ABSTRACT
This book brings together many of the world’s leading scholars of intelligence with a number of former senior practitioners to facilitate a wide-ranging dialogue on the central challenges confronting students of intelligence. There is a clear need for greater understanding of the role intelligence has played in shaping the course of domestic and international politics over the past century. Intelligence has never played a more prominent role in international politics than it does now at the opening of the twenty-first century. National intelligence services are larger than ever an play a more public role than ever in the policy-making process of most states. Public discussion of intelligence, even the most secret intelligence, has become common in political discourse on international issues. The central objectives of this book are twofold. Like most scholarship on the subject, it seeks to deepen our understanding of the impact of intelligence on a series of key events in the international history of the past century; but it also aims to explore the different ways in which intelligence can be studied by bringing together a diverse array of both scholarly and practical expertise to examine a range of primary material relevant to the history of intelligence since the early twentieth century.
