Every Friday during term-time, the convenors of the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar meet for tea in an old college’s combination room, beneath the gaze of a portrait of Christopher Marlowe. One of Elizabethan England’s greatest writers, Marlowe makes good company for those interested in the history of spies and spying: as a student at Cambridge in the 1580s, he slipped away from his scholarly duties and did the state some (secret) service abroad. Among the assembled scholars at the seminar, you will find Christopher Andrew, the historian behind the authorised history of MI5, who in The Secret World presents a history of intelligence from the earliest times to the present day – from ancient Greeks to WikiLeaks.
This panoptic history starts broad, sketching the place of spying and deceit in Greece, Rome and the Holy Land. In China, Sun Tzu’s The Art of War informed its readers: “Secret operations are essential in war; upon them the army relies to make its every move.” The Art of War (probably written in the third century BCE, and probably not by Sun Tzu) identifies five different kinds of spy, including double agents, “inside agents” working within the enemy’s camp, and “expendable agents”, who can be used to spread disinformation. Working in secrecy and harmony, the five groups form the “divine skein”, “the treasure of a sovereign”. The Arthashastra, written around the third or fourth century BCE in India, argued similarly that a sovereign needed to use spies, including “hunchbacks, dwarfs, eunuchs, women skilled in various arts, dumb persons”, alongside poisoners and other assassins.
After these global beginnings, Andrew’s scope narrows somewhat as the book goes on, with its account of the last millennium of espionage focusing mainly on Europe, Russia, and the US. It’s something of a missed opportunity. China, for instance, is mostly absent from the book’s timespan after Sun Tzu: in what might become a Chinese century, its intelligence history could fit neatly in this narrative.
The author is a genial guide to the great successes of the secret world, from Moses’ use of spies from the 12 tribes of Israel to case the promised land (and, if possible, to come back bearing grapes) to the cracking of the Zimmermann telegram in 1917, “the best-publicised decrypt in intelligence history”, which helped to bring the US into the first world war. He is also attentive to some of history’s more spectacular intelligence failures. The night before the launch of Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, Lavrenti Beria (the head of Stalin’s notorious NKVD) wrote confidently that: “Hitler is not going to attack us in 1941.” I hadn’t known that the dodgy intelligence from a source codenamed Curveball, used by Colin Powell to sell the war on Iraq to the UN in 2003, was found by the Chilcot report to have been lifted in part from the 1996 film The Rock, starring Nicolas Cage and Sean Connery. Andrew’s narrative is often livened with moments of excitement and interest, though sometimes the detail overwhelms and chapters bulge at the seams like an overstuffed diplomatic bag.
The Secret World invites readers to look beyond the traditional narratives of political and diplomatic history to the murkier practices underneath. “Black chambers” worked overtime to decipher the correspondence of enemies and allies alike; the 19th-century Congress of Vienna was a playground for informers, who broke coded dispatches and listened in on pillow talk in the name of continental peace. Some female spies are singled out, though Andrew doesn’t give them the same attention as Nadine Akkerman, whose recent Invisible Agents is a meticulously researched history of women in espionage in the 17th century.
We meet Marie-Caudron Bastian: a cleaner in the German embassy in fin-de-siècle Paris, under the codename “August” she rifled the waste baskets for coded messages that she passed to her handlers in French military intelligence. Elizabeth van Lew, an Abolitionist living in Richmond, Virginia, during the US civil war, smuggled valuable secrets out in eggshells and seamstresses’ patterns with the help of her African American servants.
As Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden might tell you, debates about espionage often reveal tensions between how a nation imagines itself and the dirty tricks of its agents. These are questions with a long history. In 1723, Francis Atterbury – suspected of treason after his Jacobite correspondence had been intercepted and deciphered – railed in the House of Lords against such lowly, and (he believed) un-English, tactics, asking: “In the name of God, what are these decypherers? They are a sort of officers unknown to the English nation. Are they the necessary implements and instruments of ministers of state?”
Just over a century later, the Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini, exiled in London, discovered that his correspondence was being opened – he put poppy seeds in his envelopes, only for them to have disappeared by the time his letters arrived at their destinations. The result was a national outcry. The Times thundered that this “proceeding cannot be English, any more than masks, poisons, sword-sticks, secret signs and associations, and other such dark inventions”. In the House of Commons, the historian Thomas Babington Macaulay argued that while letter-opening, spying, and torture might be effective, “this country had determined long ago that such were pernicious, debasing and dangerous modes of maintaining its institutions”. Such pronouncements might seem laughably naive, but the past and present of espionage show that it hasn’t just been enemies of the state who have been deluded by its spies.
Andrew argues that the intelligence industry today often lacks an understanding of its own history. He diagnoses 21st-century intelligence practitioners with what he calls (with just a hint of Alan Partridge) “historical attention-span deficit disorder (HASDD)”. That spies should study their profession’s past seems obvious: during the first world war, the Russians were still using the kind of cipher devised by Julius Caesar almost 2,000 years before, seemingly unaware that this kind of code had been comprehensively (and independently) cracked twice in history, once in ninth-century Baghdad by Yaqub ibn Ishaq al-Kindi, and again in Renaissance Italy by the polymath cryptographer Leon Battista Alberti.
An awareness of history can offer a strategic advantage, though the chilling resonances between past and present suggest that spies and their handlers might do well to reflect on their profession’s past atrocities too. Andrew traces the emergence of the torture known as “waterboarding” in the simulated drowning tortures of the Spanish Inquisition. Rediscovered by US forces in the Philippines in the late 19th century, it became an American practice – though George W Bush’s government argued (unlike the Spanish Inquisition) that it did not constitute a form of torture.
Even if modern-day practitioners of intelligence are unskilled at making knowledge of the past their ally in the present, that’s not to say they’re utterly unaware of their histories. Many seem to see themselves as heirs to a historical national mission. The heads of GCHQ and MI6 both sit beneath portraits of 17th-century codebreakers (John Wallis and John Thurloe respectively). In 1978, the CIA’s in-house journal devoted an article to critically analysing Moses as an intelligence chief, while al-Qa
ida training manuals justify the use of spies with admiring reference to the networks of informants run by the prophet Muhammad. Some problems are perennial: double-crossing, bad information or politicians and a public who only want to hear intelligence that confirms their own views. But while Andrew argues that for many major powers, the most predictable global intelligence priority is the continuing threat from “international (primarily Islamist) terrorism”, it’s worth wondering whether the future of the secret world will be so predictable. State-level hacking operations, domestic far-right terrorism and fundamental shifts in the global political order all threaten to reshape the secret world in ways that mean the past remains, as much as it ever was, only an imperfect guide.
• The Secret World: A History of Intelligence by Christopher Andrew is published by Allen Lane. To order a copy for £30.80 (RRP £35) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
