JOURNEYMAN

Code name for a Royal Navy task force led by HMS Dreadnought and deployed secretly to the South Atlantic in 1977 in response to intelligence that Argentina intended to invade the Falkland Islands. The nuclear hunter-killer  submarine moved quickly ahead of the surface component, and when news of the deployment circulated in Buenos Aires, the plan was abandoned. Although JOURNEYMAN is credited with having deterred aggression, there remains some doubt as to whether the Argentine plan was anything more than a deception scheme to conceal a move against Chile in the disputed area of Tierra del Fuego. Exactly how JOURNEYMAN was deliberately compromised is also the subject of debate, as submariners are always reluctant to reveal their positions.

JONNY X

Recruited by Frank Foley, the Secret Intelligence Service head of station in Berlin, Johann de Graff, later to be known as “Jonny X,” was an experienced Comintern agent. A German who had run away to sea in 1907 at the age of 14 and served in the kaiser’s navy during the war, he had been one of the leaders of the Communist-inspired mutiny in 1917 on the battleship Westfalen and later attended Lenin University in Moscow. Having become disenchanted with the Soviets, de Graff had simply volunteered his services to Foley, who used him as a human encyclopedia on the Comintern’s activities in Germany and to gather information on his missions across Europe, to Great Britain and to Shanghai. When de Graff was sent to Brazil to foment revolution there in 1935, the SIS played a key role in providing Brazilian authorities with the detailed information they needed to suppress the uprising. When he was  arrested in Brazil in 1940 and threatened with deportation back to Germany—and certain death as a by-now notorious member of the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlande—de Graff was rescued by the SIS and resettled in Canada.

JOINT INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE (JIC)

Created in Great Britain  in 1936 under the chairmanship of a senior diplomat, Sir Ralph Stevenson, to coordinate intelligence, the JIC evolved into a weekly gathering of the four directors of intelligence —representing the Secret Intelligence Service, MI5, GCHQ, and the Defence Intelligence Staff—the chief of the Defence Staff, and the permanent undersecretaries from the Home Office, the Foreign Office, and the Treasury. It sets the requirements for the SIS and GCHQ, and since 1968 has provided an Assessment Staff to undertake independent analysis. The JIC is also attended by the  Central Intelligence Agency chief of station in London and his equivalents from Australia and New Zealand.
The chairs of the JIC have been Ralph Stevenson (1936–39), Bill Cavendish-Bentinck (1939–45), Harold Caccia (1945–48), William Hayter (1948–49), Patrick Reilly (1950–53), Patrick Dean (1953–60), Hugh Stevenson (1960–63), Bernard Burrows (1963–66), Denis Greenhill (1966–68), Edward Peck (1968–70),  Stewart Crawford (1970–73), Geoffrey Arthur (1973–75), Antony Duff (1975–79 and 1983–85), Antony Acland (1979–82), Patrick Wright (1982–83), Percy Cradock (1985–92), Rodric Braithwaite (1992–93),  Pauline Neville-Jones (1993–94), Michael Pakenham (1994–96), Paul Lever (1998–99), Peter Ricketts  (1999–2001), John Scarlett (2001–04), and Ted Abraham (2004– ).

JOHN, OTTO

An Abwehr defector to the British in Spain immediately after the failure of the 20 July 1944 plot against Adolf Hitler, John had been a Lufthansa lawyer in civilian life. He made propaganda broadcasts for the Political Warfare Executive in England before returning to Germany in 1945 to assist the prosecution at the Nuremberg war crimes trials. In December 1950 he was the British nominee for the first director of the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV), but in July 1954 he defected to East Germany. A year later he returned to the West, claiming to have been abducted. He was charged with treason, convicted, and sentenced to four years’ imprisonment. Upon his release in July 1958 he moved to Austria, where he wrote his memoirs and died in 1997.

JEDBURGH

British code name for paramilitary teams of three dropped into Nazi-occupied territory before and after D-Day. Trained at Milton Hall in Leicestershire and consisting of French, British, and American personnel, their objective was to establish contact with local resistance groups, offer training, coordinate supply drops, and maintain independent communications. The “Jeds,” as they became known, were nominated individually by Special Operations Executive, the Office of Strategic Services, and the Bureau Centrale de Renseignements et d’Action. They operated in uniform, principally in a liaison capacity.

JAMAHIRYA SECURITY ORGANIZATION (JSO)

The intelligence apparatus of Libya, the JSO played a significant role during the 1970s in support of European and Palestinian terrorist organizations and was implicated in the bombing of the La Belle discotheque in Berlin in April 1986. The JSO also supervised three large consignments of explosives and weapons delivered by ship to the Provisional Irish Republican Army and shot an unarmed police-woman in London in April 1984. One JSO staff officer, Abdelbasset Megrahi, was convicted in a Scottish court convened in The Hague of planting the bomb that destroyed Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie in December 1988.