Demystifying the world of espionage

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.