Spies and counter-spies

The origin of this unique publication is the 1990s Waldegrave open government initiative, encouraging departments to reveal more. MI5 began sending its early papers to the National Archive and in 2003 commissioned an outsider to write its history, guaranteeing almost unfettered access to its files. It retained right of veto over the book’s content, but the judgments were to be the writer’s own.

The lucky man — unsurprisingly, given his record as an intelligence historian — was Chris Andrew, Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Cambridge. The result, squeezed into one fat volume, 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 of 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 or the 1988 shooting of the IRA bombers in Gibraltar.