It is fascinating to me to read this teller of events and his perceptions of the WWI and WW2 and how the spy community began. His writing style is like hearing an older man reminisce about the younger days. For me, it is like the voice over at the beginning of the movie.Soon you forget the voice or that you are reading because you fall into the prose.

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5-star review at amazon:

By Acute Observer (North Jersey Shore) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

Peter Wright was a former assistant director of MI5 (Britain's secret service or counter-intelligence). This is his story of his career, including his anecdotes about his American allies. He joined MI5 as a scientist who specialized in tools for espionage. He had been promised credit for his years as a civilian scientist. When this promise was broken at retirement, he wrote this book to even out things.
This is an interesting book that can't be summarized in a few paragraphs. It is definitely worth reading for the details on government activities in a "democracy". Watergate was a notable failure of such activities. Do these activities continue? Of course!

Pages 158-9 tell of his proposal for a "Bolshevik model" for former colonial countries: let a political party control the army and secret police so that neither the army or another political party could gain control of the government. He pointed out that only those newly created countries that adopted this principle have escaped military dictatorships and civil war.

Does the above advice seem too cynical and radical? But our Establishment DOES control the army and secret police so that neither the military or a populist political party (one not controlled by corporate interests) can gain control.

Yet the classic solution for democracies, from Aristotle to Machiavelli to our Founding Fathers was well-armed citizens and their militia. It has worked well for over over a century, and the idea still survives today.

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