The U. Intelligence Presence in Great Britain. The Turkish Intelligence Facilities. The great thing about the study of history is that it is a dynamic process. Unlike the sciences, engineering and mathematics, there are no hard and fast rules to the study of history because it is forever changing as new information come to light. This is especially in true in the realm of intelligence history, one of the youngest but fastest growing areas of serious academic endeavor, where literally every day researchers around the world are unearthing formerly classified documentary materials on dusty shelves in archives and libraries that are changing, in some cases dramatically, our understanding of how and why certain world events happened the way they did.
The result is that many of the books and articles written over the past seventy years about intelligence matters by journalists and popular non-fiction writers, which were based largely on interviews with confidential sources of varying levels of knowledge and sometimes dubious reliability, are now being challenged by intelligence scholars and researchers, who have the benefit of access to many of the formerly classified primary source documents that their journalistic brethren did not.
In the U. Not only have the revelations generated considerable public anger, but they have also had a decidedly negative impact on the U. Many current serving and retired American and European intelligence officials that I have spoken to over the past two years are both angry and more than somewhat perplexed about the reaction in Western Europe to the reports in the press about U.
There is more than a little truth in what these past and present intelligence officials say, but regardless of whether you agree with their views or not, the simple fact of the matter is that the Snowden leaks have, perhaps forever, changed the way Europeans view the U.
The irony is that seventy years after the first American spies took root in Europe, the American intelligence presence in Europe has now become a source of both public controversy and high-level concern within a number of Western European governments. THE U. As the documents in this collection show, the multitude of civilian and military intelligence agencies comprising the U.
