Historian and Author

In German, my academic field is restrictively and prosaically described as Geschichte der Nachrichtendienste: History of the Intelligence Services. As an author, however, my interests go far beyond merely documenting the monolithic structures, strategies, policies, and procedures of clandestine organisations. Instead it is the people within them — their ideas and their behaviours, their triumphs and their failures — who inspire me to research and write about the secret world. In my work I always strive to give official history a human face, which is the very opposite of the official historian’s intent.

Added to this are my special interests: the Third Reich, the Second World War, the ‘true’ Middle East (east of Suez and the Levant, that is), and the interplay of diverse occidental and oriental cultures within a complex context of global conflict. Such dynamic dimensions inevitably lead me (and my readers) far from the confines of the intelligence services per se, into a twilit operational world of espionage, counterintelligence, subversion, sabotage, and black propaganda.