The Franks Report is an extraordinary document. On a rapid first reading-all that was possible in the immediate debate which followed its publication in January 1983-it exonerates the government in office from all blame. A more leisured re-reading, some months later, provides a very different perspective. The report's often-quoted conclusion (para. 339) that '. . . we would not be justified in attaching any criticism or blame to the present government for the Argentine Junta's decision to commit its act of unprovoked aggression in the invasion of the Falkland Islands on 2 April 1982' (italics added) must be balanced against the indications, scattered throughout the report, that a confrontation of some sort, quite probably military, was already considered highly likely at some point during that year. What criticism there is of the British government is directed most clearly at the Joint Intelligence Organization (paras 316-19). Yet the Report carries repeated evidence that Britain's intelligence-gathering machinery worked well throughout the years, months and weeks before the invasion, and that accurate assessments of the shifting situation were available to ministers at all times. One must conclude, as Professor Bill Mackenzie concluded of the Plowden Report, that we are faced with a coded document, and that cryptographic skills are needed to read between the lines. The report is a major document for students of foreign policy in several respects. For the first time, so far as I am aware, the British government has lifted the cujrtain of secrecy surrounding its intelligence apparatus, and outlined its structure in print. The Joint Intelligence Committee UIC), the Current Intelligence Groups which prepare assessments for the JIC, the Assessments Staff which services them and provides their chairmen: all appear in the report, and are briefly described in Annex B. The Cabinet's Defence Committee, its core membership, the frequency of its meetings, are all admitted; and the student of foreign policy-making can gain a good sense of the flow of memoranda around Whitehall, the relationship between Cabinet ministers and junior ministers, and much else. The substance of the report is of course more important than the insights it gives on the process of British government; unless we conclude that: 'Unluckily, it turns out that the real problem is about the nature of government in general, and of British government in particular. This is what we are discussing, but of course we have to wrap it up in Mandarin prose.'2 The key to the code, perhaps, is to juxtapose the careful phraseology of para. 339 with the injunction in the Committee's terms of reference to take account not only of the immediate weeks before the invasion but 'of all such factors in previous years as are relevant', and to observe that the report's more general conclusions-which are far more critical-are to be found in paras 278-92. These present a much more sobering picture of the drift of British policy from 1977 to 1982: of a succession of 'signals that could be read by Argentina as evidence of diminishing British interest in protecting its sovereignty in the area' (para. 279), of 'other British policies which may have served to cast doubt on British commitment to the Islands and their defence' (para. 280), of repeated but inconclusive discussions with Argentina 'in which the negotiating options were progressively eliminated' (para. 282), 'against the background of a general belief [within the intelligence agencies, the Foreign and