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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)
Published by Johns Hopkins University PressDOI:
For additional information about this article
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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
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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
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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
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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
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651Peterson / Spies, Snitches, and Subterfuge
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).”
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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
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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
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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
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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-
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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-
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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/
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REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / DECEMBER 2019658
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
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659Peterson / Spies, Snitches, and Subterfuge
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