The authorised history of MI5 by Professor Christopher Andrew records the view of the late Professor Sir Michael Howard, founder of the King’s War Studies Department, that:
In Britain the activities of the intelligence and security services have always been regarded in the same light as marital sex. Everyone knows that it goes on and is quite content that it should, but to speak, write or ask questions about it is regarded as bad form. So far as official government policy is concerned, the British security and intelligence services, MI5 and MI6, do not exist. Intelligence is brought by the storks and enemy agents are found under gooseberry bushes.
I note that Michael Howard in that passage did not even dare to name GCHQ, the British signals intelligence and cybersecurity organization where I started my career in 1969. I was told when still at university about their fast stream cadet programme without being expected to know officially beforehand that GCHQ was an intelligence agency or even to know of the wartime existence and triumphs of Bletchley Park. There were almost no academic sources that I could have consulted to enlighten me. David Kahn had published in the US in 1966 his groundbreaking book, Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing but we now know that without his knowledge his publisher (Macmillan) had sent a copy of the draft to the US National Security Agency (NSA) who tried unsuccessfully to suppress it, but they did succeed – at GCHQ's insistence – in removing references to NSA’s relationship with GCHQ as its long-term partner in UKUSA. Only during a briefing given to the small number of candidates who had survived the ordeal of the stiff GCHQ entry examination, just before the final interviews in the summer of 1969, were the veils of secrecy lifted, slowly one by one, with exhortations at each stage encouraging withdrawal if any of us were experiencing doubts about what we were learning of the real work of the organisation we were seeking to join.
Since those days the academic study (at least in liberal democracies) of secret intelligence has become a mainstream subject. Specialist journals are devoted to it. It now takes a considerable effort to keep up with the volumes of published works in the field. The creation of the King’s Centre for the Study of Intelligence (KCSI) will, I hope, help with that problem of plenty.
A measure of the acceptance of the discipline of intelligence studies inside the US intelligence community was the 2010 publicised ceremony honouring the pioneer David Kahn held at the NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, home to the US National Cryptologic Museum. NSA Director General Keith Alexander and Deputy Director (and chief civilian officer) Chris Inglis took delivery from David Kahn of his collection of over 2800 books on secret intelligence and over 130,000 pages of notes from interviews with hundreds of cryptologic and intelligence personnel, both foreign and American, many now deceased, obtained in the course of research for his many books, such as The Codebreakers. Open to intelligence studies researchers, the collection also houses photocopies of rare or unique intelligence documents from foreign and domestic archives and from private collections and some extremely rare books, such as a copy of the first printed book on cryptology, Johannes Trithemius's Polygraphiae of 1518 and a typescript of Herbert Yardley's controversial book, American Black Chamber, written in protest in 1931 after President Hoover's new Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson refused to continue its funding with the now-famous comment, ‘Gentlemen do not read other people's mail’.
Yardley caused a sensation when he published his book and revealed to the world exactly what his agency had been doing with the secret and illegal cooperation of nearly the entire American cable industry. There were no British equivalent disclosures at the time about the work of Government Code & Cypher School (GC&CS, now called GCHQ) although the publicity that had been given by President Wilson to the contents of the Zimmerman telegram in 1917 was capable of revealing that not only was the Admiralty evidently tapping transatlantic cables but had been able by one means or another to crack at least some German cyphers. British cryptographers were exhorted to be, in Churchill’s later phrase, the geese that never cackled. As an example, it was only when my 1995 appointment as Director GCHQ was announced in The Times that my aunt felt she could tell me that, as a Glasgow University honours graduate in German, she had spent the second world war working in SIGINT as a Women’s Royal Navy Service officer. All she had ever said to the family was that she was in England ‘on war work’ and had even kept hidden the certificate of commendation she had received from GC&CS at Bletchley Park when demobbed at the end of the war.
Whilst across the Atlantic it had been open Congressional legislation in 1947 that created the CIA, successive UK governments chose in the subsequent decades not to admit to the continued existence of the UK secret services. Despite large numbers of academics (with distinguished mathematicians, classicists, philosophers, historians and linguists amongst them) having worked in wartime British intelligence none turned their hand to writing about the study of intelligence until F. W. Winterbotham published The Ultra Secret in 1974. Even after the first UK legislation on interception was passed in 1985 (the Interception of Communications Act, IOCA, made necessary by a series of critical findings by the European Court of Human Rights) any questions about exactly which organisations were conducting State interception were blocked by the Table Office in Parliament. Even with the more fundamental avowal legislation of 1989 (for MI5) and 1994 (for MI6 and GCHQ) it took quite a time for the older generation of practitioners in the UK intelligence community to recognise that intelligence studies could help them, not least in opening up recruiting routes as well as balancing sensational reporting by the likes of Chapman Pincher in the Daily Express (and the excesses of James Bond and other spy novels) with reputable academic research. An important early challenge to historians to re-examine their conclusions and narratives was thrown down by Christopher Andrew and David Dilks in their 1984 book, The Missing Dimension. They chastised academic historians for ignoring intelligence altogether or treating it as of little importance, fleeing from the uncomfortable lesson that acts of courage or treason, subterfuge, deceit, or sheer chance can change the course of history. Reliable historical accounts also proved to be essential in helping create a more informed Parliamentary and public understanding of the value of secret intelligence for national security (demonstrated yet again after 2013 following the Snowden allegations).
Academic interest has proved unstoppable, initially encouraged by the monumental 5-volume official history of British intelligence in the Second World War, edited by the Bletchley Park veteran and Cambridge Professor of history, Sir Harry Hinsley (the first volume appeared in 1979 and the last in 1990), followed by authorised histories of MI5, the Special Operations Executive (SOE), MI6, the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), Defence Economic Intelligence and most recently GCHQ, and more and more overseas archival material becoming available to scholars.
It was Lawrie Freedman, when head of War Studies at King’s, who came to call on me in the Cabinet Office as I prepared to retire from the post of UK Security and Intelligence Coordinator, to suggest that I might join him as a visiting Professor. Even in 2006 I had some trepidation about how my former colleagues on the inside would react as I settled down to research and write my first book on security and intelligence, Securing the State, a book that an MI5 Director General told me he wished he had had available to read when he first came into contact with the world of secret intelligence. In that book I suggested that the primary purpose of intelligence had remained constant over the ages: to help improve the quality of decision making by government and military leaders by reducing their ignorance of what they may have to face. Secret intelligence is essential to achieve that purpose in respect of information that others who mean us harm do not wish us to have, and indeed will go to very violent lengths to prevent us acquiring.
Two consequences for intelligence studies have always inevitably followed.
The first is that the only way for intelligence officers to overcome the will of the determined adversary to keep their secrets hidden is to deploy exquisite tradecraft to steal those secrets and understand their import. Today, that takes academics into the moral philosophy of intelligence ethics and human rights and into understanding the inner recesses of digital technology and surveillance capitalism. An example of a new intelligence frontier that is being explored is the use for intelligence and security purposes of advanced AI, especially the generative AI of ChatGPT, Claude, CoPilot etc. and the multitude of AI-driven applications. The use of neural networks to select relevant (mostly but not entirely) open-source information, and thus assist intelligence assessment and security investigation, is fast developing. But questions remain to be researched in depth about the degree of confidence that can be associated with conclusions that emerge from an intelligence agency’s AI black box. At least we know from long experience how to classify human sources, for example as regular and reliable or as a new source on trial, but AI is as yet opaque to the analyst’s gaze.
The second consequence is the need for secrecy over which sources and methods are being used to obtain which secrets. Otherwise, the holder of the secret will simply dodge, and the exercise becomes self-defeating. That matters for public safety and national security, and makes the responsible academic study of secret intelligence a uniquely demanding one, something I am sure all in the KCSI recognise. Just because we can reveal some past or intelligence secret should we, especially if we suspect it may still be being exploited? But young intelligence officers need to have access in an age of AI to the wider history of their chosen profession, not just the successes and failures of their own agency, but why the British community is the way it is, and how it came to be placed under the rule of law, matters that as I have said were until recent years deep secrets d’état.
What Whitehall has been saying today it wants above all from academia is ‘impact’. Academia must show, in the words of the Research Councils (UK), the ‘demonstrable contribution that excellent research makes to society and the economy' including ‘increasing the effectiveness of public services and policy through significant advances in understanding, method, theory and application’. In the fields of study of social sciences and public policy Whitehall says explicitly that it is looking for three things: instrumental contributions, influencing the development of policy, practice or service provision, shaping legislation, and altering behaviour; conceptual contributions to the understanding of policy issues and reframing debates; and capacity building through technical and personal skill development. The work of KCSI members can certainly contribute to each of these including, dare I say it. inspiring some of the graduates from our institutions to seek a career in intelligence in public or private sectors.
Finally, the study of intelligence is of intrinsic value as a human activity, especially in terms of developing a better understanding of the place it occupies in modern statecraft; a point recognised by the requests we receive from the intelligence communities of many of our allies and partners to help them develop their own academic/practitioner links.
I like to think, therefore, that the late Michael Howard would have given a very warm welcome to the setting up last year of the KCSI to widen the network of scholars working on intelligence and security and expand the international scope of research interests. Within the KCSI team, for example, Daniela Richterova’s upcoming publication of the untold history of Czechoslovakia’s relations with the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO), Watching the Jackals, and Paul McGarr’s recent history of India’s secret Cold War, Spying in South Asia, explore unchartered waters in intelligence studies. There is still much new ground to till. For example, we still lack definitive accounts of the wartime SIS station in New York, British Security Coordination, and of the Foreign Office Information Research Department. The role played by intelligence in the run-up to war in Ukraine and in its conduct on both sides will throw up much to study. New issues in intelligence ethics keep appearing, most recently in relation to the use of AI, that deserve scholarly attention. For example, in a future where we may have brain-computer interfaces, like Elon Musk’s Neuralink, capable of providing direct access between the analyst and the algorithms how can we safeguard the most fundamental unqualifiable human right of all, the right to our own private thoughts and opinions. And the associated the right to keep our thoughts free from manipulation, the essence of human dignity and agency – something that until recent technological advances hardly deserved discussion amongst scholars.
Let me end this blog with a very warm tribute to Mike and Daniela, Yusuf and everyone who helped get King’s to approve the setting up of the KCSI. I hope this series of blogs will help keep us informed of each other’s journeys in our common enterprise.
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