How the Lead Role in Strategic Intelligence Passed from Asia to the West

okay welcome everyone welcome to the Whitney and Betty Macmillan Centre for International and area studies at Yale my name is Alex Deb's and I'm an associate professor here in the political science department and normally Ian Shapiro the director of the mechanoid Center would be introducing the speaker today but unfortunately teaching at this moment at least he can't be here any senses regrets what happening with you but thank you thank you I'm happy to be filling in for him and we're delighted to host Christopher Andrus this year's Henry L Stimson lecturer Christopher Andrew is an emeritus professor of modern and contemporary history at the University of Cambridge he's the founder of the Cambridge intelligence seminar and founding co-editor of intelligence and national security he's also chair of the British intelligence study group and former official historian of the British security service mi5 he's honorary professor at Queen's University Belfast and former visiting professor at Harvard University the University of Toronto and the University of Canberra professor Andrews latest book the secret world a history of intelligence analyzes the period from Moses to Putin and it's the basis for his lectures this week his previous books on the use and abuse of intelligence including the sword and the shield the world was going our way and defend the realm have appeared on bestseller lists on four continents professor andrew is here to give three lectures on the lost history of global intelligence and why it matters today is the first of the three and it's titled how the lead role in strategic intelligence passed from Asia to the West the next lecture will be tomorrow and it's titled a strange history of American British intelligence relations from George Washington to Donald J Trump and then the third lecture will be on Thursday and it will be entitled Russian intelligence operations and the web from the tsar nicholas ii to vladimir putin and i hope you will join us again for both of them the lord on 4 maps of professor andrew will speak for about an hour and then we'll have a Q&A for 30 minutes so i please ask you to reserve your questions until the Q&A period and when this is when we're done with the Q&A around 6:00 there will be a reception in the common room just behind you let me add the funding for the lecture series comes from an anonymous donor in honor of Henry L Stimson Yale College 1889 an attorney and statement whose government service culminated with his tenure as Secretary of War during World War two since 1988 the Macmillan Center and Yale University Press have collaborated to bring distinguished diplomats and foreign policy experts to the center to lecture under books that are published by the Yale Press without further ado please join me in welcoming Christopher angel let me begin by saying modern honor it is to be giving the Henry L Stimson lectures for many reasons which include the fact that he had access to a more extraordinary set of secrets over an unprecedented period than anybody else just about that I can think of in the history of the United States so it began in his junior year at Yale when he was in Skull and Bones and it didn't even quite end at the end of the Second World War but he was involved in the most terrible single decision ever taken by any world government the decision to explode the world's first atomic bomb so to have the privilege of talking about some of his secrets and what he did with them is something that I highly appreciate so what's the third thing I think to note is about him the way that he dealt with his extraordinary secret I think the first thing is that he changed his mind about these secrets more than any really major figure in American history who ever had access to secrets of this importance so in his diplomatic career he becomes Secretary of State under the Hoover administration the public administration because in 1929 he's confronted with the kind of intelligence which shortens the second world war even though people argue about how much it shortened the the second world war SIGINT as it was called at the time in other words the intelligence derived from intercepting and when necessary decrypting other people's communication what was his attitude to that it was entirely unethical and he insisted that the State Department stop it and it did and he closed down the black chamber not the official name but that's what most people told him and yet when he comes back as Secretary of War under the Roosevelt administration at the beginning of the Second World War what is he enough for as much SIGINT as possible what his diaries which are in the so it's telling library say that the most exciting thing that had ever happened to him whilst the Japanese SIGINT at the beginning of them the Second World War so here we are this is what his library his Diaries as in sterling library he recalled wonderful progress were made by us codebreakers quote I can't even go in my diary go into some of the things that they have done well what couldn't he go into the main thing that he could not go into was these success or in breaking the Japanese diplomatic cipher which the Americans were not the Japanese called purple that of course produced an immediate interdepartmental problem the army wanted sole responsibility for the diplomatic code you know they accepted that the Navy should be able to break if they could which he couldn't at that point their naval codes and vice versa so what was agreed forgive me for putting it like this but the silliest in tight departmental agreement in the entire history of the United States and that is a challenge which I'd be really excited it was somebody can think of a West example so this is the official formula it was agreed after lengthy negotiations that the Army and Navy would exchange all diplomatic traffic from there into facilities so when they got these coded messages they're passing on to the other the army receive all purple traffic of days with an even date two four six eight and so on and the Navy all traffic of days we then odd date one three five seven nine not a very good idea I'm sorry so why did they do this well you know the just about the oldest platitude about learning from the the past and by the way the only way that platitudes get to be platitudes is by being true the about the oldest platitude is only those who understand past mistakes and can learn from them and those who don't are doomed to repeat them so had the history of intelligence people know this idiotic agreement would have been absolutely impossible because the Stimson and the FDR administration would have known that the French tried this a complete chaos the British had tried to complete chaos the Russians have tried it and even worse chaos and the idea that they would have done it again no not even plausible and cause what it course was chaos in the White House as well I mean the the military and the naval a has found it too difficult to swap responsibilities for this every other day so they did it every other month and there's General Edwin Park Watson FDR's military aide but also a close friend who was so confused by the odd to even date Sigmund at 30 starts filing somebody's waste paper basket and he's denied access altogether in July 1941 and there's the the naval aide who could tell the difference between odd numbers and even numbers and so he becomes the sole supplier now what does this produce I mean as usual in history conspiracy theories get from our attention the simple human incompetence but we all know from our professional lives that when something goes badly wrong it is usually because people have been incompetent rather than they've thought of a really interesting conspiracy so here we are sadly to the 6th of December 1941 the Navy makes the original intercept and to its immense annoyance 6 is an even date so it has to hand it over to the army and it does hand it over to the army but the army has no money on Saturdays to get people in the afternoon so they have to hand it to back and then the army does get some money and evening so they cooperate for the first time and all the detail of this by the way I think is so well-established and so many official reports it's simply that the sheer incompetence of Saturday the 6th of December hasn't attracted a fraction of the attention of the non-existent conspiracies of the the sane huh it was the first person to really notice this this man Sherman Kent Yale historian founder of CIA a cold war intelligence assessment and also involved in that in the OSS in World War two and he's the first person to articulate the proposition that there is no future for American intelligence unless it learns from the past and in particular learns from the errors of the past that's what he says and by the way the way the school for intelligence analysis at CIA headquarters where I will be speaking on this American tour is named in his honor so here's my experience but I think it extends to both sides of the Atlantic because this extraordinary intelligence headquarters whose mere existence was kept secret for thirty years after the Second World War but is now the first British intelligence headquarters to become a tourist site Bletchley Park and the scene of the greatest intelligence collaboration between two powers since there were different numbers of powers so beginning my career in Cambridge Christ some years ago because the people who are recruited to Bletchley Park were very young I say we'll talk to them about daily experience I was fascinated by what they knew but in the end I think I was also the first person to be fascinated by what they didn't know now they they brilliant young academics from all kinds of disciplines some of them historians political scientists and so on it didn't occur to any of them by which I mean not a single one that the extraordinary achievements of Bletchley Park had been equalled by previous British codebreakers and terrible moments of national crisis so three times in the last 500 years Britain has faced invasion from forces greater than its own it thought it was about to be invaded by Hitler in 1940 it wasn't but it was a sensible idea that Hitler certainly wanted to but those who broke into his codes and the slightest idea that their early 19th century predecessors had broken Napoleon ciphers during the Peninsular war and as who you bring to Britain as imagine everybody has you can see the marked hello towers that were put up all around the south coast in order to protect us against an invasion which didn't happen I love myself time for that and that's the breaking of the code which you can find in if you have time in the British National Archives and the people who broke napoleon ciphers and the slightest idea the during the the previous main invasion threat and leave out by the way the Glorious Revolution because King Billy William of Orange was invited in so there doesn't care no philip ii of Spain the Spanish Armada of 1588 well philip ii ciphers were broken just as a few hundred years later Napoleon's were and a few hundred years hundred and fifty years after after that Hitler's were so you know because SIGINT sounds a very modern the idea that Franklin Delano Roosevelt understood it better than Queen Elizabeth the first is it's a common idea even though nobody had actually he was nearly as good as Queen Elizabeth first I'm not saying he wasn't better than Queen Elizabeth the first in a number of areas he was but not when it came to code breaking so there we are and the all the detail of how the ciphers were broken by Elizabeth's of his code breaker whose name is pronounced Holland Thomas Phillips but he was rather dyslexic so it's called Felipe's haven't gone toe would know what is a start here is a Code Breaker in the 1580s who is personally complimented by the Queen herself he would not believe in how good part the Queen accepteth of your service she awarded him repent FDR didn't do that absolutely anybody during the longest presidency in the history of the United States I'm lifetime to talk about six days of this but so now we move on to something which I hope apart from being historical significant will also be helpful during your next visit to Venice just about everybody here has been to Venice and if you haven't well there's plenty of time and here are a few things to look at which the guides won't tell you so when does Europe begin to get really good at SIGINT and take the lead from Asia at the beginning of the Renaissance and it has the most beautiful intelligence headquarters in the history of intelligence the United States has never sought to compete and for the most beautiful intelligence and headquarters so and there we are here's what you get shown anyway and here's what you will only get shown if you ask to see so this is where the Council of ten talked about all the official secrets and then if you know you have to ask to see this the secular inquisitors who were supposed to be responsible for state security they could have anybody they wanted to paint the fresco so they got Tintoretto the prodigal son on these ceilings I have been to a most American intelligent list of quarters I've yet to say sorry I don't want to be in the middle in visalia stories written the level of artistic patronage is pathetic sorry I'm Clifford and then they've still got around there just a couple of the blaze dweeb or how do you denounce a traitor in 16th century Venice there's a special letter book look at this fellow where his his mouth is that's where you put the letter denouncing people now I'm against that but the artistic quality is and far higher than the FBI have every reason thought about but this is where you really have to ask what is most original in this extraordinary building it's the world they're Europe's first SIGINT agency which is on the top floor and so there are these cramped rooms which it divided laterally into two which means that in some of their appalling because you can only open the windows of you have access to the both floors at the same time and there's something about code breakers I mean they're they're very they're very modest in their requirements so here is the best code breaking organization in history of the world until that point Bletchley Park and they put in missing hearts and you know when the United States somewhat later has far more you know if there is an ugly I'm sorry if I mustn't get carried away if there is an uglier intelligence headquarters in the entire history of intelligence headquarters I would be jolly surprised and I do not expect I do not expect to be surprised now i'ma go time for him haven't got time for him but what's extraordinary is that the Venetians who think that they are well ahead particularly of anything that the Ottomans could do it's complete nonsense their major theoretical breakthrough is exactly the same has been as had been made by the Baghdad House of Wisdom in the the ninth century and here's a man because there's no like a real likeness al-kindi and this is his crucial text but the problem from the point of view of Islam is that from the moment that the Ottomans become the main Muslim power from the moment that they take constant level they can't be doing with all this so they throw his stuff away and it has not discovered again till 1987 my book contains details which library to look at if you won't have a look at the the original and of course there's also absolutely no idea that Mohammed on both of the basically evidence that I'm about to summarize had a far better grasp of intelligence then any secular over that mountain on secular European leader in the Middle Ages so this book the sealed nectar is the best-selling Muslim biography of Muhammad and it describes him as as as to the others the greatest military leader in the entire wealth which for the non faithful is obviously debatable but according to the conventional version he fights twenty-seven battles he instigates about fifty armed raids playing clothes at Ellen in attention to military intelligence now you don't find that in Quran obviously but because the Quran is about the message not the messenger but if you look in the hadith which record his deeds and saying there is more intelligence there than you will find in any medieval text about a Western leader so all these needs paying some attention to but nowadays they're badly only people who pay attention to it are the Islamists so here is a typical al-qaeda training manual which you find on the web if you want to the Prophet Allah bless him and keep him had a local informants in Mecca who told him everything big and small that my harm the Muslims welfare right well the problem is the Ottoman Empire the Ottoman Empire is a great power the greatest matter is Mediterranean power but it despises in intellectual innovation so after their conquest of continental Constantinople the Ottomans refused to allow an Arabic printing press until the end of the 18th century they refused to establish embassies permanent embassies abroad which are the basis for Western espionage so they're doomed to decline and Venice takes over why Venice well because it has the biggest trading empire of the Middle Ages and it needs political as well as commercial intelligence in order to keep that no time to talk about that and they what's next well the the age of discovery now obviously impossible take all the detail in there but the arrows give you some sense of how importance it was so all one's going to do is to compare European maps of the 16th century with Asian maps to see why Europe has now overtaken Asia so this is a very well known map you can find it on the web the salviati's world map at 1525 notice how quickly the Western image of the world has changed it shows the new world coastline which had only been discovered since now Columbus is first voyage in 1492 and it also indicates which is really important the awareness that just don't know or what the rest of the world consists of so China the first map in China which shows any part of the world at all is 1602 that's not produced by a Chinese cartographer it's produced by a Western Jesuit missionary so here's the best known early bit of European imperialism Spanish conquest of the new world which is a classic example of using intelligence as a force multiplier against a civilization which doesn't even understand it plenty all the things that did understand but not that so here is Fernando Cortez now the odds unbelievably great that people argue about whether the Aztecs I don't a how many hundreds of thousands of men they had put up against him what is not in doubt is that Cortes has only six hundred men with him but they beat this huge and sophisticated empire in two years and how do they do it they do it our intelligence so there's Cortez and La Malinche who was a young slave woman who had an extraordinary gift for languages indeed an extraordinary intellectual gifts anyway and they're meeting the man I pronounced as Montezuma but it's I should be able to develop that but what I can't so what she is telling him all the time is that Montezuma is beatable why because most of his vassals and all of his rivals absolutely hate him so in the end the six hundred people because they are able to get an alliance against him it's not as simple as that of course but that is an essential part in the force multiplier now here is the of the absolute role model so Francis Walsingham Elizabeth the First's intelligence chief and at the time as possible to combine these two roles and it wouldn't be nowadays the Queen sees wells in them every day so he is able to control the whole SIGINT humint and all the other intercept IVA love myself tandem engine and the other thing it's absolutely essential if you're an intelligence chief that you dare to tell your political and superiors what they don't want to know so what one of Margaret Thatcher's intelligence chief said at one point was my job was to tell the Prime Minister what she did not want to know and that is why ultimately Putin's intelligence is a mess the idea of anybody risking their future by telling him what he doesn't want to know is you know the more autocratic you go to the regime the more impossible that is now we know there's one occasion in which wells even tells the other Queen something she doesn't want to know she took her slipper off threw it at him and got a direct hit but that didn't stop me you're a moment which is to the inestimable credit sorry about being patriotic really near the British intelligence no haven't got time to talk about him no not them there was not time for them either that's very interesting I wish they would time talk about that now one of them one of the great things about looking at the influence that in tempted sister had over the ages is how diverse the evidence is now one of the few things in the can scarcely bring myself to pronounce the terrible B word brexit there I've done it once and will not do it again but the few areas in which Britain still leads the world is royal dresses I mean if there has been a program on American television services which has had higher viewer ratings than the last couple of royal weddings I would be surprised but I am used to being surprised I might have got that wrong now what nobody has noticed about Queen Elizabeth of firsts but her dresses is that they would make important political points now this is the last portrait over not later than 1602 she died in 1603 you could not do a portrait of her unless it was exactly as she wanted so the first thing that you notice look at the fair she is 29 and 3/4 and it's been twenty nine and three quarters for the last half century or almost that but this dress is boasting about the fact that she has the best intelligence service anywhere and you can tell that from the symbols you can't see the symbols of that scale but you can now so what does this mean don't even think about it traitors my boys and it was not an equal-opportunity profession at the time my boys can see everything you do and hear everything you say the eyes and ears and when mi5 was founded in 1909 it took one of her eyes and that became its symbol as well yes well what tells me forgotten now I mean people if rulers are not fascinated as most of them aren't but quite a few of them have been the view tends to be oh no problem oh yes there was a problem I mean the nearest thing that Britain has to a national celebration and is going on at this very moment is that Guy Fawkes Day when the Pope used to be burnt I mean just as simple as a boat on actual Pope's and Guy Fawkes it was the chief from Plata I mean it's the silliest national celebration in in modern history and it makes me really proud to be a Brit because you know just one shouldn't take it too seriously so there's Guy Fawkes who's the third from the right and called Guiteau Forks just to make him that bits much more interesting so because there is this extraordinary idea as I've begun to say that Coe breaking concern is something that only really clever people with amazing maths degrees in the 20th and 21st century do the fact that it was sometimes more important at the 16th or 17th century is something that deserves more attention that it's so far received and I haven't got time to talk about this yes I have so another at Cambridge codebreaker John Wallace who was one of the founders of the Royal Society the main scientific society in British history and during the English Civil War the only time we were as you know ends with the only time we've actually came to the monarch he breaks Charles the First's ciphers chance' first used them in order to communicate with his french wife who had understandably fled abroad and this is probably no I I think I did locates where it's not in the Stirling library but kind of snows amazing now is so Parliament the Roundheads the first Republicans in British history in order to discredit the king D publish he's decrypted correspondence and it tends to be forgotten that early British Republicans were extraordinarily anti-feminist and so one of the ways that they use against him is the argument that he's not merely bossed around by his wife but worse than that it's a French wife and even worse than a French wife it's a French Catholic life like the rare the Royalists were not quite as anti-feminist the Kings councils are wholly managed by the Queen though she be of the weaker sex born an alien bred up in a contrary religion yet nothing great or small is transacted without her privity who consumed the Queen appears to have been as harsh and imperious towards the king and she is implacable to a religion nation in government so that's an end to her and him and as a reward for this John Wallace is made professor of called geometry potato chili was mathematics at Oxford at the age of only 33 and he'd like the job so much he kept him for more than half a century now the same is true in French history great code breakers were more esteemed at the beginning of the 17th century than they have in any century including so far as I know at the 21st so here is a carbonara Schiller who liked himself so much he insisted that there were three different pictures of him on the same portrait and there's his code breaker on there on the right all plan ha seen y'all ha seen y'all is a very appropriate name because not merely it does if it referred to the nightingale but it's also French out go for a key that will pick any lock and he is so appreciated that he is bought a chateau this Chateau the chateau de do easy now the Chateau GZ is now in a degraded form the Hotel de Ville at which is only 20 miles from Paris but when he was there louis xiii went to see him and say how wonderful it was louis xiv went to see him in the beginning of his reign and so did assertive costed alicia yeah now at no point in American or French history since has any codebreaker been shown that level of personal esteem so no American president even goes to code-breaking headquarters until a Ronald Reagan in 1986 actually had to get there because he had absent mindedly quotes quoted some highly classified they intercepted communications from Colonel Gaddafi but there we are that was all for all forgiven so at the end of the 17th century and again just to imagine this in British or American or French history at the end of the twentieth sharp arrow of the Academy font-size which had been founded during the century produces a book on the 40 most illustrious lipra zena's Frenchman of the 17th century and he includes somewhere near the top it's a great Code Breaker so you know it's a we just don't understand it seems to be the background for all this now back to back to Asia what tends to be forgotten about British intelligence is that for a period about a couple of hundred years it was actually more active in Asia then it was in Europe there's obvious reason for that and the obvious reason is that Britain is in the process of conquering India and we tend now adays to think of outsourcing and intelligence as something that is 20th century complete rubbish there has never been a moment when Britain out sourced as much intelligence in the 20th of the 21st century as it did in the 18th and 19th so here is a harry's of recent book on the conclusion possibly slightly overstated the authors appoint East India Company imagine a company with the influence of Google or Amazon granted a state sanction of monopoly and the right to levy taxes abroad and with mi6 British foreign intelligence and the army at its disposal so there we are the East India Company official with escort foot soldiers and Indian retainers what you don't see are the intelligence officers but the single best least so regarded in Britain certainly Britain's leading historian of India in recent years so Christopher Bailey he reaches the conclusion the British conquered India in under two generations not only because of military superiority but because they used a sophisticated intelligence system and you know if there's a turning point of the 18th century it's the Battle of Plassey and Clive of India says exactly the same so from the moment one starts looking at the outsourcing it's extraordinary this is the coat of arms of the British East India Company 1803 by which time the East India Company has a private army of 260 thousand which is I think something like four times the current British army three anyway and was twice the size of the then British Army and it has boy intelligence personnel well the government outsourcing has yet to even come close to getting what it was a couple of hundred years ago and there's the Duke of Wellington it never even occurs to Napoleon that his main cipher had been broken by Wellington's intelligence staff during the Peninsular war and that was the beginning of the end for Napoleon but where did he learn the importance of military intelligence not in Europe he leant it against the martyrs in in India so Victorian intelligence operations were on a much larger scale in India than Britain this is what I was brought up to call Calcutta Kolkata nowadays and there is Queen Victoria lording it over the Indians with the assistance of one or two pigeons who are impertinently so what all this then has is an influence on how intelligence develops in and some of the things that on both sides of the Atlantic we take per absolutely granted in the operations of intelligence without many place things fingerprinting for example that was devised in British India in order to work on Indians and then it was discovered that it also worked on Brits and then the Americans discovered it also worked on Americans but all this was developed by Herschel who was a magistrate in India and those are some of the very early ones that he took in in 59 and 60 so if you go through British intelligence the 19th and the first half of the 20th century what you see is that some of the the best practitioners had actually learnt that trade in India including this man Sir David Petrie who was director-general hearing and i5s finest hours the double cross system in World War two his whole previous career have been in intelligence in India and what historians the British Empire only just beginning to discover is that even after independence the local intelligence services quite often not telling their governments wish to keep in touch with the British so here's something I found in the mi5 archives 1957 Maliki didn't have to say this in my talks and discussions I never felt I was dealing with any organization which was not my own besides this hospitality and kindness which all of you showed me it was also quite over whelming so when I think of the exciting things about looking at the intelligence dimension which is of course just as I mentioned it is not it cannot be never will be the whole of human history but the mere idea of doing Gender Studies for example without giving a really important role to intelligence is something I find really a bit baffling so here's the breaking the public breaking of the glass ceiling in Britain the first woman to become a head of any of the world's major intelligence agencies is this woman and I've been fortunate to do into the on it Stella Rimington now this goes back to the First World War and it's an interesting example of how you can arrive at what I think is fair to say is a famous conclusion starting from entirely different premises so at the beginning of the First World War mi5 is very small because all able-bodied men are supposed to be off fighting and so it's only the non able-bodied and so the gents when they're sitting around one evening actually arrive at and this is pretty much what they did arrive at why don't we have the cleverest say or trees in British history not difficult because people were not offering women interesting jobs so mi5 approaches two of the Oxford women's colleges Royal Holloway which was the Women's College then in Oxford and the Cheltenham ladies College which was best in private school for but now what you what you then get then is the first organization in British history and I would dare to say American history open to in which a high proportion of the women are not simply better educated but actually come from higher up the social scale because for a woman to go to university in Britain before the First World War meant that they had to come from pretty high up the social scale now what's the response of the men to this the men's response some really dislike the fact that their secretaries are cleverer than they are others a really grateful that their secretaries can actually understand the accounts which they can't so it's is broadly speaking positive but this is a cartoon that was done during the First World War which shows what I think than everyday scenes so you you see a smart 20 year old something-year-old and secretary explaining to her boss who's twice her age and whose molecule has gone astray what a document actually means and as you can see he doesn't really know how to respond to that so what you get as some extraordinary karez number extraordinaire Jane sis for married name later Archie she comes straight from school in 1916 ten years later she is accepted as mi5 s leading Soviet expert the leading Soviet expert in in Britain and British intelligence and she qualifies with support from mi5 as a barrister in 1924 thirty years before that would have been an impossible profession in anywhere in Britain and then also an another area this is not intend to be too frivolous but just looking at the greetings cards sent by official bodies in Britain you can arrive at I think really rather large conclusions now it may seem silly to devote so much effort to producing a new year and card but they did and in the bottom left hand corner you can see well you might be able to see the initials of the man who designs it eh w Eric Holt Wilson in vain it designed and then in the bottom right hand corner there's by I'm sure who was the most expensive illustrator of the time now what's going on and very few other people on the 1st of January 1918 dared to predict that this would be the last year of the war mi5 mi roman 5 does so and what you see as ella Li 5 s image is now female it's a female masked britannia how do we know that beneath the mask is awry v easy look at the end of her Trident and you can see its em i ro Minh 5 and what she's doing is impaling the loathsome figure of subversion which was always male and always impossibly her suit there was no such thing as clean-shaven subversives in those days at least seven so it was it was believed and then if one looks at the parties now you know it's up to you to draw your own conclusions and these invitations but these were the raciest invitations sent anywhere again in british officialdom and they were drawn up by both men and women and as you can see this young mi5 female operative has borrowed her boss's cap and she is a little notebook which says mi5 so there's now we now move to the most interesting archive i have recently found in the university of oxford I come from Cambridge we know there is interesting stuff there but we don't go there all that so this is the most attractive intelligence headquarters in British history it wasn't designed for intelligence but his Blenheim Palace it's where Churchill was born you can go there you probably already been there so the majority of the personnel they won't have course allowed the best jobs but the majority of personnel were female but there wasn't there weren't enough bedrooms there so they were lodged at Keeble College Oxford and they had such a good time that cable College wrote to mi5 to complain that their dinner parties was simply outrageously boisterous well you may not be able to see everything there so I'll read a little bit for you in comparing our staff with undergraduates and sound anyway mi5 insists they couldn't possibly have broken all this crockery it is difficult to envisage that among other things our staff a broken 28 large coffee pots 740 plates of all sorts 104 dishes of sorts in the dining room and less than has been a free fight and so on so it's always been an exciting in British intelligence point that I want to make is that cable College was coming in complaining that for women it was actually too exciting being in British intelligence to say well we're outrageous but that's the kind of thing that Oxford colleges say well they don't actually very often so thanks chief leader the level cross system based mainly on double agents who feed this information to the enemy World War two is mi5 s finest are so far now back to what they didn't know you know the only in the the 20th century the fact that you know I can't pronounce this I do forgive me as some say is the best that I can do actually if I weren't here I would probably say something zoo but anyway contemporary of and of Confucius required reading at West Point and lots of other places in the in the United in the in the United States all warfare based on deception I don't think there's much doubt that the double-cross system was partly but only partly based on the teachings of Santa and you know here is an area in which it takes the West to millennia to catch up with some of the key work of the Confucian era whose the man who does it it's the first head of mi5 why is it the first rate of mi5 because of Vernon Cal who had been in China during the Boxer Rebellion and the beginning of the of the century is a qualified Chinese interpreter and probably I think I would say almost certainly the first Western intelligence office to read the art of war and also the first to recruit double agents in World War one in order to yes but I'll go home for a little bit longer but what I think has been lost sight of on this side of the Atlantic is that two most successful First World War double agents were both Americans the first is a good example of one of the things that historians complain about in Britain but the intelligence services still regard is extremely important if you tell somebody that if they become your agent you will never never even their grandchildren and great-grandchildren will not know then I mean that's extremely frustrating for her story there's a good argument against it but you're far more likely to get good agents if you do that and I have certainly come across examples of people whose confidence in British intelligence derives largely from their ability to keep very old secrets indeed so when I was official historian of mi5 I saw the Como file I know who it was and I'm not going to say and I with anybody else and there's a good argument that I showed that I'm not Rosslyn Batok he rather liked being it so we know who and we know his name so you get over to Alania later and he really pretty unusual in human history that something really important's only has its importance acknowledged other continents after all that time so here's Allen Dallas head of the CIA director of Central Intelligence used to be called sons Oh deserves credit not only for the first remarkable analysis of the ways of espionage but also for the first written recommendations regarding any organized intelligence service and there's a Kissinger who concludes that Mars foreign policy owed more Towson's than to Lenin it's quite good evidence that I'd the regionís and therefore can't possibly say it's conclusive but during the long march Mao did actually send for a copy of the art of war that is known and an ironic moment in Chinese American relations when who Jintao comes over in 2006 he presents george w bush with a super copy of the art of war by Sun sir and it's that one I know because it's in the bush library now and I am ready to try that well I'm ready so then you get this extraordinary period in which sons are actually becomes part of a US celebrity culture this one you can still get although I don't recommend it on that premise of how other timeless strategies of sansa can transform your game at likely story but Don Wade is and allows of that then something for women on the left some sort of the art of war for managers and then the real evidence of celebrity culture Paris Paris Hilton and of course nowadays this is the the last Indian National Security Adviser he says and I don't believe him that the Indian Alfa Shastra was equally important what it does have is more about ways of assassinating people and any other book I've ever so but men and his argument goes like this many Indians believe Orientalist caricatures of India India supposedly incoherence to strategic approach is actually a colonial construct as is the idea of Indians somehow forgetting their own history and needing the beard taught by Westerners as they're there now my visit I'm sorry to and on such a personal moment my visit to the strange named a university in the world and the Strand it's named University of the world is Peking University Beijing because they wish to be recognized as the oldest one now Beijing 1 2 234 or whatever it is I had a really good time there and you know we couldn't talk about the present but the fact that students all knew about summer and could apply to it doesn't tell you I found rather interesting but of course China is nowhere near at the same level now as it was in Confucius's time because from the moment that you can't talk about crucial things it's really not worth talking about so I have this isn't the best book that I've ever read on China but it's the one with most arresting title I think the People's Republic of amnesia so if in China you attempt to do research which combines nine six one nine eight nine you can't do it because that is the date of Tiananmen Square people talk about whistleblowers in the West but if he any whistleblower in the West is added to our knowledge nearly as much as those who release the tournament papers so we're now back to Yale the man who got it most right and take continues getting more right than many people who write about intelligence issue in Kent whatever the complex puzzles we strive to solve whatever sophisticated techniques we use there can never be a time when the thoughtful person can be supplanted as the intelligence device Zhu cream right on Sherman Kent 6070 years on he is still the best thank you very much I would be very happy to answer or trying to answer better say try to answer the questions Thanks okay talk here's to know when you start making the distinction yes the the contemporary distinction goes back to the founding of both organizations which is in in 1909 now so far as operation operating abroad the rule at the time when India and other former parts of the British Empire became independent was that anything which was which remained or had been British territory was mi5 and anything which had never been part of the British Empire was mi6 or sis which was all pretty crazy because the idea that you know in Africa neighboring independent states would have different British responsibilities so ever since the the late 1960s it has been as I asked which mi6 which has the the responsibility but going through all the papers I don't think anything surprised me more than the response of newly independent parts of the British Empire to maintaining a connection particularly with mi5 so here's just one example at the beginning of the 1960's jomo kenyatta the greatest independence leaders I think everybody here knows in the history of West Africa came over to Britain to settle the final details and Lancaster House of of Independence now if anyone had any right to be and really really personally angry with the British authorities during such a negotiation it was him he'd been accused quite wrongly of being a member of Mau Mau he had been locked up and so on and he insists on going to mi5 headquarters this causes an amount of trepidation but when he turns up so Roger Hollis the then head of mi5 he simply says I've so much enjoyed talking to your representative in Nairobi and so as my a daughter and would you kindly stay on I think that may have had something to do with the fact that he felt that he needed further advice all over again grow dinga but there we are anyway that is a shorter the shortest answer I can give to a question which deserves much longer one no I didn't yes which is why the whole of my side like to as announced at the beginning will be on that subject it's it's simply there wasn't time to include it but I will give just one one link between what I say I plan to say then and what I've been saying today which I don't think preempt and that is the importance of a long view the Russians have actually even though their interpretation of past intelligence is not something that I agree with they have been far better at taking a long view than we have done in the the official history well the authorized history written by me as official historian of mi5 only goes back to the Victorian era the official Russian historian history of foreign intelligence six volumes I disagree with the interpretation but I agree with the other timescale goes all the way back to not merely that Ivan the Terrible be beyond Ivan the Terrible hi thank you for your talk so your last slide there how do you see I wonder if you can elaborate on how the role of Technology well what it does of course is to change online jobs change life but there's no reason to believe is there that it's yet have the invent the impact that the invention of printing had in the 15th century I mean comparing across several hundred years is is pretty difficult but you can see why the inability to come to terms with new methods of IT can bring what a previously being a great part down to the also-rans and this is after all what happens to the Ottoman Empire you know not simply by view but Ataturk said exactly the same about them when he gave a long view in the in the end of 20th century so they want him access to the Internet does those countries who tried to limit themselves limit the access of their citizens to it are condemning themselves to a degree of backwardness which makes someone kind of comparison I mean history never completely repeats itself but as people who say they it rhymes so you know Chinese universities research on contemporary on the contemporary world relaxed the most basic credibility because of the obstacles that put which in some ways are reminiscent of the Ottomans to the the study of sources which are available to all the all the rest of us and as I'm saying I really really enjoyed going to lecture at Peking University with the contradiction between these people is understanding of Sansa you know beat any lecture audience that we expect to find in Britain when talking about them classical learning and international relations there today just hit a point beyond which it could not develop any other questions the current American president has been somewhat ambivalent in his relationship with the intelligence agencies you talk with deep state and so on Sarita historical precedent for that kind of relationship between the rules our intelligence agencies yes that is the subject of my lecture tomorrow oh no no no not the the entire the entire subject but we sort of take it for granted that heads of government and heads of state will sort of get on with the intelligence agencies and when it doesn't happen this is regarded as I don't know something so bizarre how can we take it in but their operative previous examples are they're talking about the particular individual having scanned the last three or four thousand years of human history I find it difficult drawing exactly well any other questions all right then thank you professor Andrew for a very very interesting presentation I invite you all to join us upstairs in the common room for a reception [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Yale University

Views: 10,137

Keywords: Christopher Andrew, The Lost History of Global Intelligence—and Why It Matters, Henry L. Stimson Lectures on World Affairs, the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale, Yale, The MacMillan Center, The Secret Word, The History of Intelligence, MI5, MI6

Id: yFn6y-G1BdU

Length: 59min 20sec (3560 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 09 2018