Intelligence Elsewhere: Spies and Espionage Outside the Anglosphere

Abstract

Intelligence Elsewhere: Spies and Espionage Outside the Anglosphere Edited by Philip H. J. Davies and Kristian C. Gustafson Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2013 320 pages $34.95 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Cultural analysis is an academic tool that holds considerable potential for understanding complicated issues outside an analyst's normal frame of reference. However, within the intelligence community, this tool is often misunderstood or misapplied, producing disappointing results that tend to discredit the discipline as a component in the production of quality intelligence analysis. The authors and editors of Intelligence Elsewhere: Spies and Espionage Outside the Anglosphere provide a different view. They claim that cultural analysis is beneficial and possibly vital to understanding both allies and adversaries. They build their argument by using comparative analysis to examine case studies written by multiple authors about a wide selection of intelligence services from non-Western countries. This book serves as both an example of how cultural analysis might be applied by practitioners of intelligence as well as an insightful collection of case studies about intelligence services that have often been neglected in the body of Western intelligence research. This book devotes four early chapters to examining ancient intelligence traditions arising from China, the Maurya Empire in India, the Byzantine Empire, and the foundation of Islam. The authors and editors believe these traditions have a profound, but often unrecognized, impact on a swath of modern states and their security services. The book continues to describe individual countries and their security apparatus in terms of historical layers, each of which contributes a portion to the explanation of their organization's current status. As asserted by multiple authors throughout the text, the study of culture cannot predict what action a country or its leaders will take in any given circumstance, but it can offer great insight into how they will carry it out. Furthermore, even the individual actors themselves may not be fully aware of the influences that color their own decisionmaking processes. The chapter on Russian security services, entitled "Protecting the New Rome," is a high point in the book. Russia's tilt away from the West since the end of the Soviet Union towards an authoritarian model has tended to baffle many Western observers. However, an examination of Russia's Byzantine influences provides a fascinating perspective on the culture that underlies this process. President Putin's patriarchal behavior toward the Russian Orthodox Church draws parallels to emperors of a millennium past, but far from being an isolated anachronism, this chapter demonstrates elements of this pattern have perpetuated, even during the Soviet Union. This culminates today in a security culture that has allowed Russia's intelligence services to weather extreme political change with surprisingly little impact. …