The barrier between the secret British state and the public sphere has become increasingly permeable over recent decades. Never wholly impenetrable—for instance, the journalist and former spy Compton Mackenzie was prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act in 1932 for revealing details about his wartime work for Britain's legendary spymaster, Mansfield Cumming—the floodgates held surprisingly fast for surprisingly long. A major crack appeared, however, in 1972, when Oxford don J. C. Masterman published The Double-Cross System in the War of 1939 to 1945. Wartime deception was out of the bag, more or less officially. The ULTRA secret, the sensational story of how allied cryptanalysts broke Nazi code systems, followed in short order. And soon, official histories of British intelligence became a feature of the academic and popular landscape. But this literature was not the first attempt at writing the history of British intelligence. Numerous secret internal volumes had been penned over the decades by intelligence officers and other civil servants; the emerging public literature had a secret analogue. Indeed, Masterman's published volume was based on a secret internal secret report he had written on the business of double cross and deception, and managerial challenges of running a network. Over the years, these secret volumes have gradually been declassified, uncovered and utilized by historians. But, by and large, they remain unpublished. In Secret History: Writing the Rise of Britain's Intelligence Service, Simon Ball surveys a collection of these histories, from the First World War to the 1950s.

Secret History is not a book of spy stories. Rather, Ball examines the reports to consider what insights can be drawn from them about the evolution of British intelligence as a cog in machinery of state and about the evolution of a British intelligence culture. He uses the internal histories to examine how the British intelligence services set out to manage their image, to craft a suitably favorable narrative for their customers in government. This took a variety of forms. Sometimes, as Ball highlights, histories were produced to show how crucial intelligence was to defense and national security; occasionally they were produced as warnings, cautionary tales of the serious consequences of ignoring hard-gained intelligence when designing policy. At other points they were there as reminders for future generations of officers and customers—after all, one of the challenges of operating a secret service is that only a select number of people knew what was done, how, and how important it was—establishing an institutional memory was key lest the secrets be forgotten and the secret agencies left to whither. Frequently, these accounts were about settling scores or passing bucks. In writing the review of his agency's performance and casting for a significantly increased peacetime budget as Britain emerged from the Second World War “[Secret Intelligence Service chief Stewart] Menzies laid the blame for SIS's poor performance squarely on the shoulders of the service intelligence departments” (108), reminding his readers that the Army had discounted the need for intelligence on Italy and that the Navy “decreed that Japan should be ruled out as an enemy” (108). Either way, constructing the record was a political business, one that illustrated secret services were not averse to sharpening their elbows to gain a little more space at the table. In this regard, Secret History as a history of the histories offers many revealing perspectives on the politics of British intelligence.

Ball sets out with a critique of a certain strand of intelligence studies, the strand that prioritizes the attempt to draw out lessons for contemporary practitioners from historic case studies. Doing so, he notes, is limited, and not really what historians should be doing. Rather, they should be examining bigger questions: “the proper task of the historian is to analyse how and why the British intelligence machine was created from the British cultural matrix, and to explain why that matters rather more than the effectiveness, or otherwise, of, contemporary spies” (6). Achieving such a goal, across so many institutions, organizations, and personalities, spanning two World Wars and the onset of the Cold War was always going to be challenging. And the thread of the cultural thesis is easier to grasp at some points than at others in this (relatively) short—280 pages—but rather detailed book. Nonetheless, he offers several points of note on how the writing of British intelligence history constructed, and then helped cement, a “settled view” of British intelligence, and the idea of a British way in intelligence (committee based, consensus seeking, and so on) (168). It was both a product of a particular type of intelligence culture, and also helped generate the idea of a particular cultural approach to intelligence. The “settled view” has resonated throughout the historiography of British intelligence. It is not the only argument Ball offers that bears scrutiny. Readers will grasp several others, including the overshadowing of the military intelligence agencies by their civilian counterparts in the historical narrative; the evolution of internal intelligence history from being an adjunct to operations, providing essentially a how-to manual to a broader, more strategic history of a supposedly integrated “intelligence machine” during the Second World War and then back again to operations in the 1970s. But, in particular, Ball's exploration of the secret services’ mission to develop positive internal public relations and eventually with the publishing of official histories offers an intriguing perspective on the resilience of the secret state in the face of increasingly public embarrassments and failures: penetration, defections, insurgencies, the leaking of the atomic bomb plans to the Soviets. The decades of writing their own history was “devised as a buffer against hard times . . . The history of the war had to be repeatedly deployed as a protective device by the civilian intelligence agencies when their underlying incompetence was revealed to public view” (212). Although the book reads as somewhat too specialist at times, in chronicling the process and politics of secret internal histories and in creating such a detailed reference of the available material in the archives, with Secret History, Ball doubtless adds value to the literature on British intelligence.