Spooky History.

• Author: Baksbian, Aram, Jr.
• Position: The Secret World: A History of Intelligence - Book review

Christopher Andrew, The Secret World: A History of Intelligence (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2018), 960 pp., $40.00.

One of the oddest dinner parties I've attended took place at Washington's plush Watergate apartment complex in the mid-1980s. Along with me, the host, a retired gentleman spook, had invited one or two other OSS/CIA alumni, a colorful British journalist and backstairs Thatcher advisor, the newly-knighted Sir Alfred Sherman and Hollywood legend Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Although I knew Sir Alfred well from numerous visits to London, I was there mainly as a friend of Fairbanks. And he was there because, in between star turns on stage and screen, Doug had done naval and intelligence work during World War II and--as I had long suspected--continued to dabble in the dark arts as a civilian.

Following a fairly good dinner and excellent wine, the party adjourned to a separate Watergate suite where our host kept his private collection of books on espionage through the ages. There were thousands of volumes, some quite rare, some already familiar to me as an occasional historical writer. It was fascinating going, sipping cognac, poring over old tomes and heating almost as old spy lore recalled by some of the spooks who had actually been there. About the only thing missing was a comprehensive, single-volume history that pulled it all together from ancient times to living memory.

Now there is one that does. Professor Christopher Andrew has produced a masterful and illuminating history of the secret side of world history. While a hefty tome, it is a masterpiece of concision, more than three thousand years of espionage and intelligence gathering covered within a single volume. Just as importantly, Andrew has a captivating, occasionally wry writing style that keeps the story moving and entertains as it informs.

And it's all in a good cause, since, as the author explains in his introduction:

Twenty-first-century intelligence suffers from long-term historical amnesia. Early in the Cold War, the historian Sherman Kent, founding father of US intelligence analysis, complained that intelligence was the only profession without a serious literature: "From my point of view this is a matter of greatest importance. As long as the discipline lacks a literature, its methods, its vocabulary, its body of doctrine, and even its fundamental theory run the risk of never reaching full maturity." It was more difficult to leant the historical lessons of intelligence than of any other profession mainly because there was so little record of most of its past experience. Thus even the brilliant scholars and mathematicians working at Bletchley Park during World War II were barely aware of the fact that "[t]hree times over the previous 500 years, Britain had faced major invasion threats - from the Armada of Philip II of Spain in 1588, from Napoleon at the start of the nineteenth century, and from Hitler in 1940" yet the Bletchley codebreakers who cracked Hitler's ciphers, "had no idea that their predecessors had broken those of Philip II and Napoleon..." No other wartime profession was as ignorant of its own past, he adds. "It is impossible, for example, to imagine an economist who had never heard of the Industrial Revolution."

Nor is it an exaggeration to maintain, as the author does, that before World War II, "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," since the Old Testament (the Jewish Tanakh) "contains more references to spies than any history of Britain or of most other countries." This is even more true in the case of the United States, a very late entry in the global intelligence sweepstakes. Spain, France, Britain, the Holy Roman Empire and the long forgotten but once far-flung commercial network of the Venetian Republic, even Peter the Great's half-barbaric Russia, had all been major players long before the United States was born, much less before it became a global power with overseas possessions of its own in the decades immediately preceding World War I.

But forget about Europe, the New World and Greco-Roman classical civilization. Andrews reminds us that the:

...first books to argue that intelligence should have a central role in war and peace were written not in classical Greece or Rome but in ancient China and the...