[2017]

Michael Herman is a pioneer of the academic study of intelligence. His career spans the worlds of intelligence and academia in the United Kingdom, and has done much to bring the two closer together. Born in 1929, Michael was educated at Scarborough High School before securing a scholarship to read Modern History at Queen's College Oxford, in 1946. His studies there were interrupted by two years’ National Service between 1947 and 1949, when Michael served in the Intelligence Corps in Egypt. He then returned to Oxford to complete his studies and was awarded a first class degree. In 1952 he joined the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) based in Cheltenham, where he was to remain in a succession of roles until 1987, a period that also included secondments to the Cabinet Office, as Secretary of the Joint Intelligence Committee, and to the Defence Intelligence Staff.

On his retirement from GCHQ in 1987, Michael moved to Nuffield College Oxford, initially as a Gwilym Gibbon Research Fellow, and it was here that he began to work on what would become his landmark study of intelligence organisations, roles and effects, Intelligence Power in Peace and War. This was published by Cambridge University Press and the Royal Institute of International Affairs in 1996. On publication, Professor Christopher Andrew called it: ‘the best overview of the nature and role of intelligence that I have read. It is surely destined to become a standard work.’ This was a prescient comment, as Intelligence Power quickly established itself as a key reference point for all those seeking to study the nature, roles and impact of intelligence as a state function, influencing a whole generation of academics drawn to its study.

Michael has continued to publish regularly and promote the study of intelligence ever since. He was the founding Director of the Oxford Intelligence Group, which provided a valuable space in which to discuss intelligence and played a role in bringing together practitioners and academics. His recommendations for the future of the British system of intelligence appeared in 1997 as a Centre for Defence Studies publication and elsewhere. He gave evidence to the Butler review of intelligence into weapons of mass destruction in the wake of the 2003 invasion of Iraq which influenced the review group's recommendations around improving professional intelligence standards and training.