THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 2, 2019 53
The law of unintended consequences rules with a special ferocity in the realm of intelligence gathering and covert action.
THE CRITICS
A CRITICAT LARGE
SPY VS. SPY VS. SPY
How valuable is espionage?
BY ADAM GOPNIK
ILLUSTRATION BY SIMON LANDREIN
I
s intelligence intelligent? This is the
question that runs or, rather, leaps
through the mind of the reader strug-
gling with Christopher Andrew’s ency-
clopedic work “The Secret World: A
History of Intelligence” (Yale). Andrew,
who is a longtime history don at Cam-
bridge, begins his book—as long and
thorough as Diarmaid MacCulloch’s
classic “A History of Christianity,”
though less violent—with one of the
most appealing opening lines in recent
nonfiction: “The first major figure in
world literature to emphasize the im-
portance of good intelligence was God.”
The Israelites’ reconnaissance mission
to the promised land of Canaan is the
first stop in Andrew’s tour of four thou-
sand years of spying; the last is the Amer-
ican failure to anticipate 9/11. For any-
one with a taste for wide-ranging and
shrewdly gossipy history—or, for that
matter, for anyone with a taste for spy
stories—Andrew’s is one of the most
entertaining books of the past few years.
Yet these tales of spying and coun-
terspying involve dances so entangled
