Spies, Snitches, and Subterfuge: The History and Future of...

Spies, Snitches, and Subterfuge: The History and Future of Intelligence

Christian Philip Peterson

Reviews in American History, Volume 47, Number 4, December 2019, pp.647-649 (Review)

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SPIES, SNITCHES, AND SUBTERFUGE:THE HISTORY AND FUTURE OF INTELLIGENCE

Christian Philip Peterson

Christopher Andrew, The Secret World: A History of Intelligence. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2018. xii + 948. pp. Figures, notes, bibli-ography, and index. $40.00.

John Hughes-Wilson. The Secret State: A History of Intelligence and Espionage. New York and London: Pegasus Books, 2016. xvii + 506 pp. Select bibliogra-phy and index. $33.45

On 12 April 2019, news organizations across the world announced the arrest of Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange after the Ecuadorian government revoked his asylum status and forced him to leave its embassy in London.1 This nonprofit organization gained international fame by publishing the se-cret information of governments and corporations. Wikileaks became more even famous—some might say infamous—in 2010 when it published the U.S. soldier Chelsea Manning’s Afghan and Iraq war logs, which consist of hundreds of thousands of secret U.S. Army reports and diplomatic cables that often portrayed U.S. conduct in a less-than-flattering light. The debates about public information and government secrecy only intensified when Wikileaks released emails from the U.S. Democratic National Committee, in all likeli-hood stolen by hackers affiliated with the Russian government. The released emails, obviously designed to discredit the Democratic Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, prompted the Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump to proclaim: “I love Wikileaks.” At the time, Trump did not indicate if he loved the Snowden Files, a collection of top-secret National Security Agency (NSA) documents NSA subcontractor Edward Snowden released to various newspapers in 2013. These files revealed how the NSA had spied on American citizens through domestic surveillance programs and listened to the telephone conversations of foreign leaders and non-governmental organizations like the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).2

The controversies surrounding the publications of Wikileaks and Russian efforts to use tools like social media to deepen divisions among Americans on the eve of the 2016 Presidential election help explain the appearance of

Reviews in American History 47 (2019) 647–659 © 2019 by Johns Hopkins University Press

REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / DECEMBER 2019648

Christopher Andrew’s The Secret World and John Hughes-Wilson’s The Secret State. These works offer important insights into the history of intelligence, espionage, and government surveillance. While these books do not cover the full scope of Russian efforts to undermine U.S. liberal democracy, they reference some of the most pressing issues confronting policymakers in the burgeoning fields of cybersecurity and cyber conflict—even if more complete treatment of these subjects exist.3

Their similarities should not obscure the fundamental differences in these works. The Secret World stands out as a detailed, chronological study of the global history of intelligence during the past three millennia that reaches almost 1000 pages. Besides hoping to modify existing interpretations in fields such as international relations, Andrew wrote The Secret World to help citizens and government officials develop the “long-term historical perspective” needed to maximize the utility of intelligence in today’s world (pp. 9–11). In contrast, Hughes-Wilson chose not to write a dense historical tome that might inter-est only academics and intelligence professionals. He structured The Secret State to offer an accessible account of contemporary intelligence history that general readers will find informative. Instead of moving from one historical event to another in chronological order over hundreds of pages like Andrew does, he relies on case studies on a wide variety of subjects to demonstrate the ever-present difficulties involved in gathering and drawing the appropriate conclusions from intelligence.

For the most part, the strengths and weaknesses of The Secret State and The Secret World flow from the goals of the authors and how they structured their works. Academics and people interested in the history of intelligence will probably prefer Andrew’s exhaustive, footnoted treatment of the subject. He provides fascinating details about the history of intelligence, a subject that needs more scholarly attention. He also deserves praise for calling out the pre-sentism of many recent intelligence debates and reminding readers that other intelligence scandals have had far more impact on government policy than Snowden’s and Manning’s leaks. The Secret World also inadvertently reveals the best ways to prepare for a career in the ever-evolving field of intelligence.

The Secret State spans over 500 pages, but it is a much easier read than The Secret World. Hughes-Wilson’s easy-to-follow prose and use of case studies to illuminate the field of intelligence will appeal to readers with little knowledge of the subject. On the other hand, Hughes-Wilson generally avoids scholarly and historiographical debates about intelligence. His focus on developments from World War II to the present sometimes has the effect of divorcing his analysis and insights from the long-term historical context of intelligence that Andrew hopes to cultivate. Because Hughes-Wilson eschews footnotes and full documentation of his sources, he sometimes makes assertions that cross the line between informed speculation and conspiracy theory. Despite these

649Peterson / Spies, Snitches, and Subterfuge

limitations, Hughes-Wilson does a better overall job than Andrew of explaining how the enduring issues of human nature and technological transformations will only make the “intelligence problem” worse in the coming years (p. 474).

Both Andrew and Hughes-Wilson have written widely on the subject of intelligence. An Emeritus Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Cambridge University, Andrew has written and edited a wide variety of works related to intelligence, including Defend the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (2012) and the co-edited volume Eternal Vigilance? 50 Years of the CIA (2013). He is probably best known for working with Soviet defectors to produce the co-written book The Sword and the Shield (2000) and co-edited volume More Instructions from the Centre (2013). Both of these works utilize documents smuggled out of the USSR by Soviet defectors to elucidate the clandestine operations of the KGB. A former colonel in the British army and senior British intelligence officer, Hughes-Wilson has written numerous books on the subject of intelligence and military history designed for general readers, including Military Intelligence Blunders (1999; updated edition, 2004), A Brief History of the Cold War: The Hidden Truth About How Close We Came to Nuclear Conflict (2006), and The Puppet Masters: Spies, Traitors and the Real Forces Behind World Events (2005). The fact that Hughes-Wilson sometimes indulges conspiracy theory should not come as surprise given his previous titles like JFK: An American Coup d’Etat: The Truth Behind the Kennedy Assassination (2016).

The Secret World and The Secret State mostly avoid the controversies sur-rounding the larger projects of defining the term intelligence and developing intelligence theory.4 Privileging the goal of elucidating the history of signals intelligence (SIGINT), Andrew chose not to offer a precise definition of intel-ligence or to ground readers in debates about what the term encompasses, although he references spying and counterintelligence. He comes the closest to a definition with the observation that with the exception of SIGINT, “no clear separation between diplomacy and espionage emerged in Western and Central Europe until professional intelligence bureaucracies were founded in the later nineteenth century (p. 5).” The lack of a rigorous definition has obvi-ous drawbacks for general readers with little knowledge of what intelligence is and how policymakers either use or ignore it. Such a choice will also displease scholars committed to improving intelligence definitions and developing more nuanced and useful intelligence theories. Even if Andrew might have better addressed definitional issues, his focus on the history of SIGINT makes sense in light of how the larger project of intelligence theorizing privileges issues like human psychology, bureaucratic infighting, and human motivation.5 Andrew in effect makes a reasonable case that building a body of intelligence theory should not come at the expense of obtaining the insights and perspective that only the study of intelligence history can provide.6


Hughes-Wilson takes an approach designed to help general readers better understand what intelligence is and how it is produced. Instead of engaging with scholarly debates about what constitutes intelligence, he defines the term in two ways. In his view, the general term intelligence constitutes “informa-tion that has been systematically and professionally processed and analysed.” “For the professional,” he writes, intelligence boils down to the “‘processed, accurate information presented in sufficient time to enable a decision maker to take whatever action is required (p. 55).’” He also uses a chart to show readers how the intelligence cycle produces intelligence through a “circular process” of direction, collection, collation, interpretation, and dissemination (p. 55).

Hughes-Wilson’s choices will not satisfy scholars who want more special-ized definitions of intelligence that make room for activities like covert ac-tion and counter intelligence.7 Other specialists who find the concept of the intelligence cycle simplistic and inaccurate will also bristle at his suggestion that “every professional intelligence officer understands precisely what he or she is required to deliver (p. 55).”8 In Hughes-Wilson’s defense, he notes that politicians in democratic countries more often than not fail to articulate precisely what they want from intelligence analysts, better known as the “Essential Elements of Information (EEI) (pp. 58–9).” He also recognizes the perpetual difficulty analysts face in differentiating between an adversary’s capabilities and intentions (p. 56). Just as important, Hughes-Wilson provides a useful reminder that “intelligence does not exist in a political or bureaucratic vacuum.” In an ideal world, intelligence analysts would always do their duty and “tell truth to powerful decision makers . . . whether they like it or not” (p. 50). Unfortunately, real-world intelligence agencies often succumb to the temptation of writing reports that “pander to the preconceptions and whims” of policymakers. In turn, those policymakers “all too often try . . . to ignore intelligence that does not coincide with their priorities” (p. 50).

Whatever definitional issues might exist, Andrew succeeds in writing the most detailed and thorough global history of intelligence that exists. Well aware that most examinations of intelligence focus on the Anglo-American world, he uses his first six chapters to examine developments from the Biblical accounts of Moses through the apogee of Islamic civilization. For example, he recounts how acting on good intelligence helped the Carthaginian general Hannibal and Roman general Julius Caesar succeed on the battlefield (p. 42 and pp. 46–7). He also devotes considerable attention to the Chinese text The Art of War and the Indian manual of statecraft the Arthashastra, which he calls “the first book to argue that intelligence should have a central role in war and peace (p. 54).” He then traces the evolution of intelligence in Western Europe, the United States, Russia/Soviet Union from the European Middle Ages to the present. Readers will find out how the British government ended its codebreak-ing program in 1844 to mollify a public backlash against the Prime Minister


Robert Peel’s decision to pass the contents of the exiled Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini’s mail to Austria. The so-called Mazzini affair had a long shadow, as the British entered World War I without any codebreakers (pp. 382–5). Readers concerned with the public release of intelligence will benefit from reviewing Andrew’s description of how Lord Curzon read decrypted Russian diplomatic telegrams in public as part of an ultimatum to decline a trade deal with the Soviet Union unless Moscow stopped fomenting revolu-tions within the borders of the British Empire (pp. 579–80). Several years later, British politicians read decrypted Soviet messages in a Parliamentary debate concerning whether or not to punish the Soviets for spying by suspending British recognition of the USSR—a course of action that led Moscow to adopt almost indecipherable encryption methods for its diplomatic traffic (p. 583–4).

Andrew also makes other important points that analysts, policymakers, and scholars should find instructive. Contrary to popular belief, it remains difficult to find a moment when allies have totally refrained from spying on each other. The Mazzini affair mentioned above and events such as the publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 had far more impact on U.S. and British behavior than the release of the Snowden files thus far has (pp. 746–47). He also asks why scholars of international relations continue to devote more attention to the conduct of the CIA than the KGB even though the latter organization had a more active role in world affairs from the 1960s to the end of the Cold War. Furthermore, he makes a strong argument that evaluations of whistleblowing too often suffer from a “narrow and short-term perspective (p. 750).” After all, he writes, what would we now know about North Korean prison camps without the insights of defectors and refugees? The Chinese whistleblowers who smuggled out the “Tiananmen Papers” have given the world a resource that elucidates how leaders of the Chinese Communist Party think and why they viewed the student demonstrations of 1989 as an existential threat (pp. 750–3). He also explains how a better grasp of intelligence history, especially the British experience analyzing German weapons developments during World War II, would have made the CIA much more open to the possibility that Saddam Hussein had shut down the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program (p. 741).

Even if Andrew’s recounting of events will tax all but the most dedicated readers, he enlivens his prose with fascinating historical information. To cite a few examples, he recounts how English fishermen searching for escaping Catholic priests strip-searched James II as he fled to France during the Glori-ous Revolution (pp. 250–51). He also describes how the transvestite Chevalier d’Éon de Beaumont in effect served as the chief French spy in England for much of the 1760s and 1770s (pp. 292–4). Lenin even advised the Cheka to use “a large electro-magnet” when looking for “concealed weapons in house-to-house searches (p. 559).”


Despite offering a thorough and thoughtful account of intelligence history, The Secret World has some limitations. Andrew devotes little attention to the role women have played in the field of intelligence. Other subjects or topics are not addressed. For example, he ignores scholarship demonstrating that the Aztecs never seriously debated whether or not the Spanish conquistadores that they faced were gods (p. 132).9 He also does not analyze the role that intelligence played in the failure in the Allies’ Gallipoli Campaign during World War I. Nor does he note the role that reports about the poor Soviet performance in the Winter War (1939–1940) against Finland played in Hitler’s underestimation of Soviet military strength (p. 627). Given the attention that he pays to the subjects of Soviet spying and domestic surveillance, Andrew might have mentioned how the FBI illegally spied on Americans, including Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Nation of Islam from 1956 to 1971, through a program known as COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program).

On a more fundamental level, some might argue that this work does not in fact constitute a global history of intelligence. Except for occasional refer-ences to subjects like Ottoman spying in Europe during the sixteenth century (pp. 123–24), Andrew does not really examine the history of intelligence in the non-Western world after examining Islamic intelligence in Chapter 6. He in effect frames this decision as a function of how the lack of interest in intelligence shown by empires like Chinese, Ottomans and Mughals flowed from their lack of concern about the outside world (pp. 58–9, p. 198, and pp. 406–7). Other specialists may judge the accuracy of such an argument, but it seems to leave out a lot of non-Western intelligence activities. Andrew has addressed the subject of Soviet intelligence operations in other works, but one wonders why he did not spend more time discussing the intelligence history of the Japanese Empire, modern China (beyond what exists in his conclusion) and Soviet-bloc nations like East Germany and Czechoslovakia. Some might also ask: What about Latin American governments during the Cold War such as Pinochet’s Chile and Communist Cuba? How about Iran both before and after the overthrow of the Shah?

Experts may also question just how much Andrew has modified existing historiography. This critique does not mean that he has failed to provide im-portant insights or raise subjects that need further research. Scholars should take heed of his advice to pay more attention to the understudied impact of U.S.–British intelligence sharing and recent revelations about how the intel-ligence agencies in former British colonies like India and Kenya (pp. 734–6) forged close working relationships with MI5. We still need better studies of the scope and impact of the operations that the KGB carried out during the Cold War across the globe. For all of these accomplishments, Andrew does not fully illustrate how any of his findings by themselves transform our understanding of existing historiography. To take one example, he simplifies a complex question


of historical causation when he writes that “by postponing the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the KGB also prolonged the Cold War” (p. 700). Nothing Andrew presents gainsays the historian Raymond Garthoff’s argument that espionage failed to have a crucial impact on any of the superpowers’ major political and military decisions during the Cold War.10

John Hughes-Wilson’s The Secret State has a different set of strengths and weaknesses. The general reader without much background knowledge of intelligence will find this work easier to digest than The Secret World. Hughes-Wilson begins by covering the history of intelligence in about forty pages. He addresses many of the subjects that Andrew does, although the two authors sometimes have different points of emphases and reach divergent conclusions. For instance, Hughes-Wilson praises the efficacy of Mongol intelligence gather-ing (pp. 13–4), whereas Andrew contends that source issues make evaluations of Mongol spying difficult (p. 78nFOOTNOTENUMBER). Hughes-Wilson also tries to make the case—although not very convincingly—that Napoleon made excellent use of HUMINT (human intelligence) to achieve battlefield success. He is on firmer ground when arguing that Napoleon’s secret police played a key role in undermining domestic subversion (pp. 23–24). Unlike Andrew, he devotes considerable attention to the exploits of Wilhelm Steiber, the Chief of the Royal Prussian State Gendarmerie, who became the “first national intelligence chief to use agents to . . . control the press, banks, business and industry” and developed a vast spy network whose intelligence played a key role in Prussia’s winning the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–871 (pp. 32–4).

General readers will also appreciate how Hughes-Wilson outlines the dif-ferent types of intelligence and illuminates the intricacies of the intelligence collection process. He also explains the role that the indicators and warning display (IWD) plays in the intelligence process. In short, an IWD consists of a matrix display that relays all available intelligence information in ways that elucidate “an enemy’s capabilities and intentions.” A good IWD also indicates what “critical elements of information” analysts “lack to complete the full picture” of an intelligence issue (p. 65).

Hughes-Wilson does a nice job of employing vignettes about events since World War II to reveal the complexities of intelligence and how changes in technology have shaped the field. In his section on HUMINT and spying, he employs the motive acronym MICE: Money, Ideology; Compromise/Coercion; and Ego (p. 73) to explain why people become spies. More to the point, he uses individual case studies to reveal how each of these motivations work in practice. His treatment of Robert Hanssen succeeds in explaining how this FBI agent’s ego led him to send highly classified information to the Soviets and Russians for twenty-two years before a former KGB agent helped reveal his identity (p. 109). Along with exploring the history of SIGINT through events like the Battle of Midway, Hughes-Wilson summarizes major developments in


the field of aerial and satellite reconnaissance to demonstrate just how much governments like the United States can detect from the sky (p. 198). For the foreseeable future, governments will have a need for spy planes because these vehicles can be placed around targets more quickly and remain cheaper to use than satellites (p.184).

The Secret State also utilizes case studies to demonstrate that intelligence failures remain common because of the persistent problems involved with hav-ing too much information to analyze, difficulty interpreting evidence, the need to overcome the assumptions of policymakers, and lack of proper intelligence coordination. In a chapter that devotes more attention to the Pearl Harbor attack than Andrew’s book does, Hughes-Wilson provides easy-to-follow analysis of how the U.S. government failed to coordinate existing intelligence reports and appreciate the implications of a wide array of accurate intelligence about Japanese behavior (pp. 243–70). He also demonstrates how a mixture of hubris, bureaucratic inertia, and a lack of diverse intelligence sources resulted in Israel’s failure to predict the coming of the Egyptian and Syrian attacks that started the Yom Kippur war of 1973 (pp. 205–28).

Hughes-Wilson also tackles the topics of intelligence security, intelligence fiascos, and the dangers of intelligence collection. Addressing these subjects allows him to provide details about events as diverse as the failure of the U.S. mission to rescue hostages in Iran in 1980 (Operation Eagle Claw), North Korea’s capture of the USS Pueblo in 1968, CIA operative Aldrich Ames’s impact as a double agent for the USSR/Russia, and the series of intelligence failures that resulted in the humiliating British surrender of Singapore to the Japanese in 1941. The chapter covering the British decision to invade Iraq in 2003 will interest many readers. Hughes-Wilson essentially shares Andrew’s conclusion that Saddam Hussein refused to certify that he had destroyed and ceased developing WMD out of a fear of projecting weakness to foes like Iran. In contrast to Andrew, Hughes-Wilson charges Tony Blair’s staff with changing the wording of the Joint Intelligence Committee’s intelligence estimate to substantiate the argument that Hussein definitely possessed WMD (pp. 415–23), though Hughes-Wilson makes this falsification charge without referencing the findings of the 2016 Chilcott Report, the official government inquiry into why the British invasion of Iraq took place.

The chapter on terrorism in The Secret State will appeal to general readers even as some of its arguments vex experts. Much like war, Hughes-Wilson asserts, terrorism relies on the use of “calculated violence to achieve a political goal by killing and maiming . . . to terrify and intimidate as many people as possible” (p. 361). Instead of exploring the nuances of what constitutes ter-rorism, he offers a reductive scheme based on the premise that terrorists are “not normal people” (p. 363). To substantiate this argument, he offers a “Chart of Dissatisfaction” that traces a disaffected person’s journey from protest to


seeking parliamentary action to generalized terrorist attacks (p. 364). He also makes the dubious argument that Islamic terrorist groups “have no intention of even attempting to try and modify their enemies’ policy or to ‘win their case’” (p. 365). Even a cursory reading of Osama bin-Laden statements and the propaganda of the Islamic State (ISIL/ISIS) show articulated visions of a new world order designed to attract support and outlining specific steps that the United States could take to address their grievances—a reality that the Hughes-Wilson does appear to recognize (p. 383). He also uses the term “jihadis” to refer to Islamic terrorists (p. 365) only to chide Westerners in the following chapter for demonstrating their ignorance of Islam by referring to Islamic terrorists as “jihadis” (p. 373). Despite these problems, he success-fully uses examples such as Britain’s handling of Irish terrorism during the twentieth century to showcase how terrorism can further the goals of specific groups and that the struggles between governments and terrorists are best defined as intelligence wars (pp. 367--68). His chapter on the 9/11 terrorist attacks provides a straightforward account of how miscommunications and a lack of coordination among competing agencies crippled the U.S.’s ability to prevent this atrocity from taking place (p. 402).

Hughes-Wilson also devotes significant attention to the issues of cybersecu-rity and cyberwarfare. Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election come to mind when he observes that “cyber warfare in its many forms increasingly represents an alternative to conventional warfare as we have understood it” (p. 445). Without tanks and airplanes to strike an opponent, hackers carry out “asymmetric” attacks on a nation’s infrastructure, spread misinformation on social media cites, or commit corporate espionage—points reinforced by examples such as the use of the Stuxnet computer worm that sabotaged Iranian nuclear centrifuges in 2010 (pp. 435 and 445). In this new era of cyber warfare, the Department of Defense created the United States Cyber Command in 2009, whereas the federal government created the Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center (CTIIC) in hopes of better coordinating responses to cyber threats (pp. 443–45).

Again, The Secret State is an informative work that will help general read-ers better understand the difficulties involved in collecting and analyzing intelligence and appreciate why governments will always need HUMINT no matter what technological developments shape the field of intelligence. These accomplishments do not come without limitations, however. Beyond the criti-cisms mentioned above, Hughes-Wilson probably understates the role that open-source intelligence (OSINT) now plays in the collection and analysis of intelligence (pp. 60–1).11 He also could have devoted more attention to what readers can learn from the intelligence records of non-Western nations and communist governments, especially the Soviet Union’s KGB and Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence. His focus on events from World War II to the pres-


ent also works against readers’ thinking about intelligence with a long-term historical perspective. Case in point: Hughes-Wilson in effect accuses Julian Assange of redefining security without referencing events like the Mazzini affair or Lord Curzon’s public reading of decrypted Russian diplomatic telegrams (p. 302) and sometimes makes claims without enough supporting evidence, as in the case of Jonathan Pollard, a U.S. Naval Intelligence officer convicted of spying for Israel. Dabbling in conspiracy theory, he asserts that Israel threatened to release recordings proving Bill Clinton’s sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky unless the U.S. President pardoned Pollard, which Clinton never did. Without much evidence, he then asks readers to accept the conspirato-rial—some might say anti-Semitic—argument that the Congressional effort to remove Clinton from office failed because of “plentiful Jewish bribes on Capitol Hill and . . . threats to expose several well-known Republican Senators” who shared the president’s inability to “keep their flies shut” (p. 99). Overlooking the complexities of existing evidence, including the contents of declassified National Security Agency communications, Hughes-Wilson also accuses Israel of attacking the USS Liberty in 1967 so this SIGINT collection ship would not compromise Israeli plans to invade Syria (p. 462).

For all of these shortcomings, Hughes-Wilson does a better job than Andrew of explaining why the difficulties involved in collecting and analyzing intel-ligence will only become worse in the future. After all, we now live in a world where news outlets like Al Jazeera can make millions aware of secrets like the disconnect between the Mossad’s evaluation of the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear program and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s alarmist rhetoric on the subject (p. 472). Teenage hackers working with or without government support can carry out denial-of-service (DoS) attacks capable of disrupting financial institutions and potentially shutting down railways (p. 432). In the eternal quest to help policymakers make informed decisions based on accurate information, analysts will have to wade through ever-increasing amounts of data without receiving redress from the enduring problems of bureaucracy and human nature. As Hughes-Wilson puts it, the field of intelligence will always suffer from “conflicts over interagency feuding, competition for budgets . . . hubris, human frailty . . . poor security . . . [and the] under-estimation of potential enemies” (p. 474).

This insight raises the question of just how much a deep knowledge of intelligence history will matter if analysts still feel compelled to tailor their conclusions so as not to contradict the views of the politicians whom they serve. What can historians do when policymakers continue to ignore intelligence conclusions that do not conform to their preconceived notions? From another angle, how much good will developing a long-term historical perspective about intelligence matter if an analyst still lacks a deep understanding of a country’s history, religion, and culture or the defining moments of a terror-


ist’s life and psychology? Just how far can knowledge about the past take us in a world where hackers have shown the ability to shut down electric grids and governments use tools like social media to reach millions with slanted accounts of events that sometimes never took place?12

In all fairness, Andrew is not oblivious to these issues. He mentions a fail-ure of imagination when explaining the intelligence debacles of Pearl Harbor and the 9/11 attacks (pp. 636 and 728). He also references the psychological dimensions of intelligence analysis. It is also hard to argue with his contention that analysts and policymakers will perform their duties better if they learn more about the history of intelligence and take a “longer” view of contempo-rary events. Yet—and I think Andrew would probably agree— studying and thinking about history is not enough. Good intelligence must also rest on an exploration a of people’s or nation’s art, literature, poetry, languages, and cul-ture. The British were on to something when they advised Americans during World War I that the new U.S. codebreaking unit should recruit individuals who possessed an “active, well trained and scholarly mind [i.e., classical]” rather than a “mathematical” one (p. 517). By referencing this moment in time, Andrew inadvertently highlighted why future analysts can best prepare for their work by pursuing a well-rounded education in the humanities and learning as much about their chosen field as they can.13 They will need “clas-sical” or “nimble” minds to analyze the ever-growing quantity of information in a short amount of time and carry out tasks such as exposing “deepfake” videos that have become easier than ever to produce.14 In theory at least, the study of the humanities will also help future analysts develop the patience and fortitude necessary to deal with policymakers who claim to have a superior understanding of what constitutes “accurate” intelligence.15

Christian Philip Peterson holds a Ph.D. in history from Ohio University and now teaches history at Ferris State University (MI). He has written and co-edited a wide array of books, book chapters, and peer-reviewed articles, including Globalizing Human Rights: Private Citizens, the Soviet Union, and the West (2012) and the anthology The Routledge History of World Peace since 1750 (2018). He recently received the Visegrad Scholarship from the Open Society Archives at the Central European University in Budapest. He will use this award to complete his current book project Changing the World from Below: The Transnational Struggle for Peace, Human Rights, and a People’s Détente.

1. See “Julian Assange: Wikileaks co-founder arrested in London,” BBC News, last modified 12 April 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-47891737 ; “British Judge Sentences Julian Assange To 50 Weeks In Prison,” NPR, 1 May 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/05/01/718945707/british-judge-sentences-julian-assange-to-50-weeks-in-prison ; and “Why Assange and Ecuador Fell Out,” NYR Daily, 1 May 2019, “https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/05/01/why-assange-and-ecuador-fell-out/ .

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-47891737https://www.npr.org/2019/05/01/718945707/british-judge-sentences-julian-assange-to-50-weeks-in-prisonhttps://www.npr.org/2019/05/01/718945707/british-judge-sentences-julian-assange-to-50-weeks-in-prisonhttps://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/05/01/why-assange-and-ecuador-fell-out/https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/05/01/why-assange-and-ecuador-fell-out/


2. Carly Nyst, “There’s No Good Reason for Spy Agencies to Snoop on Humanitarian Groups,” Slate, 22 May 2014, https://slate.com/technology/2014/05/nsa-gchq-spying-on-humanitarian-groups-like-unicef-medecins-du-monde.html ; Allie Malloy, “Trump in 2016: ‘I love WikiLeaks,’ Trump now: ‘I know nothing about WikiLeaks,’”CNN, last modified 12 April 2019, https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/11/politics/wikileaks-donald-trump-julian-assange-campaign/index.html ; and Paul Skorda, “This is everything Edward Snowden revealed in one year of unprecedented top-secret leaks,” Business Insider, last modified 16 September 2016, https://www.businessinsider.com/snowden-leaks-timeline-2016–9 .

3. For example, see Richard A. Clarke and Robert. K. Knake, Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It (2011); Fred Kaplan, Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War (2017); Michael Cherthoff, Exploding Data: Reclaiming Our Cyber Security in a Digital Age (2018); and Ben Buchanan, The Cybersecurity Dilemma: Hacking, Trust, and Fear between Nations (2017).

4. For works that grapple with the difficulties of defining intelligence and building intel-ligence theory, see Peter Gill, Stephen Marrin, and Mark Phythian, eds., Intelligence Theory: Key Questions and Debates (2009); Peter Gill and Mark Pythian, “Developing Intelligence Theory,” Intelligence and National Security 33, no.4 (2018): 476–71; Stephen Marrin, “Evaluating Intelligence theories: current state of play,” Intelligence and National Security 33, no.4 (2018): 479–90; Hamilton Bean, “Intelligence theory from the margins: questions ignored and debates not had,” Intelligence and National Security 33, no.4 (2018): 527–40; Michael Stout and Michael Warner, “Intelligence is as intelligence does,” Intelligence and National Security 33, no.4 (2018): 517–526; Jeffrey P. Rogg, “‘Quo Vadis?’ A comparatist meets a theorist searching for a grand theory of intelligence,” Intelligence and National Security 33, no.4 (2018): 541–52; and Mark M. Lowenthal, Intelligence: From Secrets to Policy (2016), especially Chapter 1.

5. For example, see Uri Bar-Joseph and Rose McDermott, Intelligence Success and Failure: The Human Factor (2017); Keren Yarhi-Milo. Knowing the Adversary: Leaders Intelligence and Assessment of Intentions in International Relations (2014). Richard K. Betts, Enemies of Intelli-gence: Knowledge and Power in American National Security (2007). For a solid treatment of the debates concerning the role that the fields of biology, neuroscience, and genetics should play in shaping the subject of intelligence, see H-Diplo Roundtable on Robert Jervis’s Perception and Misperception in International Politics, New Edition. Princeton University Press, 2017 and How Statesmen Think: The Psychology of International Politics. Princeton University Press, 2017, 13 December 2018, file:///C:/Users/cpp4/Documents/Intelligence%20Stuff%20to%20Read/Jervis%20works%20on%20subject.pdf

6. See Andrew’s article “Intelligence, International Relations and ‘Under-theorisation,’” Intelligence and National Security 19 (Summer 2004): 170–84. John F. Fox Jr. also argues that scholars should think more about the history of intelligence when approaching the task of intelligence theorizing. See “Intelligence in the Socratic Philosophers,” Intelligence and National Security 33, no.4 (2018): 491–501.

7. See Arthur S. Hulnick, “What’s Wrong with the Intelligence Cycle,” Intelligence and National Security, 21 (December 2006): 959; and Paul R. Pillar, Intelligence and U.S. Foreign Policy: Iraq, 9/11, and Misguided Reform (2011).

8. For example, see Hulnick, “What’s Wrong with the Intelligence Cycle”; and Stout and Warner, “Intelligence is as intelligence does.”

9. For example, see Matthew Restall, The Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest (2004).10. See Raymond L. Garthoff, “Foreign Intelligence and the Historiography of the Cold

War,” Journal of Cold War Studies 6 (Spring 2004): 30.11. See Amy Zegart and Michael Morell, “Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: Why U.S. Intelligence

Agencies Must Adapt or Fail,” Foreign Affairs 98. No. 3 (2019): 89–91.12. For a cogent overview of these developments, see Richard Andres, “Cyber Conflicts

and geopolitics,” in Great Decisions—2019 Edition (2019), 69–78.13. See Mark Edmundson, The Heart of the Humanities: Reading, Writing, Teaching (2018);

and Fareed Zakaria, In Defense of a Liberal Education (2016).14. For a solid summary of how the U.S. intelligence agencies need to do a better job of

adapting to technological changes, see Zegart and Morell, “Spies, Lies, and Algorithms.”

https://slate.com/author/carly-nysthttps://slate.com/technology/2014/05/nsa-gchq-spying-on-humanitarian-groups-like-unicef-medecins-du-monde.htmlhttps://slate.com/technology/2014/05/nsa-gchq-spying-on-humanitarian-groups-like-unicef-medecins-du-monde.htmlhttps://www.cnn.com/2019/04/11/politics/wikileaks-donald-trump-julian-assange-campaign/index.htmlhttps://www.cnn.com/2019/04/11/politics/wikileaks-donald-trump-julian-assange-campaign/index.htmlhttps://www.businessinsider.com/snowden-leaks-timeline-2016-9file:///C:/Users/cpp4/Documents/Intelligence%20Stuff%20to%20Read/Jervis%20works%20on%20subject.pdffile:///C:/Users/cpp4/Documents/Intelligence%20Stuff%20to%20Read/Jervis%20works%20on%20subject.pdf


15. John Walcott, “‘Willful Ignorance.’ Inside President Trump’s Troubled Intelligence Briefings,” Time, last modified 5 February 2019, https://time.com/5518947/donald-trump-intelligence-briefings-national-security/ ; Shane Harris and John Wagner, “In latest attack on intelligence agencies, Trump ignores where they actually agree,” Washington Post, 31 January 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-claims-great-progress-on-isis-north-korea-after-intelligence-officials-present-less-optimistic-view/2019/01/30/e95b74c6-23b7-11e9-90cd-dedb0c92dc17_story.html?utm_term=.342ce1035655 .
https://time.com/5518947/donald-trump-intelligence-briefings-national-security/https://time.com/5518947/donald-trump-intelligence-briefings-national-security/https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-claims-great-progress-on-isis-north-korea-after-intelligence-officials-present-less-optimistic-view/2019/01/30/e95b74c6-23b7-11e9-90cd-dedb0c92dc17_story.html?utm_term=.342ce1035655https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-claims-great-progress-on-isis-north-korea-after-intelligence-officials-present-less-optimistic-view/2019/01/30/e95b74c6-23b7-11e9-90cd-dedb0c92dc17_story.html?utm_term=.342ce1035655https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-claims-great-progress-on-isis-north-korea-after-intelligence-officials-present-less-optimistic-view/2019/01/30/e95b74c6-23b7-11e9-90cd-dedb0c92dc17_story.html?utm_term=.342ce1035655

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