Her Majesty's Secret Service: The Making of the British Intelligence Community

by Christopher Andrew

Chronicles the history of the British secret service, probing its influence on foreign and military policy and profiling its key personalities

Genres: History, Espionage, Nonfiction, Military Fiction, Historical, Biography, Research

619 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Christopher Maurice Andrew, FRHistS is an Emeritus Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Cambridge with an interest in international relations and in particular the history of intelligence services. (military.wikia.org)

Reviews

[Malette Poole]

So Far, so good. Well done, balanced and funny! Amazing we won WWI, much less WWII. Humit is so hit-or-miss...

Using documents available to the public as well as interviews, Andrew put together a well documented and useful history of the SIS. While it tells of the triumphs, it also notes the failures, particularly those where the information was there but because the source was not 'reliable' (not OUR sort of people) or because pre-existing prejudices or beliefs clashed with the information, it was dismissed.

Well worth reading for anyone who wants to see how the class system practically hamstrung the Intelligence Service between the Wars and hampered it during the wars. Plus, all the types of mistakes they made are STILL being made by the CIA and others, where they will not open themselves to new thinking.

[Richard]

I'll admit I was a little disappointed in this book. While well referenced and magisterial, it nonetheless focused so much on the organizational structures and mentions SO many people by name, rank, and future rank/title, that it really obscured the main theme. It was much more a top down view of Intelligence, was much more interested in the inter-service rivalries and the bosses, with MUCH less information on the ground level work the agencies did. Still, not a bad reference to have, to refer back to when reading other books on the subject.

[David]

It amazes me. Le Carre, Fleming, all the other spy writers, with all their in-house dissent, doubling, distrust, dissatisfaction, and their labyrinthine plots: if Andrew is right (and over 160 pages of scholarly apparatus suggests a well-researched book), our spy fiction writers over the last 50 years have been downplaying and soft pedalling the level of non-communication and self-centredness in the secret world. It's a non-fiction book that sometimes reads like a novel, but, if a novel, would be comic. As history, it's more than occasionally terrifying.

[Laura]

HEADS UP- May be a hard slog at times unless you are intensely interested in the topic.
(My copy does not have the words "Her Majesty's" in the title, but it is the same year, title, author.)
The WW1 period offers lots of colorful characters, tho, such as the guy who worked for MI5 who used his wife to get navel secrets from a British Navy warrant officer, so he could sell secrets to Germany. That arrangement fell apart but later the same guy comes to MI5 practically begging to be arrested as a German spy when the marriage also fell apart.
An interesting case of military information disguised as cigar orders also brightens the WW1 section. A pair of cigar merchants attracted attention from cable censors with improbably huge cigar orders, stuff like :10,000 Cabanas, 4,000 Rothschilds and 3,000 Coronas from Portsmouth" was actually reporting on the presence of 10 destroyers, four cruisers and three battleships in harbor.
My ears perked up the most when then finally get around to giving credit to the Poles for breaking the Enigma code ahead of the breakout of WW2. They do not go into full detail, but I don't know if it is because the Brits cling to the idea that they invented everything used to crack that code, or whether it would have sent the book into a whole chapter on the Polish codebreaking effort.
Winston Churchill was a great supporter of intelligence efforts from the time he was a young Navy assistant. His deep respect for the importance of intelligence reports informed his decisions during WW2.
A great book for scholars of both world wars and of the history of intelligence departments and spy-mongering. I only gave it three stars for the dryness of much of the text, but would give it four for informational value.

[Alan]

The best book on intelligence I have ever read. And I have read a lot.