7 - Reconceiving Realism: Intelligence Historians and the Fact/Fiction Dichotomy

Summary

If official secrecy had a devastating impact on American history, its impact on Americans' understanding of that history was a collateral disaster.

The academic study of intelligence has long established itself in opposition to spy fiction. In Christopher Andrew and David Dilks' seminal introduction to The Missing Dimension, they argued that the lurid embellishments and gross inaccuracies of novelists, journalists and filmmakers had dissuaded professional historians from undertaking a serious study of intelligence history:

The treatment of intelligence by both mass media and publishers often seems ideally calculated to persuade the academic world that it is no subject for scholars … Alexander Dumas once said of a woefully inaccurate history of the French Revolution that it had ‘raised history to the level of a novel’. Many writers on intelligence have achieved the same feat. But historians have been far more put off the subject of intelligence than they need have been. One of the purposes of this volume is to show what can be reliably based on existing archives and published source material.

The historical study of intelligence is conceived of here as a response to fiction. Its epistemological foundations rest in its self-defined status as a verifiable authority on the past, with the expressed aim of correcting the factual inaccuracies of popular misconceptions. In this manner, the fact/fiction dichotomy has formed both a methodology and an epistemology for historians of intelligence.