MI6 : Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty's Secret Intelligence Service

Rating:
Summary: Factoid Pigout
Review: Stephen Dorril's humungous (800+pages) history of the U.K.'s foreign intelligence service has a limited value. But for seekers of factual accuracy, reading this book takes care. I examined this volume mainly for its treatment of one of MI6's earlier Cold War adventures - Valuable: the effort to dump Albania's Enver Hoxha. Dorril's fairly thorough account is littered with errors and misinterpretations, i.e. naming Xhafer Deva, a World War II collaborator with Nazi Germany, as a member of a Free Albania Committee set up in the U.S. Deva never fit with the MI6-CIA affiliated FAC set up in Rome and New York. Dorril links directly episodes which, in actual time, were months or years apart, i.e. describing relations of the FAC and Assembly of Captive European Nations; the CIA set up the latter after the Truman administration's "containment" doctrine was dumped. Lest one think this is nitpicking, remember that all these factoids added togther as errors or accuracies can influence a book's value. If one episode is ridden with mistakes, why would one trust that the author's other episodes are any more reliable? Dorril ends most of his paragraphs with a footnote that usually includes multiple sources for what he writes in the paragraph. Far too many footnotes for this book to be a fun read. It is best used by a serious student of espionage who also has other sources on his desk.