RT book part
T1 Talking with spies: From naive to distrustful researcher
A1 Díaz Fernández, Antonio Manuel
A2 Derecho Internacional PúblicoPenal y Procesal
AB Intelligence officers - generally known as 'spies' - will not openly admit, even within their own family circles, that they work for an intelligence service. These agencies have neither local offices nor facilities, nor do they visit schools to talk about the daily life and work of their officers. Public media appearances are extremely rare, and it is usually only the director of the agency whose face is seen in public. Innate secretiveness and the inaccessibility of many official archives are obstacles to transparent research on intelligence services. In 1998, I commenced my doctoral thesis on the Spanish intelligence services. Far from being a passing adventure, the topic became my principal line of research for over two decades, during which time I completed almost 250 interviews, including 100 with members and ex-members of the intelligence services and another 50 with heads of government, Spanish and foreign intelligence service directors, military staff, politicians, and diplomats. In this chapter, I present my fieldwork experience of interviewing intelligence officers and the evolution of a young and somewhat naïve researcher into a more mature and distrustful one.
SN 9783031415739
YR 2024
FD 2024
LK http://hdl.handle.net/10498/33624
UL http://hdl.handle.net/10498/33624
LA eng
DS Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Cádiz
RD 07-nov-2026