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The Second Oldest Profession: Spies and Spying in the Twentieth Century
 
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The Second Oldest Profession: Spies and Spying in the Twentieth Century (Paperback)

by Phillip Knightley (Author)
5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)

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Product details

  • Paperback: 516 pages
  • Publisher: Pimlico; 2nd New edition of Revised edition edition (6 Nov 2003)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 1844130916
  • ISBN-13: 978-1844130917
  • Product Dimensions: 23 x 15.2 x 3.8 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 499,382 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Review
" If Reagan, Gorbachev, Thatcher and Mitterand only manage one book this year, they could do a lot worse than pick up Phillip Knightley' s." -- John le Carre

Product Description
Intelligence is very big business with a very rich history, told here by a master historian. The big question is, 'Did the actions of spies such as Sorge, Donovan or Angleton and their masters make any difference at all in the course of history?'

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The Second Oldest Profession: Spies and Spying in the Twentieth Century
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The Second Oldest Profession: Spies and Spying in the Twentieth Century 5.0 out of 5 stars (1)
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Mirrors, imbecilities, blunders and failures, 16 Jan 2006
By Luc REYNAERT (Beernem, Belgium) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   
Phillip Knightley's book is a frontal attack against the intelligence business.
He poses the rhetoric question: 'Is there a justification for expensive, virtually incontrollable intelligence agencies in peace time?'
'The secrecy which surrounds them, corrodes a democratic society, contracts our civil liberties ... They spend more time protecting their budgets and their establishments and invent new justifications for their existence.'
For the author, 'open, published information and that obtained through traditional contacts have proved more useful.'

He illustrates his thesis profusely with examples where nobody trusts and believes nobody. Even specialized authors can only give hypotheses about what really went on: the Hollis affair, the Penkovsky - Nosenko - Golitsyn defections, the Sorge spy ring (Stalin didn't believe Sorge when he cabled the exact date of the Barbarossa invasion), the Lucy spy ring, the Kim Philby affair (discovered only after nearly 30 years).

Intelligence agencies have become wellsprings of power in our society, secret clubs for the privileged. Their cost is prohibitive, but the powerful are ready to protect their privileges at any cost ... for the entire population.
If democratic regimes constitute a threat for their holdings (mostly oil) or their credo (no distributive taxation), intelligence services will intervene. Some of these interventions were highly effective indeed (the PM Wilson affair in Great-Britain, Indonesia, Guatemala, the Philippines, Colombia, the Shah's Iran), at least in the short run. In the long run, they turn whole populations against the US.

That 'any global group of this size must be intensely concerned with its survival', can be illustrated by the fate of President Kennedy, who wanted to 'splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.'
The culprits behind the assassination are clearly exposed in Gregory Douglas's book 'Regicide', based on the memoirs of CIA chief Angleton, one of the main characters in this book.

Although written before the fall of the Berlin Wall, this is still a very topical book about 'freedom and democracy' in the world. It reads like a thriller.
It contains also certain corrections on the author's former book 'The Philby Conspiracy'.

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