The Secret World: A History of Intelligence by Christopher Andrew

ASH SMYTH

The Secret World: A History of Intelligence Christopher Andrew Allen Lane £35 Oldie price £20.79 inc p&p

‘For centuries before the Second World War, educated British people knew far more about intelligence operations recorded in the Bible than they did about the role of intelligence at any moment in their own history.’

Nowadays, one might think, few would even know that. But that’s where Christopher Andrew – emeritus professor of modern and contemporary history, and formerly president of Corpus Christi, Cambridge – begins his compendious survey, with the story of the 12 Israelite spies sent out by Moses into Canaan and stricken with plague for coming back with intel that displeased their overlords.

At approximately one word per long, footnoted page, it seems hopeless, almost impertinent, to summarise The Secret World: a list of just the ‘firsts’ would take up half of The Oldie. What’s more, ‘intelligence’ includes a multitude of sins. But he pulls together, variously, the threads of deception, subversion, image analysis, psychological operations, covert operations, propaganda, espionage, signals intelligence (Andrew’s chief hobby-horse) and what the KGB called ‘active measures’ (that is, killing).

Andrew’s brightly coloured tapestry depicts, among other things: Egyptian-Hittite diplomatic correspondence (intercepted); Caesar’s early use of ‘substitution ciphers’; Ivan the Terrible; the intelligence partnership between Elizabeth I and the ruthless Walsingham; the original special relationship, between the English and the Dutch... and so on, up to the grotesque return of holy warfare in our own supposedly enlightened era.

Israeli security services, Andrew points out, take their mottoes – and their remit – from religious scripture. Likewise, Sun Tzu actively feeds into contemporary, real-world conceptions of what intelligence is for, and even how to go about it. Andrew’s avowed intent is ‘to recover some of the lost history of global intelligence over the last three millennia, to show how it modifies current historiography, and to demonstrate its continuing relevance to intelligence in the 21st century’.

Straightening out the ‘non-linear’ history of intelligence is one thing: peaks and troughs occur, nations scale back intelligence activities in peacetime, and official secrets legislation hinders research. Few people had heard of Bletchley Park for decades after the Second World War; and Cold War history to date remains misshapen by the Kremlin’s ability to keep a secret more effectively than the CIA.

But Andrew is determined to correct the ‘long-term historical amnesia’, not only for the purpose of tweedy, collegiate assessment, but also for the sake of ongoing intelligence. Wars predictably prove a routine turning point. Although Xenophon suggested it was probably a good idea to give some thought to spies before hostilities (a lesson repeatedly

unlearned over the intervening ages), for most of the hundred years between Waterloo and the First World War, Britain essentially had no intelligence infrastructure.

The Secret World, inevitably, contains a litany of ‘intelligence failures’ which are, often as not, in fact broader political ones. The burning of the English fleet in the Medway (no budget); Pearl Harbour (inherent racism); the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (missed by the CIA, but ill-considered by the KGB). Andrew admits it’s possible to get away with these: at its height, the Roman Empire had so many soldiers that there were essentially no rebellions, and no need for much intelligence.

A lifelong academic, bestseller of intelligence scoops such as The Mitrokhin Archive, and official historian of MI5 (in which role, if no other, he is enrolled in the Security Service), Andrew knows whereof he speaks – and no doubt, from time to time, whereof he must keep silence.

Though he is not shy about repeating himself to make a point (he laments, as scholars will, that other historians fail to note the vital issues in his field), this magisterial result is highly readable, if barely portable. It’s packed with fascinating characters; and with 200 pages of notes and bibliography that are an absolute trove for the intelligencer (not to mention raw material for several dozen novels), The Secret World looks certain to become a standard reference work for graduate courses, and beyond.