Defend the Realm -- The Authorized History of M15 by Christopher Andrew, Knopf '09, stated First U.S. Edition, $40, 1032 pages, ISBN #0307263630. Index, bibliography, source notes, grouping of b&w glossy images, other b&w images sprinkled through text.
So secretive is Britain's Security Service, writes historian Christopher Andrew, that when Rab Butler was appointed Home Secretary with responsibility for the Security Service in 1957, he didn't even know where its headquarters was located. On the centennial of this historically-clandestine organization, an independent historian "describes the distinctive ethos of M15, how the organization has been managed, its relationship with the government, where it has triumphed, and where it has failed."
In the course of its 1,032 pages, this landmark book recounts "how it (M15) was so astonishingly successful in turning German agents during the Second World War; and that it had much greater roles than has hitherto been realized during the end of Empire and in responding to recurrent fears by successive governments (both Conservative and Labour) of Cold War Communist subversion."
Here's a brief sampling:
"For most of its history the Security Service (M15) has seemed to outsiders a deeply mysterious organization. Successive governments intended it to be so. The Service, like the rest of the intelligence community, was to stay as far from public view as possible. The historian Sir Michael Howard declared in 1985: 'So far as official government policy is concerned, the British security and intelligence services do not exist. Enemy agents are found under gooseberry bushes and intelligence is brought by the storks.' The past as well as present of the Security Service remained officially taboo. Even at the end of the Cold War, staff could scarecely have imagined that the Service would mark its hundredth birthday in 2009 by publishing this Centenary History."
Andrew is professor of modern and contemporary history, and former chair of the faculty of history at Cambridge University. He has written 14 previous books, including a number of groundbreaking studies on the use and abuse of secret intelligence in modern history.
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