Many years ago in the United Kingdom a popular television advertisement presented one of the car breakdown services as the fourth emergency service, after the police, ambulance, and fire service. In this book the reader is presented with an account of Britain's fourth intelligence agency. This absorbing and meticulous account is the first by Huw Dylan, a lecturer in Intelligence and International Security in the Department of War Studies, King's College London.
The book follows hot on the heels of official accounts of Britain's primary intelligence agencies, the British Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Intelligence Service, as well as the official history of the Joint Intelligence Committee, together with an unofficial history of the UK's Government Communications Headquarters. In a sense Dylan's account completes the story of British intelligence in the postwar period by looking at the twenty-year history of the Joint Intelligence Bureau (JIB). Created out of the...