Bio:
Daniele-Hadi Irandoost is an educator and historian, as well as a former commissioning editor for E-International Relations. Additionally, he has a bachelor’s degree in Intelligence Studies from Aberystwyth University, is a winner of the Ken Robertson Prize in Intelligence Studies, while he is currently reading for his PhD at the Department of War Studies in King’s College London.
About the book:
Finely crafted by a current academic researcher and espionage enthusiast, A New Vision of Spycraft provides insight into the techniques, methodologies, and attitudes characteristic of Anglo-American intelligence agencies as well as their continuing aim to be largely free of parliamentary oversight.
As a rising academician who has studied spycraft and espionage in several universities and think tanks, Daniele-Hadi Irandoost brings the full power of historical art and science to bear on this mercurial, frequently invisible, and generally misunderstood subject. Certainly, distinctions between desk-bound intelligence analysts and far more romantic field agents are explored, although only as a means to unearth a number of unsettling facts about this particular side of national life. As such, this eye-opening book is a must-read for anyone interested in the gritty realities behind intelligence agencies worldwide.
Excerpt:
The word intelligence is a term extremely vague in its signification. It is at present generally admitted, that its whole history may be traced to its remotest source found to be among the ancient volumes, if the Jewish Old Testament, The Art of War by Sun Tzu, and the Arthashastra were added to the list. This general term afterward was successively repeated among the inhabitants of Ancient Greece and Rome, at the Islamic Golden Age and the Renaissance of Europe. The histories here mentioned on the conduct of intelligence lead the mind to a very interesting subject, that of divination and astrology as the instruments of their purposes. If we compare in this respect the case of diviners and the adherents of rationalism, which burst into explosion at the age of reason, some extraordinary talents will be brought to our minds. There could not perhaps be a better example than that of John Dee, the English mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, occult philosopher, and Queen Elizabeth I’s tutor-adviser, who engaged in a careful development of close relations with the Virgin Queen’s spymaster, Francis Walsingham. Indeed, the whole period of his existence was devoted to the study of alchemy and Hermeticism; he invented with indefatigable care the plan for the imperial expansion of England, which he most properly termed, the British Empire. As such, Dee corresponded between the boundless catalog of science and the chilling system of ancient magical inheritances, just as the former was gaining ground, upon which he trained many who advanced in England’s voyage of discovery of every other quarter of the globe. In any case the connection between intelligence and occultism or the paranormal is an affirmable, and will be found to surface from time to time.
