ABSTRACT
In recent years intelligence historians have become increasingly conscious of the benefits of working outside what one might consider the traditional confines of our subject. Sun Tzu might have put a good case for ‘knowing your enemies’ 2,500 years ago, but it was not until Martin Alexander's 1998 collection, Knowing Your Friends, that scholars began to consider the spying that went on between ostensible allies or coalition partners. 1 Further interest has been provoked by the study of intelligence services of states that have hitherto been considered peripheral to the main cut and thrust of the ‘secret war’. This research has revealed the extent to which the discipline has suffered from an ‘intelligence history snobbery’; a process that privileges the study of US, British, or Soviet intelligence history, while belittling the accomplishments of the world's other, smaller, powers. 2 The importance of taking a more ‘internationalist’ approach to our subject has exposed tongue-tied Anglo-Americans to the wealth of research carried out in the non-English-speaking reaches of academe, but also shown how small states can, as Eunan O'Halpin showed recently, operate as ‘intelligence powers in their own right’: offering partnerships based not on ‘historical friendships or familiarity’ but on their ability to provide unique sources of expertise and information. 3
