TY - JOUR
AU - Herrington, Lewis
AB - Abstract In recent years, the British and American governments have declassified vast volumes of previously secret files. They have also taken a greater interest in public understanding, by assisting films, sponsoring official histories and permitting intelligence chiefs to write memoirs, thereby providing yet more research material for the booming field of intelligence studies. In his book review essay, I consider some of the more important new books on intelligence. They offer timely, realistic and balanced analyses and show that skilled research allows us to make conclusion about these secret organizations with greater confidence than we might have suspected. But they also show us that some of the key questions remain fiercely debated. Moreover, while more information about western intelligence agencies is welcome, it exacerbates a growing problem: we know more and more about a few famous services like the CIA, and comparatively less about intelligence services elsewhere in the world. The spies of the global South remain very much in the shadows. There are probably too many spy books these days. Their publication was once a cause for comment—even for moral panic—but currently a new one appears every week. A recent foray into London's larger literary emporia produced a count of over a hundred such tomes, half of which seem to be about minor agents of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), some of whom would perhaps have been better left unknown to history. Even more well worn than the story of the SOE is that of the Cambridge Five: Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Duart Maclean, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross. For exactly half a century—beginning with the publication of Philby's barbed memoir—we have been bombarded with studies of spies as traitors. Britain's mole mania was stoked by the pantomime saga of the banning of Peter Wright's Spycatcher: the candid autobiography of a senior intelligence officer (New York: Viking, 1987). In more recent times, we have had authoritative histories of the Soviet Committee for State Security (KGB) based on defectors and their archives,1 followed by excellent solo accounts of figures like Blunt, Blake and Burgess.2 So it is something of a puzzle that Richard Davenport-Hines, one of Britain's leading modern historians, has chosen to write yet another history of traitors in our midst. In fact, Enemies within is a fascinating and important book. At first glance, it might be mistaken for mere enjoyable social observation, characterized by the author's matchless ability to spot a peculiar, but illuminating, detail. The highlight of the book is surely the moment when the relatives of Burgess and Maclean are escorted to Waterloo station by MI5 to receive the luggage that the departing spies had discarded on the cross-Channel ferry as they made their way to Moscow in 1951. The account of the ensuing debate among the relatives over who should have Burgess's dirty black pyjamas and Maclean's repulsive worn-out socks ‘stiff with dried sweat’ is truly memorable (pp. 415–16). However, the real value of this book is the way in which it reveals a debatable land. After fifty years of argument, it is surprising to see just how much remains unresolved in the spy realm and Davenport-Hines disagrees with almost everyone about everything. Much is at stake here, including the very reputation of the British secret services. Many historians have sided with Philby's 1968 memoirs in depicting these mid-century agencies as filled with buffoons and bibulous wasters, often citing Sir Alexander Cadogan's diary portrayal of the wartime ‘C’ as a dullard. Even one of Britain's most distinguished former secret servants, Stella Rimington, paints a not dissimilar picture of MI5 in the 1970s: filled with retired colonial policemen and professional drunks falling out of elevators (Open secret, London: Arrow, 2002). In 2009, Keith Jeffery began a pushback against this ‘blimp’ school orthodoxy with his sympathetic official history of MI6 (MI6: the history of the secret intelligence service 1909–1949, London: Bloomsbury, 2010). But Davenport-Hines takes this much further, dismissing the idea that Britain's secret operatives were foolish, incompetent or reactionary and instead insisting that they were ‘subtle, patient, responsive and astute’ (pp. 547–9). Even more provocative are the twin assertions that Britain's KGB moles were not motivated by class and that the secret services were not undermined by class exclusivity. Again, this is an eye-opening observation that seeks to overturn fifty years of conventional wisdom which insists that many intelligence officers were ineffective precisely because they were recruited through the old boy network. Davenport-Hines suggests that we have come to explain the KGB's successful penetration of the British intelligence security apparatus by falling back on a Marxian argument about class. As a result, Russian espionage is blamed not on the KGB but on the corroded nature of the British establishment. Davenport-Hines is, of course, a fan of the traditional social order—so much so that he echoes the views of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, whose reaction to a stream of new intelligence about moles in Whitehall and Westminster in 1963 was to write to the Queen to apologise for undermining the fundamental fabric of society. Enemies within develops this rather Edwardian sentiment into a much bigger argument by suggesting that the Cambridge spies inflicted only limited damage on national security, but instead led to a collective collapse of confidence in venerable institutions. All this is linked to a general tide of increasing social malaise and distrust of experts, culminating with Brexit, Trump and fake news. This is significant revisionism, since others, including Christopher Andrew, have argued that figures like Blake and Philby did considerable damage as actual spies, not least to Anglo-American cooperation.3 Enemies within is an exceptional book that delights and disturbs at equal turns. Rather like Rebecca West's landmark study The meaning of treason (London: Phoenix Press, 1949), this is a work that will be discussed and debated for years to come. Intelligence studies has only been a serious and self-conscious area of academic research in universities since the 1980s—when Christopher Andrew and David Dilks presented their famous ‘missing dimension’ thesis (The missing dimension: governments and intelligence communities in the twentieth century, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984)—and this book, drawing heavily on newly declassified MI5 files, illuminates how little we definitively know and how little we actually agree on. For younger scholars of espionage, some of whose new works are reviewed below, this study will be reassuring. Even more spy books will surely be published to try and settle these arguments and as yet there is everything to play for. Daniel W. B. Lomas's Intelligence, security and the Attlee governments, 1945–51 is one such book, which—through his study of intelligence and the first postwar government—redraws our picture of Clement Attlee, perhaps Britain's most uncharismatic prime minister. Lomas highlights that one of Attlee's most frequent visitors at Downing Street was another shy man, Sir Percy Sillitoe, Director General of MI5. Their meetings were somewhat laconic, but the fact that they were so frequent illuminates the importance of this enigmatic figure to the development of Britain's intelligence community. Attlee developed a good relationship with Sillitoe, the new head of MI5, who was a former Chief Constable of Kent. They met every few weeks and Attlee was the first premier to inspect MI5's headquarters. During the interwar years, Labour politicians had developed a rather distant relationship with the intelligence and security services—not least because of episodes such as the Zinoviev letter, which they believed had undermined Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald's government. But Attlee was a quiet enthusiast for secret service. As wartime Deputy Prime Minister, he often presided over some of the most sensitive areas, including intelligence on enemy aliens and the inquiry into the German penetration of SOE operations in the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg—though this is almost unknown. Moreover, Attlee was also regularly supplied with Ultra (highly classified signals intelligence)—just like Churchill. But unlike his boss, Attlee was all about order, process and procedure and he brought this talent to bear on the expanded intelligence community throughout the 1940s. His last intervention in intelligence was perhaps his most important: at the end of his postwar administration he, together with his Cabinet Secretary Norman Brook, created the committees that kept the spending and strategic direction of the British intelligence effort under constant review. Attlee's contribution to intelligence and security was significant and it is remarkable that his many biographers have completely missed it. By contrast, this excellent book by Lomas shines a welcome spotlight on an unknown architect of Britain's secret world. When Attlee arrived in Downing Street, he was one of the most experienced intelligence consumers ever to become prime minister. As the Cold War developed, he was receiving diplomatic intercepts from Bletchley Park—which was in the process of relocating to Eastcote on the edge of London and renaming itself Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). As relations with Russia deteriorated, Attlee authorized risky operations, both at home and abroad. This included the re-creation of the Political Warfare Executive, rechristened the Information Research Department, which undertook propaganda and intervened in domestic politics, including in trade union matters. By 1948, he had also authorized special operations run by former SOE personnel. Attlee was a rather unlikely supporter of such banditry, but gave the green light for what became known as Operation Valuable, a combined MI6–CIA plot to overturn the communist regime in Albania. MI6 sent in waves of anti-communist Albanians—nicknamed the ‘Pixies’—who had been trained on Malta, but Operation Valuable had been compromised and resulted in the deaths and imprisonment of many of the agents. When they landed on the beaches of Albania they were often ambushed and so this unsuccessful scheme was Attlee's miniature Bay of Pigs. Lomas also covers the subject of vetting. He argues that Attlee's administration began to weed out communists and far-left sympathizers within the civil service, introducing ‘negative vetting’, which meant checking existing files, and ‘positive vetting’, which meant active investigation by MI5. The more stringent screening procedures were introduced in the last weeks of the Attlee government, as the US threatened to break off any atomic cooperation if this was not done. Lomas plays down this episode and sees it as proportionate to the KGB threat. His suggestion, however, that this was something new is wrong. As Jennifer Luff has recently pointed out, much of this had already been tried out in the interwar years—including an anti-communist purge of the civil service.4 Many of the secret files these new books are based on have only just been declassified. However, in another sense, Britain's secret agencies were opened up decades ago by television and film. Ask any member of the public about MI5 and they will immediately reference Spooks, describing its air-locked entrance and feverish operations centre. Ask anyone about MI6 and they will reference 007 and mention the striking yellow building at Vauxhall Cross, variously known as ‘Legoland’ or ‘Spedding's Sandcastle’, designed by the famous architect Terry Farrell. Many could doubtless add some details about the furniture in M's office. GCHQ has not yet enjoyed its own TV series, but any future ‘sigint soap’ would doubtless feature perpetual car parking problems on the western edge of Cheltenham. (GCHQ was the subject of a major feature film with Michael Caine and Nigel Havers, called The whistleblower, made in 1984.) Over the years, the British public has observed their secret services less through press stories and the asterisk-ridden reports of the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament, and more through the prism of fictional programmes. Accordingly, Joseph Oldham's meticulous and fascinating study exploring the history of spy and conspiracy genres on British television is especially welcome. Paranoid visions takes us from the classic Cold War series of the 1960s through the conspiracy dramas set in the Thatcher era to current ‘war on terror’ thrillers. It examines important series such as The sandbaggers, A very British coup and Spooks, together with famous adaptations of the novels of John le Carré, such as Tinker tailor soldier spy. Intriguing, insightful and intellectually rigorous, this book not only makes a superb contribution to intelligence studies but also has much to say about the wider landscape of British cultural history. There are some surprises here. Many will have forgotten The sandbaggers, an ITV series from the late 1970s that offered a remarkably realistic view of MI6 through the lens of Whitehall politics. No one seemed to ask how ITV had achieved this unprecedented examination of the machinery underpinning intelligence activity, even down to the role of the prime minister's private secretary for foreign affairs as the link to the hidden hand. Most readers will be more familiar with Spooks—a BBC series which started in 2002 and ran for a decade. It was not only an unprecedented re-creation of MI5, but also an important dramatic comment on the ‘war on terror’ under the later years of the Blair government. Initially, Spooks involved a wide cast of MI5 agents who valiantly defeated nefarious terror plots, but later it developed various one-off conspiracy episodes with a more critical sensibility that offered a rather conspiratorial vision of the ‘war on terror’, perhaps inevitably involving the CIA, renditions and torture. This is a fascinating book, covering over half a century of cultural history and it reminds us that the spooks simultaneously have been hidden from us and have been very visible in the corner of our living room. Samantha Newbery's new book, Interrogation, intelligence and security, is a welcome reminder that the British have their own torture trope. The core of this study is the sorry tale of British interrogations in Northern Ireland during the 1970s. Carefully constructed and meticulously researched, this book explains the long gestation and development of the British interrogation method known as the ‘five techniques’: uncomfortable stress position; hooding; loud, continuous noise; sleep deprivation; and restrictions on the quality and amount of food intake. These were essentially empire imports from colonial counter-insurgencies in places like Aden during the 1960s. The book also explores the legacy of this episode, ending with the controversy over the British Army's interrogations in Basra, Iraq, in September 2003. Much has been written on torture by public intellectuals and it makes a change to have some solid empirical research on a topic that mostly generates moral assertions. The book is also admirable for its measured language. Torture is a slippery and enormously sensitive subject—the United Nations defines it as the intentional creation of intense pain or suffering, but what exactly is intense? We might argue that prolonged solitary confinement is an especially unpleasant form of torture, in which case many prison systems around the world would qualify. The ‘five techniques’ were deemed torture by the European Court of Justice in 1976, but it then changed its mind and retreated to a finding of cruel and degrading treatment—but not torture. Newbery has chosen not to describe the ‘five techniques’ as torture and instead focuses on a forensic analysis of their use and effects. The deployment of the ‘five techniques’ in Northern Ireland implicates multiple organizations, such as Special Branch, MI5 and the army. We also see the first significant impact of organizations such as Amnesty International and the Sunday Times Insight team—more familiar to Whitehall officials in the twenty-first century. These, in turn, led to more formal investigations, which prompted Prime Minister Edward Heath to ban the use of the ‘five techniques’ in 1972. It has to be said that Heath's judgement in these matters was perhaps more sophisticated and displayed more foresight than that of some of the security ‘experts’ who surrounded him. Newbery's study is also a fascinating investigation of corporate memory, or more precisely corporate forgetting. Lessons learned at some cost in Aden were forgotten on the road to Belfast, and yet again in Basra in 2003. Despite the tendency of the British to boast about their expertise learned over decades in low-intensity conflicts—and indeed the penchant of middle-aged military men for recounting their experiences during ‘The Troubles’—the directive banning the use of these techniques had strangely fallen from corporate memory in the Gulf. The Iraq Temporary Detention Facility incident, in which a detainee in Basra died during interrogation, makes for depressing reading as the ‘five techniques’ rear their head again, but in a nastier form. There are many lessons to be learned from Interrogation, intelligence and security, not least how senior security chiefs and military commanders can avoid becoming complicit with torture. They need to be aware that, at the operational level, torture is often deemed to be a good idea when security forces are up against the perceived obstacle of time and operators believe that pressure can produce results quickly. Problems also occur when unexpectedly large numbers of detainees appear quickly and people on the ground lack the training or resources to deal with them. After 9/11, huge numbers of people found themselves in custody, in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. As a vast security machine was confronted with improbable numbers of people to interrogate, something was likely to go wrong. The events of 9/11 were a visible watershed, marking a shift from old watch-and-wait style operations against terrorism towards incarceration—followed by a further shift after 2006 towards assassination with drone strikes. Newbery shows that, curiously, British soldiers' knowledge of the techniques probably came more from ‘conduct after capture’ training than from clear instructions as to what was prohibited. This raises the murky issues of special forces and counter-interrogation training. The other interesting issue is the NATO context. To what extent was British behaviour in Iraq affected by contact with other countries—primarily with the US, but also others including Poland? We know that allied special forces worked closely together when handling prisoners in both Iraq and Afghanistan, sometimes conducting joint operations and joint interrogations. Simon Willmetts's path-breaking book, In secrecy's shadow, provides the first full historical account of the links between Hollywood and the US wartime intelligence Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the CIA. These links should not be so surprising given that Hollywood luminaries, such as John Ford, worked for the OSS. Ford ran the OSS Field Photographic Unit and made training films, together with two mainstream films that saw public release: The Battle of Midway (1942) and December 7th (1943). What is surprising and delightful is the innovative way in which Willmetts uses obscure studio archives from across the US to unravel a whole new dimension to the history of the CIA. This underlines an important methodological point: researchers are not dependent on CIA releases to write about the CIA. Willmetts uses film to chart the decline of domestic trust in government. Beginning with the wartime years, he identifies four cinematic types on the road to near paranoia in the 1970s. The postwar decade was characterized by the semi-documentary, the first cinematic type. These were films that catalogued real episodes and some were even made with the help of the Chief of the OSS, General William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, who was trying to shape the history of his own wartime agency and to make the case for its continuation as a nascent CIA. Therefore, these films were a deliberate celebration and commemoration of courageous resistance work and were often indistinguishable from the official narratives. The films included O.S.S (1946), Cloak and dagger (1946), and 13 Rue Madeleine (1947). Indeed, one detects almost a continuation of a wartime mentality, reinforced by the detonation of the Soviet atomic bomb, the atom spies and the surprise outbreak of the Korean War. Radical change came in May 1960, with the infamous Gary Powers U-2 spy plane incident that led to the collapse of a major East–West summit and much unwelcome publicity for US intelligence. This was swiftly followed by the Bay of Pigs fiasco in April 1961. CIA covert action was on the front page of every newspaper in the world. This, in turn, spawned a new category of film that Willmetts labels ironic/camp romance, typified by the much-loved mid-1960s series The man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964–8) with Robert Vaughn and David McCallum. They were a radical departure from the semi-documentary, mixing camp, artifice and satire together with an obsession with futuristic science. Their overall message was that the CIA could not possibly be taken seriously. Willmetts sees the the late 1960s is as period of tragic realism. But what interests him far more is the 1970s, a period of conspiracy thrillers and paranoia. The stand-out film here is Three days of the Condor (1975), which conjured the idea of a dark and twisted CIA within the US national security state. Robert Redford and Richard Helms, Director of the CIA, actually met on set, although the latter was less than impressed by the overall thesis when the film finally emerged. These films captured American citizens' growing distrust of spying, surveillance, special operations and government agencies. One of the consequences of these conspiracy thrillers is that they prompted the CIA to take a greater interest in the shaping of its own image. As Willmetts himself notes, the CIA culture war is not news as scholars have been busy unpicking the intervention of the CIA in the interrelated worlds of art, music, literature and festivals for over a decade. Accordingly, it is surprising that Hollywood has so far received far less attention. Willmetts endorses Hugh Wilford's view of the relationship between the CIA and Hollywood, arguing that the CIA was not the puppetmaster and that Hollywood was not funded by CIA money, since they did not need it (The mighty wurlitzer: how the CIA played America, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). He joins a phalanx of historians anxious to overturn the work of Frances Stonor Saunders, whose famous 1999 book Who paid the piper?: The CIA and the cultural Cold War (London: Granta Books) argued that the CIA pulled the cultural strings. Instead, Willmetts joins the state–private network trio of Scott Lucas, Helen Laville and Hugh Wilford in arguing that there was a strong voluntary aspect to the Cold War's cultural propaganda.5 Hollywood and the CIA enjoyed a relationship that was mostly marked by collaboration and cooperation, a path that was also pursued by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. Above all, Willmetts shows that the CIA's complaints about the threats to secrecy ring hollow since the most active agency in undermining the secrecy around secret operations was the CIA itself. It is, of course, commonplace to remark that the CIA is splendidly unsecret. There are over a thousand spy agencies in the world, belonging to something short of two hundred countries. But so many espionage books are about just one agency—the CIA. No intelligence service is simultaneously more praised, popularized, parodied and persecuted. As others have shown, this is partly a situation of its own making. Employing a de facto press officer even from its earliest years, the CIA has promoted its own press campaigns, blockbuster movies, semi-factual thrillers, a flotilla of academic works and collections of declassified documents. But Christopher Moran's superbly researched book, Company confessions, shows us a startlingly different world. Exploring the fascinating subject of spy memoirs by both loyalists and dissidents, he reminds us that there is more than one CIA. No obscure collection of papers at a far-flung Midwestern college goes unexamined in this superbly researched book. Moreover, just like Willmetts, Moran has discovered exciting new types of sources on the CIA: the legal materials that piled up high as disaffected former CIA officers and the government tried to sue each other. Moran takes a multi-biographical approach to explore the way in which the public image of the CIA has been fought over by its own officers. And it is a surprisingly exciting read, since these battles were no less bloody and belligerent than any covert action in Khartoum or Kandahar. The CIA's most viscous weapon is the pen and its operatives have been busy stabbing each other for decades. When writing a memoir, CIA officers are required to submit their manuscript to the CIA's Publications Review Board, so that the agency can remove anything that might undermine sources and methods or damage US national security. At first glance, this appears to be reasonable. However, many authors, even loyalists, have been left exasperated by this process. Company confessions contains examples of intelligence officers being placed under surveillance, taken to court, having their manuscripts stolen and even being polygraphed to ascertain their literary intentions. Yet there are some memoirs that the CIA wants to see in print. Moran's account shows us that—unlike many other secret services, including MI6, which have gone to inordinate lengths to prevent their officers from writing memoirs—the CIA has positively encouraged some books in more recent years. This has opened the door to sizeable advances from trade publishers, running into millions of dollars. Most of the recent directors of the CIA have written memoirs, often co-opting CIA speech writers or journalists to help them produce a text ready for the airport bookstall. This phenomenon is not as new as it appears. Vexed by ad hominem attacks launched with the help of the KGB, Allen Dulles, the CIA's director in the late 1950s, took an increasing interest in the presentation of the CIA to the world. His classic book, the Craft of intelligence, published in the wake of the Bay of Pigs, was clearly a co-production with more than one writer. Even Richard Helms, known as ‘the man who kept the secrets’, eventually succumbed and, despite telling everyone how much he despised CIA memoir writers, finally sat down and wrote one himself with agency support. Moran also demonstrates the importance of the Vietnam War in reshaping US attitudes to openness and secrecy. Vietnam—even more than the Watergate scandal, the oil crisis or the Pentagon Papers—undermined the American sense of self-belief and any associated veneration for the national security state. It was only in the wake of the US withdrawal from Vietnam that dissident former CIA employees first published a memoir really vilifying the CIA. In 1974, Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks's The CIA and the cult of intelligence (New York: Alfred A. Knopf) caused a shockwave and, a year later, Philip Agee—with assistance from the Cuban intelligence service—followed with Inside the company: CIA diary (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975). Rather like Philby's My silent war (New York: Grove Press, 1968) in the UK, these books seem to have touched an institutional nerve. In Britain, the government's response to a hostile KGB information assault was to turn to Harry Hinsley at St John's College Cambridge and ask him to produce a five-volume history of the triumphs of British intelligence during the Second World War. In America, the response was rather different and placed faith in private enterprise. Stanfield Turner's programme of openness was partly an attempt to repel the ideological borders with memoirs. In 1977, the CIA established the Publications Review Board. Now it reviews 4,000 publications a year. Some are obscure, but others profoundly shape the way the American public think about intelligence. George Tenet, who ran the CIA for Bush during the Iraq War, penned a memoir that climbed high into the best-seller charts, reaching the number two slot, just behind J. K. Rowling's seventh volume of the Harry Potter series. Company confessions brilliantly dissects the prolonged battle over the US' paradoxical world of public secrets. Both Moran and Willmetts have made a major contribution to our understanding of how America came to know the CIA. Three of the books reviewed here are about intelligence and popular culture. Yet despite the so-called ‘cultural turn’ in intelligence studies, Edward Said's Orientalism: western representations of the Orient (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978) and notions of post-colonialism have received little attention from scholars of intelligence and espionage. Dina Rezk's intellectually sparkling book, The Arab world and western intelligence, deploys these concepts as a prism through which to analyse recently declassified intelligence assessments produced by bodies such as the Joint Intelligence Committee in the UK and the Office of National Assessments in Australia. Rezk's focus is on perceptions of world-famous national leaders such as Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat, together with the issue of ‘national character’. Critically informed, the book reveals the consistent pre-conceptions of the West about Arab culture, including religion, rhetoric and the role of ‘honour’. Just as literature scholars have deployed MI5's surveillance reports on writers in new ways to give us exciting insights into figures like W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender, so Rezk's book makes a significant methodological contribution, showing that intelligence history does not have to be a narrow study of secret institutions and instead can offer important windows on ideas and institutional mentalities. From the 1953 Iranian coup d'état, to the Palestinian intifadas and to the recent war in Syria, the CIA has often been accused of misinterpreting the politics and society of the Middle East. Indeed, the analytical apparatus of intelligence communities of countries as diverse as Denmark and Australia have been strongly criticized for their western-centric approach. Despite energetic efforts to train analysts to think outside the box, old pathologies like ‘mirror imaging’—where one projects one's own way of thinking onto the behaviour of the enemy—remain widespread. Surprisingly, what Rezk reveals is that both UK and US intelligence analysts were actively debating the issue of the cultural lens as long ago as the 1960s. Some of the most scholarly and bespectacled boffins at Langley were penning essays on the significance of ‘Arab culture’, and the extent to which this could be applied to the understanding of leaders such as Nasser, long ago. Confronted with issues such as Moscow's deepening alliances with Cairo and Damascus, intelligence officers were actively debating ideas of ‘face among the Arabs’ and Arab ‘otherness’. Some of their ideas about exaggerated Arab honour connect with the themes of Said's Orientalism. Some analysts were successful in deploying ideas of culture in their analyses, and were not always that far wide of the mark. Nevertheless, western intelligence largely failed to appreciate the complexity of culture as a concept. Rezk argues that expressions of culture interact with power and human agency in myriad ways, remaking that very culture in the process. She sees culture as a repertoire of competing ideas that can be shuffled, selected and manipulated, and therefore demonstrates that early efforts to deploy culture as a lens through which to view Nasser and Sadat were simplistic and static. The Arab world and western intelligence, more than any other book reviewed here, points the way to a better future for this field. Intelligence studies is not only a debatable land, it is also, at present, irredeemably Anglo-centric. Superb work is coming forward on intelligence and security services in Africa and Asia, but sadly it is at the margins. So much intelligence activity remains persistently and stubbornly in the shadows and therefore we have a rather distorted sense of what intelligence is and of its real role in world politics—one suspects that it is quite dark. Perhaps we need fewer books on the CIA and more on the intelligence services of countries like Nigeria, Brazil and India. (See e.g. Michael Schoenhals, Spying for the people: Mao's secret agents, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, and Panagiotis Dimitrakis, The secret war for China: espionage, revolution and the rise of Mao, London: I.B. Tauris, 2017.) Meanwhile, this review shows us that the intelligence services—and the books written about them—are often connected in a subterranean way. Intelligence chiefs have been sensitive, even paranoid, about what has been written about them, both by journalists and by ‘enemies within’. They have responded with their own cultural counter-fire, launching yet more books. Every year now, a tsunami of new spy studies floods onto the shelves, with more stories of moles and manipulations. The CIA's Publications Review Board currently clears 4,000 items by former intelligence officers annually. It would be interesting to know if the collective effect of all this ‘openness’ was ever considered in the CIA's Directorate of Public Affairs. The net result has been that intelligence ‘revelations’ are no longer greeted with outrage, but instead with something of a yawn. Perhaps this was secretly their intent all long? If it was, then this is surely the CIA's most successful conspiracy. 1 C. M. Andrew and O. Gordievsky, KGB: the inside story (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1990); C. M. Andrew and V. Mitrokhin, The sword and the shield: the Mitrokhin Archive and the secret history of the KGB (New York: Basic, 1999). 2 Miranda Carter, Anthony Blunt: his lives (New York: Macmillan, 2002); Roger Hermiston, The greatest traitor: the secret lives of agent George Blake (London: Aurum, 2014); Andrew Lownie, Stalin's Englishman: Guy Burgess (London: Allen Lane, 2015). 3 Christopher Andrew, Defence of the realm: the authorised history of MI5 (London: Penguin, 2009), pp. 126–74; Nigel West, ‘With friends like this’, International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence 27: 4, 2014, pp. 845–54; Michael S. Goodman, ‘Who is trying to keep what secret from whom and why? MI5–FBI relations and the Klaus Fuchs case’, Journal of Cold War Studies 7: 3, 2005, pp. 124–46. 4 Jennifer Luff, ‘Covert and overt operations: interwar political policing in the United States and the United Kingdom’, The American Historical Review 122: 3, 2017, pp. 727–57. 5 Scott Lucas, Freedom's war: the US crusade against the Soviet Union, 1945–56 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999); Helen Laville, Cold War women: the international activities of American women's organisations (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002). © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Royal Institute of International Affairs. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.
TI - The debatable land: spies, secrets and persistent shadows
JO - International Affairs
DO - 10.1093/ia/iiy061
DA - 2018-05-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-debatable-land-spies-secrets-and-persistent-shadows-oajXS7Wl0V
SP - 1
EP - 655
VL - Advance Article
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -