How Spies Think: Ten Lessons in Intelligence

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Essentially, Omand makes the case that ‘big tech’ knows more about us than we’ll even admit to ourselves – and that there are countless malign agents out there (political and commercial) that are queueing up to exploit that information. To part us from our money, to confuse us, to invert alternative realities with ‘deep fake’ technology, to influence world events or to just sew chaos. He coins the term WMCs “weapons of mass control”. They hustled down the corridor to show it to the then prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. “This is very serious, isn’t it?” she said. But it was too late: they’d been taken by surprise, and an invasion occurred two days later. Memorandum from Commander General Vogel to the Marine Corps Regarding Enlistment of "Navaho" Indians (1942) From the former director of GCHQ, Professor Sir David Omand, learn the methodology used by British intelligence agencies to reach judgements, establish the right level of confidence and act decisively. Full of revealing examples from a storied career, including key briefings with Prime Ministers and strategies used in conflicts from the Cold War to the present, in How Spies Think Professor Omand arms us with the tools to sort fact from fiction, and shows us how to use real intelligence every day. Read more Look Inside Details He believes the British government “has begun to wake up”. But why then have we not had the kind of official investigation undertaken in the US by Robert Mueller? “It may be political sensitivities over Brexit,” he says. “We’ve been rather slow, I think, and I’m still not quite clear who in government is really responsible for protecting the nation from disinformation.” Inside GCHQ (Photo: Jacob King/PA) One big regret

Omand’s opening yarn is about the moment in early 1982 when he and his then boss, the defence minister, were handed an urgent GCHQ dossier informing them that the Argentine fleet was on course for the Falklands. Yes, yes,” he says unequivocally. “I gave them the benefit of the doubt. And I also made the mistake of giving them an advanced pre-record, just because it was more convenient, which of course left them to be able to cut the interview in the ways that pushed their side of the argument, so I won’t do that again.” The author leads us thorugh the process of critical thinking and analysis in a accessible way and the cases provided as examples often sent me down the rabbit hole of Google/ Firefox .

by David Omand, London, Viking, 2020, 344 pp., £20.00 (hardback), ISBN: 978-0-241-38518-0

Ukraine & the Alliance with NATO’s Assistant Secretary General for Intelligence David Cattler (2023)

The Bayesian method of reasoning therefore involves adjusting our prior degree of belief in a hypothesis on receipt to form a posterior degree of belief in it...' And perhaps it's a little odd that Professor Omand does not take the trouble to list the several failures of the JIC over the years, regardless of his beautiful formula: p(N)/E=p(N.(p(E/N/p(E) It’s really one of the points of that chapter in the book, that if you’re just doing that Trump-like real-estate deal, you can afford to be pretty rough and you can walk away from the deal. A nation cannot walk away from the outcome of the Brexit negotiations.” Britain has the best spies in the world, according to former GCHQ director Sir David Omand (Photo: Ben Birchall/Reuters) Britain’s world-beating spies Here's the damage notorious Russian spy Robert Hanssen caused the US in over 20 years, YouTube (2023) [5 min. video] Andrew leads a SPY Museum panel discussion between four experts on the most damaging mole in FBI history, Robert Hanssen. This program was in collaboration with CBS/Paramount on their new podcast “Agent of Betrayal"And there was the visit to Belgrade to deliver an ultimatum to Ratko Mladić, commander of the Bosnian Serb Army. Sir David’s delegation had been forewarned he “was likely to be bluffly affable” so resolved to rebuff his offer of sweetmeats and plum brandy. It worked as “an act that we guessed would cause offence and thus jolt Mladić into recognising this was not a friendly visit”. Brexit negotiations