ABSTRACT
Never believe anything until it has officially been denied (Claud Cockburn2)
Over two hundred years ago Daniel Defoe wrote, ‘intelligence is the soul of all public business’.3 And yet, as political history came to dominate the academic discipline of history from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, 4 intelligence was notable by its absence from mainstream scholarship. Today, while political history has lost its former pre-eminence in the discipline, it remains very significant an is the main domicile for those scholars engaged in the study of intelligence. The emergence of intelligence history over recent years is the catalyst for this volume’s consideration of issues arising from the study of intelligence using archival material. Such issues arise chiefly from two sources. First, from the traditional limitation of archive-based scholarship faced by all historians and, second, from those problems more intimately associated with the inherent secrecy of the activity of intelligence. In the specif c case of intelligence history, recent years have seen a number of developments that can only be of assistance to the scholar. The reform of archival release policies internationally, allied to innovations in information flow, means that official histories are no longer the sole source of information the intelligence dimension of international history. While it is true that there is no right and wrong approach to working with archives, a rigorous methodology is the vital element in the art of writing history. The acquisition of archival access is by no means the end of the process. E.H. Carr noted that while ‘Bricks are important . . . a pile of bricks is not a house. And should the master-builder spend his time in a brick-field? 5 In construction, as in historical scholarship, it is the manner in which the ‘bricks’ are put together that determines the quality of the product. For the individual scholar, this ‘construction’ process is crucial and it takes time to perfect. Ferdnand Braudel was quite right when observing that the discipline of history ‘cannot be understood without practising it’. 6 And, as Gary Player, the legendary South African golfer, used to say: ‘The more I practice, the luckier I get.’7
