Everybody with half a brain understands today that a strong country or a superpower needs large sophisticated intelligence networks to function. You need to know early about domestic and foreign threats and in which direction the world is developing.
So…..what about these old empires then in medieval times or even ancient times? Rome was just one of the mega-empires back then and much later the British Empire controlled about a quarter of the world’s land and population.
Most historians are not specialized in intelligence matters at all so their opinion is of litle use. If you consult the book of a historian who is regarded an expert, you will read that before the 20th century no significant intelligence services existed. Even the British and the Americans supposedly made do without real services until they had to hastily improvise them overnight, recruiting Yale graduates, WallStreet types and adventurers who knew how to travel. Before those times, countries only used some secret diplomatic channels, some informants and military intelligence or reconnaissance.
Does that strike you as realistic? Hardly. These historians have arrived at this conclusion because they will only consider which they can read on papers or stone tablets. If they can’t find any, they will default to the position that no networks existed.
Better historians have reconstructed individual pieces of networks and operations stretching back to the French Revolution and other major events. New studies suggest that even Rome was sophisticated and organized in spying against domestic and foreign populations. Logic dictates that fundamental princples of intelligence are fundamental human behavior. We want to keep our own secrets and we wanto to know other people’s secrets. We often can guess what kind of information can be found somewhere. The next obvious step is to find people who may be willing to sell this data. One can simpnly try to steal it. Concealment is possible through fake identities, cover stories and front organizations.
Domestic intelligence is fairly easy: You recruit selected people in all segments of the populations and pay them for reports about suspicious activities. To conduct foreign intelligence even the Romans used accredited diplomats and also illegal spy rings. People back then were not morons and they had the money and the time to experiment and hone their skills. In an evolutionary process empire with higher intelligence capabilities were more succesful.
The Romans could muster a few hundred thousand professional troops at best and the speed of moving them was limited. If your spies alerted you of a domestic threat early, it was possible to deploy an adequate number of soldiers. If a foreign threat was detected you could make military plans early. If you had sources in the enemy leadership camp, options presented themselves to conduct assassinations or to create disunity.
In Rome aristocratic families handled intelligence matters. This is why only few texts have survived that tell us about the different roles of agents. There was no Roman Central Intelligence Agency with an official headquarters and budgets and FOIA requests. There was no public advertisements to choose an intelligence career. If you were asked to join, you didn’t know how bigthe organization was and who was really running it.
By the 20th century the demand for intelligence capabilities had grown so much that different empires decided to expand the structure and recruit more people from the regular population. It didn’t make sense to have aristocrats open intercepted letters all day or work on a foreign mission, posing as a trade representative.
By understanding modern intelligence we have the tools to reconstruct history. We have to go through all kinds of events again and try to figure out what the networks and operations were. Not a perfect method, but good enough.
With this method, we notice something that stands out: A triple family cluster known as Welfs, Wettins and Reginarids, going back at least 1200 years. They are unusually large, unusually loyal towards each other and display the most succes in intelligence. They started out with rather small German territories and then took over Denmark, infiltrated Scotland and then took the British throne. Britain became the most dominant power in the world.
The triple cluster seems to have learned from all the major mistakes of previous empires: Instead of keeping the core of the families small, they made it very large. Instead of constant infighting, they maintained an astounding coherence. Instead of showering the members with wealth, they demanded a strong work ethic. Instead of focusing on blunt force, they emphasized intelligence and later science.
The names Welfs, Wettins and Reginars are unknown to virtually everyone except a few historians. The sub-lineages are named after the smaller Germa territories they controlled like Hannover, Schleswig-Holstein or Sachsen.
If you have enough trusted family personnel, you can have a significant intelligence service that cannot really be penetrated. These people could vet each other over centuries which is absolutely unique in the intelligence world. Every other service is plagued by the problem that you don’t have this long backstory. A modern government asset is vetted over months and years. We can see from the US, Britain, the USSR and other places that they prefer a multigenerational approach, kind of a social credit system. If one of your parents has worked in intelligence, you have a much better chance of joining the profession and rising up higher.
There is a ton of evidence that high level ristocrats used a multigenerational approach early on when they recruited new people from society. If the recruit showed absolute loyalty, his children could get more responsibilities or even low level aristocratic titles.
After taking the British throne in 1714, Welfs, Wettins and Reginars understood the potential of modern science. Hence, the “Royal Society” for science was reformed and attached to the new British Freemasonry. Science is similar to ancient mystery cult rituals in the sense that everything has to be done precisely and in a very specific order. If you wanted to join Freemasonry you had to have skills and also prove them in reciting ritual texts word-perfect.
Every old empire forced its serfs (people with very little rights) to produce grain on the fields to fund everything. Modern science made it possible to produe more food with far less manpower. People could be put in schools and universitioes and factories to make new things for the Empires.
This is the true reason serfdom was ended. The rulers gave the people more rigts and freedoms and the illusions of political participation. This was a dangerous gamble, because it all had to be secretly run by intelligence networks and front organizations. Old empires had the tremedous flaw that everybody knew who was in charge. The anger of the people was directed at the top. With the new phony political systems, people directed their anger at other egular people. A flurry of political parties, oligarch dynasties and other roganizations became too confusing for the populations to understand. Finally you could voice your anger, but you didn’t know any longer who was running everything.
The privileged class had much to loose from change, therefore they became the conservatives. The middle ground of society wanted some change but not too much. They became the democrats of the enligtenment. The poor had nothing to lose and became the left.
In the transition period it was easy to control the political spectrum. The police and “secret police” could snoop around, find (mainly leftist) radicals and force them to cooperate.
The British had stopped military action against the Rebels in the 13 American colonies, but continued the intelligence war indefinitely. These networks were thene expanded with groups like Skull&Bones. The United States was flooded with migrants from Britain and German territories. Many intelligence assets were among them.
Welfs, Wettins and Reginars had taken over the Russian throne, but there was also the dreaded old “white” slavic aristocracy. Britain wanted to avoid problems with the Whites and especially an alliance between the French and the Whites. Therefore the communist revolutio was supported. After WWI Britain and America said they had no interest in sending many troops to Russia to fight the Bolsheviks. They watched Russia burn to the ground in the Civil War.
This plan may have backfired. Communist acquired highly sensitive information about the British Royal family and their many relatives. Lord Louis Mountbatten and people like him apparently made secret deals with the Communists. Maybe the aristocratic control over the communists was much greater than previously known.
There is a very large historic actor group that nobody is even aware of. Historians don’t know it and neither do modern intelligence analysts. They are simply not trained for it.
