The secret war

The secret war - Max Hasting

Spying is the second-oldest profession, at least according to the Bible. In the Book of Numbers, Moses sends off a dozen sleuths to case out Canaan: “See what the land is like and whether the people there are strong or weak, few or many. Do their cities have walls around them?” Yet for the next 3,500 years or so, the intel business did not grow much. Indeed, as the fabled Henry Stimson story has it, spycraft was both worthless and infra dig. So Stimson, as secretary of state, closed down the department’s Cipher Bureau, the “black chamber,” in 1929, recalling in his memoirs that “gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.” Until 1939, the government stuck to a 1934 law barring interception of messages between the United States and foreign countries.

In his monumental new work, “The Secret War,” the British author Max Hastings reminds us that intelligence did not become a “growth industry” until World War II. Above all, Britain and the United States “elevated intelligence, hitherto a ­little-respected branch of staff work, to an unprecedented importance.” Today, the United States has 16 intelligence outfits. Has it been worth it?

“Intelligence gathering is inherently wasteful,” Hastings replies. “Perhaps one-thousandth of 1 percent of material garnered from secret sources by all the belligerents in World War II contributed to changing battlefield outcomes.” Add two more problems. One is the familiar “signal-to-noise ratio”: How to unearth that shiny nugget in a mountain of rubbish? Two, even if spies find it, leaders must act on the information