The Second Oldest Profession: Spies and Spying in the 20th Century (1986)

November 6, 2003

The Second Oldest Profession: The Spy as Bureaucrat, Patriot, Fantasist and Whore, Andre Deutsch (London) and as The Second Oldest Profession: Spies and Spying in the Twentieth Century, W. W. Norton (New York) is a comprehensive and controversial history of espionage in our times.

The first permanent intelligence agency was created in 1909, and within a few years all the great powers had similar agencies. Concentrating on Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and the United States, the book reveals why these services are not worth the enormous sums they cost, are not effective in predicting enemy actions, and cause more trouble than they prevent.

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Book Review: Black Kettle and Full Moon

November 1, 2003

This is history at its sparkling best–interesting, enlightening, painstaking and objective. If you want to know about prime ministers and politicians, wars and class, economics and production, religion and sport, then look elsewhere. This is a book about people, ordinary Australians, and how they organised their daily life a long while ago.

It describes where they lived, how they shopped, what they ate and how they cooked it, what they drank and why. It tell us how they kept warm and cool, how they lit their houses, what they wore and where they bought it. It begins in the middle of the 19th century when there were less than half a million white Australians and ends with the First World War when there were five million.

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Was Diana under surveillance by MI5? Yes.

October 21, 2003

Before her death six years ago, was Princess Diana under surveillance by “watchers” from MI5, the British Security Service? Yes. Did MI5 have a file on her? Yes. Were her telephone calls bugged? Yes. Were there, in the Queen’s words, “powers at work in this country of which we have no knowledge”? Yes. Did MI5 or these mysterious powers murder Diana? Emphatically, no.

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Can we survive six weeks of Australia?

October 11, 2003

We can handle six weeks of World Cup rugby but can we survive six weeks of Australia? Here’s a country just a little over 100 years old, and with only 20 million people, that is a world leader in so many fields, and not afraid to boast about it. Six weeks of seeing and hearing confident, optimistic Australians enjoying their life in their Spring sunshine as our winter closes in may be too much even for Rugby fans.

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The Master Spy: The Story of Kim Philby (1989)

October 6, 2003

Philby, the agent, double agent, traitor and enigma revealed all to Knightley just before his death. Few knew the real man that for years fooled British Intelligence, the CIA and the FBI and was simultaneously head of the British Intelligence Service’s anti-Soviet section and a long-time KGB agent.

After he defected to Russia in 1963, he maintained a code of silence for 25 years – until a few weeks before his death. He invited Phillip Knightley to his Moscow apartment and in six days of conversation bared his soul.

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A wilderness of mirrors

October 5, 2003

Poor old James Bond has had a terrible thrashing this week. First former British ambassador Sir Peter Heap accused Bond and his colleagues in the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) of being useless spies who frequently made things up. Then the the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) reported that it could find no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, thus underlining a fundamental failure of intelligence and removing at a stroke Britain’s justification for going to war.

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From No 10 with love – why is New Labour so passionate about spies?

August 31, 2003

One of the Hutton Inquiry’s little surprises concerns the relationship between the Labour government and the top ranks of the British intelligence community. They are in love.

Downing Street’s Director of Communications, Alastair Campbell, regards John Scarlett, once our top spy in Moscow and now chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, as “a mate”. Tony Blair is immensely grateful for the help the intelligence services gave in the preparation of the dossier on the threat posed by Iraq. At the urging of an unnamed spymaster, the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) empties its files trying to find a few nuggets to help make the dossier even stronger.

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Doomsday for James Bond

August 24, 2003

James Bond and his masters will never be the same again. The changes in the relationship between the British intelligence community and the government, revealed by the Hutton Inquiry, are–for better or worse –here to stay.

Intelligence bureaucracies such as Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and America’s Central Intelligence Agency have traditionally seen their role as identifying monsters. Their officers go out into the world, keep their eyes and ears open and return with warnings for their masters of threats to the well-being of the nation they serve.

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Of secrets and spies

August 17, 2003

The Hutton Inquiry has surprised everyone. It was meant to look at the circumstances surrounding the death of the government scientist Dr. David Kelly. Instead it has been revealing who wields power in Britain and how.

Most of the facts in the Kelly affair were clear in the public mind long before Lord Hutton called his first witness at the Royal Courts of Justice this week: Tony Blair wanted to attack Iraq and hoped for help from the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) in making the case for war.

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