occupied territories and then shared the results (Minutes of the sixteenth meeting 1945).
Atomic weapons heralded a new geopolitics that could not be extrapolated from past models. SIGINT offered a chance to anticipate future emergencies and preempt them (Adey and Anderson 2012), as stipulated in this 1 September 1945 memo to the Secretaries of State, War, and the Navy: In view of the disturbed condition of the world and the necessity for keeping informed of the technological developments and possible hostile intentions of foreign nations, it is recommended that the United States take advantage of unique British sources of information by continuing the full exchange of technical data and intelligence. (Marshall and King 1945, 2) This postwar collaborative work on Soviet codes, originally known by the code word RATTAN and then as BOURBON, was an affect-informed response to a new element of the assemblage: the circulating multiplicitous forms of the atomic bomb (images of mushroom clouds, accounts of the aftermath in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, strategic planning reports, etc.).
A second factor was the technological geographies of radio and encryption used in the late 1940s (Pinkerton and Dodds 2009). The geography of the postwar British Empire and the new global presence of the United States made for a natural partnering (Denfeld 1947); where the United States had few listening stations, the British had many, and vice versa. This geographic fact only gains salience in conjunction with the techniques of decryption used at the time, for as important as the topography of empire is the topology of communications technology: "British intercept stations are more favorably located than ours to copy certain RATTAN traffic. In addition, RATTAN traffic passed on British-owned cables would be available" (Wenger 1945a, 1). Decryption is a "volume" business, requiring as many intercepts as possible. The intersection of a nuclear future with both the prewar telegram cable network (centered on London; see Keefe 2006) and the routine processes of decryption, incentivized UKUSA collaboration.
There was resistance to UKUSA as it was formalized, often based in uncertainty of the future. One uncertainty was in future capabilities: In the latter part of the war we have had to share considerably more than our share of the load. . . . Unless a proper bargain is struck with the British, it is probable that this state of affairs will persist and we shall find ourselves at the short end of things. (Wenger 1945a, 2) Whereas this line of flight envisioned a more pragmatic, barter-based system in the future, another imagined an entirely different postwar order: [W]e will find ourselves disadvantageously placed if we have to support GREAT BRITAIN always vis-a-vis RUSSIA. I feel the technical advantages gained by this collaboration are entirely insufficient to warrant any possible hamstringing of our proper position in the international structure. (Cooke 1945, 1) This future, almost impossible to envision today, nevertheless recognizes how intelligence cooperation would mangle U.S. and British foreign policy.
Other futures were envisioned and eventually actualized. One was influential in the UKUSA agreement: budget cuts. One naval officer wrote, "I feel that not long after the peace, [the British] will outstrip us in communications intelligence-not in what we might do, but rather in what we shall be allowed to do" (Thebaud 1945, 1). And so, motivated by imminent cuts on both sides of the Atlantic, representatives of GC&CS (the earlier name of GCHQ) met with representatives of the U.S. intelligence community, beginning in October 1945, to negotiate. The framework agreement was dated 5 March 1946, and a subsequent set of UK-U.S. technical conferences produced, and updated, the appendices to the agreement in which the specific procedures of intelligence collaboration were set out. I now turn to the scale of mundane procedures and everyday life to show how affects circulated within the everyday diplomacy of UKUSA, producing an emergent agency.

Bodies Politic, Liaisons, and Affect
UKUSA can be thought of as a mangling together of two (or five, if the dominions are included) secondorder bodies politic (the U.S. and UK intelligence communities). Each has within it several other second-order bodies politic (originally, GC&CS, Op-20-G [U.S. Naval intelligence], the Army Security Agency, etc.). All of these second-order bodies politic are composed of first-order bodies politic (individual people) and the technologies that enable them to operate. At the scale of these individuals, the mangling together of these assemblages meant the harmonization of security procedures, terminology, and other everyday materialities of the state: the physical forms of intercepted raw traffic, the translation of intercepts, the brand of equipment (IBM), the style of analytic reports, the method of encryption, and so on. These common materialities enabled wider circulation of affects across the Atlantic.
The first appendix to the initial UKUSA agreement spells out the code words to be used for various forms of intelligence, along with their security procedures. Decrypted intelligence was designated by the term CREAM, and traffic intelligence (i.e., anything that can be learned from a still-encrypted message) was termed IVORY. This stratification of intelligence carried with it a stratification of its material and spatial forms; CREAM was top secret and IVORY was merely secret (raw intelligence was classified as confidential). CREAM could therefore only be transported unencrypted if "sealed and via officer courier or other trusted routes, . . . or by protected in-house local communications systems, or by external landlines only as specifically approved" (Appendix A 1946, 7). IVORY could be transported via the same routes or by registered mail. Neither CREAM nor IVORY could be "conveyed by aircraft or land transport over territory controlled by other than the United States or British governments" (Appendix A 1946, 40-41).
A further stratification was directed at intelligence officers. Both parties were required to have as few people as possible indoctrinated (sworn) into the cooperation. Those not indoctrinated could not even know the terms CREAM and IVORY existed. This requirement led to stratification of spaces: "due precautions shall be taken (by providing segregated, secure areas or otherwise) to ensure that the activities and knowledge of such persons are confined to the COMINT [a synonym for SIGINT] material and activities to which they have access" (Appendix B 1953, 7).
Beyond the microgeographies of the office, a further stratification reworked not only space but time: "Every effort shall be made to ensure that no person who has a knowledge of current value about COMINT, such that his capture or interrogation could be a substantial risk to the security of COMINT, shall be assigned to or engage in activities of a hazardous nature" (Appendix B 1953, 8). In practice, this meant that staff was categorized into four groups. Group A did not know there were groups. Their mobility was unrestricted. Group B knew about IVORY (the terms had changed by then, but the categories remained), and Category C was indoctrinated to CREAM. The former could be assigned to hazardous duties after six months' separation from intelligence material, whereas the latter required a year's absence. Category D had "precise knowledge of COMINT processing techniques, competence, or potential" and could never be assigned to hazardous duties (Appendix B 1953, 9). Given the link between hazardous duties and particular spaces, these procedures created a set of striated spaces of differential access, with the intelligence sticking to the bodies of the indoctrinated for various lengths of time (or permanently).
Even as UKUSA was productive of new hierarchical spatialities and temporalities, it attempted to produce a smooth space of flows between intelligence centers. For instance, within UKUSA "foreign communications" were defined as those of "a faction, group or nation that is not a party to this agreement" (Enclosure A 1945, 6). In defining it so, a domestic space was constructed that included both the United States and the British Empire. Indeed, Lander (2004) noted that one reason for UKUSA's success is that consumers of intelligence do not know from which country it originated. Crucial to such domesticated space is the role of trust as an affective relation between bodies. A significant amount of trust was built up between British and Americans at all levels of the war effort. Often this circulation of trust became "stuck" in particular, crucial bodies. For instance, while considering the British offer of collaboration, one U.S. Army officer said this of British Foreign Secretary Bevin (Communications intelligence 1946, 1): "he had debated vigorously and sometimes harshly before entering into [agreements], but having once committed himself he would carry out his contracts to the full." Trust could not depend on such individuals for long, and UKUSA procedures were used to maintain this transnational intimacy through the organization of space (Thrift and Leyshon 1994).
The wartime practice of secondment was institutionalized, such that "[e]ach party is authorized, with the consent of the other, to send personnel to work with the personnel of the other part on any task allocated to such other party or for which it may be responsible" (Appendix, 5 February 1946, 6). This is true also of today's UKUSA. One retired senior UK official explained, "There is a massive exchange of people coming back and forth all the time for talks. . . .
The key players will all know each other, from the mid-career on up." Another retired senior UK official noted that once or twice a year the NSA and GCHQ managerial boards hold a conference. There are also frequent specialist conferences: "cryptographers holding conferences about elliptic curves or other mysterious things which I never understood." The procedure was never that secrets were disallowed, in fact secrets were explicitly allowed; rather, it was that the other side should know via their proximity that secrets were being kept. This discouraged secrets because both sides knew trust was crucial. Further, having people in close proximity helped to form bonds of friendship that helped an affective reservoir of trust to form over time. A retired U.S. official described this: Friendship requires having a reserve; "you know you can trust me because I haven't done this to you before this." With the Commonwealth it just makes it easy, it's comfortable and you know you can trust one another even though you recognize you work for another country.
The microgeographies of common labor thus contributed to the emergence of second-order bodies politic in which some individuals play a key role: liaisons.
Appendix G of the original agreement allows for the establishment of "senior liaisons" (Appendix G 1946, 1). Beyond this ambassadorial figure, other liaisons can be accredited to specific agencies or working groups as necessary. Liaisons "shall normally have unrestricted access to those parts of the other's operating agencies which are engaged directly in the production of Communication Intelligence" (Appendix G 1946, 1-2). Policing the transparency of the other party is not their primary job; the senior liaison is meant to be the conduit for requests for specific information.
Liaisons remain central to mediating diplomatic intercepts and human intelligence. The relations between opposite numbers deepen over a multidecade career; one retired UK senior intelligence official described it as a process of "growing up together," with a relationship often beginning in a far-flung outpost and continuing as both parties rise in their respective organizations: "In the SIGINT world you have lifelong friendships that extend into families, into holidays, because people don't know anybody else. You are in this business for life." Now I turn to the role of communications technologies in the UKUSA assemblage.

Technologies and Affordances
Understanding UKUSA requires knowing more than the role of institutions and individuals in its emergence. Communications technologies not only compose the tendons connecting the participating intelligence services but also form the objects of UKUSA surveillance. Therefore, UKUSA has always incorporated communications technologies used by governments (and later, civilians) throughout the world.
As early as January 1944, GC&CS was discussing the creation of the BRUSA circuit, a radio connection among Washington, Pearl Harbor, Melbourne, Colombo, and London created by linking together existing U.S. and UK radio systems (U.S.-British R.I. 1944a). On its completion later that year, "cryptochannel 34" of the BRUSA circuit was kept free for the exchange of Japanese intercepts (U.S.-British R.I. 1944b). Of course, with any transmission there is the chance of interception, and so the Combined Cipher Machine (CCM) was deployed throughout the circuit. Encryption machines such as this converted messages into code and also reverted them to their original texts. As the name implies, the CCM was based on an adaptor enabling the British Typex machine and the U.S. ECM Mark II machine to be interoperable.
It was widely recognized in 1946 that the secure links between Washington and London were insufficient to enable a full integration of effort (Technical Conference 1946). Appendix H in 1946 explicitly stipulated that new circuits be added (and old World War II circuits be channelized to increase their capacity) to better connect the capitals. By 1953, Appendix H added that "lateral communications between stations of one party and Agencies or stations of the other" may also be provided (Appendix H, 1953, 1); we can therefore see the increasing density and rhizomatic nature of these relations as UKUSA evolved.
If the intensity of connection within UKUSA increased over time, so did the intensity of surveillance that linked UKUSA to its outside. The difference between the intra-UKUSA connections and those linking it to the object of UKUSA's surveillance was not in the quantitative number of the connections but in their qualitative nature. In short, communications within UKUSA contributed toward a smooth space of flows, whereas topological connections with the outside were hierarchical.
The arrival of satellite communications in the 1960s changed the geography of spying. For many years, UKUSA only required three satellite intercept bases-in Cornwall, West Virginia, and Washington. Now the density of world communications requires more satellites than that and more listening stations.
In the mid-2000s the NSA had ten or eleven operating in satellite download footprints (Keefe 2006). Further, microwave radio communications (e.g., mobile phones) require yet another geography of listening stations; recent revelations point to UKUSA embassies in foreign capitals as highly sophisticated eavesdroppers reliant on their immediate proximity to the foreign policy apparatuses of their hosts (Campbell et al. 2013).
The cutting edge of surveillance today lies in fiber optic cables. This form is a challenge because unlike radio, microwave, or satellite signals, if light signals are intercepted, the signal is degraded and therefore tampering is revealed. Nevertheless, UKUSA has incorporated technology affording it the capability to tap fiber optics. Just as earlier forms of UKUSA relied on the topology of the telegraph network (e.g., the United Kingdom's role as a jumping-off point for undersea cables), a current program called STORM-BREW relies on U.S. centrality in the global telecommunications network, with seven chokepoints where cables intersect the U.S. borders. In contrast to such "upstream" collection, UKUSA agencies also collect data "downstream": PRISM entails receiving data from Internet corporations through overt or covert means. The NSA has been known to physically intercept the delivery of servers to private companies, open them up, implant a "back door," and then reseal them and continue delivery (Greenwald 2014).
Another point of similarity with past UKUSA efforts is that defeating encryption remains, as in World War II, crucial. "PROJECT BULLRUN [is] a joint effort between the NSA and [. . . GCHQ] to defeat the most common forms of encryption used to safeguard online transactions," while "EGOTISTICAL GIRAFFE . . . targets the Tor browser that is meant to enable anonymity in online browsing" (Greenwald 2014, 94). Other possibilities exist for SIGINT collection that precedes the moment of encryption. For instance, the NSA conducts "Computer Network Exploitation" or putting malware called "Quantum Insertion" onto specific computers when the NSA wants to observe "every keystroke entered and every screen viewed" (Greenwald 2014, 117). Therefore, private servers of companies such as Yahoo! and Google and private computers of the more than 50,000 recipients of Quantum Insertion have all been enrolled in UKUSA. If the importance of both topology and decryption to UKUSA has remained constant, one thing has not: the intensity of communication flows.
Criticism after 11 September 2001 of the intelligence apparatus provided impetus for new technologies to organize this vast flow of intercepts for rapid operationalization. XKEYSCORE is software that examines e-mails and metadata stored on more than 700 servers in 150 cities and seemingly replaces an earlier keyword search program that achieved some notoriety: ECHELON (Hager 1996). BOUNDLESSINFORMANT is a program visualizing NSA metadata collection in real time. Such programs attempt to operationalize the sheer volume of data collected through these UKUSA programs. "As of mid-2012, the [NSA] was processing more than twenty billion communications events (both Internet and telephone) from around the world each day" (Greenwald 2014, 98). Beyond visualization, another problem is the actual materialization of all these data. In late 2013 the NSA completed a new $1.5 billion data center near Bluffdale, Utah, in hopes of holding all the intelligence it sweeps up a bit longer before being compelled to delete it for a lack of space (Hill 2013).
The increasing role of the private sector in constituting UKUSA is one of its most important evolutions in the last fifteen years. In addition to the aforementioned collaborative relationships and coercive cooptations, a whole range of contractors have become suppliers of technology and even intelligence itself (Crampton, Roberts, and Poorthuis 2014).
[T]he growing importance of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) has given rise to the flourishing of private sector and non-state actor intelligence enterprises. Initially focused on business intelligence, companies have moved into mainstream security to meet the capacity problems that emerged after 9/11. (Svendsen 2008, 139) The rise of private interests in UKUSA points to the distributed nature of its agency, as corporate interests become enrolled in its direction.
Companies like Booz Allen Hamilton and AT&T employ hordes of former top government officials, while hordes of current top defense officials are past (and likely future) employees of those same corporations. Constantly growing the surveillance state is a way to ensure that the government funds keep flowing, that the revolving door stays greased. (Greenwald 2014, 168) This account of UKUSA, drawing as it does on recent journalistic sources, tends to overemphasize those sources' view of the UKUSA agencies as a looming, all-powerful eye, dominating the private-sector companies through which it occasionally operates and the individuals whose privacy it violates. The Bluffdale NSA data facility and the crucial niche occupied by the private sector in intelligence, however, hint at the ways in which the ability of NSA and GCHQ leaders to direct the assemblage is highly contingent. Rather, these agencies can equally be understood to have the tiger by the tail, constantly buffeted by the material affects circulating through the wider assemblage. These include the firehose of data that must be assimilated, analyzed, and operated; the range of private-sector interests that must be accommodated; and the need to maintain capability with regard to new communications technologies (like Tor) coming online. Even periodic gaps in coverage (e.g., the initial inability to view Skype calls) or analysis (a 2000 crash of NSA computers that left GCHQ solely in charge of analysis for three days) hint at the inherent fragility of the UKUSA assemblage.
Further, these attempts to sweep up, store, and circulate SIGINT have been hampered by the striated spaces of security that UKUSA enacts. The tight relationship between the NSA and GCHQ is not necessarily matched by the CIA and MI-6, complicating intelligence sharing between the SIGINT and human intelligence (HUMINT) sides of the special relationship. One CIA senior official described an odd moment during the Falklands War: "GCHQ seems to share everything they get from the NSA with the SIS [Special Intelligence Service, aka MI-6], and we [the CIA] would give the NSA something that is NOFORN [not for foreign distribution] and they would say we can't do that-our system is not set up that way." This is still true today; as one retired MI-6 official told me, "The NSA-GCHQ infrastructure is sui generis. Logically on the broader intelligence front there wouldn't be interlinked computer systems." The actualization of UKUSA over time has coded space in ways that foreclose some courses of action.
If there is (in theory if not always in practice) unrestricted exchange of SIGINT among the five UKUSA states, there is also a further web of intelligence relationships-bilateral or otherwise-that need accommodation. For instance, NATO also has a policy of intelligence sharing. Recent disclosures have also revealed privileged intelligence relationships with individual partners, such as Sweden (NSA intelligence relationship 2013). Therefore, UKUSA is the dense inner circle of a wider web of intelligence relationships: [T]he UK and US intelligence communities contribute towards the greater globalization of intelligence. . . . Notably, officials seek to accomplish this gradually, within UK-US terms or "rules of engagement." These conditional movements help establish UK and US-led "best practices" and frameworks. (Svendsen 2010, xx) UKUSA works as an engine of intelligence harmonization, serving as the nucleus of a web of material flows binding together a wide range of intelligence services in a hierarchical fashion.
If the previous section focused on the role of affective relations between individual bodies in the production of the UKUSA assemblage, this section has shown the role of a range of technologies in mediating those affects and enabling the agency of UKUSA to emerge. These circulating materialities-nowadays almost entirely in digital form-carry with them an affective push that shapes the political cognition of those they encounter (albeit in highly differentiated ways). In the next section I turn to the affective impact of UKUSA on the second-order bodies politic that compose it.

Reworking State Assemblages and Affecting Foreign Policy
It is crucial to understand that UKUSA is not simply an agreement between governments. The agreement formalized processes of mangling already underway. The intelligence services of both countries, even before the war was over, were making integrated personnel decisions. For instance, when a shortage in Japanese translators was found in Op-20-G (U.S. naval intelligence) one month before V-J Day, it was decided that "[t]he British should be persuaded not to reduce their scale of effort until the Japanese emergency is over, as they provide a reserve of skilled and experienced personnel" (Snyder 1945, 3). Ad hoc collective decision making thus existed prior to the agreement. Still, the agreement rippled through the intelligence communities of all five participants. Entering into UKUSA reshaped the actualized form of each intelligence community. Power was not only exercised by these organizations but through them, a transformational process.
The U.S. intelligence community was fundamentally reshaped by cooperation prior to the 1946 agreement. During the war, the U.S. SIGINT assemblage was at best loosely territorialized, being fragmented between the Army (Arlington Hall) and the Navy (Op-20-G). As Aid (2009, 3) put it, "Though the two cryptanalytic organizations shared code-breaking responsibilities, cooperation was the exception rather than the rule." This was a direct contrast with the highly centralized British SIGINT effort.
This fragmentation proved troublesome to the war effort, diminishing effectiveness with friends as well as enemies. Arlington Hall was much more enmeshed with British intelligence than Op-20-G was. This allowed the British to play one against the other. For instance, when Op-20-G refused to give intelligence to the British but shared it with Arlington Hall, the British would just ask Arlington Hall for it. Toward the end of the war the U.S. Navy briefly suspended its intelligence sharing with the U.S. Army for exactly this reason (Wenger 1945b). To prepare for the UKUSA negotiations, it was decided to present a common front, and this required a common decision-making body. Thus was created the State-Army-Navy Communications Intelligence Board. This organization was the organizational equivalent of the London Signals Intelligence Board (LSIB), which claimed to speak for the British intelligence community throughout the Empire. By 1953, despite resistance from the armed forces, U.S. SIGINT was centralized in the NSA, which mirrored GCHQ. Having established the role of UKUSA in both reterritorializing the U.S. intelligence assemblage and producing new smooth (between U.S. and UK agencies) and striated (hierarchies of centralization) spaces, I now turn to the role of UKUSA in changing the intelligence communities of the British Empire.
UKUSA's effect on the British Empire can be understood as the inverse of the U.S. experience of centralization. First, it had the long-term effect of territorializing the dominions (Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) with regard to intelligence matters. Second, it harmonized the intelligence apparatus of each dominion with that of the United Kingdom.
With regard to the first point, recall that one of the assets the United Kingdom brought to the agreement was its substantial presence in areas where the United States had little. To make this claim, GCHQ relied on their ability to speak on behalf of the dominions; indeed, the draft agreement in late 1945 (Enclosure A 1945) made this claim despite the fact that no dominion intelligence agency recognized the supremacy of the LSIB. The confusing constitutional arrangements among the dominions made for a topological puzzle: Were they inside the agreement, on account of their being part of the Empire, or were they outside them on account of their independence? The Americans were in favor of these countries falling under LSIB, as they wanted a single point of contact. Indeed, wartime intelligence collaboration with the dominions had been problematic (Draft British-U.S. 1945). For their part, the LSIB "felt it should have a preferred position as regards the dominions and desires to exercise the right of approval regarding United States contacts with dominion agencies." The U.S. Navy insisted that the explicit approval of the dominions be given. To satisfy them, the British took the representatives of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand aside during a Commonwealth conference, explained the parts of the UKUSA agreement that would apply to them, and gained their agreement (Minutes of inauguration meeting 1946). The topological muddle was maintained in the final agreement: "While the Dominions are not parties to this Agreement they will not be regarded as third parties." Despite this initial fudging of the status of the dominions, by 1953 all of these states would take up a fully independent role in UKUSA.
Nevertheless, there were fundamental asymmetries between the dominions and the main partners. This, and the topological relation between the United Kingdom and the dominions, was perhaps best materialized in the Australia-New Zealand Integrated Communication Intelligence Center in Melbourne, which despite its name was run by the British. Where the United States and United Kingdom both had global ambitions, the three dominions not only had skeletal SIGINT operations but were woeful in their security. One of the delays in Australia's full admission to UKUSA was the discovery of KGB and GRU spies within the intelligence establishment (Keefe 2006;Aid 2009). Only after Australia was convinced to set up a counterintelligence outfit parallel to MI-5 were they allowed to fully participate (Aldrich 2010).
Beyond security procedures, the dominions needed to restructure their previous, ad hoc intelligence apparatus into something resembling the institutional model emerging in UKUSA. As a Canadian document attests, In general the tendency is toward greater control by the Foreign Office and the State Department. . . . In planning the structure we might draw from the experience of both countries though our governmental system is somewhat different than both and so that we cannot transplant the whole from either. (Memorandum on post-war plans 1945, 1) Indeed, Canada ended up consolidating its wartime intelligence efforts into a single organization-the Communications Branch of the National Research Council. Similarly, Australia set up a British-inspired Joint Intelligence Committee and "most importantly, a unitary Signals Intelligence Centre along the lines of GCHQ, which was given the cover name Defence Signals Branch" (Aldrich 2010, 93). The institution was British in form, as twenty of its officers were seconded from GCHQ, including its first director (Andrew 1989).
From the preceding it can be seen that UKUSA acted back on the participating countries' intelligence agencies. As Aldrich (2010, 278) noted, UKUSA is more than just a tool for the enactment of foreign policy. UKUSA became an end unto itself: At remote locations such as the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean or Ascension Island in the Atlantic, the future of entire territories was shaped by the need for Anglo-American listening stations. Intelligence had once merely served the "special relationship," but now secretive intelligence and defence projects lay at its very centre.
If foreign policy came to revolve increasingly around maintaining joint intelligence capabilities, what of the affective power of intelligence cooperation to produce other common policies? Dumbrell (2006, 461) argued that UKUSA cooperation contributes to the "inclining logic" of the special relationship, predisposing policymakers to similar attitudes and predispositions. More specifically, Lander (2004, 487) noted that "the UK Weekly Survey of Intelligence and the Presidential Intelligence Brief probably look very similar most weeks and that tends to reinforce the closeness of the world view of the two governments." This long-term bureaucratic intimacy means that producing distance when desired is a challenge; Dumbrell (2006, 461) noted that it was "practically impossible to disentangle U.S.-U.K. sharing of military intelligence regarding Argentina" during the Falklands War, although he also cited the Vietnam War as proof that policy outcomes do not follow from common intelligence (the United Kingdom never joined the United States in that war). Indeed, Aldrich (2004) noted that almost all Western intelligence services believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction in 2003, and yet there were wildly divergent responses.
The assemblage approach does not attribute emergent effects to the materialized intelligence itself, however, but sees them as a product of the way the various parts of the assemblage come together. The integrated processes of intelligence produce embodied predispositions that color how common intelligence is interpreted or acted on. Additionally, UKUSA is enmeshed with other forms of everyday diplomacy, such as military and foreign policy cooperation. A senior UK intelligence official argued that UK participation in the 2003 invasion of Iraq resulted from the enmeshing of the two countries' executive branches: Having committed himself [Blair] morally, . . . the railway timetables of war meant that most of the British Army was in the process of being deployed to the Gulf before any [Parliamentary] decision was actually taken that the UK was going to participate, because they couldn't afford to wait. . . . Having had our military planners integrated with U.S. military planners, we were an integral part of the U.S. military plan. . . . So are we going to say, "Sorry, we are not coming?" This would have been unthinkable.
Intelligence cooperation is here only one part of the story and one insufficient on its own to account for the United Kingdom's intervention in Iraq. But the preemptive logic of intelligence, combined with the affective world of everyday diplomacy, feeds into an emergent causation that both explains the invasion of Iraq and also holds out the possibility of alternative lines of flight, as seen in the 2013 Parliamentary vote on action in Syria.
These geopolitical events could not be foreseen in their specificity; however, Major General Sir Stewart Menzies, chair of the 1946 Technical Conference, noted that UKUSA was crucial "both in ensuring cooperation in the SIGINT field and in its effect on cementing the relations between the two countries generally" (Minutes of inauguration meeting 1946, 1). Menzies's vision has been borne out over time; one senior UK official said that the UKUSA infrastructure is "right at the center of the U.S.-UK relationship. It is the connection between the two and the reason for the special relationship." As Kuus (2013) noted, the political often masquerades as the technical. I now turn to some concluding thoughts.

Conclusions
This article has traced the emergence of UKUSA with as much empirical specificity as can be mustered on such a secretive topic. Credit must go to the many scholars of intelligence cooperation who have documented many of the "black box" empirical details on which this article's argument relies. It is hoped that the findings of this article will stimulate a discussion in that field about the role of theory and the starting assumptions of intelligence-related scholarship. The disembodied, institutionalist, and rationalist assumptions of much of this literature threaten to perpetuate the disconnection of intelligence studies from wider scholarship. This article, it is hoped, goes some way to answer Gaddis's (1989, 212) "So what?" regarding the historical detail of intelligence studies by connecting intelligence cooperation to wider processes of everyday diplomacy that have produced transnational geopolitical assemblages.
This attention to historical detail is necessary because UKUSA could be seen as the poster child for the Anglosphere, and if the next-nearest circle of confidants is included (Germany, Sweden, etc.), then intelligence sharing seems to point to the West. What this historical account of UKUSA indicates is the highly contingent evolution of the partnership, which could easily have been other than what it is and indeed is constantly morphing into something different. Only by setting governmental intent alongside the agency of technologies, private companies, and even whistleblowers like Edward Snowden can the baroque workings of power be seen.
UKUSA is an emergent system originally improvised from common opposition to Nazi Germany and an array of in-the-field collaborations between U.S. and UK military personnel. The affective relations of trust produced in the war between specific individuals in each country's intelligence community, when juxtaposed with the uncertain future of atomic weapons in a new world order, enabled a new kind of body politic to emerge: UKUSA. This was not a given, and there are numerous lines of flight that are equally real, if not actualized. Nevertheless, UKUSA was institutionalized as a set of common procedures that harmonized states in the realm of intelligence. The flows of standard-format intelligence, the sharing of embodied routines, the harmonized jargon, the use of common computer technologies, the affective bonds with liaison officers-these are everyday forms of diplomacy that have thus far escaped our attention, despite their collective agency that can be seen acting through foreign policy apparatuses and shaping foreign policy decisions.
Because international relations theory has too often emphasized the rationality of state elites, such embodied affects have been rendered invisible, despite their evident effects. It is for this reason that I have described affect as the poltergeist of international affairs, rearranging the room when nobody is looking (or willing to see). Attempts to explain away the ghost in the system via civilizational thinking take the microscaled complexity of overlapping harmonized practices, material flows, and affective relations, in which individual first-and second-order bodies politic are multiply enmeshed, and reduces them to a crude macroscaled singularity-culture. Therefore, further study of this topic is crucial-not only for working out the empirical details of the innumerable everyday diplomacies yet to be investigated but also because such empirical work is needed as part of a political project that undercuts simplistic and reductionist accounts of geopolitics and replaces them with better ones. The literature in critical geopolitics has been consistently excellent in deconstructing civilizational discourses (e.g., Bassin 2007) but rather less excellent in offering a constructive account for what appears commonsensical to many observers. This article has attempted to do just that.
There are everyday diplomacies beyond intelligence collaboration, such as equipment standardization and interoperability in NATO (and beyond) and international arrest warrants (and subsequent extradition of bodies). These everyday diplomacies not only enact the states in whose name they are done, but they also produce uneven geographies of affective intensity and flow. These uneven geographies enable systems to self-organize over time, becoming anew and enacting a collective agency that shapes the cognitive sense-making of the bodies politic enrolled in them. A whole world of everyday diplomacies awaits careful examination.