Writing about espionage and intelligence can be a tricky business. By their very nature they are secretive and involve deception. Obtaining confidential information often requires lying, illegal or unethical behavior, and the use of people of dubious moral character. Those involved have powerful motives to muddy the waters in which they have swum. Because secrets and how they are used and misused can reflect badly on powerful and important politicians and statesmen, the pressure to bend the truth can be overwhelming. And because so much of the gathering of secret intelligence takes place in a shadowy world, the truth can be hard to discern. The temptation to indulge the public's appetite for juicy conspiracy theories—not to mention the lure of garnering attention by making hard-to-prove but sensational claims—invites books that titillate but are unreliable. And, since significant portions of even 60- or 80-year-old intelligence files may be only partially available, speculation can often trump knowledge.
One of the protections against misinformation is to rely on written, archival material. Many of the first-person accounts of espionage, penned by spies, by those who tried to expose them, or by those who directed them, contain important and useful information. But without supporting documentation, these accounts can tend toward exaggeration, error, blinkered perspectives, or deliberate attempts to obfuscate. Those writing popular histories of intelligence are sometimes prone to another danger: They eschew the dull, scholarly, and sometimes off-putting apparatus of footnotes and careful evaluation of the sources of information to avoid boring the average reader with caveats, lacunae, or alternative explanations. Even authors with impressive credentials to write about the secret world might produce deeply flawed narratives, faced with these temptations. Colonel John Hughes-Wilson, one of Britain's leading military historians, unfortunately succumbs to them in his latest book, The Secret State: A History of Intelligence and Espionage.
As befits a military historian, Hughes-Wilson is particularly interested in the acquisition and use of intelligence in warfare. Knowing your enemy's (or potential enemy's) hand—his capabilities, plans, and intentions—is a major advantage. What stands in the way of gaining this advantage is faulty intelligence collection, due to any number of causes: inadequately defined intelligence requirements, poorly planned collection efforts, bureaucratic snafus that hinder the collation of information, misinterpreted information, lack of proper channels for dissemination. Hughes-Wilson emphasizes that decision-makers may not get important intelligence crucial for their nations' safety and security, and that even when they do, there is no guarantee they will use it wisely. Joseph Stalin famously discounted numerous warnings that Adolf Hitler intended to attack the Soviet Union in 1941, believing it was all part of a British plot to drive a wedge between Nazi Germany and the USSR.
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