James, William M. [Admiral Sir] The Eyes of the Navy: A Biographical Study of Admiral Sir Reginald Hall. London: Methuen, 1956. The Code Breakers of Room 40: The Story of Admiral Sir Reginald Hall, Genius of British Counterintelligence. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1956.
Pforzheimer notes that this is the biography of Britain's Director of Naval Intelligence in World War I by the officer in charge of communications intelligence part of that time. "It includes an interesting description of the exploitation of the Zimmermann telegram." Beesly's Room 40 is "perhaps a more useful study."
Constantinides argues that although "James has written an important book on one of the outstanding figures of intelligence, not all has been revealed.... Friedman and Mendelsohn's research raises questions as to whether James's cryptanalytic account of the Zimmermann note is the full one."
Jones, R.V. "Alfred Ewing and Room 40." Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 34 (Jul. 1979): 65-90.
Judd,
Alan. The Quest for C: Mansfield Cumming and the Founding of the
Secret Service. London: HarperCollins, 1999.
Roberts, Spectator, 16 Oct. 1999, calls this biography of Sir Mansfield Cumming "a serious testament to the bravery and determination of the secret services" during World War I. The author "has had the inestimable advantages of support from his old employers [presumably SIS] and access to Cumming's secret diaries,... which he has diligently and on the whole successfully followed up."
For Swain, I&NS 15.4, "Judd's is a general account, fluently written with journalistic flair and well worth reading; but it is not scholarly and footnotes are rare."
Kennedy, Greg. "Intelligence and the Blockade, 1914-17: A Study in Administration, Friction and Command." Intelligence and National Security 22, no. 5 (Oct. 2007): 699-721.
"Without the constant acquisition and provision of accurate and timely intelligence, commanders of the Blockade strategy ... would have been blind to ... key issues. Blockade intelligence saw the most sophisticated and wide-ranging intelligence assessment acitivities ever done to that date."
Landau,
Henry.
1. All's Fair: The Story of the British Secret Service Behind the German Lines. New York: Putnam's, 1934. [Chambers]
2. Secrets of the White Lady. New York: Putnam's, 1935. [Chambers]
3. Spreading the Spy Net: The Story of a British Spy Director. London: Jarrolds, 1938.
Constantinides: Landau headed the Military Division of the British secret service in Holland from 1916, running networks in France and Belgium. The "largest and considered the most successful" network was named the White Lady. These books are the memoirs of "a field intelligence officer." Some doubts have been raised about the accuracy of some of Landau's stories.
Macksey, Kenneth. The Searchers: Radio Intercept in Two World Wars. London: Cassell, 2003. New ed. London: Cassell, 2004.
From advertisement: This "history of radio intercepting answers the question of how enemy messages are detected in the first place. The focus is on the early war-shortening Y and Radio Intercept Services, and their brilliantly clever inventors and technologists who proved to be unsung heroes with headphones clamped to their ears."
Maclaren,
John, and Nicholas Hiley. "Nearer the Truth: The Search for Alexander
Szek." Intelligence and National Security 4, no. 4 (Oct. 1989):
813-826.
The authors take on the long-running legend of the activities and fate of Alexander Szek, thought to have stolen German codes from Belgium which later helped in breaking the Zimmermann telegram. Their research and analysis essentially shoot down most elements of the previous story. Definitive? Probably not, but in most of its elements better based than its predecessor myths.
Maechling, Charles, Jr. "Scandal in Wartime Washington: The Craufurd-Stuart Affair of 1918." International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 4,
no. 3 (Fall 1990): 357-370.
Morgan, Janet. The Secrets of Rue St. Roch: Intelligence Operations Behind Enemy Lines in the First World War. London: Allen Lane, 2004.
Peake, Studies 49.1 (2005), notes that this is the story of the involvement of the 7th Baron Balfour of Burleigh -- or Capt. George Bruce, as he was in 1917 -- in espionage in World War I. Capt. Bruce created and operated "a very successful troop- and train-monitoring network working out of Luxembourg" from his office at No. 41 Rue St. Roch in Paris. The author "provides historical context about the war and the Luxembourg network's role in it. She also describes the often complicated arrangements with the other British and French intelligence services whose cooperation was essential.... But more than all that, she delivers a fascinating narrative of a time when case officer and agent problems were much the same as today, but the pace of life was much slower."
For West, RUSI Journal, Apr. 2004, this is a "work that earns plenty of superlatives." It "is a splendid example of painstaking research in several countries, tracing descendants, unearthing photographs and interpreting documents."
Bath, NIPQ 21.3 (Sep. 2005), says this is "[a]n interesting story, well told, and well worth the time of the intelligence history enthusiast."
Occleshaw,
Michael. Armour Against Fate: British Military Intelligence in the First
World War. London: Columbus, 1989.
Chambers calls this work "serious history."
O'Halpin, Eunan. "British Intelligence in Ireland, 1914-1921." In The Missing Dimension: Governments and Intelligence Communities in the Twentieth Century, eds. Christopher Andrew and David Dilks, 55-77. London: Macmillan, 1984.
Oliver, David. Airborne Espionage: International Special Duties Operations in the World Wars. Gloucestershire, UK: Sutton Publishing, 2005.
Peake, Studies 49.3 (2005), finds that the author covers special-mission flying in World War I, between the wars, and in "the glory days of what the Allies called Special Duty (SD) Squadrons," World War II. In addition, Oliver "includes many of the Nazi and Japanese operations against the Allies and also describes their aircraft."
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