Rodric Braithwaite

Demystifying the world of espionage

There’s nothing glamorous about spying, but much hard work and imagination — and derision when it fails, says David Omand

An aerial view of GCHQ, Cheltenham. Credit: Getty Images

John le Carré once wrote sadly that he felt ‘shifty’ about his contribution to the glamorisation of the spying business.

David Omand doesn’t deal in glamour. He was at the top of the Ministry of Defence and the Home Office, director of the code-braking Government Communications Headquarters, chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, and responsible for structuring the government’s current anti-terrorist organisation. He thinks and writes deeply about the intellectual and moral problems thrown up by a business that depends on stealing other people’s secrets. He knows what he is talking about.

How Spies Think is engagingly readable, even though the arguments are complex. It aims, ambitiously, ‘to empower ordinary people to take better decisions by learning how intelligence analysts think’. It is no use gathering secrets, even by the most ingenious means, Omand maintains, unless you can assemble them into a useful whole. It is the end product that matters, not the the adventures of the secret agents of fact and fiction — the Philbys, the Bonds, even the unglamorous Smileys. It is the intelligence analysts, boring people working in scruffy offices, who are the key to the whole business. It is they who put together the coherent picture on which — with luck —their bosses will base their decisions.

The analysts need accurate, reliable and timely information. But their raw material is rarely either plain or simple. More often it is incomplete, ambiguous and self-contradictory. Sometimes our spies on the ground are actually working for the other side and feed us information deliberately to mislead. Sometimes they are working for nobody but themselves, and invent stuff in order to attract reward. Omand explains how the analysts try to avoid the traps. And he issues two general warnings, from which the rest of us can indeed learn.

Our instinct is to believe what our group believes, and, alas, to tell our bosses what they want to hear

The first ought to be obvious.

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