Unclassified, official histories of ‘secret’ intelligence organisations, for public readership, seem a contradiction in terms. These ‘official’ works are commissioned by the agencies in question and directly informed by those agencies’ own records, thus distinguishing them from other, outsider historical accounts. But while such official intelligence histories are relatively new, sometimes controversial, and often challenging for historians and agencies alike, the experiences of the Australian and British intelligence communities suggest they’re a promising development for scholarship, maintaining public trust and informed public discourse, and more effective functioning of national security agencies. Furthermore, these histories remain an ongoing project for Australia’s National Intelligence Community (NIC).

This report outlines the many challenges experienced in writing Australia’s and the UK’s official intelligence histories to date. Those challenges include the inherent sensitivity of the subject matter, the accentuation of more typical historiographical challenges (not least due to the state of records held by operational agencies), the seismic recent shift in official documentation to electronic generation and storage, and the critical question of trust (between agencies and their partners who have shared with them sensitive secrets, between official historians and the agencies who have engaged them, and within the historical profession more broadly).

It also identifies and examines the mitigations and techniques used by those official history projects to address these challenges—be they particular approaches to information access, the careful selection of what’s in and out (both in topics and time frames), review processes and the use of intermediaries, and the deployment of supporting historical materials.

Importantly, the report identifies why and how such histories are valuable for explaining and building the social licence for the work of intelligence agencies, honing and improving actual intelligence practice, and advancing historical scholarship on an important but previously obscured element of democratic statecraft.