{"id":941,"date":"2009-08-20T22:10:10","date_gmt":"2009-08-20T22:10:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/?p=941"},"modified":"2009-08-20T22:10:10","modified_gmt":"2009-08-20T22:10:10","slug":"guest-post-michael-holzman-on-writing-intelligence-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/2009\/08\/guest-post-michael-holzman-on-writing-intelligence-history\/","title":{"rendered":"Guest Post: Michael Holzman on Writing Intelligence History"},"content":{"rendered":"

In response to <\/em>my review of his book<\/em><\/a> on the life of Jim Angleton, Michael Holzman has written a thoughtful post on the particular challenges of writing histories of secret intelligence organizations:<\/em>
\nHistories of the activities of secret intelligence organizations form a specialized branch of historical research, similar, in many ways, to military and political history, dissimilar in other ways.\u00a0 They are similar in that the object of study is almost always a governmental institution and like the Army, for example, a secret intelligence organization may produce its own public and private histories and cooperate or not cooperate with outside historians.\u00a0 They are dissimilar due to the unusual nature of secret intelligence organizations.
\nThe diplomatic historian has at his or her disposal the vast, rich and often astonishingly frank archives of diplomacy, such as the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS).\u00a0\u00a0 Needless to say, there is no publication series entitled the Secret Foreign Operations of the United States (or any other country).\u00a0 What we have instead is something like an archeological site, a site not well-preserved or well-protected, littered with fake artifacts, much missing, much mixed together and all difficult to put in context.
\nThe overwhelming majority of publications about secret intelligence are produced by secret intelligence services as part of their operations, whether purportedly written\u00a0 by \u201cretired\u201d members of those services, by those \u201cclose to\u201d such services, by writers commissioned, directly or through third or fourth parties, by such services.\u00a0 There are very few independent researchers working in the field.\u00a0 The most distinguished practitioners, British academics, for example, have dual appointments\u2014university chairs and status as \u201cthe historian\u201d of secret intelligence agencies.\u00a0 There are, of course, muckrakers, some of whom have achieved high status among the cognoscenti, but they are muckrakers nonetheless and as such exhibit the professional deformations of their trade, chiefly, a certain obscurity of sourcing and lack of balance in judgment.
\nThus, an academically trained researcher, taking an interest in this field, finds challenges unknown elsewhere.\u00a0 The archives are non-existent, \u201cweeded,\u201d or faked; the \u201cliterature\u201d is tendentious to a degree not found otherwise outside of obscure religious sects; common knowledge, including fundamental matters of relative importance of persons and events, is at the very least unreliable, and research methods are themselves most peculiar.\u00a0 Concerning the latter, the privileged mode is the interview with secret intelligence officials, retired secret intelligence officials, spies and so forth.\u00a0 Authors and researchers will carefully enumerate how many interviews they held, sometimes for attribution, more often not, the latter instances apparently more valued than the former.\u00a0 This is an unusual practice, not that researchers do not routinely interview those thought to be knowledgeable about the subject at hand, but because these particular interviewees are known to be, by definition, unreliable witnesses.\u00a0 Many are themselves trained interrogators; most are accustomed to viewing their own speech as an instrument for specific operational purposes; nearly all have signed security pledges.\u00a0 The methodological difficulties confronting the researcher seem to allow only a single use for the products of these interviews:\u00a0 the statement that the interviewee on this occasion said this or that, quite without any meaningful application of the statements made.
\nAn additional, unusual, barrier to research is the reaction of the ensemble of voices from the secret intelligence world to published research not emanating from that world or emanating from particular zones not favored by certain voices.\u00a0 Work that can be traced to other intelligence services is discredited for that reason; work from non-intelligence sources is discredited for\u00a0that<\/em>\u00a0reason (\u201cprofessor so-and-so is unknown to experienced intelligence professionals\u201d); certain topics are off-limits and, curiously, certain topic are de rigeur (\u201cThe writer has not mentioned the notorious case y\u201d).\u00a0\u00a0 And, finally, there is the scattershot of minutiae always on hand for the purpose\u2014dates (down to the day of the week), spelling (often transliterated by changing convention), names of secret intelligence agencies and their abbreviations (\u201cSurely the writer realizes that before 19__ the agency in question was known as XXX\u201d).\u00a0 All this intended to drown out dissident ideas or, more importantly, inconvenient facts, non-received opinions.\u00a0
\nWhat is to be done?\u00a0 One suggestion would be that of scholarly modesty.\u00a0 The scholar would be well-advised to accept at the beginning that much will never be available.\u00a0 Consider the ULTRA secret\u2014the fact that the British were able to read a variety of high-grade German ciphers during the Second World War.\u00a0 This was known, in one way or another, to hundreds, if not thousands, of people, and yet remained secret for most of a generation.\u00a0 Are we sure that there is no other matter, as significant, not only to the history of secret intelligence, but to general history, that is not yet known?\u00a0 Secondly, that which does become available must be treated with extraordinary caution in two ways:\u00a0 is it what it purports to be, and how does it fit into a more general context?\u00a0 To point at two highly controversial matters, there is VENONA, the decryptions and interpretations of certain Soviet diplomatic message traffic, and, on a different register, the matter of conspiracy theories.\u00a0 Just to approach the prickly pear of the latter, the term itself was invented by James Angleton, chief of the CIA counterintelligence staff, as a way for discouraging questions of the conclusions of the Warren Commission.\u00a0 It lives on, an undead barrier to the understanding of many incidents of the Cold War.\u00a0 The VENONA material is available only in a form edited and annotated by American secret intelligence.\u00a0 There are, for example, footnotes assigning certain cover names to certain well-known persons, but no reasons are given for these attributions.\u00a0 The original documents have not been made available to researchers, nor the stages of decryption and interpretation. And yet great castles of interpretation have been constructed on these foundations.
\nIntelligence materials can be used, indeed, if available, must be used, if we are to understand certain historical situations:\u00a0 the coup d\u2019etats in Iran, Guatemala and Chile, for example.\u00a0 The FRUS itself incorporates secret intelligence materials in its account of the Guatemala matter.\u00a0 But such materials can only be illustrative; the case itself must be made from open sources.\u00a0 There are exceptions:\u00a0 Nazi-era German intelligence records were captured and are now available nearly in their entirety; occasional congressional investigations have obtained substantial amounts of the files of American secret intelligence agencies; other materials become misplaced into the public realm.\u00a0 But this is a diminuendo of research excellence.\u00a0 The historian concerned with secret intelligence matters must face the unpleasant reality that little can be known about such matters and, from the point of view of the reader, the more certainty with which interpretations are asserted, the more likely it is that such interpretations are yet another secret intelligence operation.
\n— Michael Holzman<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In response to my review of his book on the life of Jim Angleton, Michael Holzman has written a thoughtful post on the particular challenges of writing histories of secret intelligence organizations: Histories of the activities of secret intelligence organizations form a specialized branch of historical research, similar, in many ways, to military and political […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,35,38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-941","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-history","category-intelligence-and-espionage","p1","y2009","m08","d20","h22"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/941","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=941"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/941\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}