Why Spy?: On the Art of Intelligence

by Brian T.W. Stewart, Samantha Newbery

Why Spy? is the result of Brian Stewart's seventy years of working in, and studying the uses and abuses of, intelligence in the real world. Few books currently available to those involved either as professionals or students in this area have been written by someone like the present author, who has practical experience both of field work and of the intelligence bureaucracy at home and abroad. It relates successes and failures via case studies, and draws conclusions that should be pondered by all those concerned with the limitations and usefulness of the intelligence product, as well as with how to avoid the tendency to abuse or ignore it when its conclusions do not fit with preconceived ideas. It reminds the reader of the multiplicity of methods and organisations and the wide range of talents making up the intelligence world. The co-author, scholar Samantha Newbery, examines such current issues as the growth of intelligence studies in universities, and the general emphasis
throughout the volume is on the necessity of embracing a range of sources, including police, political, military and overt, to ensure that secret intelligence is placed in as wide a context as possible when decisions are made.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics

288 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2015

About the author

Brian Thomas Webster Stewart was a British soldier, colonial official, diplomat and the second-most senior officer in the British Secret Intelligence Service. He fought in the Second World War, played an influential role in the Malayan Emergency, then served as British Consul-General in Shanghai on the eve of the cultural revolution, as British Representative to North Vietnam during the Vietnam War, and as the Director of Technical Services and Assistant Chief of the MI6 from 1974 to 1979.

Reviews

[Enrico · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this book, I found a discrete, but rather general idea of what secret operations are.
Although the more interesting part is the central one, full of definitions and concepts the closing chapters take a more specialized look at more niche things or specific events.
Overall the part I enjoyed less was the first where the personal experiences of the authors are told which are all in all interesting and consequential for the following explanations. Still, I ended up finding them rather lacking in expository virtue in the scope of the book.
It is evident that the author is extremely knowledgeable in the field and had the time to gather a great amount of experience anyway details about the Malaya Crisis may appear disjoint until later in the book.

[Christian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short and to the point introduction on intelligence work. Going from personal experiences of the author to definitions of certain key concepts, moral implications and general methods. Worth highlighting is the section on ethics, if only just because a former professional gives us his two cents about it, naturally diverging from the general public consensus in western societies. The rest, apart from the short autobiographical notes, is common knowledge, like methods of intelligence collection, certain well known operations etc.

[Patrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this up out of the library because the blurb caught my eye - in particular the reference to the author's "seventy years of working in intelligence." And while he never states his age, he can't be far off a hundred years old now. There is something at first a touch discombobulating about reading someone relate about the relevance of espionage to their experiences in tank battles during the D-Day landings and then start speculating about how the failure to correctly understand the mindset of one's adversary goes some way to explaining why the west failed to foresee Vladimir Putin's interference (if invasion is too strong a word) in eastern Ukraine earlier this year. Certainly, Brian Stewart's the length personal experience of the world of espionage must be about as great as the human lifespan allows though he was not, as a tank commander, involved in a spying role in the World War 2, he does find himself in such a role just a few years later in Malaya and while he claims to have retired in 1998, he would appear still to take a more than passing interest in developments in his field.

Having said that, this book is not a personal memoir so much as a 'beginner's guide' to what is actually involved in spying, the various forms it can take. Stewart mixes examples from his own professional life with those from history, quoting liberally from Sun Tzu and Machiavelli and citing the Trojan Horse myth as the earliest example of a deception operation. As a general summary of the different forms that spying can take, it's quite well put together though I don't know what I don't know, and I'm not sure I actually learned anything genuinely new that I hadn't sort of picked up from reading John le Carre novels and Guardian articles about the Edward Snowden affair...

...Which brings me to the things I found a bit frustrating about the book. Stewart is fairly summarily dismissive of the concerns that Snowden was trying to highlight and appears to regard him as little more than a foolish traitor to his country (though he says so little on the affair that it's not impossible I'm misrepresenting the author's views). It's not that I'm necessarily on Snowden's side on the issue, or necessarily convinced that the advantages of mass surveillance (or, strictly speaking, the mass collection of data) don't outweigh the potential for abuse. It's more that the author doesn't even seem to consider the possibility that rogue elements within the intelligence services could abuse such a power to subvert democracy, or just to pursue a grudge against personal enemies. If he'd shown signs of having thought about the arguments and set out why we should set them aside, I'd be more inclined to give the security services the benefit of the doubt. That said, perhaps his attitudes simply reflect the private frustrations of someone who fought on the Western Front in World War 2, dealt with murderous Communist terrorists in Malaya in the 50s, came up close and personal with Maoism in China in the 60s and finds concerns about internet snooping something of a liberal indulgence. Something which might explain his slightly ambivalent attiude towards the use of torture too.

I couldn't help thinking that the four or five pages he dedicated to the thorny question of assassination (his summary: UK agents don't have a licence to kill. At least in peace time. Others may not be so concerned with such niceties) deserved a more in-depth treatment. On the other hand, his exploration of the difference between simple intelligence gathering and what one does with that information was very well written. Facts are one thing. Intentions are another. He suggests that American intelligence analysts underestimated the Vietcong during the Vietnam wae because they made the mistake of 'mirror-imaging' – assuming that the Vietcong would think as they did and give up on account of being so vastly outgunned – underestimating the advantages of irregular forces on home territory, and the nationalist desire to get the foreigners out of their country. And he's good, too, on the Iraq war 'weapons of mass destruction' affair, where the problem appeared to be that the intelligence services got drawn into the role of media management and cajoled into saying rather more than they would have wanted to.

Not a perfect book by any means, I do wonder if Stewart, who must be well into his 90s by now, might lack the mental energy to write something lengthier and more in-depth, but as a tour of the field from someone with – if the dust jacket's claim is accurate – 70 years' experience to draw on, it's a good read.