Having invested three full months in reading Stephen Dorril’s massive work, MI6, I'm finding myself incapable of remarking more than "this book sucks". Hardly a scholastic critique, and a completely unfair one, considering the author's commendable research efforts, but there are a few points that certainly diminish it's apparent ambition to be considered the definitive source on British intelligence
Originally published in 2000, MI6 promises to take its readers "inside the covert world of Her Majesty's Secret Intelligence Service", a deceptive boast, considering that it consists entirely of information that is a matter of public record. The British government itself, which had attempted to halt the book's publication, was surprised at the amount of material Dorril was able to gather without delving too deep into the secrecy of the SIS.
To say that it "sucks" isn't to suggest that anyone interested in the covert world of security force operations should dismiss the book. As earlier mentioned, Dorril has compiled a massive amount of information for his readers. Therein, however, lies its greatest fault in terms of readability. There is such an exhausting list of names, places, dates and events, even the most conscientious student of the spying underworld would become confused. With 62 pages alone of reference notes and, mercifully, an index of acronyms, at least one of the three months spent reading the material was devoted to flipping back and forth for clarification or explanation. In other words, it seems more encyclopedic than academic.
While much of the analysis shouldn't be described as obsolete, it can reasonably be considered out-of-date. Dorril approaches the subject in seven parts: from World War II, the Cold War years, the Soviet Empire and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and the post-Cold War era, focusing on the specific methods employed by the MI6 in each region in the context of historical circumstance. Many of Dorril's arguments are based on the challenges facing the SIS in the post-Cold War era, when today's security forces are, as reality would unfortunately have it, no longer operating in this capacity. It's a post-9/11 age now, which would render assertions such as the following irrelevant:
There is a temptation to fall into the same trap that snared the West in the seventies - the belief that there is an all-embracing Islamic fundamentalist conspiracy behind Middle East terrorism. The official view is that such a conspiracy does not exist. During the summer of 1993 British Intelligence prepared for the Foreign Office a paper, 'Islamic Fundamentalism in the Middle East', which looked at the reason for the proliferation of fundamentalist political groupings, some with an international following, and the idea that there is a possibility of 'contagion', with their leaders meeting in Europe, South-East Asia, Khartoum and Tehran. The anonymous author reported that 'the coincidental rise of fundamentalism across North Africa and the Levant has certain common factors. But the main causes are internal. It breeds on failure to resolve economic and social problems, corruption in government and the bankruptcy of political ideologies - Communism, Nasserism, Baathism, etc. It is prevalent in the overcrowded cities plagued by poverty and unemployment.'
Article comments
1 - CW
Ok Emily - I found it. I see you agreed with me. You were kinder than I would have been on Dorril's facts. Most of the information he presents is available elsewhere with higher fidelity and greater detail, and the last couple of chapters are completely out to lunch. I should have known that any book about the SIS entitled "MI6" would be pretty ill-informed. Thanks for the review!