Christopher Andrew, The Secret World: A History of Intelligence (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2018), 960 pp., $40.00.

One of the oddest dinner parties I’ve attended took place at Washington’s plush Watergate apartment complex in the mid-1980s. Along with me, the host, a retired gentleman spook, had invited one or two other OSS/CIA alumni, a colorful British journalist and backstairs Thatcher advisor, the newly-knighted Sir Alfred Sherman and Hollywood legend Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Although I knew Sir Alfred well from numerous visits to London, I was there mainly as a friend of Fairbanks. And he was there because, in between star turns on stage and screen, Doug had done naval and intelligence work during World War II and—as I had long suspected—continued to dabble in the dark arts as a civilian.

Following a fairly good dinner and excellent wine, the party adjourned to a separate Watergate suite where our host kept his private collection of books on espionage through the ages. There were thousands of volumes, some quite rare, some already familiar to me as an occasional historical writer. It was fascinating going, sipping cognac, poring over old tomes and hearing almost as old spy lore recalled by some of the spooks who had actually been there. About the only thing missing was a comprehensive, single-volume history that pulled it all together from ancient times to living memory.

Now there is one that does. Professor Christopher Andrew has produced a masterful and illuminating history of the secret side of world history. While a hefty tome, it is a masterpiece of concision, more than three thousand years of espionage and intelligence gathering covered within a single volume. Just as importantly, Andrew has a captivating, occasionally wry writing style that keeps the story moving and entertains as it informs.

And it’s all in a good cause, since, as the author explains in his introduction:

Twenty-first-century intelligence suffers from long-term historical amnesia. Early in the Cold War, the historian Sherman Kent, founding father of US intelligence analysis, complained that intelligence was the only profession without a serious literature: “From my point of view this is a matter of greatest importance. As long as the discipline lacks a literature, its methods, its vocabulary, its body of doctrine, and even its fundamental theory run the risk of never reaching full maturity.” It was more difficult to learn the historical lessons of intelligence than of any other profession mainly because there was so little record of most of its past experience.

Thus even the brilliant scholars and mathematicians working at Bletchley Park during World War II were barely aware of the fact that “[t]hree times over the previous 500 years, Britain had faced major invasion threats – from the Armada of Philip II of Spain in 1588, from Napoleon at the start of the nineteenth century, and from Hitler in 1940” yet the Bletchley codebreakers who cracked Hitler’s ciphers, “had no idea that their predecessors had broken those of Philip II and Napoleon . . .” No other wartime profession was as ignorant of its own past, he adds. “It is impossible, for example, to imagine an economist who had never heard of the Industrial Revolution.”

Nor is it an exaggeration to maintain, as the author does, that before World War II, “educated British people knew far more about intelligence operations recorded in the Bible than they did about the role of intelligence at any moment in their own history,” since the Old Testament (the Jewish Tanakh) “contains more references to spies than any history of Britain or of most other countries.” This is even more true in the case of the United States, a very late entry in the global intelligence sweepstakes. Spain, France, Britain, the Holy Roman Empire and the long forgotten but once far-flung commercial network of the Venetian Republic, even Peter the Great’s half-barbaric Russia, had all been major players long before the United States was born, much less before it became a global power with overseas possessions of its own in the decades immediately preceding World War I.

But forget about Europe, the New World and Greco-Roman classical civilization. Andrews reminds us that the:

…first books to argue that intelligence should have a central role in war and peace were written not in classical Greece or Rome but in ancient China and the Indian subcontinent: The Art of War (Sunzi bingfa), traditionally ascribed to Confucius’s contemporary, the Chinese general Sun Tzu (c. 544-c.496 BC); and the Arthashastra, a lengthy manual on statecraft attributed to Kautilya (c. 350-c.283 BC), a senior advisor to the founder of the Mauryan dynasty in northern India.

At first glance, this might seem a bit of distant, arcane historical trivia, but nothing could be further from the case:

Central to the revival of interest in intelligence in twentieth-century China and India was the rediscovery, after centuries of neglect, of these two ancient works. In India today, the Arthashastra has a status similar to that of Aristotle’s Politics and Machiavelli’s The Prince in the West. Sun Tzu has been far more revered in Communist China than in any imperial dynasty since the third century AD. Even in the United States, he is more frequently quoted than any pre-twentieth-century Western writer on intelligence.

Another early starter Andrew cites—and some of whose militant followers are still very much a concern of the modern intelligence community—took a sophisticated approach to intelligence while western Europe was still in its so-called Dark Ages. “[T]he global leaders in intelligence operations were Muhammad and the Islamic Caliphate established in the Middle East after his death in 632.” In the course of “uniting the tribes of the Arabian Peninsula under the banner of Islam, Muhammad fought twenty-seven battles and instigated about fifty armed raids” and “[t]he Hadiths (sacred records of Muhammad’s words and deeds) give many instances of how, during his military campaigns, he paid close attention to intelligence ... frequently cited by Islamic extremists [today].”

European spy and intelligence operations only begin to emerge in something like modern form in a few influential states in Renaissance Italy, most notably the Venetian Republic and the Vatican, both of which had far-flung global networks in the form of Venetian merchant travelers and, in the case of the Vatican, clerical agents spread throughout pre-Reformation western Europe and sometimes sent as emissaries or missionaries to non-Christian empires in Asia and Africa. With the rise of major, centralized monarchies in emerging nation states like Spain, England, France and, much later, a semi-modernized Russia and newly-united Germany and Italy, the blank spaces on the espionage map begin to fill up.

In an introduction, thirty chapters and a conclusion, Andrew serves as guide and mentor on a grand tour of the secret side of history from “In the Beginning: Spies of the Bible and Ancient Egypt from Moses to the Last Supper” to “‘Holy Terror’: From the Cold War to 9/11.” Needless to say, it is quite a ride and impossible to even begin to do justice to in a single review. It is, however, possible to give a sense of the work’s breadth, insight and erudition by citing a few themes, cases and examples.

Thematically, the history of intelligence, like history itself, is a reminder of how often and how badly even sophisticated intelligence operations can get things wrong. In 1848, for example, as the tide of revolution swept from France to Germany, Italy, the low countries and even the seemingly unshakable Hapsburg Empire, almost everybody in power was caught sleeping. Austrian Chancellor Metternich, the architect of the post-Napoleonic restoration of monarchic “legitimacy” as the guiding principle for maintaining European peace and stability, didn’t see the storm coming until it hit, despite the Austrian monarchy having what was probably the most pervasive and tightly structured internal intelligence and security apparatus of any European power.

Although Metternich and monarchs like Prussia’s Frederick William IV

…read intelligence reports from their spies and cabinets noirs attentively, the news of the February Revolution in Paris and the enthusiasm it aroused in Vienna and Berlin took them by surprise. In March 1848 rioters forced Frederick William and his army to flee from Berlin. For several months “unrespectable” and “unruly” crowds dominated the capital. Seeing revolutionary demonstrators in front of Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna, the intellectually challenged [downright feeble-minded would be a more accurate description] Austrian Emperor Ferdinand I is said to have asked Metternich: “Well, are they allowed to do this?” When they continued demonstrating, Ferdinand abdicated in favour of his nephew Franz Joseph, who was to rule Austria for the next sixty-eight years. “Afterwards,” he wrote in his diary with evident relief, “I and my dear wife heard Holy Mass . . . After that I and my dear wife packed our bags.” Metternich fled from Vienna on 13 March and, after a difficult journey, found refuge from revolution in London on 20 April.

London was a safe destination, Professor Andrew wryly concludes, because “[d]espite a revival of Chartism in 1848, most British people believed that revolutions were only for foreigners.”

Not that 1848 had been the first time a sophisticated European intelligence and security system had been taken by surprise. In 1789, despite scandals, rampant agitation by paid street orators and countless demonstrations of public discontent, France’s Louis XVI and the vast state surveillance system he sat atop, proved incapable of foreseeing or coping with the mob action, fanned by anti-Bourbon provocateurs and pamphlets smearing the royal family, that resulted in the fall of the Bastille to a lawless, bloodthirsty mob. The virtually unopposed taking of the Bastille—a moth-eaten relic of the old regime with a skeleton garrison and only a handful of non-political prisoners—launched the revolution that would lead to the killing of the king, the Reign of Terror and the Napoleonic military dictatorship which kept Europe at war for a quarter century, ran up a pointless butcher’s bill from the Rhine to the Moskva rivers and, at the end of the day, resulted in a slightly watered-down version of the old order being restored. As a French courtier is said to have exclaimed when news of the fall of the Bastille reached the royal court at Versailles, where it was decried as a crime: “It is worse than a crime. It’s a blunder.”

Andrew’s book is peppered with such ironies, illustrating the tendency toward self-delusion in large but covert bureaucracies. Thus,

[i]n a secret speech to a major KGB conference in May 1981, a visibly ailing Leonid Brezhnev denounced Reagan’s policies as a serious threat to world peace. He was followed by Yuri Andropov, who was to succeed him as General Secretary eighteen months later. To the astonishment of most of his audience, the KGB Chairman announced that, by decision of the Politburo, the KGB and GRU were for the first time to collaborate in a global intelligence operation, codenamed RYAN – a newly-devised acronym for Raketno-Yadernoye Napadenie (“Nuclear Missile Attack”). Operation RYAN was to collect intelligence on the presumed, but non-existent, plans of the Reagan administration and its NATO allies to launch a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union… For several years, Moscow succumbed to what its ambassador in Washington, Anatoly Dobrynin, called a “paranoid interpretation” of Reagan’s policy.

It was all the more paranoid since it occurred at a time when one of President Ronald Reagan’s top personal priorities was reaching a weapons agreement with the Soviet Union to reduce the risk of any East-West nuclear confrontation. The depth and sincerity of Reagan’s commitment and peaceful intentions were brought home to me when he added a handwritten insert to the speech I had been assigned to draft for him on the subject. It was a moving personal letter to Leonid Brezhnev urging him to join in an effort to reduce tensions on both sides of the Iron Curtain by mutually reducing nuclear arsenals. Unfortunately, by this time Brezhnev was in only marginally better shape than the aforementioned doddering Emperor Ferdinand I of Austria.

Predictably, Andropov continued this hardline position during his own short, disease-ridden stay at the Soviet helm. So did his immediate successor, who, like Andropov, quickly succumbed to illness, leading some observers to speculate on hygienic conditions in the Kremlin after three leaders of the Soviet gerontocracy in a row suddenly succumbed to the ravages of age.

Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader—and a younger man with a reality-based view of the democratic West—reached historic agreements with Reagan, and the Russian-American thaw would continue under the well-intended, brave but overly-bibulous Boris Yeltsin, the first leader of the Russian Federation in the post-Soviet era. For better or worse, Yeltsin’s biggest problem was to be found not in intricacies of Russo-American relations, but at the bottom of many a bottle of vodka.

As for what came after Yeltsin, despite much valuable and largely accurate analysis on the precarious state of the Russian economy, fragile democratic institutions and the even more fragile state of Boris Yeltsin’s liver, the CIA was caught completely unawares. Predictable or not, the emergence of Vladimir Putin, himself an ex-spook yearning for a return to the glory days—as he sees them—of Russian stability at home, power abroad and better living through unquestioning obedience means that a still volatile nuclear superpower is now ruled by a more youthful, energetic clone of the late Yuri Andropov.

There’s plenty more déjà vu. In a bloody foreshadowing of the Soviet nightmare, Czar Ivan the Terrible created an alternative state-within-the-state in late sixteenth-century Russia. The notorious oprichniki were black-clad butchers who would massacre entire cities at their paranoid master’s bidding:

Ivan gave responsibility for identifying and disposing of traitors to his newly established imperial guard, the oprichniki, who, bizarrely, he liked to think of as a monastic order with himself as “Father Superior.” The oprichniki, though their responsibilities went beyond intelligence collection and analysis, were Russia’s first organized security service. Swathed in black and mounted on black horses, they must have seemed like a vision from the Apocalypse as they rode through Russia. Each had a dog’s head symbolically attached to his saddle (to sniff out and attack treason) and carried a broom (to sweep away traitors). A seventeenth-century silver candlestick preserved in the museum at Alexandrovskaya Sloboda shows Ivan himself on horseback with dog’s head and broom.

One bad deed deserves another. Nearly four centuries later, Heinrich Himmler, who tried to set up another black-uniformed state-within-a-state inside the Third Reich, was said to have been inspired by the example of two historical precedents: Ivan the Terrible’s oprichniki “brotherhood” and a more legitimately religious fraternity, the Jesuit Order, which at its height—before its eighteenth-century estrangement from the Vatican (and temporary disbandment)—had acted as a global “secret service” of sorts for the Papacy. In fairness to the Jesuits, their black uniforms were about the only thing they had in common with either the oprichniki or the Schutzstaffel.

On a lighter note, Andrew shares some of the secret police keyhole-peeping that went on during the Congress of Vienna and resulted in scandalous reports that rival current tabloid journalism—not to mention a certain so-called “Kremlin Dossier” alleging all sorts of overseas hanky panky on the part of one D. Trump. The Vienna reports, if equally salacious, were probably a lot more accurate, compiled and reviewed by Baron Franz von Hager, the Austrian Head of Police and Censorship at the time, before being sent on to the Chancellor and the monarch.

After [Foreign Secretary] Castlereagh’s return to London, the British embassy in the Starhemberg Palace and the British plenipotentiary’s residence were transformed, according to police reports, into combinations of “brothel and pothouse”, where actresses and chambermaids worked as prostitutes. Police reports on behaviour at the Russian embassy, where one of the valets was [an Austrian] agent, were even more censorious. According to a report by “Agent D” forwarded to Hager on 9 November, “the Russians lodged at the [Hof]burg, not content with keeping it in a filthy condition, are behaving very badly and constantly bringing in girls.” One officer in the Tsar’s entourage tried to blame Russian bad behavior on “the unbelievable depravity of the female sex of the [Austrian] lower orders.”

More than a century later, the local Viennese, no longer blessed with a “Head of Police and Censorship” of their own, would once again be heard complaining about the sexual mayhem being committed by Russian members of the joint allied occupation of Austria in the years immediately after World War II.

In those early postwar years, with Josef Stalin still firmly in charge in the Kremlin, murder was a routine intelligence tool applied on a massive scale. Some intended victims were luckier than others, as is attested by one of the excellent illustrations included in The Secret World. In it, a still relatively young Marshal Tito, the Yugoslav strongman who brought his country out of the Soviet orbit without renouncing Communism as a socio-economic system, is pictured with a smiling, swarthy rather oily-looking gentleman, the caption explaining that “…Tito (left), receives the Costa Rican envoy, ‘Teodoro B. Castro’, in 1953, unaware that ‘Castro’ is a Soviet illegal (real name Iosif Grigulevich) planning his assassination – a mission aborted after Stalin’s death.”

Saved by the bell.

Another illustration, this one a color reproduction of an oil portrait, identifies “[t]he first known transvestite spy, the flamboyant French Chevalier d’Éon de Beaumont (with five o’clock shadow), who enjoyed his life in London so much that for some time he refused instructions to return to France.” Professor Andrew enlarges on the Chevalier’s curious career in his text, explaining that he was able to tie down a French pension despite his insubordination because he possessed documentary evidence of a secret plot by King Louis XV to invade England, concocted behind the backs of his government ministers by the monarch’s very private, personal espionage bureau known, appropriately enough, as “Le Secret du Roi” (King’s Secret).

Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, the celebrated (“Marriage of Figaro”) playwright who also moonlighted as an ancien regime espionage agent, was sent to London to cut a deal with d’Eon securing his permanent silence. Under terms of the resulting “transaction,” d’Eon was required to announce that he was, in fact, a woman, and agreed—perhaps a little too eagerly—to dress as one for the rest of his life.

On 21 November 1777, following a four-hour toilette supervised by Marie-Antoinette’s dressmaker, Rose Bertin, the 49-year-old d’Éon was at last presented in female dress at court to Louis XVI [who had succeeded Louis XV, his grandfather (and d’Éon’s old spymaster) to the throne] and his queen. “She had nothing of our sex except the petticoats and the curls”, complained the vicomtesse de Fars (among others). After a fortnight at Versailles, the court ended the embarrassment by banishing d’Éon to the provinces…While d’Éon languished in the provinces, Beaumarchais continued to combine a flamboyant career in both drama and intelligence. In May 1776, two months before the American Declaration of Independence, [he was]…authorized…to found a company, “at your own risk”, to supply arms to the American rebels…

From the start, the paper firm of Rodrigue Hortalez et Compagnie was a front operation, unofficially channeling military supplies to North American forebears of the Nicaraguan Contras two centuries later. As for the cross-dressing Chevalier, while Professor Andrew leaves him languishing in the French countryside, he soon grew tired of life in the provinces, returned to England and continued to dress as a woman, even when engaging in occasional pay-to-view fencing matches, before dying in debt and obscurity. An autopsy revealed that he was, as most people had long suspected, a man.

Where will it all end? Probably nowhere and never. As always, some leaders will be better at deploying their agents and evaluating their intelligence than others. The Secret World is an invaluable compendium of “past experience” in the field. I am confident that it will achieve well-deserved status as a classic, a learned and readable work that throws light on the shady world of intelligence and espionage and—not least of its virtues—entertains as well as informs its readers along the way.

Aram Bakshian, Jr. served as an aide to Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan, and has written extensively on politics, history, gastronomy and the arts for American and overseas publications.

Image: Wikimedia Commons