COME BACK, ADMIRAL POINDEXTER:

There's no romance left in espionage (Max Hastings, 9/16/11, Financial Times)

[T]he British think spying is something we excel at. We may not be as rich as Americans, as good at making things as Germans, as cultured as the French or as energetic as the Chinese. But John Buchan was only the first of many writers to tell us that we play The Great Game jolly well.

There is something in this. But as a historian I am doubtful about the performance of British spies both before and after their glory days in the second world war. Keith Jeffrey's history of M16 from its foundation in 1909 to 1949, published last year, shows the service employed many exotic personalities and staged some wizard japes. But it seems questionable how much intelligence it generated that was both true and useful to governments. MI5, the security service, on the whole did better.

In the post-war decade, Kim Philby betrayed almost every significant MI6 operation against the Soviet bloc. Only later did British successes in running some key Soviet personnel as double agents - Oleg Gordievsky was the most notable - revive the service's confidence and prestige.

The greatest British achievement was not the work of spies - so-called "humint" - but of "sigint" at Bletchley Park, home of the codebreakers who gave the 1939-45 allies an unprecedented view of the enemy's hand. I once put it to Professor Harry Hinsley, a Bletchley man who became chief official historian of wartime intelligence, that his volumes suggest that amateurs, enlisted for the duration, produced better results than the career men. "Of course they did," he responded tartly. "Surely you wouldn't want to think that in peacetime the nation's best brains wasted their time in intelligence?"

The correct model for intelligence is the Iowa Markets/Wikipedia, not 007. The greater the de-institutionalization the better.

Posted by oj at September 19, 2011 6:54 AM
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