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  • Empires of Intelligence: Security Services and Colonial Disorder after 1914
  • Priya Satia
Empires of Intelligence: Security Services and Colonial Disorder after 1914. By Martin Thomas. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).

The author is, indeed, dead: this is one of three new books identifying something novel and strange afoot in the colonial states of the modern Middle East.1 Perhaps it is the spirit of our own age screaming down our throats: intelligence, and more especially intelligence failure that have been at the heart of Western engagement with the Arab world. The amanuensis of the present work, the prolific Martin Thomas, generously embraces two European empires in a single comparative study to argue that intelligence was so much a central preoccupation and crutch of interwar Middle Eastern colonies that they comprise a distinct category of “intelligence states.”

Sweeping effortlessly across North Africa and the Middle East, Thomas highlights the role of intelligence in the survival of French and British states in Egypt, Sudan, Palestine, Transjordan, Iraq, Syria, Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. Thomas’s style is fluid and engaging—but almost to a fault as he glides unfalteringly from story to story and colony to colony without, at times, registering analytical inconsistencies along the way. He is at his most thoughtful in the Introduction and Conclusion, situating the story within the interwar cultural obsession with information and anxieties about imperial security and casting intelligence agents as both the backbone and liability of the colonial state, whose very presence alienated its subjects and compromised its intelligence gathering ability.

In the main text, however, Thomas trades this structural understanding of the intelligence state for a more conventional account of the entirely contingent missteps of a hapless information order. Two chapters hijack rebellion as the mark of intelligence failure rather than an endemic feature of a state in which intelligence workers doubled as agents of repression and administration. Voluminous information but poor analysis facilities; scanty information but paranoid interpretation; earnest immersion in tribal life but foolish commitment to technical solutions: the British and French never quite got it right—and they might have, these chapters imply. An irrepressible faith in the curative power of human intelligence curiously dogs this narrative of systemic intelligence failure (especially curiously given the plentiful evidence out there of agents’ frustrations with and contempt for the “lying natives” they were compelled to work with). Agents’ various fixations on nomads and insecure frontiers, Communism and Pan-Islam, are cast in such a forgiving glaze of rationality that the genesis of the intelligence state seems both logical and necessary. Indeed, however prejudiced the agents, their tactics are depicted as eminently appropriate, from immersion to ethnographic styling of desert sources, as Thomas unquestioningly accepts their rendering of the desert spy zone and their conviction that intimacy can sweeten the bitter pill of imperialism. Air control alone appears the product of blind obsession, but Thomas vacillates so confusingly between condemning its brutality and its impotence—at one point rather cruelly echoing critics of its failure to fully subdue the Bedouin nuisance—that the story intermittently loses its ethical bearings.

The root problem here is that the central figure in the story—the intelligence agent—remains, literally, a cipher; it is unclear how the European spy in the Middle East differed, in background or approach, from the spy elsewhere. Thomas bemoans interwar agents’ dependence on passé writings about Bedouin from earlier generations without heeding their own investments in that romantic tradition—even in their invention of the intelligence state. Intelligence gathering may have been tedious, as he insists, but those involved in it experienced it as high drama.

It is not that Thomas is insensitive to culture’s influence on intelligence; racial stereotypes befuddle nearly every instance of intelligence failure he cites. But methodologically, it makes him uneasy. (The chapter “Constructing the Enemy” shifts with palpable relief from constructions to realities.) Invoking Edward Said, Thomas asks whether all the racial bias doomed intelligence to failure, countering that racist intelligence nevertheless shaped policy—something of a non sequitur and hardly a conclusion Said would dispute. At the same time, Thomas invokes a Foucauldian straw man to press the limits on the power intelligence conferred...

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