As an intelligence historian and author, Adrian O’Sullivan’s 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 Adrian to research and write about the secret world. In his work he always strives to give official history a human face, which is the very opposite of the official historian’s intent.
Added to this are his 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 Adrian far from the confines of the intelligence services per se, into a twilit operational world of espionage, counterintelligence, subversion, sabotage, and black propaganda.