Second oldest profession in the world

Review The Second Oldest Profession • The Second Oldest Profession: Spies and Spying in the Twentieth Century, by Phillip Knightley. New York: Penguin Books edition, 1988; xii, 436 pp., photographs and index, $7.95, ISBN 0-14-010655-3. Reviewed by James J. Martin People over-impressed by spies and espionage are fond of quoting the observation attributed to Napoleon that a spy "in the right place" is worth 20,000 soldiers on the battlefield. At Waterloo, Napoleon could have used 100,000 more armed men and five fewer spies. Even earlier, when he faced Imperial Russia as an adversary, Napoleon did not get anywhere near his money's worth from spies, if anything at all, and they had the loveliest of situations for espionage agents: the Czar's intelligence service transmitted its communications in the language of the enemy, the French Nevertheless, the catastrophe of 1812 was not averted. Apparently the failure to conquer Russia was another case of the spies not being in the "right place." These reflections have been inspired by contemplating some of the implications of Phillip Knightley's new book on the occupation or enterprise of intelligence-gathering, though he has chosen to concentrate on the history of this endeavor for mainly the last 75 years. Those whose first encounter with the author was his book The First Casualty (1975), which.dealt so engagingly and informatively with the phenomenon we call the war correspondent, will find here the same genial style and feeling fo...

THE SECOND OLDEST PROFESSION Spies and Spying in the Twentieth Century by Phillip Knightley (Penguin Books: $7.95) A comprehensive and damning account of the rise and proliferation of modern-day intelligence agencies, from the creation of Britain’s secret service in 1909 on a budget of 7,000, to the CIA’s 1985 annual budget of more than $1.25 billion, “more than the entire budget of many a Third World country.” Before the modern era, according to Phillip Knightley, espionage expert for The Times of London (and who has himself survived recruitment efforts from both Eastern and Western intelligence networks), “spies for collecting military intelligence flourished in wartime, but usually wilted when peace arrived.” Today’s vast bureaucracies, employing more than 1.25 million people, using satellites, computers and other high-technology capable of monitoring anything from radio or telex communications to private telephone calls, are of a “size and power which is unprecedented,” and, ultimately, out of control. “There might . . . be some justification for the intelligence community if it did what it claimed to do,” Knightley writes, “provide timely warnings of threats to national existence. But . . . this claim is exaggerated even in wartime and, in peacetime, intelligence agencies seem to have spent more time trying to score off each other, protecting their budgets and their establishments, and inventing new justifications for their existence, than in gathering intelligence.” ...

Professor Jeffrey Burds has released a set of audio CDs entitled The Second Oldest Profession: A World History of Espionage (2012). Professor Burds examines espionage activity in the ancient world, the Roman Empire, the American Revolution, the Age of Napoleon and the American Civil War. Professor Burds’ study makes clear that spying is not only a never-ending source of fascination but also a major contributor to world history and the development of nations.

While other MediaPost newsletters and articles remain free to all ... our new Research Intelligencer service is reserved for paid subscribers ... Subscribe today to gain access to every Research Intelligencer article we publish as well as the exclusive daily newsletter, full access to The MediaPost Cases, first-look research and daily insights from Joe Mandese, Editor in Chief. • by Did you know that advertising is the second-oldest profession in the world? It's a little known fact, but if you follow the money, as they typically say on reruns of "Law & Order," you'd guess the folks engaged in the oldest profession in the world had to advertise to find clients, right? Seriously, though, advertising has been around a long time. According to sources like Wikipedia, advertising has been traced all the way back to ancient Egypt, Pompeii and ancient Arabian civilizations. The concept of promoting a service to people who need it is as old as anything else in the world -- but the last 15 years have witnessed more change in the business than possibly anytime in history. The advent of the data age -- or, as I've referred to it previously, the "Money Ball era" of marketing -- has brought more accountability and addressability to advertising, and the next ten years are only going to get more complicated. These days the business of buying media is work-intensive, and complex. The "Mad Men" days were heavy on creative, light on research, and media was a secondary consideration. In the d...

“The intelligence community may have finally overextended itself. As well as being out of government control, it may have also expanded beyond its own control.” Truer words could hardly be written about the fiascos facing the U.S. National Security Agency today because of its massive global eavesdropping, and the Central Intelligence Agency, because of its all-too-lethal drones. At a meeting in Brussels Thursday, European leaders vied with each other to express their outrage at the NSA program, which reportedly gathered information on tens of millions (actually, if you extrapolate the numbers, hundreds of millions) of phone calls on the Continent, and also, by the by, appears to have tuned in on German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s official cell phone. Meanwhile Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif made it clear in a public statement while visiting the White House: no more drones! Never mind that his predecessors reportedly signed off on the not-so-secret CIA drone program blowing away jihadist bad guys and, all too often, Even the intelligence operations of the redoubtable New York City Police Department are under fire. A coalition of 125 civil rights, religious and community groups has just written to the U.S. Department of Justice to demand a federal investigation of the surveillance activities the cops conduct in New York’s Muslim communities. The Obama administration is blaming leakers like Edward Snowden, the former private contractor for the NSA who defected (yes, let...

News Spying — the World's Second-Oldest Profession Intelligence services should demand that their officers possess integrity about their objectives, about what they learn, about whom and why, and what they do with this information. Yet this is often precisely where politics and personalities intersect. Housed in a bleak complex of concrete on 103 Ruschestrasse off Frankfurter Allee in Berlin-Lichtenberg, Stasi officers saw themselves as an elite group of “first-class comrades” serving “the dictatorship of the proletariat”. They referred to each other as “Chekists” after the secret police established by the Bolsheviks in 1917, notorious for their brutality, even by Russian revolutionary standards. Responsible for the internal suppression of dissent, the VChK (or By 1988 the Stasi had established a vast network of more than 90,000 agents and at least 189,000 “unofficial collaborators” (though the total of “information providers”, or Auskunftspersonen, is estimated to be over two million) to keep tabs and files on the Two months after the fall of the Wall, demonstrators invaded the Stasi building to prevent the destruction of an estimated one billion pages of files. The Stasi had assembled “F16” card files on 5.4 million people, which were supplemented by the “F22” explaining why they took an interest. Some 20,000 Personal Surveillance Operations (OPK) were being processed by the end of 1989. Most of these were preserved and are now publicly available. The Stasi didn't just i...