Introduction

Although the events discussed in this book occurred nearly a century ago, the portrait of an intelligence community at odds with its government on policy matters resonates with many of the debates on intelligence reform that preoccupy us today. This history focuses on the course of a single military campaign, the Arab Revolt of 1916-17, but in concentrating on the role of British intelligence in that campaign, it also functions as an intelligence case study with application beyond the First World War. The singularly close relationship that developed between British intelligence and the creation of policy in the Hejaz was not only a landmark for intelligence history, it produced one of the most strategically successful military campaigns of the war.