The Secret World by Christopher Andrew review – a global history of espionage

From waste baskets rifled for coded messages to early uses of waterboarding … what can spies learn from the past?

Every Friday during term-time, the convenors of the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar meet for tea in an old college’s combination room, beneath the gaze of a portrait of Christopher Marlowe. One of Elizabethan England’s greatest writers, Marlowe makes good company for those interested in the history of spies and spying: as a student at Cambridge in the 1580s, he slipped away from his scholarly duties and did the state some (secret) service abroad. Among the assembled scholars at the seminar, you will find Christopher Andrew, the historian behind the authorised history of MI5, who in The Secret World presents a history of intelligence from the earliest times to the present day – from ancient Greeks to WikiLeaks.

This panoptic history starts broad, sketching the place of spying and deceit in Greece, Rome and the Holy Land. In China, Sun Tzu’s The Art of War informed its readers: “Secret operations are essential in war; upon them the army relies to make its every move.” The Art of War (probably written in the third century BCE, and probably not by Sun Tzu) identifies five different kinds of spy, including double agents, “inside agents” working within the enemy’s camp, and “expendable agents”, who can be used to spread disinformation. Working in secrecy and harmony, the five groups form the “divine skein”, “the treasure of a sovereign”. The Arthashastra, written around the third or fourth century BCE in India, argued similarly that a sovereign needed to use spies, including “hunchbacks, dwarfs, eunuchs, women skilled in various arts, dumb persons”, alongside poisoners and other assassins.

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from Books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2EWGukW

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