[close] Christopher Andrew is Professor of Modern and Contemporary History, former Chair of the History Faculty at Cambridge University, Official Historian of the Security Service (MI5), Honorary Air Commodore of 7006 Squadron (Intelligence) in the Royal Auxiliary Air Force, Chair of the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar, and former Visiting Professor at Harvard, Toronto and Canberra. Professor Andrew is also co-editor of Intelligence and National Security, and a regular presenter of BBC Radio and TV documentaries, including the Radio Four series What If?. His twelve previous books include a number of path-breaking studies on the use and abuse of secret intelligence in modern history. He is currently a governor of Norwich School and President of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

Along with fellow historian and former Times reporter Peter Hennessy, Christopher Andrew studied under the historian and wartime cryptanalyst Sir Harry Hinsley. As some of the first professional historians to pursue intelligence history as an independent field of study, the two can be considered the "fathers" of intelligence studies. Former students of Andrew--including Peter Jackson, Richard Aldrich and Wesley Wark--now staff the intelligence studies and intelligence history posts in universities around the English-speaking world.

Professor Andrew's reputation as an historian of intelligence studies was cemented with two studies completed in collaboration with two KGB defectors, Oleg Gordievsky and Vasili Mitrokhin. The first of these works, KGB: The Inside Story was a scholarly work on the history of KGB actions against the West produced from archival and open sources, with the critical addition of information from the KGB defector Gordievsky. His two most detailed works about the KGB were produced in collaboration with KGB defector and archivist Vasili Mitrokhin, who over the course of several years recopied vast numbers of KGB archive documents as they were being moved for long storage. Exfiltrated by the Secret Intelligence Service in 1992, Mitrokhin and his documents were made available to Andrew after an initial and thorough review by the security services. Both volumes, 1999's The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB and the 2005 edition The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World (both volumes simply titled "The Mitrokhin Archive" in UK publication) resulted in some public scandal as they revealed the names of former KGB agents and collaborators in government, industry and private life around the world. Most famous amongst these was the revelation of the "Grandmother Spy", 87-year old Melita Norwood, who had passed industrial information and other intelligence to the KGB for more than 50 years.

The Cambridge Intelligence Seminar, chaired by Prof. Andrew (and founded by his late mentor Harry Hinsley), convenes regularly in rooms at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Active and former senior members of various intelligence services around the world participate in the discussions, with most participants made up of Andrew's graduate students, fellow historians and other academics. At these meetings, detailed analysis of various past and present intelligence affairs is discussed under the Chatham House Rule, with the confidence that it will not be attributed to a person or organisation.
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