The Worst Books Written on Intelligence
The following is a list I obtained from Nigel West. The books are listed with some comments, and are certainly not recommended for reading.
Thomas, Gordon (2009). Secret Wars: One Hundred Years of British Intelligence inside MI5 and MI6. New York: St. Martin’s Press. ISBN-13:978-0-312-37998-8; ISBN-10: 0-312-37998-6. Supposedly a centenary history of dMI5 and MI6, this book is filled with errors, invented quotations, and incidents that simply never happened, such as Allen Dulles and Stewart Menzies meeting at the 1945 Yalta conference. Neither attended it. He names Kim Philby’s father as Sir Harry Philby. St. John Philby never held a knighthood, and never could owing to the British class structure.
Stevenson, William (1976). A Man Called Intrepid. Macmillan. The fabricated biography of Sir William Stevenson by a Canadian journalist. Even the photographs, supposedly recovered from a secret wartime archive, are faked, and are stills from a movie made after the war. And Stephenson was never codenamed INTREPID.
Holzman, Michael (2008). James Jesus Angleton. University of Massachusetts Press. Yet another biography of the legendary CIA counterintelligence chief, but poorly researched and full of supposition masquerading as fact. The content mainly drawn from three other books, none of them any good.
Twigge, Michael (2008). British Intelligence. National Archives. Presented as a guide to declassified documents from the British Intelligence services, this is riddled with very basic mistakes and ahs no value whatever.
Allen, Martin (2005). Himmler’s Secret War. Robson Books. One of three books written by an author with a talent for forgery. Most of his “authentic archival documents” are rather poor modern forgeries.
Bennett, Richard (2002). Espionage: An Encyclopedia of Spies and their Secrets. Virtually every date in this encyclopedia is inaccurate. Most of the entries are a mixture of error and falsification.
Boyd, Colonel Arthur (2007). Operation Broken Reed. DeCapo Books. A delusional account of a clandestine operation in Korea that never happened.
I have recently purchased Espionage by Richard Bennett. I wish I had read your comment before buying it. I have just posted a blog on John A. Walker Jr. Bennett's information on the subject is false. Readers would do better to refer to Wikipedia on the subject rather than buy this book.
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