Nineteen-sixty-eight was a momentous year for a multitude of reasons. In the wider context of the Cold War, the ‘Prague Spring’ was underway in Eastern Europe, whilst the war in Vietnam was gathering an ugly momentum. Both Martin Luther King and Robert ‘Bobby’ Kennedy were assassinated.

Albeit mixed, uneven and occurring on incremental bases, in the context of British intelligence, trends towards a greater degree of ‘liberalisation’ were gradually emerging. As scholar Richard J. Aldrich has argued vis-à-vis the world of intelligence and amid various political propaganda battles: ‘Secret service exploits were emerging as one of the most eye-catching variants of the Cold War story and each side wished to be seen as ahead in this clandestine war’. Among many activities conducted by intelligence communities, a forward lead in helping to shape overall narratives, extending to wider discourses, was adopted. Aldrich continued: ‘Accordingly, the 1960s were peppered with authorised memoirs by veterans of secret service’. And the year 1968 was no exception.

On closer examination, 1968 stands out as a significant year for the study of British intelligence. Significantly, a revised second edition of M. R. D. Foot's ‘classic study’, SOE in France (1966), appeared – in essence, refining a text which can be regarded as forming the first overt ‘“official history” in all but name’ of a British secret service (the Second World War era Special Operations Executive). Also significant were two other intelligence books.