Front Organizations in the Cold War

Front organizations have been, and are, established by various actors, including state actors, for a range of purposes. Seeking insights through recent literature highlighting the historical importance of the transnational movement of knowledge in the history of science and technology as well as the application of a novel conceptual framework from the theory of civil society, this chapter considers front organizations as a manifestation of the “politics of (backward) infiltration.” The latter concept is borrowed from Klein and Lee (Sociol Theory 37:62, 2019), whose work the chapter considers even as it is suggested that there are certain refinements to be made to their framework, at least for the purposes of the present inquiry focused on the Cold War period and examples of the (cross-border) state infiltration of the economy (rather than just civil society). Infiltration took place in the cases concerned through methods that Klein and Lee may describe as “substitution” and “occupation,” respectively. This interpretation is shown to be analytically meaningful, especially as it highlights the diversity of goals involved in the setting up of front organizations with a mission deriving from the context of international politics, where disguise/maskirovka for the purposes of covert action and hidden technology transfer are often main aims. This is demonstrated through a case study of SOMAREM (Société Marocaine de Recherches et d’Exploitations Minières), a U.S.-French joint company, which was set up in the 1950s to prospect for mineral resources in Morocco in the context of the early Cold War quest to map the world’s uranium deposits.