ABSTRACT
Over the last quarter of a century a new sub-discipline has emerged in the world of academia: intelligence studies. There can be no doubt that the general intelligence revolution of the 20th century has had a substantial impact on Austria. In the other social sciences even fewer specialists have so far contributed to an understanding of secretive and subversive phenomena in Austrian society, past or present; those who have published in this field are mostly judicial experts and political scientists. The intelligence studies community, as it has emerged since the early 1980s, basically brings together seven groups which can be differentiated by their specific focuses: historians, military scientists, political scientists, juridical experts, practitioner-scholars, journalists/laymen, and freelance writers. In this community the historians have clearly achieved pre-eminence. Recently two monographic studies by younger Austrian historians have been published; both exhibit a broad foundation in archival sources and good empirical evidence.
