The Secret World: A History of Intelligence

About the Book: The history of espionage is far older than any of today’s intelligence agencies, yet the long history of intelligence operations has been largely forgotten. The codebreakers at Bletchley Park, the most successful World War II intelligence agency, were completely unaware that their predecessors in earlier moments of national crisis had broken the codes of Napoleon during the Napoleonic wars and those of Spain before the Spanish Armada. Those who do not understand past mistakes are likely to repeat them. Intelligence is a prime example. At the outbreak of World War I, the grasp of intelligence shown by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith was not in the same class as that of George Washington during the Revolutionary War and leading eighteenth-century British statesmen. In this book, the first global history of espionage ever written, distinguished historian Christopher Andrew recovers much of the lost intelligence history of the past three millennia—and shows us its relevance.


About the Author: Christopher Andrew is emeritus professor of modern and contemporary history and former chair of the faculty of history at Cambridge University. He is also chair of the British Intelligence Study Group, founding co-editor of Intelligence and National Security, former visiting professor at Harvard, Toronto, and the Australian National universities, and a regular presenter of BBC Radio and TV documentaries. His most recent book, Defend the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5, was an international hit. His fifteen previous books include The Sword and the Shield, The World Was Going Our Way, and other path-breaking studies on the use and abuse of secret intelligence in modern history.