John Hughes-WilsonBesprekingen

A very good summary of a complex period whose influence on contemporary politics still plays. Understanding how wars move from capability to technology Nd economy Nd information is an important lesson for analysing any conflict.

A staid British slightly jingoistic history of the war divided into chapters where each chapter has an image of a thematically central object from the British War Museums. You can read it right through, but the chapters also stand alone. It is an attractive book and (but?) unreferenced. The author claims that the expression "chatting"as in schmoozing comes from times when WWI soldiers were talking and picking chats (lice) from themselves. This seems to be almost certainly incorrect.

Amazon second hand £10

American history, John F Kennedy, conspiracy theories

A really good book looking at the incidence of nuclear accidents and slipups since the Second World War. This is frightening, enlightening, and at times reads like a thriller. However, there is a distinct bias against nuclear power and fuel. There’s nothing wrong with that bias it’s just that you need to be aware of it before you embark upon reading this. Well recommended and I would look out for other books by the same author.

O título não corresponde ao que é efectivamente o assunto deste livro: a informação nas suas mais variadas vertentes. Apenas uma pequena parte do livro se ocupa da espionagem e dos serviços secretos. O autor preocupa-se mais com a orientação e exploração das informações – actividades que se encontram em extremos opostos no ciclo das informações e cuja execução não é nem da responsabilidade nem da competência dos SI – do que com a produção de informações – recolha, processamento e análise.
A maior parte das histórias apresentadas – porque este é mais um livro de histórias do que de análise – são histórias do sucesso ou do fracasso dos decisores, não dos SI. Por exemplo, que culpa tem o NKVD que Estaline não agisse levando em conta as informações que lhe eram fornecidas? O NKVD cumpriu o seu dever, Estaline é claro que não.
Algumas histórias são interessantes mas, por vezes, a descrição do contexto é mais abrangente do que o necessário. Além disso, há a registar vários erros de terminologia, os quais podem ser da responsabilidade do tradutor, mas também erros conceptuais que são indubitavelmente da responsabilidade do autor. O livro tem o grande mérito de ser de agradável leitura.½

Em "A História da Espionagem e o Mundo dos Serviços Secretos e de Informação", John Hughes-Wilson apresenta-nos a história da espionagem - desde as suas ori­gens bíblicas até ao estado de vigilância da era digital em que vivemos - e levanta o véu de secretismo desse mundo misterioso e obscuro.

A espionagem e os serviços secretos e de informação sempre estiveram e continuarão a estar, para o bem ou para o mal, no epicentro dos grandes acontecimentos mundiais.
Neste livro vai conhecer as razões por que certas decisões foram tomadas, analisar os numerosos sucessos obtidos, mas igualmente aos erros, mentiras e disparates cometidos pela «Inteligência» (cuidadosamente escondidos do contribuinte que pagou por eles).
O autor revela o que realmente sucedeu nos bastidores do mundo dos serviços de informação e secretos durante alguns dos mais conhecidos acontecimentos militares que afetaram as nossas vidas.

Focando-se com mestria em algumas questões e incertezas dos espiões e da espionagem humana, como por exemplo:
- A Guerra Fria e como se tornou numa guerra de espionagem eletrónica;
- A revolução técnica que começou com o uso do reconhecimento fotográfico na Primeira Guerra Mundial;
- Como a espionagem de comunicações deu à América uma das suas maiores vitórias;
- Como o Wikileaks realmente aconteceu;
- Teria o 11 de Setembro sido evitado se as agências secretas americanas pós-Guerra Fria se tivessem adaptado à nova realidade do terrorismo internacional?

A remarkably complete history of the war covering every major combat theater – Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East – from mining operations below ground to air combat and bombing, from under the sea to the Battle of Jutland. It covers weapons and war financing, logistics and espionage, home front politics and war production, mutinies, the soldiers’ life in combat and behind the trenches and on leave, and artists and the war.

The format is simple. Each chapter has a full-page picture of an object, an inset talking about it, and anywhere from one to six pages of text, often with additional, smaller photos, covering the subject the object represents.

The objects are not always what you expect. For instance, a “body density map” is shown for a chapter on Western Front casualties, a fullerphone (a scrambler for voice and Morse signals passed on a wire), Lieutenant Augustus Agar’s boat (used in a raid on the Bolshevik fleet for which he won “the mystery VC”), and a harpoon gun used by interred German sailors at Scapa Flow to supplement their meager rations with birds.

Fourteen of the 100 objects refer to events either before or after the war.

As you would expect in a book produced by the Imperial War Museum (itself a product of the war as per chapter 98), there is a bit of a British Empire bias in the selections. We get multiple chapters on the Irish problem, and the chapter on espionage really only covers British espionage. On the other hand, this works in the book’s favor sometimes. For instance, while German food shortages are often mentioned, British food shortages during the war are less so.

The book is indexed with multiple maps beginning with Europe before the war and ending with Europe’s new nations after the war. Apart from Africa, every major theater gets maps with several of the Western Front during various years. There’s even a sewn-in ribbon for a bookmark. The paper and binding are high quality.

Could you, as the introduction suggests, use this book as a chronological depiction of the war? Yes, with a little work in hunting down the relevant chapters. It would seem more useful for newbies to World War One history to just dip into a chapter at random and let their curiosity take them through the book as their curiosity is piqued.

Obviously, there is only so much detail you can put in 448 pages, but, as a one volume history of the war, I haven’t come across better.

John Hughes-Wilson is a former British intelligence officer. As such, he may have been privy to information not available to most journalists or historians. Most of his book is a fast-paced, easy-to-read history of the Cold War, but it contains several eye popping assertions that most historians might disagree with.

First, he claims that during the Hungarian uprising in 1956, “Washington may even have indicated secretly that the United States was prepared to turn a blind eye to any Soviet action in Hungary” because Eisenhower was preoccupied with the imminent presidential election.

Second, he asserts the American mafia, not Lee Harvey Oswald, killed President Kennedy. According to Hughes-Wilson, the mob had relative immunity from J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI because Hoover had been compromised as a homosexual by the mob. However, the mob had no such protection against a crusading Bobby Kennedy, and when JFK failed to protect mob interest in Cuba, he “signed his own death warrant.”

The rest of the book, however, is pretty insightful. The author is adept at showing how domestic pressures to be “tough on communism” often made it difficult for American presidents to make intelligent deals with the Soviet Union. He also shows that Mao’s pressure on Khrushchev led to significant trouble for world peace.

The book is comprehensive and thorough. It would make a good introduction for young people to a period of history that we elderly lived through.

(JAB)

A very good general overview, with a slightly folksy style. The downside is e obvious non dispassionate stance, the author coming across as right wing in his politics, but his list of references & bibliography @ the back impressive. A well paced overview, lacking at times in detail, but good enough to steer you in hoe right direction.

This books is written by a retired UK Colonel who clearly knows what he's talking about. I found it a surprisingly easy read for a history book, even managing to make his discussion of the battles I knew nothing about (Barbarossa, Yom Kippur, Singapore and Dieppe) as interesting as the ones I did (Falklands, Gulf War I, 9/11, Pearl Harbor).

He traces the causes of the failures - often on the apparently victorious side as well as the defeated - showing that sometimes it was scared Intelligence Officers saying what they knew the Dictator wanted to hear, sometimes it was a failure of collation, sometimes of not having good enough dissemination, and sometimes lack of direction from the top. The lack of coordination between the intel agencies in the USA comes under particular fire: a full 6 decades after Pearl Harbor, the same structural problems prevented the mass of intelligence ahead of the Al-Qa'ida attacks of 9/11 being collated and acted on. The UK's Joint Intelligence Community (JIC) approach is normally held up as the example on how to do it, but even then it failed over the Falklands. He also said it failed over its 'sexed-up' dossier published to the public to persuade them of the need to invade Iraq in 2003, though here his analysis didn't go far enough. If the press reports are right, this was less of an issue in the JIC, and more the inevitable problem of intelligence from on a few MI6 agents that couldn't be corroborated.

Recommended: not just for intelligence buffs, but for those who want to get a quick overview of some of the most pivotal (or at least infamous) military events of the twentieth century.½