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Mi6: The History Of The Secret Intelligence Service, 1909-1949 (2011)

by Keith Jeffery(Favorite Author)

3.44 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

1408810050 (ISBN13: 9781408810057)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Bloomsbury UK

review 1: What a letdown! What red-blooded American man would not want to read aboutMI6, organization of James Bond? But the book ended up disappointing me ona couple levels. Granted the author was very thorough on the presentedmaterials and it was an early history of the organization, but it was alittle too much. I was almost expecting to hear what each of the subjectshad for breakfast lunch and dinner. There is detail and then there is toomuch detail. This seems to be a common theme on British Authors. I likeshort and to the point, this was not. Great subject material but stoptrying to act like this was a textbook!
review 2: Covers only 1909 to 1949. Gets badly bogged down in bureaucratic bullshit and doesn't say enough about what field agents did to acquire in... moretelligence. I'm not satisfied with the organization of the book, either, but I get that Jeffery had only a small scope of the larger British Intelligence story to tell, as but one of several officially sanctioned histories covering specific elements. Frustrating, but understandable.I should also say that I had an interesting disconnect at times because this all took place during the end of the British colonial era, so racism and classism are endemic, and horrifying behavior, especially during wartime, was both par for the course and also very carefully spoken *around*, in passive voice. Maybe they needed the distance of passive voice to save their sanity in war? Things I liked: the coverage of the first world war and revolutionary Russia and the deliberate attempts to mention any and all women who were present when possible, and not only the (sexy) field agents -- alas, the mentions are mostly brief and often fail to show ostensibly awesome women doing anything particularly awesome. I'd happily read a book ONLY about women of various intelligence services being excellent intelligence officers, especially if it didn't spend half of its length praising the male commanders of the service, as the ones I've flipped through seem to.Anyway, this book is not exciting and parts of it are actively dull, but it contained things related to my interests. Hence my somewhat generous 3 stars. less

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