Case studies in early modern European intelligence

ABSTRACT

This introduction to the special issue ‘Case Studies in Early Modern European Intelligence’ provides an overview of scholarship on the history of intelligence in the early modern period. Examining outstanding research contributions to the field, it highlights the potential of early modern European history to contribute to a refinement of the methodology and theory of intelligence history as a whole. In light of the contributions made by the articles collected in this special issue, we argue that intelligence history as a discipline will benefit from an increased dialogue between scholars working on different periods. We therefore invite historians of intelligence to study the early modern period and historians of the early modern period to study intelligence.

KEYWORDS:

• Intelligence history
• early modern period
• methodology
• intelligence theory

Introduction

In many respects, the twenty-first century has been a century of intelligence. Following 9/11 and a series of leaks and revelations on both sides of the Atlantic, intelligence agencies have been dragged into the light of public scrutiny as never before. This has also stimulated an interest in the history of these services, including the recent publication of authorized histories of the British security service MI5 by Christopher Andrew and its foreign intelligence counterpart SIS by Keith Jeffery.¹ In the US, the tradition of authorised historical scholarship is somewhat older with the journal Studies in Intelligence established as early as 1955 by Sherman Kent and the creation of the CIA’s Center for the Study of Intelligence in 1974.² Even though the International Intelligence History Association was founded in Germany in the 1990s, intelligence studies has remained a rather obscure field in that country.³ This situation has improved somewhat with the establishment of two independent commissions of historians investigating the history of the domestic intelligence service (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, BfV) and the German foreign intelligence service (Bundesnachrichtendienst, BND), respectively.⁴ A general trend towards an increasing interest in the history of intelligence organisations is also observable in other European countries and languages.

While the history of services founded in the twentieth century has drawn increasing attention from academic audiences as well as the general public, perennially fascinated with the likes of James Bond, the study of intelligence organisations and intelligence operations in other periods has also received important stimuli from the growing awareness of contemporary intelligence services. Writing in 2013 and commenting on a flurry of scholarship on the intelligence organisation of Sir Francis Walsingham (c. 1532–1590) on behalf of Queen Elizabeth I of England (r. 1558–1603) in the early 2000s, the early modernist Michael Kempe half-mockingly diagnosed an apparent shift from the ‘history of great men’ to a ‘history of great men in the background’, a shift from the study of political and military leaders to the study of spies and spymasters who supplied them with information. The article, in fact, opens with twenty-first century episodes: the assassination of the former head of the Islamist terrorist organisation al-Qaeda Osama bin Laden in May 2011 and the false information about Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction in 2003.⁵

Kempe’s diagnosis is accurate in so far as, in the past decade and a half, a new generation of historians, in particular, has undertaken ground-breaking research into how early modern polities gathered and used intelligence. In the process, they have identified and traced the history of individual spies and spymasters and reconstructed operational details from fragmented evidence spread across a multiplicity of archives and languages. Whenever such research has not confined itself to individual operations or spies, the study of social networks has provided unprecedented insights into the organisation of intelligence on a personal, as well as an institutional level.

This special issue of the Journal of Intelligence History presents a selection of case studies which examine aspects of the intelligence activities of European governments between roughly 1500 and 1750. Deeply rooted in empirical investigations, the contributions offer reflections on the process of intelligence more generally, its organisation, its place in governance, and its relevance (or irrelevance as Matthias Pohlig’s article argues) to decision-making which are of interest not only to specialists in early modern history but to historians of intelligence more generally. It is our hope that this collection will help stimulate and intensify discussions between scholars working on the subject of intelligence in different periods in order to overcome a chronological compartmentalisation which is an obstacle to the better understanding of historical developments and phenomena – especially when the proverbial ‘second oldest profession’ is concerned. In the process, the issue and its contributions challenge the notion that systematic intelligence work is a modern, or even more particularly a twentieth-century phenomenon and that intelligence activities before then were mainly ‘private venture[s]’.⁶

A brief history of the history of early modern intelligence

The recent interest of early modernists in the institutions and practices of intelligence is certainly not new in itself. Garrett Mattingly’s classical monograph on Renaissance diplomacy first published in 1955, for example, acknowledges the role of ambassadors and other diplomatic personnel in intelligence-gathering, without, however, discussing this aspect in any greater depth.⁷ Nearly half a century later, Lucien Bély painted the picture of an entangled history of espionage and diplomacy in his groundbreaking and extensive study of Louis XIV’s (r. 1643–1715) foreign policy. Bély spoke of ‘spies and ambassadors’, their different roles in information policy, intelligence gathering, and negotiations. He also employed the old proverb of the ambassador as the ‘honourable spy’, an assessment of the role of senior diplomats widely accepted by contemporaries. In this view, the diplomat’s tasks encompassed besides the representation of his ruler and possibly consular services to his ruler’s subjects (and often enough particularly members of the diplomat’s own family) the gathering of open-source as well as secret intelligence.⁸ Some scholars have taken up Bély’s concept and applied it to other historical periods and geographical settings.⁹

German publications often use the term ‘secret diplomacy’ (Geheimdiplomatie) to discuss topics otherwise understood as espionage, the gathering, analysis, and distribution of secret information concerning another state’s or monarchy’s political, dynastic, or military arcana.¹⁰ In some recent publications of diplomatic history, these aspects of diplomats’ duties have even been integrated into the analysis without explicit reference to either intelligence or espionage.¹¹

As far as actors, organisations, and practices of gathering, producing, and disseminating intelligence and information is concerned, Venice has received particular attention.¹² One important reason for this, as research on the history of Venetian intelligence and the Venetian archives make clear, is not only the reliance on written documents, but also the systematic archiving of records by the Venetian state throughout the early modern period.¹³ This contrast is particularly stark, when the Venetian case is compared to the Ottoman Empire which, as Emrah Safa Gürkan has shown, not only delegated the task of intelligence to officeholders and thus outsourced it to their households, but also very heavily relied on oral reporting.¹⁴ While historians – generally as a result of their own socialization – have often considered the preference for orality over writing a disadvantage or even ‘backward’, contemporaries did not necessarily share this perspective. Johann Baptist Weber, vice-chancellor of the Holy Roman Empire in the reign of Maximilian II (r. 1564–76), for instance, ‘believed that the only way to ensure confidentiality was to do business orally, rather than in writing.’¹⁵ This structural and cultural difference in any case does not necessarily mean that Ottoman intelligence was generally less effective – in fact, by all accounts, decision-makers in the Ottoman Empire were very well-informed, indeed – however, the relative dearth of written records places severe limits on what historians are and will be able to uncover.¹⁶

The two other major geographical foci of early modern intelligence history are England and Spain. In the latter case, historians have concentrated particularly on the reign of King Philip II (r. 1556–98), not least because, throughout the sixteenth century, the Spanish were enmeshed in a number of European conflicts, notably the Dutch revolt (1566–1648), the French Wars of Religion (traditionally dated to 1562–98), the attempt to reclaim England for Catholicism which culminated (famously, if only retrospectively) in the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, and, of course, the contest over dominance in the Mediterranean with the Ottoman Empire epitomized by the repeated changing of hands of Tunis (1535, 1569, 1573, and 1574) and the Battle of Lepanto (1571).¹⁷ And Spain continued to play a key role on the continent throughout the seventeenth and even the eighteenth centuries.¹⁸

The history of intelligence in early modern Britain – particularly, of course, during the reign of Elizabeth I – has likewise stimulated a significant output. In contrast to the large number of studies focusing on either individual spies or spymasters or particular operations,¹⁹ the monographs by John Michael Archer and Alan Marshall take a long-term view, showing how intelligence on the British Isles developed from the courtly spying for Queen Elizabeth I in the late sixteenth century to an intelligence system with professional spies during the reign of King Charles II (r. 1660–85), which collapsed soon after the accession of his brother James II (r. 1685–8).²⁰

Spies and intelligence have traditionally also played a role in military history. Historians have studied the influence of intelligence on the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48),²¹ on the struggle of the British government with the Jacobites, the supporters of the Catholic parts of the Stuart dynasty deposed from the British thrones during the Glorious Revolution of 1688, especially in the first half of the eighteenth century,²² and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars at the end of the eighteenth century.²³ In his work on the period between the War of the Austrian Succession and the French Revolution, Stéphane Genêt has pointed out the impact of scientific methods and enlightened thinking on military espionage.²⁴ In addition, a number of more recent studies, such as the work of Gábor Ágoston and Emrah Safa Gürkan link their treatment of intelligence to scholarship on the issue of strategic thinking and the question of whether rulers such as Philip II of Spain or, indeed, the Ottoman sultans pursued a ‘grand strategy’.²⁵

Newer studies of early modern intelligence, however, go beyond these traditional research contexts and centrally connect to recent trends in historical scholarship, such as the history of political culture,²⁶ the history of communication and travel,²⁷ the history of archives,²⁸ and gender history.²⁹ Particularly notable is the assessment by Marika Keblusek that early modern spy networks need to be analysed with contemporary patronage in mind. Early modern society was largely built on deeply personal interactions, particularly patron-client relationships. Since the actors involved in early modern intelligence were inescapably embedded in patronage networks, they were consequently more inclined to honour their loyalty to their patron than to any abstract institution or state.³⁰

Finally, Nadine Akkerman’s recent study of women in English intelligence during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (c. 1638–1660) deserves special mention because it is eye-opening not only for early modern history, but for intelligence history in general. Obscured by the reluctance of contemporaries and later generations alike to believe that any woman could engage in ‘such a dirty, secretive business’ as espionage as well as demonstrable attempts by male spymasters to efface the intelligence work of women, ‘she-intelligencers’, as Akkerman calls them, have largely been overlooked or dismissed in historical studies. In fact, female spies ‘were everywhere, but scholars had simply been unable or unwilling to discern their activity.’³¹ Akkerman’s study, however, has achieved more than to transcend the gender bias in the historical record as well as in scholarship. It proves how valuable both a material approach to texts (in this case particularly the use of ciphers, secret inks, and the various methods for sealing letters) and the critical approach to the archives and the particular context of production of the records they store are for the study of the history of intelligence in any period.³² On the whole, this ‘new’ intelligence history is ultimately a logical extension of the cultural turn to fill in a missing dimension in our understanding of early modern political cultures, an attempt to explain, to quote the historian of twentieth-century British intelligence Wesley K. Wark, ‘how governments think and act.’³³

The challenges of studying the history of intelligence

Wark’s methodological observations on how to study the history of intelligence organisations in the twentieth century are of particular relevance to historians of the early modern period. While there is a certain temptation to study the history of intelligence on the basis of the archives of intelligence services, doing so captures only a partial picture, even when and where the relevant files have been declassified in their entirety, as is usually the case with early modern records. Writing before the UK Freedom of Information Act of 2000 significantly expanded historians’ access to British intelligence files (albeit sometimes very selectively so), Wark advocated the adoption of a wider understanding of intelligence archives as not merely the documents kept by the secret services themselves, but ‘the record of all those government departments who receive, incorporate, digest and report on intelligence that comes to them from both secret and overt sources.’ Precisely because intelligence services exist within a wider ‘bureaucratic framework’, ‘the secret services leave a paper trail as they work to impress their intelligence on government departments’. In the absence of access to the intelligence archive narrowly defined, this paper trail allows valuable insights into intelligence and its uses, especially if it is read, as Akkerman advocates, ‘against the archival grain’.³⁴ And even where the files of intelligence services are available, this paper trail is vital for understanding the role of intelligence services beyond the narrow confines of their operations and their role as senders of information to other branches of government, as Christopher Murphy and Daniel Lomas have highlighted.³⁵

For early modernists, the search for this paper trail is even more important. For even though they can take it for granted that all material has been declassified, only rarely do they have the luxury of access to anything like a coherent intelligence archive. This is not to say that such intelligence archives do not sometimes exist. Ioanna Iordanou’s contribution to this issue, in fact, argues that the intelligence service of Venice as early as the sixteenth century was organized very much along bureaucratic lines which appear comfortably familiar to us today.³⁶ But at least within Europe, Venice’s centralized intelligence archive was an exception. Historians of other polities, therefore, have to painstakingly piece together disparate evidence from a sometimes staggering array of sources which include state archives as well as private papers.³⁷ Yet leaving aside the seemingly more scattered and fragmented nature of the record as a result of early modern archival practices, the rearrangement and often destruction of valuable material by later generations of archivists, the loss caused by wars, disasters, decay, and discarding, as well as the particular palaeographic challenges (which are easily paralleled in hastily scribbled notes originating in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries), the underlying method of research of historians working in different periods is essentially the same.

In spite of the many similarities dictated by their quarry, historians of early modern and modern intelligence only rarely talk to each other or read each other’s work. Notable and laudable scholarly exceptions to this rule in the English language are the two-volume collection Spy Chiefs, Christopher Andrew’s recent survey of the ‘secret world’, and the comprehensive three-volume Cambridge History of Intelligence and Espionage edited by him and Calder Walton.³⁸

As a result, early modernists specializing in the history of intelligence are often unaware of the models and theories developed in intelligence studies which form such an important part of the work of scholars interested in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. At the least, this non-engagement results in a measure of intellectual redundancy. In his discussion of Elizabethan intelligence, Michael Kempe, for instance, devotes considerable space to outlining ‘four epistemic operations’ which he calls ‘collection’ (Sammeln), ‘analysis’ (Analyse), ‘evaluation’ (Beurteilung), and ‘application’ (Verwendung). This is essentially Kempe’s version of the intelligence cycle which classically consists of the five stages of planning and direction (absent in Kempe’s model), collection, processing (Kempe’s analysis), analysis (evaluation), and dissemination (application, although Kempe’s concept here includes the actual use of intelligence in decision-making).³⁹ Sadly, he appears to have developed his model not only without knowledge of this staple of intelligence theory, but also without awareness of the considerable debate surrounding it.⁴⁰

This critical observation does not diminish the overall value of Kempe’s work on intelligence, for, in the very same article, he advances an understanding of intelligence as ‘suspective knowledge’ (suspektives Wissen) which makes a major contribution to the epistemology of intelligence. According to Kempe, intelligence is ‘a form of knowledge which never manages to entirely shake off all self-doubt’.⁴¹ While this position is reminiscent of Kira Vrist Rønn and Simon Høffding’s characterization of intelligence as ‘fallible knowledge’,⁴² Kempe goes further in outlining its implications for intelligence activity which is fuelled by attempts to dispel the doubts about information already collected by means of gathering additional information. While establishing greater certainty in some areas, this additional information, in turn, introduces doubt, prompting further questions which require the acquisition of further knowledge. The result is a vicious cycle.⁴³ While one of the reasons why Kempe’s ideas have not received the attention they deserve is certainly the fact that he published them in German (albeit in the prestigious Historische Zeitschrift), his article – arguably one of the most stimulating conceptual contributions to early modern intelligence history in recent years – is symptomatic of the lack of dialogue between those working on the history of intelligence in different periods.

It is self-evident to us that the intensification of exchanges about theoretical concepts and models as well as their application to empirical studies across the boundaries of disciplinary and periodical specialization is beneficial to the field of intelligence history as a whole. Work on the early modern period, in particular, has the potential to help solve definitional issues at the heart of intelligence studies, not least the perennial questions of whether covert operations should be regarded as an intelligence activity and what relevance secrets and secrecy play for the conceptualization of intelligence as a process.⁴⁴ At the very least, the study of ‘premodern’ intelligence organizations and operations put problems of modern intelligence in perspective and thus enable us to develop a better grasp of what is ‘modern’ about modern intelligence. The distinction between ‘modern’ and ‘premodern’, in fact, is not always as clear-cut as the traditional cut-off points of 1760 (particularly in the British tradition) or 1789/1815 (the continental preference) and the general emphasis on the early in the term early modern period suggest.⁴⁵

Consider the following episode: In June 1794, during the French Revolutionary Wars, several English newspapers reported the arrest of a French spy in Theresienstadt (Terezín in the present-day Czech Republic). Although infamous today as the site of a Nazi death camp, the town is also the site of a fortress (built from 1780 to 1790) which was widely hailed as one of the most advanced fortifications of its day. It was therefore a frequent target of espionage and it is unsurprising that the French revolutionary regime sought to gain intelligence about a stronghold which had been erected on behalf of one of its enemies, the Habsburg dynasty, who fought to undo the Revolution and restore the Bourbons to their throne in Paris.⁴⁶

What is of greater interest here than the intelligence operation itself is the cover apparently chosen by the spy. According to the reports, he ‘pretended to be an Arabian Prince, by wearing the habit, &c.’.⁴⁷ While to us today this may seem like a rather outlandish and therefore ineffective cover, in the context of the eighteenth century, it was a reasonable choice which associated the spy with a highly mobile group whose movements were unlikely to cause suspicion, even in times of war. In fact, the so-called ‘Arabian princes’ – actual as well as purported Christians from Ottoman Syria – had been a frequent sight in Central and Western Europe, including England, since approximately the 1720s. The French spy, therefore, could draw on a well-established stereotypical character to provide cover for his mission and take advantage of the fact that the relatively slow speed of communications between Central Europe and the Near East would make it unlikely that his story was verified before his mission was complete.⁴⁸

The choice of cover is of particular significance. Even though our spy firmly belongs to a period which is most often regarded as the beginning of the modern period proper, his cover was nevertheless deeply rooted in premodern phenomena and practices.⁴⁹ By 1794, high mobility had long been associated with intelligence. It is no coincidence, for example, that those gathering intelligence on behalf of the Habsburg dynasty as well as the Ottoman sultans whose imperial rivalry in the Mediterranean as well as South Eastern and Central Europe dominated almost the entire early modern period frequently drew not only on diplomats but also former prisoners of war and slaves as well as merchants who regularly crossed the border. Such groups consequently could and did easily come under suspicion of being enemy spies.⁵⁰ In this respects, the history of intelligence therefore shows continuities which are most often eclipsed by a focus on bureaucratic intelligence services and technical means of collection which were unavailable before the switch to electric and electronic communications from the turn of the twentieth century onward. Such continuities and parallels are becoming more evident, as intelligence services targeting non-state organizations such as the Islamic State, al-Qaeda, and Boko Haram are once again turning to HUMINT following the overwhelming concentration on SIGINT and other technical means of collection such as aerial photography and satellite imagery during the Cold War.⁵¹

Case studies in early modern European intelligence

In the hope of promoting both the study of early modern intelligence and an increased dialogue across the early modern–modern divide, the articles collected in this special issue of the Journal of Intelligence History present three case studies of intelligence activities and organisation from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries which either challenge prevalent assumptions about the sophistication (or lack of sophistication) of premodern intelligence or shine a new light on the place of intelligence within the wider context of governance. In addition, all studies address the particular methodological challenges for the study of early modern intelligence and illustrate how specific types of evidence can be exploited productively to tease out information about the organisation and practice of intelligence in this period.

The collection opens with a new take on a classical example of early modern intelligence: the Republic of Venice. In her contribution, Ioanna Iordanou evaluates the intelligence organisation headed by the Council of Ten, Venice’s infamous spy chiefs. She assesses its organization and performance not only from the point of view of the historian, but also in light of theoretical insights from the disciplines of sociology, organisation studies, and management. As her interdisciplinary approach demonstrates, Venetian intelligence displays characteristics which are remarkably similar to contemporary intelligence services. In fact, ‘Venice’s secret service functioned like an organisation of public administration with managerial structures that determined the working relationships between its members’. Iordanou thus challenges the idea of a fundamental difference between ‘modern’ and ‘premodern’ intelligence organisations and, as a result, the inherent incommensurability of modern and early modern experiences in this sphere.

It is not unlikely that Venice is a special case, as Iordanou herself acknowledges when comparing the Republic to other European states of the time.⁵² The Austrian-Habsburg intelligence organisations created in the second half of the sixteenth century to monitor the Ottoman Empire, which are the subject of Tobias P. Graf’s contribution, certainly appear less sophisticated, even if the archival documentation in this case is considerably less complete as a result of losses caused by disasters and discarding. Since Austrian-Habsburg foreign intelligence did not operate on the basis of a clear division of labour with other branches of government and notably relied on the institutions created to administer the defence of the extensive land border with the Ottomans as well as the resident ambassadors in Istanbul for its collection and analysis of information, it is tempting to regard it as largely unprofessional and therefore ineffective.

However, as Graf shows on the basis of a careful study of the sources, this impression is misleading. Instead, intelligence work was ‘woven into the very fabric’ of the military administration headed since 1556 by the Aulic War Council as well as the embassy in Istanbul established in 1546. While historians of diplomacy frequently acknowledge that diplomats were involved in intelligence, this article provides rare insights into just how important this task was relative to diplomatic representation through the close study of a rare series of ambassadorial expenditure accounts. For the ambassadors as well as the Aulic War Councillors, handling intelligence played a major part of day-to-day business not because respective officeholders took a particular interest in such matters, but because this task was a structurally embedded and regular aspect of their posts.

Concluding this issue and returning us to the issue of the relevance of early modern intelligence history to intelligence theory raised in this introduction, Matthias Pohlig examines the question of the use and utility of intelligence through a case study of the British government during the Spanish War of Succession. Even today, the assumption that intelligence serves decision-making is fundamental to the study of intelligence history and members of the eighteenth-century British government shared this view. Yet, as Pohlig shows, ‘most of the time, the English government’s active reading interest fell short of the urgency with which it demanded its agents to send as much information as possible.’ Drawing on organizational sociology, he concludes that the government collected information not for immediate decision-making but for its possible future relevance as a ‘mother of prevention’. Arguably, the symbolic function of intelligence was more important since it constituted ‘the most important resource for distinguishing decisions as well as decision-makers as competent, rational, and efficient’ and thus access to intelligence became ‘an argument for legitimization’, a use particularly evident in the activities of the Secretaries of State Charles Spencer, third earl of Sunderland (1675–1722) and Robert Harley (1661–1724).

Just as Arthur S. Hulnick and others have criticized the model of the intelligence cycle as an inadequate model of the practical workings of the intelligence process, so Pohlig’s findings indicate that an understanding of intelligence as ‘the kind of knowledge which our state must possess regarding other states in order to assure that its cause will not suffer nor its undertakings fail because its statesmen and soldiers plan and act in ignorance’ or the process which produces that knowledge fails to do justice to the empirically more varied uses of intelligence in actual practice.⁵³ Instead, theoretical models of intelligence both as a product and a process need to be adjusted to allow for other goals and purposes.

Pohlig’s observations on the use of intelligence by members of the eighteenth-century British government are entirely compatible with Wesley K. Wark’s remarks about their twentieth-century counterparts. Then as now, intelligence organizations were embedded in an institutional framework in which the constituent organisations (or sub-organisations) as well as those to whom they were subordinate competed for recognition, resources, power, and attention. Wark’s paper trail, which the articles collected here so fruitfully follow, were not least a demonstration of competence and relevance to governments – or even individual actors within it – whether these governments were constituted democratically as in the Western world today, appointed from an oligarchic group as in Venice, or selected by heredity as in the case of Europe’s multitude of monarchies in the early modern period.⁵⁴

We hope that readers primarily interested in twentieth and twenty-first-century intelligence will agree with us that diachronic comparison between modern and early modern intelligence is fruitful and beneficial to modernists and early modernists alike. We see the major benefit of the scholarly dialogue necessary for such comparison in the potential for refining our common theoretical and methodological toolkits, as the contributions by Ioanna Iordanou and Matthias Pohlig demonstrate so powerfully.

To colleagues interested in the premodern history of intelligence we extend an invitation to venture into these in many ways still only patchily charted waters. We know too little, for instance, about the men and women involved in gathering and processing intelligence in the vast majority of early modern polities, nor do we have a clear picture of how such activities were organised or how and why sometimes intelligence was institutionalised in the ways observable in Venice, Philip II’s Spain, and the England of Elizabeth I, while at other times and elsewhere it was not. In addition, it would be worthwhile to re-examine the reasons for the disappearance of intelligence organisations, which appears to have been frequent before the twentieth century, which Jeffrey T. Richelson, writing in the mid-1990s, christened the ‘century of spies’, as if intelligence had been non-existent or at least unimportant rather than understudied in more distant centuries.⁵⁵ Are changes in personnel such as those caused by the accession of a new ruler or the death of courtier entrusted with organising intelligence sufficient to explain discontinuities in the organization and performance of early modern intelligence services?⁵⁶ While this link appears obvious in early modern structures of governance which in many cases centred on the person of office-holders more so than on offices and institutions as such, rather than focusing exclusively on personal abilities and affinities, historians also need to take into account practices of secrecy which may frequently have denied successors the knowledge required to pick up where their predecessors had left off.⁵⁷

Finally, existing studies have barely begun to scratch the surface of the economic side of early modern intelligence. In addition to questions of intelligence funding and expenditure, economic intelligence and even outright economic espionage in the early modern period have been understudied. Charlotte Backerra’s work on Austrian–British relations in the first half of the eighteenth century, for example, shows that at least some governments used their intelligence-gathering diplomats at foreign courts for the clandestine acquisition of both information about manufacturing processes and adequately skilled personnel.⁵⁸ Studying what historians often discuss rather abstractly as ‘technology transfer’ through the lens of intelligence offers the dual benefit of shedding light on the degree of state involvement in such transfers while at the same time affording useful insight into their practical underpinnings.

The questions outlined here do not apply to Europe and European actors alone, of course, even if the articles in this issue stay firmly within the bounds of the European continent. The story of Washington’s Spies during the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783) popularized by the TV drama series Turn (originally aired in the US 2014–2017) is an obvious example of the wider geographic relevance of our topic,⁵⁹ but the study of intelligence is of no less interest in, say, the South and East Asian contexts – not only because knowledge of these regions provides historians of Western intelligence with comparative material and potentially new questions to ask of familiar sources, but also because we are often blissfully unaware of the kinds of connections and transfers to which our colleagues in other fields have increasingly turned in recent decades.⁶⁰ Much remains to be discovered and understood, therefore. We hope that the case studies assembled here will provide inspiration as well as models for things to observe and commit to writing and thus, in a small way, contribute to improving our understanding of the ‘second-oldest profession’ and its long history.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. The ideas expressed here have been shaped by many years working on early modern intelligence. As a result, we have incurred more debts to colleagues than we can possibly acknowledge here. Our particular gratitude, however, extends to the contributors to this issue. This introduction incorporates research supported by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation (project ‘Wissen und politische Entscheidungsfindung in der Frühen Neuzeit am Beispiel des österreichisch-habsburgischen Geheimdienstwesens’ [Knowledge and political decision-making in the early modern period: The example of Austrian-Habsburg foreign intelligence], 2015–2016) and the project Stories of Survival: Recovering the Connected Histories of Eastern Christianity in the Early Modern World, which was supported by funding from a European Research Council Starting Grant under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 638578).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work incorporates research supported by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation (project ‘Wissen und politische Entscheidungsfindung in der Frühen Neuzeit am Beispiel des österreichisch-habsburgischen Geheimdienstwesens’ [Knowledge and political decision-making in the early modern period: The example of Austrian-Habsburg foreign intelligence], 2015–2016) and the project Stories of Survival: Recovering the Connected Histories of Eastern Christianity in the Early Modern World, which was supported by funding from a European Research Council Starting Grant under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 638578).

Notes on contributors

Tobias P. Graf

Tobias P. Graf: ”Tobias P. Graf is an Assistant Professor of Early Modern European History at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in Germany. He studied history at the University of Cambridge before receiving his doctorate from Heidelberg University, Germany, in 2014. He has held teaching and research positions at the universities of Heidelberg, Tübingen, and Oxford. Tobias's research focuses on geographical, social, and religious mobility especially between the Ottoman Empire and Europe, as well as the history of intelligence and information-gathering in the early modern period. He is the author of The Sultan's Renegades: Christian-European Converts and the Making of the Ottoman Elite, 1575–1610 (Oxford University Press, 2017).”

Charlotte Backerra

Charlotte Backerra: ”Charlotte Backerra is an Assistant Professor of Early Modern History at Georg August University Göttingen in Germany. She studied history, political science, and economics at the universities of Mainz and Glasgow, receicing her doctorate from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in 2017. She has held various teaching positions at the universities of Mainz, Stuttgart, and Darmstadt. In addition to the history of intelligence, her research focuses on dynastic history, economic history, and the history of diplomacy and international relations. She is the author of Wien und London, 1727–1735: Internationale Beziehungen im frühen 18. Jahrhundert (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2018).”

Notes

¹ Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (London: Allen Lane, 2009); Keith Jeffery, MI6: the history of the Secret Intelligence Service, 1909–1949 (London: Bloomsbury, 2010). For an overview of British intelligence history, see Christopher R. Moran, ‘Coming to Clarity: The Pursuit of Intelligence History; Methods, Sources, and Trajectories in the United Kingdom’, Studies in Intelligence 55/2 (June 2011), 33–55, https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/studies-in-intelligence/volume-55-no-2/the-pursuit-of-intelligence-history-methods-sources-and-trajectories-in-the-united-kingdom/. All websites cited in this introduction were last accessed on 25 August 2022.

² Nicholas Dujmovic, ‘Fifty Years of Studies in Intelligence: Building an “Intelligence Literature”’, Studies in Intelligence 49/4 (2005), https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/studies-in-intelligence/volume-49-no-4/fifty-years-of-studies-in-intelligence/.

³ Until now, there is only one Master’s programme for Intelligence Studies, which was established in 2019. Participation is reserved to members of the German intelligence services.

⁴ Website of the Unabhängige Historikerkommission zur Erforschung der Geschichte des Bundesnachrichtendienstes, http://www.uhk-bnd.de (last updated 2 May 2012).

⁵ Michael Kempe, ‘Burn after Reading: Verschlüsseltes Wissen und Spionagenetzwerke im elisabethanischen England’, Historische Zeitschrift 296 (2013): 354–79, at 354, quotation from 356: ‘Folgt man dem aktuellen Trend …, dann scheint … nach der Geschichte “großer Männer” nunmehr diejenige “großer Hintermänner” zu folgen.’; Stephen Alford, The Watchers: A Secret History of the Reign of Elizabeth I (London: Allen Lane, 2012); John Cooper, The Queen’s Agent: Sir Francis Walsingham and the Rise of Espionage in Elizabethan England (London: Faber and Faber, 2011); Robert Hutchinson, Elizabeth’s Spy Master: Francis Walsingham and the Secret War that Saved England (London: Phoenix, 2007); Derek Wilson, Sir Francis Walsingham: A Courtier in an Age of Terror (London: Constable, 2007); Stephen Budiansky, Her Majesty’s Spymaster: Queen Elizabeth I, Sir Francis Walsingham, and the Birth of Modern Espionage (New York: Viking, 2005).

⁶ Phillip Knightley, The Second Oldest Profession: The Spy as Patriot, Bureaucrat, Fantasist and Whore (London: Pan Books, 1986), 3. See also David Kahn, ‘An Historical Theory of Intelligence’, in Intelligence Theory: Key Questions and Debates, ed. Peter Gill, Stephen Marrin, and Mark Phythian (London: Routledge, 2009), 4–15.

⁷ Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (London: Cape, 1955).

⁸ Lucien Bély, Espions et ambassadeurs au temps de Louis XIV (Paris: Fayard, 1990). For further examples of scholarship on diplomacy engaging with the ambassadors’ contribution to intelligence, see Isabella Lazzarini, Communication and Conflict: Italian Diplomacy in the Early Renaissance, 1350–1520 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), esp. 76–7; Michael Talbot, British–Ottoman Relations, 1661–1807: Commerce and Diplomatic Practice in Eighteenth-Century Istanbul (London: Boydell, 2017), 44–8.

⁹ See for example Alain Hugon, Au service du roi catholique: ‘Honorables ambassadeurs’ et ‘divins espions’. Répresentation diplomatique et service secret dans les relations hispano-françaises de 1598 à 1635 (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2004); Diego Navarro Bonilla, Cartas entre espías e inteligencias secretas en el siglo de los validos: Juan de Torres-Gaspar Bonifaz, 1632–1638 (Madrid: Ministerio de Defensa, Secretaría General Técnica, 2007).

¹⁰ Max Braubach, Die Geheimdiplomatie des Prinzen Eugen von Savoyen (Cologne: Opladen, 1962); Hans Jochen Pretsch, Graf Manteuffels Beitrag zur österreichischen Geheimdiplomatie von 1728 bis 1736: Ein kursächsischer Kabinettminister im Dienste des Prinzen Eugen von Savoyen und Kaiser Karls VI. (Bonn: Röhrscheid, 1970); Volker Laube, ‘Geheimnisverrat in Wien: Anmerkungen zu den organisatorischen Bedingungen frühneuzeitlicher Außenpolitik am Beispiel Kurbayerns’, in Internationale Beziehungen in der Frühen Neuzeit: Ansätze und Perspektiven, ed. Heidrun Kugeler et al. (Münster: Lit, 2006), 212–36; Martin Espenhorst, ‘Geheimhaltung als Instrument vormoderner Friedenssicherung’, in Geheime Post: Kryptographie und Steganographie der diplomatischen Korrespondenz europäischer Höfe während der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Anne-Simone Rous and Martin Mulsow (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2015), 73–85; Anne-Simone Rous, Geheimdiplomatie in der Frühen Neuzeit: Spione und Chiffren in Sachsen 1500–1763 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2022); Maren Walter, ‘Ein Maulwurf in Wien? Informationssicherheit, geheimdiplomatische Maßnahmen und Wissensgenerierung während der Vorverhandlungen des Westfälischen Friedenskongresses 1643–1644’, in Diplomatische Wissenskulturen der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Guido Braun (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), 161–76, esp. at 162–5 for the discussion of the concepts of intelligence and secret diplomacy.

¹¹ Claudia Kaufold, Ein Musiker als Diplomat: Abbé Agostino Steffani in hannoverschen Diensten (1688–1703) (Bielefeld: Verlag für Regionalgeschichte, 1997), with just a few explicit notes on this diplomatic actor’s espionage activities, e.g. on p. 168. A small anthology with chapters on diplomatic ciphers, espionage networks of foreign secretaries, and black chambers used primarily to open diplomatic correspondence mentions neither espionage nor intelligence in its title: Robyn Adams and Rosanna Cox, eds., Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

¹² Ioanna Iordanou, Venice’s Secret Service: Organizing Intelligence in the Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019); Iordanou, ‘What News on the Rialto? The Trade of Information and Early Modern Venice’s Centralised Intelligence Organisation’, Intelligence and National Security 31 (2016): 305–26; Filippo de Vivo, Information and Communication in Venice: Rethinking Early Modern Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Paolo Preto, I servizi segreti di Venezia, 2nd ed. (Milan: il Saggiatore, 2004). References to Venetian intelligence also feature in works that are not primarily concerned with Venetian diplomacy or Venice’s government such as Eric Dursteler, Renegade Women: Gender, Identity, and Boundaries in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 21–3.

¹³ Filippo de Vivo, ‘Archives of Speech: Recording Diplomatic Negotiation in Late Medieval and Early Modern Italy’, European History Quarterly 46 (2016): 519–44; de Vivo, ‘Ordering the Archive in Early Modern Venice (1400–1650)’, Archival Science 10 (2010): 231–48; de Vivo, Information, 55; Iordanou, Venice’s Secret Service, ch. 3; Fabio Antonini, ‘Historical Uses of the Secret Chancery in Early Modern Venice: Archiving, Researching and Presenting the Records of State’, (doctoral diss., Birkbeck College, University of London, 2016). See also Iordanou’s contribution to this issue.

¹⁴ Emrah Safa Gürkan, ‘Espionage in the 16th Century Mediterranean: Secret Diplomacy, Mediterranean Go-Betweens and the Ottoman Habsburg Rivalry’ (doctoral diss., Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., 2012); Gürkan, ‘The Centre and the Frontier: Ottoman Cooperation with the North African Corsairs in the Sixteenth Century’, Turkish Historical Review 1 (2010): 125–63.

¹⁵ Paula Sutter Fichtner, Emperor Maximilian II (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 65.

¹⁶ Emrah Safa Gürkan, ‘The Efficacy of Ottoman Counter-Intelligence in the 16th Century’, Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hugaricae 65 (2012), 1–38; Gürkan, ‘Espionage’, 252, 362–87, 414–22; Gábor Ágoston, ‘Information, Ideology, and Limits of Imperial Policy: Ottoman Grand Strategy in the Context of Ottoman–Habsburg Rivalry’, in The Early Modern Ottomans: Remapping the Empire, ed. Virginia Aksan and Daniel Goffman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 75–103, at 78–92; Tobias P. Graf, The Sultan’s Renegades. Christian-European Converts to Islam and the Making of the Ottoman Elite, 1575–1610 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 136–45.

¹⁷ Carlos Carnicer and Javier Marcos, Espías de Felipe II: Los servicios secretos del Imperio español (Madrid: La Esfera de los Libros, 2005); Geoffrey Parker, The Grand Strategy of Philip II (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000).

¹⁸ Ignacio Rivas Ibáñez, ‘Mobilizing Resources for War: The British and Spanish Intelligence Systems During the War of Jenkins’ Ear (1739–1744)’ (doctoral diss., University College London, 2008); Charles Howard Carter, The Secret Diplomacy of the Habsburgs, 1598–1625 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964). For Spanish ‘secret diplomacy’, see the edition of diplomatic correspondence in Ana Mur Raurell, ed., Diplomacia secreta y paz la correspondencia secreta de los embajadores españoles en Viena Juan Guillermo Ripperda y Luis Ripperda (1724–1727), trans. Ana Mur Raurell and Karl F. Rudolf (Madrid: Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores y de Cooperación, Área de Documentación y Publicaciones and Instituto Histórico Austriaco, 2011).

¹⁹ In addition to the literature cited in n. 5, see John Bossy, Under the Molehill: An Elizabethan Spy Story (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001); Mark Urban, The Man Who Broke Napoleon’s Codes: The Story of George Scovell (London: Faber and Faber, 2001); Jock Haswell, The First Respectable Spy: The Life and Times of Colquhoun Grant, Wellington’s Head of Intelligence (Staplehurst: Spellmount, 2005); Jonathan North, Killing Napoleon: The Plot to Blow up Bonaparte (Stroud: Amberley Publishing, 2019).

²⁰ John Michael Archer, Sovereignty and Intelligence: Spying and Court Culture in the English Renaissance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993); Alan Marshall, Intelligence and Espionage in the Reign of Charles II, 1660–1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

²¹ Derek Croxton, ‘“The Prosperity of Arms is Never Continual”: Military Intelligence, Surprise, and Diplomacy in 1640s Germany’, Journal of Military History 64 (2000): 981–1004.

²² An early example is Paul Samuel Fritz, ‘The Anti-Jacobite Intelligence System of the English Ministers, 1715–1745’, Historical Journal 16, no. 2 (1973): 265–89. See also the overall analysis by Hugh Douglas, Jacobite Spy Wars: Moles, Rogues and Treachery (Stroud: Sutton, 1999).

²³ Elizabeth Sparrow, Secret Service: British Agents in France, 1792–1815 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1999); Mary McGrigor, Wellington’s Spies (Barnsley: Leo Cooper, 2005); Tim Clayton, This Dark Business: The Secret War against Napoleon (London: Little, Brown, 2018); Huw J. Davies, Spying for Wellington: British Military Intelligence in the Peninsular War (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018).

²⁴ Stéphane Genêt, Les espions des Lumières: Actions secrètes et espionnage militaire au temps de Louis XV (Paris: Nouveau Monde Éditions, 2013).

²⁵ Ágoston, ‘Information’; Gürkan, ‘Espionage’; Gürkan, Sultanın Casusları: 16. Yüzyılda İstihbarat, Sabotaj ve Rüsvet Ağları (Istanbul: Kronik Kitap, 2017); Parker, Grand Strategy.

²⁶ Diego Navarro Bonilla, Los orígenes de la inteligencia en el Estado moderno: Tratadística militar, diplomática y política en Europa (siglos XVI-XVIII) (Valencia: Tirant lo Blanch, 2017); Matthias Pohlig, Marlboroughs Geheimnis: Strukturen und Funktionen der Informationsgewinnung im Spanischen Erbfolgekrieg (Cologne: Böhlau, 2016).

²⁷ John-Paul A. Ghobrial, The Whispers of Cities: Information Flows in Istanbul, London, and Paris in the Age of William Trumbull (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Johann Petitjean, L’intelligence des choses: Une histoire de l’information entre Italie et Méditerranée (XVI^e–XVII^e siècles) (Rome: École française de Rome, 2013); David Scott Gehring, ‘Intelligence Gathering, Relazioni, and the Ars Apodemica’, in: Diplomacy & Statecraft 33 (2022), 211–32.

²⁸ Liesbeth Corens, Kate Peters, and Alexandra Walsham, ed., ‘The Social History of the Archive: Record-Keeping in Early Modern Europe’, Past and Present supplement 11 (2016).

²⁹ Nadine Akkerman, Invisible Agents: Women and Espionage in Seventeenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

³⁰ Marika Keblusek, ‘Introduction’, in Hans Cools, Marika Keblusek, and Badeloch Noldus, eds., Your Humble Servant: Agents in Early Modern Europe (Hilversum: Verloren, 2006), 9–15, at 13; Charlotte Backerra, Wien und London, 1727–1735: Internationale Beziehungen im frühen 18. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2018), 235–7.

³¹ Akkerman, Invisible Agents, 3. On the obfuscation of female intelligence work, see ibid., 66–74, 87.

³² For more on Akkerman’s methodology, see ibid., 19–25. The videos demonstrating historical techniques produced by the research group ‘Unlocking History’ and published on their website (http://letterlocking.org) which Akkerman cites, are well worth watching.

³³ Wesley K. Wark, ‘In Never-Never Land? The British Archives on Intelligence’, Historical Journal 35 (1992), 201.

³⁴ Wark, ‘In Never-Never Land?’, 201; Akkerman, Invisible Agents, 24.

³⁵ Christopher J. Murphy and Daniel W. B. Lomas, ‘Return to Neverland? Freedom of Information and the History of British Intelligence’, Historical Journal 57 (2014): 273–87.

³⁶ See also Iordanou, Venice’s Secret Service.

³⁷ See, for example, Akkerman, Invisible Agents, 19–25.

³⁸ Christopher R. Moran et al., eds., Spy Chiefs: Intelligence Leaders in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, 2 vols. (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2018); Christopher Andrew, The Secret World: A History of Intelligence (London: Allen Lane, 2018). In the German context, there is also Wolfgang Krieger, Geschichte der Geheimdienste von den Pharaonen bis zur NSA, 3rd ed. (Munich: Beck, 2014); Krieger, ed., Geheimdienste in der Weltgeschichte: Von der Antike bis heute (Cologne: Anaconda, 2007).

³⁹ Mark Pythian, ‘Introduction: Beyond the Intelligence Cycle?’, in Understanding the Intelligence Cycle, ed. Mark Pythian (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 1–8, at 1–4. For a more elaborate breakdown of the stages, see Mark M. Lowenthal, Intelligence: From Secrets to Policy, 5th ed. (Los Angeles: SAGE, 2012), 57–70.

⁴⁰ Kempe, ‘Burn After Reading’, 363–5. On the debate about the intelligence cycle, see for example Mark Pythian, ed., Understanding the Intelligence Cycle (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013); Arthur S. Hulnick, ‘What is Wrong with the Intelligence Cycle’, Intelligence and National Security 21 (2006): 959–79; Judith Meister Johnston and Rob Johnston, ‘Testing the Intelligence Cycle through Systems Modeling and Simulation’, in Analytical Culture in the US Intelligence Community: An Ethnographic Study, ed. Rob Johnston (Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency, 2005), 45–57, https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/books-monographs/analytic-culture-in-the-u-s-intelligence-community-2/.

⁴¹ Kempe, ‘Burn After Reading’, 363.

⁴² Kira Vrist Rønn and Simon Høffding, ‘The Epistemic Status of Intelligence: An Epistemological Contribution to the Understanding of Intelligence’, Intelligence and National Security 28 (2013), 694–716, at 22.

⁴³ Kempe, ‘Burn After Reading’, 374. For an English-language summary of Kempe’s argument and a brief discussion of its implications for the study of sixteenth-century Habsburg intelligence operations in the Ottoman Empire, see Tobias P. Graf, ‘Stopping an Ottoman Spy in Late Sixteenth-Century Istanbul: David Ungnad, Markus Penckner, and Austrian-Habsburg Intelligence in the Ottoman Capital’, in Rethinking Europe: War and Peace in the German Lands, ed. Gerhild Scholz-Williams, Sigrun Haude, and Christian Schneider (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 173–93, at 189.

⁴⁴ See, for example, the definitional debate between Michael Warner, ‘Wanted: A Definition of Intelligence; Understanding Our Craft’, Studies in Intelligence 46 (2002), 15–23, https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/studies-in-intelligence/volume-46-no-3/wanted-a-definition-of-intelligence/; Alan Breakspear, ‘A New Definition of Intelligence’, Intelligence and National Security 28 (2013), 678–93; Michael Warner, ‘Intelligence as Risk Shifting’, in Intelligence Theory: Key Questions and Debates, ed. Peter Gill, Stephen Marrin, and Mark Phythian (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 16–32. In fact, there is considerable scholarship on secrecy in the early modern period. Of particular relevance and providing a useful inroad into the literature is Daniel Jütte, The Age of Secrecy: Jews, Christians, and the Economy of Secrets, 1400–1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015).

⁴⁵ See, for example, Justus Nipperdey, ‘Die Terminologie von Epochen: Überlegungen am Beispiel Frühe Neuzeit/“early modern”’, Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 38 (2015), 170–185.

⁴⁶ See The Lincoln, Rutland, and Stamford Mercury LXIII, no. 3300 (Friday, 6 June 1794), 2; Jackson’s Oxford Journal, no. 2145 (Saturday, 7 June 1794), 1; Hampshire Chronicle 21, no. 1114 (Monday, 9 June 1794), 1. On the fortress of Theresienstadt and its significance, see Klaus Freckmann, ‘Die Festung Theresienstadt: Terezín als internationales Spionageobjekt um 1800’, INSITU: Zeitschrift für Architekturgeschichte 5 (Jan. 2013), 67–80.

⁴⁷ The Lincoln, Rutland, and Stamford Mercury LXIII, no. 3300 (Friday, 6 June 1794), 2.

⁴⁸ Tobias P. Graf, ‘Cheating the Habsburgs and Their Subjects? Eighteenth-Century “Arabian Princes” in Central Europe and the Question of Fraud’, in The Habsburg Mediterranean, 1500–1800, ed. Dorothea McEwan and Stefan Hanß (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2021), 229–253. On the issue of imposture in the early modern period, which is of crucial relevance here, see Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Renaissance Impostors and Proofs of Identity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Valentin Groebner, Who Are You? Identification, Deception, and Surveillance in Early Modern Europe (New York: Zone Books, 2007).

⁴⁹ Kahn, ‘Historical Theory of Intelligence’, 5.

⁵⁰ Ágoston, ‘Information’, 87–8; Gürkan, Sultanın Casusları, 123–6; Gürkan, ‘Espionage’, 97–128, 355–9; Andrej Hozjan, ‘Die ersten steirischen Kundschafter und Postbeförderer: Spionage, Kontraspionage und Feldpost der Grazer Behörden zwischen 1538 und 1606’, Mitteilungen des Steiermärkischen Landesarchivs 48 (1998): 237–79, at 252.

⁵¹ E.g. Richard K. Betts, ‘Fixing Intelligence’, Foreign Affairs 81 (2002), 43–59, at 46–7.

⁵² See also Iordanou, Venice’s Secret Service, ch. 1.

⁵³ Quotation from Sherman Kent, Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), 3.

⁵⁴ Wark, ‘In Never-Never Land?’, 201.

⁵⁵ Jeffrey T. Richelson, A Century of Spies: Intelligence in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

⁵⁶ Christopher Andrew’s magisterial investigation of intelligence through the ages repeatedly stresses the importance of individual actors to explain continuity and change in both the organization and performance of intelligence in the early modern period. See Andrew, Secret World, chs. 10–14.

⁵⁷ For such practices, see, for example, Akkerman, Invisible Agents, 66–74.

⁵⁸ Backerra, Wien und London, 341–2.

⁵⁹ Alexander Rose, Washington’s Spies: The Story of America’s First Spy Ring (New York: Bantam Books, 2006); Andrew, Secret World, ch. 15. For the TV series, see ‘TURN: Washington’s Spies’, IMDb, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543328/.

⁶⁰ See, for example, C.A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Barend Noordam, ‘Military Intelligence and Early Modern Warfare: The Dutch East India Company and China 1622–1624’, in Concepts and Institutions in a Transcultural Context, ed. Antje Flüchter and Jivanta Schöttli (Heidelberg: Springer, 2015), 113–35; Tonio Andrade, ‘A Chinese Farmer, Two African Boys, and a Warlord: Toward a Global Microhistory’, Journal of World History 21 (2011): 573–91.