Intelligence and ‘Official History’

Abstract

The extraordinary expansion of contemporary and historical intelligence studies since the mid-1970s has been both reflected and stimulated by developments in government policy, as well as academic initiative. On the government side – and we are confining ourselves here to the situation within the United Kingdom – there are two main aspects to this. First, there is the commissioning and writing of ‘Official Histories’; and, second, the release of documents. One rationale for the UK government's Official History programme is ‘to provide authoritative histories in their own right; [and] a reliable secondary source for historians until all the records are available in The National Archives’. We are not, however, going to discuss in any detail the release of intelligence records – which gained significant momentum after the Waldegrave Initiative on Open Government of 1993 – or the general writing of Official Histories – about which there is a slim literature – but, rather, the place of intelligence-related matters in the genre. Our aim in this essay is to review the place of intelligence in post-Second World War Official Histories (and some analogous productions) and the current ‘state of the art’, as represented by the recent Official (or ‘authorised’) Histories of the Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS).