• DOI:10.1080/02684527.2012.727070
• Corpus ID: 154714213

Intelligence in the First World War: The State of the Field

@article{Larsen2014IntelligenceIT,
  title={Intelligence in the First World War: The State of the Field},
  author={Daniel Larsen},
  journal={Intelligence and National Security},
  year={2014},
  volume={29},
  pages={282 - 302}
}

• Daniel Larsen
• Published 4 March 2014
• History
• Intelligence and National Security

The Second World War has certainly claimed the largest share of scholarly attention in intelligence studies over the past few decades, while scholarship about intelligence in the Cold War has been multiplying at a rapid pace. Yet with the centenary of the First World War nearly upon us, that earlier conflict remains in many ways underexplored by intelligence scholars. While there have been a significant number of important and valuable contributions, many facets of the war remain only lightly examined or, in many cases, almost wholly neglected. With a comparatively smaller group of scholars staking out their turfs amid a vast terrain, in general researchers have had relatively little cause to bump into one another. There are relatively few significant historiographical debates. To some degree, the lack of scholarly attention can be explained by the fact that, in general, intelligence in the First World War seems to see fewer documents surviving. Document destruction practices have taken their toll, as have European archival losses caused by the Second World War. Yet those scholars who have examined intelligence aspects of the First World War typically have found enough material to work from as well as creative ways of working around the problems of lost documents. With the goal of stimulating further scholarship, this review article seeks to synthesize into a coherent narrative the scholarly works that have been published in this field. For those in search of research topics, this article calls attention to the number of areas that would benefit from further study. It aims to offer a starting point into, and a succinct but comprehensive discussion of, the scholarly secondary literature in this field. This review focuses on works that can be said to fall within the broader discipline of intelligence studies, published in the decades since the discipline came into existence over the previous half-century. Memoirs or other works written by