Mention "MI-5" to the typical Anglophile, public television viewer and you will be filled in on the latest episode of BBC America's riveting, well-acted, late Saturday night show. After 9/11's catastrophic intelligence failure, there was serious talk of creating an American version of MI5, Britain's domestic security service, which is commemorating its centenary this year.
The author of this massive, authorized, highly readable tome, pre-eminent intelligence scholar Christopher Andrew of Cambridge University, was given virtually unrestricted access to more than 400,000 documents in the spy agency's archives. Taking full advantage of this unprecedented opportunity in a new age of intelligence openness (identifying MI5's director general, open recruitment, accelerated declassification of documents, etc.), Andrew attempts to fill in the "missing dimension" of modern British history with a coherent and balanced appraisal of its security service, without which one cannot understand fully how Britain prevailed against Nazi Germany during the Second World War.
He also reminds MI5 officers not to neglect the "useful lessons" (both successes and failures) of the agency's own history. Paying attention to what Andrew labels the "long-term perspective," is essential to MI5's ability to "defend the Realm" against today's powerful armed fanatics like Osama bin Laden and Britain's "homegrown" Islamist terrorists. The agency will succeed, he warns, only if it studies carefully the lessons of its past 100 years.
Unsurprisingly, the birth of MI5 was rooted in an intelligence failure, one that imperial Britain experienced during the Boer War (1899-1902). (No, Sir Francis Walsingham's "Secret Service" that thwarted various assassination attempts on Queen Elizabeth I had long disappeared.) Led by Capt. Vernon Kell, the Secret Service Bureau grew from a handful of clerks and officers into an effective arm of Britain's post-World War I military establishment. (In early 1916, the Secret Service Bureau was divided into MI5, the domestic security service, and MI6, the foreign intelligence agency.)
Central to its success and postwar survival was the agency's arrest of the most effective elements of Germany's spy network in Britain before and during the early days of the First World War. Kell's brilliant counterespionage strategy was based on gaining the cooperation of the country's chief constables and the support of Home Secretary Winston Churchill, who according to Andrew, "showed greater enthusiasm for, and understanding of, intelligence than any other British politician of his generation."
During the interwar period (1919-1939), MI5's major challenges came from the left: the Soviet Union (born out of WWI and the Bolshevik Revolution) and its espionage efforts against and subversion of Britain's democracy. Andrew's treatment of MI5's failure to detect and destroy the "'Cambridge Five,' the ablest group of British agents ever recruited by a foreign intelligence service," reflects his solid grasp of the Security Service Archives and his phenomenal facility with the intelligence historiography of the 1930s, the Second World War, and the Cold War that followed.
If the 1930s represented the nadir of British intelligence's failure to identify and neutralize Stalin's largely ideologically driven spies, the Second World War epitomized British ingenuity and courage in fighting the Nazis. As in WWI, German intelligence efforts against Britain were largely a failure.
Churchill's spies turned nearly every German agent in Britain into a double agent, devised deceptions and fed disinformation to trick Hitler into thinking the D-Day invasion of Normandy was a diversion, invented radar, broke the German Enigma Code, and assisted the U.S. with the VENONA secret (intercepting 3,000 classified telegrams between Soviet agents in North America and their handlers in Moscow).
The need for more effective transitions between chapters notwithstanding, Andrew has demonstrated why he is considered by most of his peers to be the world's leading intelligence scholar. His mastery of sources and ability to write so clearly is second to none.
I expect him to revise this current volume (especially on defending the Realm from the ongoing scourge of terrorism) and keep us current on the "missing dimension" so essential to our understanding of history.
Rorin Platt is currently writing a history of Virginians who served in America's intelligence services during World War II.
