The Secret World

The first-ever detailed, comprehensive history of intelligence, from Moses and Sun Tzu to the present day

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.

Christopher Andrew is emeritus professor of modern and contemporary history at the University of Cambridge. His many books include The Sword and the Shield; The World Was Going Our Way; and Defend the Realm, an authorized history of MI5.

“Perhaps the most comprehensive narrative of intelligence compiled: the author's breadth and depth of knowledge are unrivalled.”—Max Hastings, The Sunday Times (London)

“To write a world history of intelligence, from the dawn of recorded history to the present day, is a daunting task. To make such a work accurate, comprehensive, digestible and startling, and all in a single volume, is a stellar achievement. But that is what Christopher Andrew has done in The Secret World.”—Edward Lucas, The Times (London)

“This scholarly but readable history unlocks a portfolio of secrets—supersecrets, even. . . . Failures of intelligence . . . figure as much as successes in Andrew’s spry account. Fans of Fleming and Furst will delight in this skillfully related true-fact side of the story.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Both brilliant in its sweep and near-miraculous in the detail and confident judgments provided on two and a half millennia of spying. . . . A crowning triumph of one of the most adventurous scholars of the security world.”—Financial Times

“In this extraordinarily ambitious and monumental work, Christopher Andrew brings an enormous amount of detail together in one place so patterns can begin to emerge and readers can appreciate connections and dissimilarities. No other book has come close to what Andrew has done here.”—Harvey Klehr, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Politics and History Emeritus, Emory University

A conversation with Christopher Andrew:

Why is it important for policymakers to understand the history of intelligence?
 
Because of what happens when they don’t! WWI was the first codebreaking war. But both Woodrow Wilson, the best educated president in U.S. history, and British prime minister Herbert Asquith understood SIGINT (signal intelligence, or codebreaking) far less well than their eighteenth-century predecessors, George Washington and some leading British statesmen of the era. Had they learned from past experience, they would have made far fewer mistakes. Asquith only bothered to look at one intercepted telegram. It never occurred to Wilson that the British were breaking his codes.
 
By contrast, in WWII Churchill was the world leader in intelligence because he learned from past experience and discovered that “the further backward you look, the further forward you can see.”
 
One would think that, being secret, much of the history of intelligence has been lost. How were you able to recover so much of it?
 
By learning where to look and taking advantage of extraordinary opportunities. Early in my career, for example, I came across a document in a French archives catalogue entitled Service photographique. I knew this was Third Republic code for “codebreaking service”; if the authorities had realized that, they would never have released it! Intelligence goes back centuries in Cambridge, where I wrote this book. Those I’ve talked to there have ranged from veterans of Bletchley Park to the youngest-ever major Russian spy, who lived in the next street. I’ve been lucky also to work closely with some immensely talented former intelligence officers—notably, Oleg Gordievsky, the leading Western agent in the KGB during the later Cold War, and Vasili Mitrokhin, who smuggled out of KGB archives what the FBI called “the most complete and extensive intelligence ever received from any source”. And then I became MI5’s first (and so far only) official historian with, for seven years, an office in its HQ.