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The first full history of spies, spying, and the intelligence bureaucracy, from the author of The Philby Conspiracy.
In 1909, the business of spying was hoisted from the domain of a few European descendents to the highest reaches of British government with the formation of Britain's SIS. Acting in response to a totally fraudulent fear--the German spy scare that preceded World War I--the British soon had a lot of company as Germany, Russia, France, and other powers large and small joined the mad rush toward information and espionage. Not far behind came the biggest of them all, first with the OSS and then with the CIA, fueled by paranoia and by more money than any new bureaucracy had ever seen. "Bigger than State by '48," was the CIA's slogan on its founding in 1947. And it was.
Now intelligence is a very big business with a very rich history, told here with a depth and verve never before brought to the subject, by a master historian. All of the legends and their immensely readable stories and here--Sorge, Donovan, Philby, Mata Hari, Golitsyn, Angleton, Penkovsky--and behind them a large question: did any act of these spies and their masters make any difference at all in the course of history?
- Sales Rank: #13093789 in Books
- Published on: 1986-11-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Paperback
- 447 pages
From Library Journal
The first modern, permanent intelligence agency was created about 1909, and within a few years all the great powers had similar agencies. Concentrating almost entirely on Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and the United States, Knightley asserts that these services are not worth the enormous sums they cost, that they are not effective in predicting enemy actions, and that they cause more trouble than they prevent. He uses anecdotes of failed operations and jaundiced interpretations of other episodes in an attempt to prove that intelligence services corrode a democratic society's liberty and pervert international relations. Knightley lambasts even such famous operations as ULTRA, MAGIC, and the XX Committee as overrated and mythologized. His argument might have had greater credibility if it were not so shrill and one-sided.Edwin B. Burgess, U.S. Army TRALINET Ctr., Fort Monroe, Va.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
"If Reagan, Gorbachev, Thatcher and Mitterand only manage one book this year, they could do a lot worse than pick up Phillip Knightley's." -- John le Carre
" If Reagan, Gorbachev, Thatcher and Mitterand only manage one book this year, they could do a lot worse than pick up Phillip Knightley' s." -- John le Carre
Most helpful customer reviews
14 of 17 people found the following review helpful.
Fascinating & Informative History Of Spies & Spying
By Jon G. Jackson
Phillip Knightly's THE SECOND OLDEST PROFESSION is one of the better books on secret intelligence that I've come across. He starts in the early part of the 20th century, and presents a convincing argument that the whole concept of the need for intelligence was based largely on *misinformation*. He also suggests that the Soviet's huge intelligence empire was essentially a reasonable *response* to the massive attempts of the West to overturn the Russian revolution, culminating in the failed assassination attempt on Lenin. (Imagine how history might have been different if the Russians had been initially approached with any kind of cooperation in mind!) With those beginnings, he goes on to show how the whole intelligence enterprise has essentially been a secret "comedy" of terrible errors. The main exception, perhaps, might be World War II, though even that era was no bright and shining star. His study of the Cold War era is both fascinating and well informed. This is one of the basic books for anyone interested in the subject.
Now that a bit more time has passed, it's interesting to be able fill in the blanks where this book left off (it was published about 15 years ago). In the light of news from the last several years, we can see now what some of the figures in the book could only guess. One of Kingsley's themes, you see, is that from day one, the Soviet intelligence service was consistently the real Master in this game. After a major spy was uncovered a couple decades ago, James Angleton (of the CIA) always maintained there was another mole yet to be uncovered. Angleton was somewhat ridiculed for his views, and seen as overly paranoid. Now, in 2001, we've discovered that the top counterintelligence directors in both Great Britain *and* the CIA were, in fact, Soviet spies. So, as Kingsley maintains in this book---with rare exceptions, the Soviets knew all along *everything* that they needed to know! Imagine that.
Again, highly recommended for those who like this sort of thing.
10 of 12 people found the following review helpful.
Outdated Shrill Mythbusting
By A. Ross
I picked this book up thinking it was a general history of modern espionage, based on the subtitle "Spies and Spying in the Twentieth Century." However, the subtitle of the original British edition is much a more accurate description of what lies within: "The Spy as Bureaucrat, Patriot, Fantasist and Whore." Knightley is not a historian, but an investigative journalist, and as such, he's much more interested in destroying myths than anything else. Published some twenty years ago, in the midst of the Cold War, the book is a rather shrill critique of national intelligence agencies. Read today, the original edition (apparently an updated edition was published several years ago), suffers from being somewhat outdated, rather under researched, and presuming a great deal of reader knowledge. It's not a particularly good book for anyone who hasn't already read a few general histories of intelligence, as it presupposes a fair amount of familiarity with various "famous" espionage incidents: the "Lucy" spy ring, ULTRA intercepts, and especially the whole Philby, Burgess, et al debacle within the British services. Readers (such as myself), without a solid grounding in this history will have little basis of comparison when Knightley starts pounding away at accepted wisdom.
In terms of being outdated, so much has happened in the world since the original publication (such as the collapse of the USSR, the opening of KGB and Stasi archives, Aldrich Ames, etc.) that it's hard not to read it today without wondering what new information is out there on all the topics he speculates so freely on. And make no mistake, Knightley does engage in a great deal of speculation in the book, and it's hard to know what to make of his repeated dangling of "doesn't it seem more likely that..." before various elaborate explanations of why the accepted interpretation of something is wrong. And yet, even when he's completely categorical about something, one is forced to take it with a grain of salt. In the one area he mentions that I do know a little about, he's quite wrong. Early on, Knightley characterizes German saboteurs operating in the U.S. before the U.S. entered World War I, as "German-Americans frequently acting on their own initiative." in fact, there is ample documentation before world courts that there was an official German sabotage effort directed at U.S. arms factories and transportation facilities organized and directed by German government officials working out of the German embassy in Washington, D.C. Some of the operatives were German-American, but many were not -- and it was very organized (albeit, not as capably as one might expect) and not on anyone's "own initiative." This example also illustrates Knightley's lack of depth and bread in terms of research. As a journalist, he seems more comfortable quoting from personal interviews and drawing upon the work of other researchers than he is digging through dusty archives to gather supporting material.
These critiques are somewhat wistful on my part, because I actually am quite sympathetic to the jaundiced eye Knightley takes toward the intelligence agencies. The basic gist of the book is that throughout history, intelligence agencies have wielded power and influence completely disproportionate to their actual value while costing far far too much for what they accomplish. He focuses primarily on the establishment and rapid ballooning of British, American, and Soviet national intelligence services over the previous century, and sets out to demolish any romantic notions of the modern spy. The story starts by attempting to explain how the creation of the first modern intelligence agency in Britain was the result of some well orchestrated fear mongering by a popular writer, and some fine bureaucratic wrangling by one man. He sees much the same situation in the U.S., and lays the origin for the KGB at Britain's doorstep, theorizing that it emerged in reaction to (very real) British attempts to thwart the Bolshevik revolution (Let's just say that you'll never watch "Reilly: Ace of Spies" the same way again.)
Bureaucracy figures large in his tale, as he sees an inverse relationship between the size of the espionage bureaucracy and budget, and actual effectiveness. Some of his examples from World War II of bureaucracy's ineptness as dealing with routing accurate information to those who can act on it, as well as dealing with internal dissent, read almost word for word as if they applied to the "war on terror" and buildup to the invasion of Iraq. Of course, bureaucracies exist to perpetuate themselves, and Knightley argues that no one does it better than spies. They have the ultimate advantages of hazy mission and mandate, "black" budgets, easily evaded oversight, and no practical method of assessing effectiveness, ergo, no accountability. And as he points out time and again, spy agencies have the penultimate fallback of being able to declare that their successes can never be reveal ed... because they're secret...top secret. By the end of his shrill (and again, one wishes for a more reasoned tone throughout) exploration and litany of espionage debacles, it's hard not find oneself mulling over the prospect of what the practical difference would be to national security (not to mention civil liberties) if the budgets of spy agencies were simply cut in half. Of course, the CIA would at least be able to augment its funds by reentering the drug trade so capably engaged in during the Vietnam War and in Central America in the '80s (subjects Knightley does not touch upon).
12 of 15 people found the following review helpful.
Events Filter Interpretations
By Craig L. Howe
It is interesting to see how current events twist interpretations.
This book, copyrighted in 1986 two years after the Church Committee "declawed" the Central Intelligence Agency, concludes that spies tell us little about real or potential enemies.
They are as old as history. Delilah was one; Moses sent 12 into Canaan and Abraham Lincoln had none, so he retained the Pinkerton Detective Agency to provide intelligence. Alfred the Great was so frustrated with the information he was receiving, he disguised himself and went undercover.
Today, 16 years after what Kirkus Reviews called "perhaps the best book ever written about the business of spies and spying" we are being told the September 11th, 2001 attacks resulted from a dearth of "assets on the ground."
The author, who covered espionage for the London Sunday Times at the time he wrote this book, concludes intelligence agencies are a bureaucrat's dream - they are charged with an unclear mission, financed with undisclosed budgets and employ thousands and accomplish little. With that much at stake, Knightley argues, the rival agencies may actually connive to keep each other in business.
This is a view I doubt we will hear or see explored by today's Senate Intelligence Committee.
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