ABSTRACT
The essays collected together in this volume were, for the most part, first produced for a conference held at the University of Toronto in November 1991. This provenance has some unusual features. One was that the History Department of the University of Toronto was celebrating its centennial and had decided to sponsor, as one of its main anniversary events, a conference on the history of intelligence. One hundred years ago, intelligence was hardly a subject for polite discourse in the academy. Indeed modern intelligence services were just on the point of being born, as European and imperial tensions of the late nineteenth century and the fast pace of technological change, especially in the field of armaments, led to unprecedented attention being given, in peacetime, to the uses of systematic information-gathering by government departments. 1 These subversive pressures, in turn, ignited a spark of public fascination and fear about the clandestine world of espionage which would help generate pressure for measures of protection (counter-espionage) and offence (foreign espionage) and, not least, launch the genre of spy fiction on its glorious and lucrative popular culture career. 2 But it was to be many more years before the serious study of intelligence caught up with these developments in the conduct of international relations. Not until a fortuitous combination of events occurred in the mid-1970s was the academic study of intelligence truly born.
