The Secret World
by Christopher Andrew Allen Lane 960pp £35 The Week Bookshop £28 (incl. p&p)
This “masterly” book is a world history of espionage, “from the dawn of recorded history to the present day”, said Edward Lucas in The Times. Few writers would even contemplate such a “daunting” project, but Christopher Andrew is uniquely qualified, being “Britain’s foremost intelligence historian”. With the majority of intelligence work being pretty boring (and the “interesting bits” invariably “closely guarded secrets”), books about espionage “often sound more interesting than they read”. Yet this isn’t true of The Secret World, which contains numerous “sizzling” titbits – who knew, for instance, that James II was the only British king to have been strip-searched? – and is bracingly “simple” in its arguments. Andrew presents espionage as history’s “missing dimension”, a secret force that “shapes our world”. Moreover, he argues that it works best when “guided by a strong sense of the past”. Today, he writes, intelligence agencies are afflicted by “long-term historical amnesia”, which helps to explain their numerous errors.
Spying is often said to be the world’s second oldest profession, said Adam Sisman in the New Statesman. This survey opens with the Bible’s many stories about espionage, before moving on to the Chinese general Sun Tzu (C.544-496BC), whose book, The Art of War, was the first to “devote serious consideration to the subject”. By contrast, the Ancient Greeks were less sophisticated, relying on “seers, oracles and portents”. Many of Andrew’s claims early in this book read “more like guesswork than serious historical analysis”, said Saul David in The Daily Telegraph. But he hits his stride when he gets to the Renaissance, which he argues marked a “turning point” in spying, because the roles of diplomat and intelligence-gatherer began to merge. (Elizabeth I’s statesman, Sir Francis Walsingham, was an example, being both foreign secretary and intelligence chief.)
“Andrew’s story is full of intriguing facts and pleasing anecdotes,” said Rodric Braithwaite in The Spectator. Yet ultimately it is more a “chronicle” than a “critical history”: it doesn’t quite answer the questions that it raises. “How much influence did intelligence really have on the course of history? What are the perennial roots of intelligence failure?” I disagree, said Michael S. Goodman in the Literary Review. The Secret World provides “a fantastic picture of how intelligence has been used in the pursuit of power”. This “magisterial” work confirms Andrew as the “great Yoda of intelligence studies in the UK”.