Home >> About Corpus >> News >> Professor Christopher Andrew (m1959) unveils history of MI5
Professor Christopher Andrew (m1959) unveils history of MI5

October 2009 is the centenary of the founding of the British Security Service M15.  To mark the occasion, Professor Christopher Andrew, President of Corpus and Professor of History, was given exclusive access to the Service’s files and archives in order to produce an authorised history of the intelligence agency.

The book, “The Defence of the Realm” (from regnum defende, the Security Service's motto) is the first official history of MI5 and uses the organisation's own secret records to tell its story from 1909 to the present day.

For most of its history the Security Service (MI5) has seemed to outsiders a deeply mysterious organisation. Successive governments intended it to be so. The Service, like the rest of the intelligence community, was told 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.’ Even at the end of the Cold War, MI5 staff could scarcely have imagined that the Service would mark its centenary in October this year by publishing an authorised history of its first hundred years, "The Defence of the Realm" (published by Allen Lane/Penguin in the UK and by Knopf in the USA).

 

 

Reviews:

 ‘This unique publication is definitive and fascinating. Definitive because, after decades of ill-informed or partial accounts this book fully defines and describes its subject; no future writer can ignore it. Fascinating because the fluent clarity of Andrew’s narrative, his eye for colourful individual detail and the sheer interest of his subjects, whether reporting on Hitler in the 1930s, the Double-Cross System of the second world war, Zionist terrorism, the atom spies, the Cambridge spies, the so-called Wilson plot of the 1988 shooting of the IRA bombers in Gibraltar … will delight the specialist and general reader alike … this book is essential reading for anyone with even the slightest interest in intelligence in the modern period’
Alan Judd, Spectator

‘A scholarly and hugely entertaining account … often enthralling … Professor Andrew is an entertaining and authoritative guide through the labyrinth of secret files, with an infectious fascination for the game of counter-espionage … an important part of Andrew’s achievement is to narrate with clarity an incredibly complex story in which bizarre and improbable reality often outruns the most rococo fabrications of the spy novelist … the reader is left in no doubt that the defence of the realm is being vigorously conducted by the secret state with all the extraordinary powers at its command’
Robert McCrum (Corpus 1972), Observer

‘MI5 is the first major security or intelligence service in the world to give a historian free range of its records – nearly 400,000 paper files, some with many volumes, say Christopher Andrew with a touch of exhaustion … it has been well worth the effort. The Defence of the Realm throws new light on an important area of the running of the country, analysing the changing threats to national security over the 100 years and discussing the appropriateness or otherwise of the service’s response. But just as interestingly, the book gets inside the culture of this secret service, showing how attitudes have changed with those changing threats; how woman have worked their way from the fringes to the heart of the organisation and how a sense of humour has always been important. It will be enthusiastically scrutinised by historians, intelligence buffs and conspiracy theorists …. [there are] anecdotes and operational details as gripping as any thriller’
Stella Rimington, Financial Times.

‘The British Secret Service has opened its archives – and even ‘insiders’ may be in for a surprise … Andrew’s magisterial study is an authorised, but not official, history and is clearly written, brilliantly organised and extremely readable, not least because of something he shares with many of MI5’s staff over the past hundred years – a sense of humour … Although I know quite a lot about the organisation, I learnt much that was new to me, and I would commend it to all those who are interested in recent and contemporary history. The author of the forthcoming authorised history of MI6 has a very hard act to follow’
Oleg Gordievsky, The Times

‘To mark the centenary, the service took the unprecedented step of inviting Christopher Andrew, Cambridge historian and doyen of intelligence chroniclers, to write an authorised history. The outcome is weighty, measured and compelling … with this book, the author has done a formidably good job for both the service and the public interest … I find it hard to disbelieve much he asserts or denies … his narrative offers a feast for students and politics’
Max Hastings, Sunday Times

‘A ripping read and just the kind of work one would hope for from a well-qualified academic who has been given the run of MI5’s treasure-trove of files. It is scrupulously documented, covering both the glory days of war, when MI5’s deception operations outsmarted Hitler, and the later nightmare penetrations by the double agent Kim Philby and friends, in which the KGB thoroughly outsmarted the British … Dramatically, it is confirmed that there was indeed a secret Wilson MI5 file, under the pseudonym ‘Worthington’ …. There is more’
David Leigh, Guardian

‘The book covers everything from the agency’s origins 100 years ago as a shoestring outfit hunting German spies to the duping of the Nazis during the second world war, the scandals and successes of the intrigues against the Soviet Union and, latterly, the counter-terrorist campaigns first against the IRA and then against Jihadist suicide bombers … It is a striking experiment in openness’
Economist

‘Professor Andrew’s account is magisterial, authoritative, balanced, readable and, particularly in the first half, full of wry humour and with an eye for the absurd. Andrew shows himself to be in command of his vast amount of material and be able to fashion it into a coherent narrative which is as comfortable with MI5’s organisational structure and development and relations with Whitehall as with individual cases and personalities … MI5 has been well-served by this history and so have future historians, Service staff and the public in general’ 
Andrew Lownie, Sunday Telegraph

‘The thousand pages of this book are brimming with some wonderful details … The Defence of the Realm is a valuable and important contribution to our understanding of the 20th century’
Susan Williams, Independent

‘Andrew’s scholarship is meticulous and extensive. He deals at length with MI5’s role in the decolonisation process in the Fifties and Sixties, something little known and still less appreciated. He also gives a superb account of the Service’s role in the struggle against IRA terrorism, casting new light on the Gibraltar shootings. There is a tantalising section on MI5’s role in the battle against organised crime, especially drug trafficking; but that now seems to be taking second place to the Service’s counter-terrorism activities, in the wake of September 11 2001. MI5 could not have wanted a better historian than him. He has captured every important detail of the Service, but also its ethos and its place in our country as an institution. This book is unlikely to be surpassed for another 100 years, and until then will be the necessary starting point for anyone who wants to know what, exactly, MI5 is’
Simon Heffer (Corpus 1979), Telegraph
 
 

 

< Prev   Next >