From the Kaiser to Al Qaeda, 6.30-8pm, Wednesday 31st October 2012, Lecture Theatre INTO UEA London.
MI5, Not Nine To Five. Is the Security Service really Spooks or is the secret defence of the realm both more prosaic and at the same time much more interesting than any fiction. Founded in 1909, for over one hundred years the Security Service has protected the United Kingdom against internal and external enemies. From small beginnings under Captain Vernon Kell, its first chief, the service defeated first the Kaiser's agents and then fought the soviet secret service in the long war that began in 1917, it outsmarted Hitler’s spies (including turning the entire German intelligence network back against the Reich in the XX system) and in the 1970s confronted new enemies in the IRA and Arab terrorism. With the end of the Soviet Union MI5 has found a radically altered role in combating organised crime and the new threat from Al Qaeda.
Professor Christopher Andrew, recently retired president of Corpus Christi College Cambridge is Britain’s leading intelligence historian. He helped create the discipline of secret history, both at Cambridge, with the seminar on intelligence and in founding the key journal, Intelligence and National Security. In 2009 he published MI5, Defence of the Realm, the official history of the security service, to mark its hundredth anniversary.
From the Kaiser to Al Qaeda is an exciting talk about the creation of MI5 and its role in the secret wars of the 20th century, but it is also an attempt to contextualise the meaning of security in a n ever more complex world, were the tools of surveillance intrude further and further into or lives.