Book Review: How Spies Think - 10 Lessons in Intelligence by David Omand

This is a real mixed bag of a book. Some of it is outrageously fun stories of real-life diplomacy and derring-do, and other parts are tediously basic information with plenty of padding. I suppose it's helpful for the uninitiated to understand the lay of the land but, when mixed with the frequent name-dropping, comes across as one of those senior leaders who is desperate to prove they are still relevant.

Much like Turn the Ship Around by L. David Marquet, you have to just accept that some chapters will start with something like:

Belgrade, Sunday, 23 July 1995. It was getting dark when our military aircraft landed on an airfield just outside the Serbian capital. We were met by armed Serbian security officers …

Stirring stuff! And it mostly gets tied in to the lesson at hand. Although I can't help wondering if Omand would rather have written an autobiography. He excels at bringing the reader into his confidence and then letting slip all the things he regrets.

The book isn't really about spycraft. It is about applying pragmatic scepticism to everyday interactions. As we enter a period of full-on propaganda, how do we assess the nature of reality? The book swings from practical tips, to game-theory, to how to deal with the devious Soviet Menace.

It is a little scattershot and somewhat unsatisfactory. He is (rightly) scornful of both Trump and Putin, but it becomes a bit monotonous.

The last chapter is a bit of a gammonwanking fantasy, at complete odds with the rest of the book.

I found it a little hard to get on with. It just veered too far between extremes for me.