- Hardcover: 880 pages
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster Ltd; 1st Free Press Ed edition (8 Jun 2000)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0743203798
- ISBN-13: 978-0743203791
- Product Dimensions: 23.4 x 16.5 x 5.1 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 770,119 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Product Description
M16, Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, is one of the great information-gathering organizations of the world, internationally renowned as the employer of the mythical but emblematic James Bond. Yet it has remained one of the nation's most elusive organizations. Its head, Richard Dearlove, is virtually unknown -- a contemporary photograph has never appeared in the press -- and even its true budget is not made public. There is no legal "right to know" what is undertaken abroad in the name of Britain's security, what it costs or how it is run. In the past, any dissident reports of its operations were effectively quashed. To write about M16 risks harassment and prosecution, as former members and current commentators know to their cost, and the organization has remained veiled from scrutiny. Its inside story has never been told. Until now.
Stephen Dorril, a meticulous observer and chronicler of the security services, provides a full fifty-year history for the first time, offering the most complete portrait ever of M16's motives and character and, crucially, what it has done and where it has been most influential. At the beginning of the Cold War, Britain was a global power literally dividing up the world. By 1992, influence abroad had been lost in the Middle East, most of Africa and large swathes of Asia. Even in Europe, Britain seemed exiled and isolated. What had M16 been doing? M16's postwar activities were mired in prewar attitudes and practices, at home in the exclusive clubs of Pall Mall but poorly suited to a retreating post-imperial power. Britain's management of the Cold War was in the itching hands of a mixture of frustrated former members of the wartime SpecialOperations Executive, desperate for active military engagements, anxious reactionaries and a few socialist devotees for whom communism was the future and spying the career of choice.
This is the first operational history of M16, the first look at the organization in action. With a level of detail unparalleled in the annals of British intelligence, Dorril chronicles the fascinating history from 1949 to the current day. Replete with tales of its most spectacular failures, stirring successes, unsavory plots and bizarre missions, the real-life cloak-and-dagger world is exposed. From the grisly truth about Operation Stalin, which exploited the Russian dictator's paranoia and led to the execution of thousands, to the tunnel M16 dug beneath the Berlin wall to the recruitment methods, training programs and space-age gadgetry of the modern spy, this definitive history has it all.
M16 is a vital, essential arm of the British state. It is Britain's player at the chessboard of international intelligence-gathering and a key partner to America's superpower status. Dorril's is a searching story of the characters and situations in which the games have been played, from the back streets of Aden to the Brandenburg Gate, the mountains of Albania to the shores of the Black Sea. This is a discreet and riveting history of half a century of international political intriguing, spying and thuggery -- all in the name of intelligence.
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First Sentence
Where the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), Major-General Sir Stewart Menzies (pronounced 'Mingiss'), celebrated 'Victory in Europe' (VE) day is not known, but it is more than likely that he was standing at the bar of White's Club in St James's where much of the informal business of intelligence work was still undertaken. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
Where the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), Major-General Sir Stewart Menzies (pronounced 'Mingiss'), celebrated 'Victory in Europe' (VE) day is not known, but it is more than likely that he was standing at the bar of White's Club in St James's where much of the informal business of intelligence work was still undertaken. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
13 of 41 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
I thought this book was not as acurate as could be and showed a very different view of waht the secret service is like. I believe a British civil servasnt would have told it from a differebt angle, however this view of the the secret service was very new, modern and refreshing. This would be an invaluble asset to students of British politics and administrative law.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
8 reviews
28 of 33 people found the following review helpful
Well written and subtle propaganda.
3 Sep 2001
Format:Hardcover
I read Stephen Dorril's account with some dismay. Far from a balanced treatment of MI6's impact on the Cold War, Dorril drops one suggestion after another pointing at the West as instigator of the Cold War. Amazingly, Dorrill treats the presence of Philby, McClean and other Soviet spies in MI6 as normal, as if a diversity of views should take precendence over the destructive effect Philby had on MI6/CIA activity and morale.
This book portrays the Soviets as "victims" of Western treachery or buffoonery, a thesis that is itself a nice work of propaganda.
Nevertheless, Dorril presents events that are factual, albeit framed to suit his goal of painting MI6 as a prime cause of the Cold War. Dorril frequently omits relevant information about similar or related Soviet activity, and selectively quotes protagonists to place them in the worst possible light. He has little to say about Soviet concentration camp atrocities (which spanned two decades) or Russian political intimidation and murder in Eastern Europe after the Second World War -- facts that inconveniently undermine his thesis.
This book portrays the Soviets as "victims" of Western treachery or buffoonery, a thesis that is itself a nice work of propaganda.
Nevertheless, Dorril presents events that are factual, albeit framed to suit his goal of painting MI6 as a prime cause of the Cold War. Dorril frequently omits relevant information about similar or related Soviet activity, and selectively quotes protagonists to place them in the worst possible light. He has little to say about Soviet concentration camp atrocities (which spanned two decades) or Russian political intimidation and murder in Eastern Europe after the Second World War -- facts that inconveniently undermine his thesis.
12 of 14 people found the following review helpful
Factoid Pigout
5 July 2004
Format:Hardcover
Stephen Dorril's humungous (800+pages) history of the U.K.'s foreign intelligence service has a limited value. But for seekers of factual accuracy, reading this book takes care. I examined this volume mainly for its treatment of one of MI6's earlier Cold War adventures - Valuable: the effort to dump Albania's Enver Hoxha. Dorril's fairly thorough account is littered with errors and misinterpretations, i.e. naming Xhafer Deva, a World War II collaborator with Nazi Germany, as a member of a Free Albania Committee set up in the U.S. Deva never fit with the MI6-CIA affiliated FAC set up in Rome and New York. Dorril links directly episodes which, in actual time, were months or years apart, i.e. describing relations of the FAC and Assembly of Captive European Nations; the CIA set up the latter after the Truman administration's "containment" doctrine was dumped. Lest one think this is nitpicking, remember that all these factoids added togther as errors or accuracies can influence a book's value. If one episode is ridden with mistakes, why would one trust that the author's other episodes are any more reliable? Dorril ends most of his paragraphs with a footnote that usually includes multiple sources for what he writes in the paragraph. Far too many footnotes for this book to be a fun read. It is best used by a serious student of espionage who also has other sources on his desk.
20 of 27 people found the following review helpful
brilliant
1 July 2000
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
A most wonderful book.You won't have the chance of being bored even for one second.Every page is a blockbuster.Meticulously researched and -I believe-the first of its kind in depth of analysis.It will surely be the reference book on the subject for years to come.John Le Carre, you are having a heavy contestant in your field.
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