Covert and Overt: Recollecting and Connecting Intelligence Service and Information Science

Citation

Calvert, P. (2006), "Covert and Overt: Recollecting and Connecting Intelligence Service and Information Science", The Electronic Library, Vol. 24 No. 3, pp. 418-419. https://doi.org/10.1108/02640470610671259

There are four parts to the book, uneven in length and value. The first six papers are recollections and reminiscences from men who were once intelligence workers but who have since gone on to become information managers or librarians. I found these easy to read and sometimes amusing. Their value comes from the links the writers made between the intelligence work they once did and modern information management, for they all realized that intelligence work of the sort most of these men were doing was mostly managing information. The book's title appears to come from Robert Taylor's chapter. The second section of four chapters has more meat, although the writers must take a more historical view of events because they were not present. The short third section is on relationships between information science and intelligence, and the fourth section of five chapters is on sources of study in information science and intelligence.

One of the best chapters (or at least, the most interesting one to this reviewer) comes from Rodney Brunt, who examines in detail the indexing used by British intelligence services in the Second World War. The indexing was inconsistent between services, drew little from established information retrieval practices of the time, and yet still provided the intelligence officers with some sort of access to what little was known about enemy armed forces, security services, resistance operatives, and so on. Brunt asks whether the indexing would have been better and thus more effective if the intelligence services had sought out librarians with knowledge of new techniques that had been developed in the 1920s and 1930s, and such librarians could have been found in the one hundred or so special libraries that were using relatively modern retrieval methods. The intelligence services such as the famous Bletchley Park teams recruited mathematicians and linguists, but nobody thought it worthwhile to look for specialised indexers. This is in marked contrast to what we read in Burke's chapter on intelligence agencies, libraries and information scientists in the USA. Here was a much more professional approach that marked a huge shift in government attitudes towards information science. It gave resources to the development of organisations, technologies, and techniques for information retrieval, and one of those who was nurtured, Joseph Becker, went on to become one of the foremost information scientists of his generation. After these two chapters, a “historical note” by Pamela Spence Richards, first published in 1988, makes plain the importance attached by both the allies and Germany in getting access to scientific publications from their Second World War enemies. The Manhattan Project, apparently, moved forward at a faster rate as a result of its scientists reading about German developments that were openly published in German periodicals but which, nevertheless, had to be brought to the USA mostly by clandestine means.

It is possibly the two chapters in the third section that will have the most lasting value. Marling's chapter is called “Technology for open source government information and business intelligence”, which may be rather misleading. It deals with the use of unclassified public sources, and this is of great interest to government intelligence, business intelligence and competitive intelligence. The technology to retrieve this sort of grey literature is not yet well developed, as in, for example, the lack of tools to either search the deep web or generate alterative queries for complex searching. Equally, there is little or no technology for analyzing the retrieved documents. Strickland's chapter is “Knowledge transfer: information science shapes intelligence in the Cold War era”, which gives the author's personal insight, gained over more than 30 years, of the relationship between academia and government intelligence.

As the editors say (admit?) in their Introduction, this book is not so much a created work as an aggregation. It rather reads like that: individual chapters of interest but there is no great consistency between them, no real attempt to build a picture bigger than one author can contribute. Yet the individual contributions contain much of interest. Some may now be just of historical interest, but overall there is much of value in this collection. Though it may not immediately sound useful to information science collections, it really should sit on the library shelves alongside texts that are much more mundane than this one.