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

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 secret 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 likelihood 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 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 interest 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 presentism 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...