Intelligence in War: The Value--And Limitations--Of What the Military Can Learn About the Enemy (58 page)

Hinsley, F. H. and Thripp, Alan, eds.
Codebreakers: The Inside Story of Bletchley Park,
Oxford, 1993. A fascinating collection of thirty-one essays by B. P. initiates, on such varied subjects as how the watch system worked and the building of the famous huts. An essential companion to Hinsley’s official history.

Howard, Michael.
British Intelligence in the Second World War.
Vol. 5,
Strategic Deception.
London, 1990. The last volume of Hinsley’s great work, by Britain’s leading military historian of the twentieth century, is a fascinating account of British efforts to deceive the enemy, with mixed results but some success against Germany’s secret weapons campaign.

James, William.
The Eyes of the Navy: A Biographical Study of Admiral Sir Reginald Hall.
London, 1955. Admiral Hall, known as “Blinker” in the Royal Navy because of a nervous facial tic, was the founder of the immensely successful intelligence organisation known as O.B. 40 (Old Building Room 40), by which the Admiralty achieved complete intelligence dominance over its German equivalent during the First World War. Its achievements were later compromised by boastful disclosure of its successes, particularly in cryptanalysis, in the interwar years.

Jones, R. V.
The Wizard War: British Scientific Intelligence 1939–45.
London, 1978. Jones, a young scientific civil servant, came to enjoy the favour of Winston Churchill during the Battle of Britain and afterwards because of his discovery of how the Luftwaffe used radio beams to guide its bombers to British targets. The “man who broke the beams” thereafter rose ever higher in the service, eventually outfacing Lord Cherwell in the dispute over the V-weapons threat in 1944. His account of scientific intelligence is one of the war’s most valuable personal stories, though it fails to disclose why he fell into obscurity after 1945.

Kahn, David.
The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing.
Rev. ed. New York, 1996. Kahn’s book is a veritable encyclopaedia of cryptanalysis, superior to any other publication in the field. The original edition was published before the disclosure of the Enigma secret; the revised edition repairs the deficiency. Its great length (1,181 pages) and density will deter the casual reader but it repays the effort to persist.

Kahn, David.
Hitler’s Spies: German Military Intelligence in World War II.
New York, 1978. The title is a misnomer. The book is a study of how the German military intelligence organisation worked in the field and is a rare example of an effort, by an expert, to relate intelligence inputs to operational outcomes.

Lewin, Ronald.
Ultra Goes to War.
London, 1978. Lewin’s book, published four years after Winterbotham’s
Ultra Secret
(1974), which first disclosed the Bletchley secret, was an attempt to correct its more serious mistakes and to set the Ultra achievement in a wider context. It remains a valuable account of the Bletchley story.

Masterman, J. C.
The Double-Cross System in the Second World War.
London, 1972. Masterman, an Oxford don who became Provost of Worcester College after the war, chaired the Double-Cross (XX) Committee during its course, a body dedicated to manipulating information so as to mislead the enemy. Its most important work was in deluding the Germans about the success of their secret weapons campaign during 1944–45.

McLachlan, Donald.
Room 39: A Study in Naval Intelligence.
London, 1968. Although published before the disclosure of the Ultra secret, and so able to refer to Bletchley only as “Station X,” this has been described as “one of the best books on intelligence ever written.” It is an account of the workings of the Naval Intelligence Division, by one of its officers, during the Second World War.

Powers, Thomas.
The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA.
New York, 1979. A biography of the Director of Central Intelligence, 1966–72, under Presidents Johnson and Nixon, by a Pulitzer Prize winner, which is also a history
of the CIA from its earliest years. Cool in tone and objective in approach, it
provides a wealth of information about not only intelligence procedures and operations but also about the influence of intelligence on policy and decision making.

Sweet-Escott, Bickham.
Baker Street Irregular.
London, 1965. Sweet-Escott, like Peter Calvocoressi, a graduate of Balliol College, Oxford, held a large member of staff positions in the SOE and describes its methods and many of its personalities crisply and convincingly.

Trevor-Roper, Hugh.
The Philby Affair: Espionage, Treason and Secret Services.
London, 1968. Trevor-Roper, later Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge, and ennobled as Lord Dacre, knew Philby well and, though himself only a junior intelligence officer, provides a subtle and penetrative portrait of his ex-colleague. The book also includes an essay on Admiral Canais, head of the German Abwehr during the Second World War.

Tuchman, Barbara.
The Zimmermann Telegram.
New York, 1958. This short book made the reputation of the famous American historian. Her account of how the British Admiralty deciphered the Germans’ diplomatic traffic in 1917, so revealing their efforts to persuade Mexico to attack the United States and thus bringing about America’s entry into the First World War on the Allied side, is a masterpiece of intelligence history. Incomplete in part, it nevertheless stands the test of time.

Welchman, Gordon.
The Hut Six Story.
London, 1982. In 1939, Welchman was a mathematics don at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, one of the many recruited to join Bletchley Park at the outbreak of war. He proved highly successful at attacking Enigma and was instrumental in re-organising Bletchley to meet the challenge of all-out war. His book, besides being wholly authoritative, also provides the most comprehensible account of how Enigma worked and how Bletchley progressively broke it. Indispensable.

Winterbotham, F. W.
The Ultra Secret.
London, 1974. Winterbotham, a regular air force officer who had served with the Secret Intelligence Service, was posted to the air section of Bletchley during the war. He apparently got permission to publish this book, the first in English to disclose the Ultra Secret (though it had previously been hinted at by Trevor-Roper), because the government feared the secret was about to be broken by the Poles. Largely written from memory,
The Ultra Secret
contains many errors both of fact and interpretation.

Wohlstetter, R.
Pearl Harbor, Warning and Decision.
Stanford, 1962. Roberta Wohlstetter’s examination of how Japan succeeded in mounting its surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 is meticulous and exhaustive. Her book is widely admired by intelligence experts and, although it is not without its critics, it remains the most valuable study of the preliminaries to the outbreak of the Pacific War.

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Keegan’s books have been best sellers here and in Britain. They include
The First World War, The Battle for History, The Face of Battle, War and Our World, The Mask of Command, Fields of Battle,
and
A History of Warfare.
He is the defence editor of
The Daily Telegraph
(London). He lives in Wiltshire, England.

ALSO BY JOHN KEEGAN

The First World War

The Face of Battle

The Nature of War
(with Joseph Darracott)

World Armies

Who’s Who in Military History
(with Andrew Wheatcroft)

Six Armies in Normandy

Soldiers
(with Richard Holmes)

The Mask of Command

The Price of Admiralty

The Second World War

A History of Warfare

Fields of Battle

The Battle for History

War and Our World:
The Reith Lectures 1998

An Illustrated History of the First World War

Churchill: A Life

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright © 2003 by John Keegan
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by
Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.
www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are
registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Published in Great Britain by Hutchinson, the Random House Group Limited, London.
A portion of this work previously appeared in
Military History Quarterly Magazine.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Keegan, John, [date]
Intelligence in war : knowledge of the enemy from Napoleon to al-Qaeda /
John Keegan.
p. cm.
1. Military intelligence—History. I. Title.
UB
250.
K
44 2003

355.3′432—dc21 2002044828

eISBN: 978-1-4000-4193-0

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