During the Cold War, Andrew became renowned for his collaboration with Oleg Gordievsky, a senior KGB defector, co-authoring two important books on Soviet intelligence. He is a Cambridge don, but there is nothing drily academic about his writing: some of The Secret World is racy reading. Potential readers may be struck by the scale of Andrew’s undertaking. Weighing 1.6 kg, it has 760 pages of text and a whopping fifty-nine pages of bibliography. By collating so much information from such a cornucopia of sources and by presenting it readably, Andrew has done us a service.

Congress of Vienna, held November 1814 to June 1815 – click here for listing of featured representatives (photograph via Wikimedia Commons)

The size and ambit of the bibliography suggest an effort to show that this is a genuine history, even though it cannot reasonably aspire to be a complete one. Espionage is about the ‘crooked timber of humanity’, the best and worst of human nature – courage and self-sacrifice, treachery and ruthlessness. So this history is perforce selective.

That said, the book’s geographical and temporal scope are imposing. Setting off from the Old Testament – with ‘more references to spies than in any published history of Britain’ – Andrew takes us through the gathering and uses of secret intelligence in ancient Greece and the Roman Empire. He crosses the ancient world to consider the Chinese classic The Art of War and the roughly contemporaneous Indian classic Arthashastra. He considers the rise of Islamic intelligence. Thereafter, his main focus is Europe, tsarist Russia, the Middle East, and the United States after World War I. Andrew is at his most compelling on this familiar turf: the great powers of Europe in the age of empires, the two world wars, and the Cold War.

This Eurocentric weighting is understandable: historians have few accessible sources on the espionage activities of China. It now has huge and powerful intelligence agencies, with advanced data collection and social-control technologies. Andrew’s treatment of China may strike some Australian readers as light on, but his is after all a history, not an overview of the present.

Andrew’s study should have a particular resonance in Australia. First, because here governments and security agencies are grappling with the dilemma of protecting our citizens and secrets from a range of threats, while preserving the liberties and rights that, together with an independent and relatively uncorrupted judiciary, make Australia a better place to live. Second, because probably in no other country is intelligence more controversial. Certainly, in no other democracy do governments feel compelled to review their intelligence agencies every five or six years on average, as has happened in Australia since Gough Whitlam established the Hope Royal Commission in 1972. That decision was itself an outcome of a thunderclap of Australian history: the defection of Soviet-Russian spy Vladimir Petrov. To this day, some mouldering conspiratorialists remain convinced, in the face of all the evidence, that the Petrov Affair was a CIA–MI5 plot to destroy the Labor Party. As Paul Simon put it, ‘a man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest’.

Vladimir Petrov (right) sharing a beer with ASIO officer Ron Richards (left) on the verandah of the 'safe house' where he and his wife Evdokia Petrov were held following their defection to Australia (photograph by ASIO/National Archives of Australia via Wikimedia Commons)

One of the threads in The Secret World is the failure of the non-Russian world to learn from history. Over centuries, governments have boosted the resources of intelligence services when they perceived a threat – of war, in its various forms, terrorism, etc. – only to emasculate them when the threat is perceived to have passed. The exception, as Andrew demonstrates, is Russia. Following the turmoil of the revolutions of 1917 and 1991–2, its intelligence agencies soon regained their traditional pre-eminence as instruments of state power. Today, they are better resourced and more influential than at any time in Russian history.

In Australia, as the Cold War receded, the Keating government applied the concept of a Peace Dividend in cutting ASIO’s staff severely. And in 1996 the so-called ‘Razor Gang’, mobilised by the incoming Howard government to cut expenditure, considered abolishing the Office of National Assessments, the main outcome of the Whitlam’s Hope Commission, on the spurious grounds that it duplicated military intelligence. Then came 9/11.

In 2010, a seasoned Russian diplomat told an audience of Australian intelligence analysts that, on his flight to Australia, he had come across a recruitment advertisement for ASIS while leafing through a Qantas magazine. This, he said, had reminded him of his conviction that ninety-five per cent of the secret intelligence he had seen, presumably supplied by the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), had simply confirmed what common sense would tell one. Doubtless the SVR, and ASIS, would disagree.

Writers who specialise in the gathering and uses of secret intelligence have a problem: a tendency to make exaggerated claims for the importance of their subject, leading to an effort throughout their texts to justify their assertions. This is unsurprising, if you think about it. We may be asking too much of ‘intelligence historians’ to expect them to eschew the improbable. But more modest claims would have made The Secret World an even more convincing read.

Some writers, notably those lacking public service experience, err in the opposite direction. The excellent British military historians Max Hastings and John Keegan have dismissed the value of intelligence. But nor is direct experience a guarantee of quality; F.H. Hinseley, an intelligence collector-cum-official historian of British intelligence in World War II, wrote a boring, multi-volume study of the subject. By contrast, Mark Urban’s The Man Who Broke Napoleon’s Codes: The story of George Scovell (2001) is an informative and balanced account of British Intelligence in the Peninsular War. Urban is not a specialist historian; he is an intelligent, thoughtful journalist. The same applies to The Spy and the Traitor: The greatest espionage story of the Cold War (2018), Ben Macintyre’s gripping book on Gordievsky, the defector who helped to build Christopher Andrew’s standing.

Some of the quirks of Andrew’s style may irritate – for instance, a penchant for resounding superlatives. And the sheer dimensions of his book may seem daunting. But boring he is not: any reader with a liking for well-crafted history, and an interest in espionage, won’t regret acquiring it.