Professional Affiliation

Historian & Curator, International Spy Museum

Expert Bio

Dr. Andrew Hammond is Historian & Curator at the International Spy Museum, where he hosts the podcast “SpyCast,” and is a Public Policy Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars. He has taught international relations and modern history at institutions on both sides of the Atlantic and has supplied expert commentary to outlets such as BBC News, CNN, Cheddar, Sky News Arabia, and Alhurra. He has a BA (first class), MA (distinction), and Ph.D. from the University of Warwick. He has held fellowships at the Library of Congress, the British Library, New York University and was a Mellon Public Humanities Fellow at the 9/11 Memorial Museum. He served in the Royal Air Force (1998-2005) with secondments to a British Army HQ G2 intelligence unit and to a Royal Navy Fleet Photographic Unit. His forthcoming book, “Struggles for Freedom”: US Foreign Policy and Afghanistan Since 1979, will be published in 2022, and he is working on another book that tells the story of 9/11 and the Global War on Terror through the voices of military and intelligence veterans. He tweets @spyhistorian.

Expertise

• Cold War
• History
• Europe
• North America

Wilson Center Project

"Why We Serve": An Oral History of the Post-9/11 Wars in Afghanistan & Iraq

Project Summary

This project aims to tell the story of the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq through the stories and voices of US military veterans and intelligence officers. It aims to capture the diversity of those voices and to allow readers to benefit from some of their reflections and experiences as individual human beings who lived through those momentous events. Think Studs Terkel's "The Good War" meets James McPherson's "For Cause and Comrades" meets Svetlana Alexievich's "Zinky Boys" or "The Unwomanly Face of War." The research for the military component is largely complete, except from the chapter on “High Command,” as such if you were a general officer in the US military or an intelligence officer with a strong connection to the post-9/11 wars please get in touch with Andrew.

Major Publications

• "Struggles for Freedom”: Afghanistan and US Foreign Relations Since 1979 (EUP, forthcoming).
• “Bringing the ‘Social’ in from the Cold: Towards a Social History of American Intelligence,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 2020 (with Christopher Moran) [forthcoming].
• “Through a Glass, Darkly – Oral History and the CIA,” History: The Journal of the Historical Association, 100 (339), 2015, 311-326.