Global Security and Intelligence Studies Volume 2, Issue 1, Fall 2016 | Page 109

Global Security and Intelligence Studies - Volume 2, Number 1 - Fall 2016
Review of On Intelligence: The History of Espionage and
the Secret World
John Hughes-Wilson (2016). On Intelligence: The History of Espionage and the Secret
World, First Edition. London: Constable. ISBN: 978-1-472-11353-5. 528 pages. £25.00
The field of intelligence studies is a relatively new academic discipline that has
developed an identifiable intellectual community. It has served as a conduit through
which the history of war, the development and decline of empire as well as the calibration
of foreign policy have been subjected to fresh formats of inquiry and analysis. The study
of the relationship between the practice of intelligence and its impact on state policy
in so far as military action is concerned is one, given the repercussions, respectively, of
the attack on 9/11 and the decision to go to war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, that is
of particular interest to scholars, policymakers and practitioners of the craft. It is also a
subject area of inestimable fascination to a general reading public with a ready appetite
for stories on espionage and accustomed to a market in which there has been a surge
in the popular history genre. This has meant that studies on the history of military
intelligence, as is the case with other genres of history, have been divided into those
that fit alternately into the academic and popular writing categories.
John Hughes-Wilson, a retired British Army Intelligence Corps colonel whose
career spanned active service in the Falkland Islands and Northern Ireland as well
as administrative postings in Whitehall and NATO, is an author whose offerings on
military intelligence history fit into the popular writing category. His brief but robust
introduction offers no apologies for avoiding “getting completely lost in the thickets
of philosophy and Hegelian dialectic” as an academic text might tend to do. Instead,
his work adopts a case study approach to explain and analyze the operation of the
intelligence apparatus within the context of espionage and the conduct of war.
Before this, he takes the reader through preliminaries: a chapter on a condensed
history of the development of what he refers to as the “Second Oldest Profession” from
biblical times to the modern era, followed by a brief consolidating chapter stressing
the importance of intelligence in national self-defense by references to statements
written by Machiavelli and Sun Tzu while at the same time offering words of rebuke
for the shortcomings of Clausewitz’s 1832 masterwork, On War. He provides a lucid
overview of the fundamentals of the intelligence cycle, providing admittedly simplified
diagrammatic representations of the process, a collection plan as well as an indicator
and warning display. These are tools he deploys to function as key reference points
for analysis when he explores the different themes which he proceeds to set out. His
consideration of HUMINT and the factors typically enabling intelligence agencies to
penetrate their competitors is predicated on the traditional MICE acronym: Money,
Ideology, Compromise/Coercion and Ego. These factors provide the backdrop to his
retellings of major espionage failings and successes of American and British intelligence
agencies including that of the Walker family’s betrayal of U.S. Navy secrets and Oleg
Penkovsky’s role in the Cuban Missile Crisis.
doi: 10.18278/gsis.2.1.7
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