Mark Galeotti and Yvonnick Denoël: How Crime Organises the World
By Lorcan Cartmell (Sixth Form Academy)
From intelligence service operations in the Catholic Church to the Cosa Nostra, Mark Galeotti and Yvonnick Denoël were in conversation with journalist Stefan Stern, the two authors spoke about their books Vatican Spies by Denoël and Homo Criminalis by Galeotti.
Galeotti is a British historian, lecturer, writer on transnational crime, Russian security affairs, and director of the consultancy ‘Mayak Intelligence’. Denoël is a French historian, publisher and intelligence specialist who has written on the CIA, Mossad, and espionage in the twentieth century.
The event began with discussion about why each book was written. Yvonnick Denoël explained how he never read about Vatican intelligence and pointed out that ‘officially, there is no intelligence service in the Vatican’, but rather we can see a huge collection of intelligence through parish reports and collections in the Vatican Archives that are of great interest to both Western and Eastern intelligence services. An interest that can be cleary seen in both Bulgarian and Polish secret service records after the fall of the Soviet Union. Whilst there is no Vatican James Bond, Denoël highlighted the sheer volume and potency of intelligence collected by the Vatican that will remain under lock and key for another few hundred years. The power of the Catholic Church in this space inspired him to write about Vatican Spies and the incidents involving the Church and intelligence services.
Mark Galeotti also explained why he wrote his book Homo Criminalis, he touched upon his wonderfully challenging statement ‘bandits create states’, and how it linked into his book. He explained that states don’t always emerge naturally but rather gave the analogy of in days gone by how a bandit would take territory and tax its inhabitants in exchange for protection and creates stories to facilitate legitimacy. Galeotti then reflected on how contemporary criminals are indicators of the gaps between what society thinks it should have – and what the state is willing to let it have. These challenging questions prompted him to write his book.
Questions from the audience mainly focused on issues of intrusion of surveillance states, and the rights of civilians when it came to the NSA and Echelon in the UK-USA agreement. Galeotti and Denoël soothed most of our minds with particularly reassuring answers and overall gave a great sense of conclusiveness to the highly informative event.
Having attended this event I would wholeheartedly encourage people to read both fascinating books. Yvonnick Denoël’s and Mark Galeotti are two very enlightened people in their respective subject areas, and gave me great insight into the criminal world and intelligence.
