How Spies Think: Ten Lessons in Intelligence

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I can imagine that the publishers were dazzled by the author's background and qualifications: a former director of GCHQ, seven years on the Joint Intelligence Committee, permanent secretary at the Home Office and a professor of war studies. Both have a similar kind of message that one needs to be careful with the world when surrounded and bombarded with information from various sources, with various degrees of freedom and truthfulness. The second part is a deep understanding as to why it is happening and the various motivations behind any parties involved. A well-studied lesson of the dangers of misinterpreting complex situations is the "security dilemma" when rearmament steps taken by one nation with purely defensive intent trigger fears in a potential adversary.

It is just an extension of critical thinking and moreover they listen to their enemy or event information with utmost care. Niet voor niets beschikt de Nederlandse Militaire Inlichtingen- en Veiligheidsdienst (MIVD) sinds de Irak-oorlog over een ‘devil’s advocate’, een functionaliteit waarvan ook Omand het belang onderschrijft. There is relatively little new here for anyone familiar with scientific inquiry, heuristics, Bayesian inference, or cognitive biases, on the one hand, or the history of intelligence in the twentieth century, especially of Anglo-American history. Parts of the book did feel like there were more of a memoir of his time in various government departments and was loosely linked to the lesson being discussed.Hij corrigeert daarmee het heersende transactionele beeld als zou internationale inlichtingensamenwerking vooral gelijkenis vertonen met het ‘ruilen van postzegels’. De Britse econoom, wiskundige en natuurkundige trad in 1969 als jongeman in dienst bij het roemruchte Global Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). Vergaring en verwerking van geheime informatie dient immers geen enkel doel als de afnemer niet wordt bereikt of er niet mee uit de voeten kan. It’s a serious and rather dry sort of book, and I sometimes felt as if I was reading a set text for an undergraduate course.

As a librarian I was intrigued to discover that skills used by 'spies' are often put in to play by librarians the world over. Wederzijds vertrouwen en aantoonbare betrouwbaarheid zijn volgens Omand overigens ook onontbeerlijk voor het smeden van succesvolle partnerschappen in internationale inlichtingenkringen. In this book, Omand takes us through the process behind this system in ten lessons and provides lots of examples of how he used these techniques in his time in government and as the director of GCHQ. Sinds het einde van zijn loopbaan in overheidsdienst geeft hij als buitengewoon hoogleraar college aan onder meer het prestigieuze Kings College in Londen. However, the main overall message in the book is that we should now recognise that sedition and subversion have now gone digital.

For analytic thinkers the equivalent ability is tolerating the pain and confusion of not knowing, rather than imposing ready-made or omnipotent certainties on ambiguous situations or emotional challenges.