Military and diplomatic historians are
realizing they made a mistake not taking into account the key role played by
intelligence. Spies are certainly referred to, but with disdain. The comment by
US Secretary of State Henry Stimson under Herbert Hoover set the tone for
modern scholars: “Gentlemen don’t read other people’s mail.” He then proceeded
to ax what little code-breaking and intelligence-gathering the US relied on at
the time.
Thank God we learned to anyway, but not until
World War II. We honed the craft as the Cold War raged on for 75 years — or we
could be speaking German or Russian today. We ended up learning the importance
of spying from the British, who organized intelligence gathering in 1909. By
1941, they achieved the most dramatic example of the critical role of secret
information in the modern era.
Ultra, the operation that decrypted and
read German army and naval codes, provided the extra edge the Brits had to have
to stand alone against Germany from 1939 until the US entered the fray in 1942.
Ultra — the secret name for the herculean task of breaking the German Enigma
code — was kept secret until the early 1980s, another achievement of note. None
of the hundreds of people involved gave away the secret.
After the declassification of Ultra in
1980, it became obvious the history of the most cataclysmic event in human
existence had to be re-written. The same principle applies to the Cold War, and
will apply again when historians unravel the current conflicts in Iraq and
Afghanistan.
But there is a major difference. At the
conclusion of the Cold War in 1991, fewer restrictions were placed on the
relevant data that continue to stream into the light of day as we approach the
second decade of the 21st century. Instead of waiting around in the
dark for 40 years as was the case with the declassification of Ultra, scholars
and researchers were provided a glimpse of Soviet Comintern and Communist Party
archives and files immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union.
The access was brief. The new Russian
government closed off the files after a year. But in a dramatic and surprising
move, the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency
announced NSA (under a different name) had been intercepting and decrypting
telegraph messages from Moscow to American Soviet agents beginning in 1942 and
stretching into the 1960s.
The NSA decrypts, code-named Venona,
uncovered that the Soviets orchestrated the deepest infiltration of a foreign
government in recorded history — the US. Throw in personal memoirs, a
continuing torrent of newly declassified material and it is clear no one really
knows anything until someone declassifies something.
But there is one more significant figure in
the narrative of Cold War revelations: Christopher Andrew, professor of modern
and contemporary history at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Andrew was the
first noted scholar to recognize the critical role of intelligence in
untangling history. Before him, spies were relegated to the fiction shelves as
historians continued to ignore the subject.
In 1985, he penned Her Majesty’s Secret Service, focusing on World War I declassified
material. The major breakthrough for Andrew occurred in 1987 when Britain’s
Secret Intelligence Service approached him to co-write a book with KGB colonel
and British double agent Oleg Gordievsky — considered the most important spy of
the Cold War era.
The book, KGB: The Inside Story, appeared in 1991 and represents a watershed
in intelligence revelations. In the mid-’90s, Andrew was recruited once again,
this time to write the Mitrokhin Archive,
two volumes — published in 1999 and 2005 — relying on 25,000 typed pages
transcribed from firsthand notes surreptitiously smuggled from the KGB archives
by KGB Col. Vasili Mitrokhin.
Andrew, author of 14 books and chairman of
the British Intelligence Study Group, transformed modern history by elevating
intelligence to the forefront of events where it belongs. His efforts helped
set off an avalanche of declassified materials that will have scholars
re-assessing what we thought we knew for decades to come.
Andrew’s achievements also led to the most
significant action ever taken by a spy agency, the publication of Defend the Realm, the historic,
authorized history of MI5, Britain’s secret Security Service, published in the
US in November 2009. Never before has any nation’s spy service permitted an
individual access to its secret files.
Andrew, who was sworn in as an MI5 officer,
insisted on permission to view all secret documents, even if some of the
information could not be included in the book. This allowed Andrew a complete
picture, and provides the public for the first time with an in-depth view of
the operations of a secret intelligence service.
Andrew arranged to appear in Raleigh during
the US tour for Defend the Realm. The
large audience crowded Quail Ridge Books in November, and 50 guests paid
tribute at a dinner that evening at the famous Angus Barn steak house.
Attendees at both events were treated to an entertaining and informative talk
by the man who personally changed history.
NOTES
FROM LA-LA LAND
Political
nomenclature is changing as pundits struggle to identify the
coup d’état orchestrated by the Obama administration. Columnist Charles
Krauthammer, one of the few reliable commentators on the political scene,
simply calls Obama operatives socialists. Former presidential candidate and
magazine publisher Steve Forbes uses the term neo-socialists. David Horowitz,
the former Student Movement communist and chief of the conservative
Frontpagemag.com online magazine, says the term Progressives — often borrowed
by Obama cadres — is the word the old socialists and communists coined to cloak
their operations. All agree the word Liberal, pilfered by the Left to add cover
to their leftist and collective activities, no longer applies in light of the
revolution unfolding before our eyes.
•
• • •
It is hardly a surprise global warming advocates have cooked
the numbers, as divulged via 1079 e-mails and 72 documents made public from the
computer files of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in
the UK. As far back as 2001 in this space I wrote of Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish
ecologist who discovered that the source documents for the modern environmental
movement were suspect. For his trouble, he was hauled in front of a tribunal of
his academic “peers” to prove his case. He did, but he has been ostracized and
marginalized for telling the truth: the real color of the green movement is
red.