Ex-spy master Boinnet lifts lid on intelligence reform battles

Rarely do spies, particularly chief spies, sit to write their experiences, but a few do. Among them are Britain’s former MI5 Director, Stella Rimington, in Open Secret: The Autobiography of the Former Director-General of MI5, and CIA Director Allen Dulles in The Craft of Intelligence, as President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s pointman in implementing the Eisenhower Doctrine, which deviated the CIA from its original 1947 purpose of collecting and centralising intelligence for the president into stressing ‘plausible deniability’; overthrowing governments and assassinating leaders.

In Africa, there is Nigeria’s Matthew Benabafa Seiyefa, who served for a very short time in 2018, and wrote Swimming Against the Currents: Memoir of a Spy Chief. Kenya’s Bart Joseph Kibati wrote Memoirs of a Kenyan Spymaster. Then came Brigadier Wilson Boinett’s Fixing Spy Craft to Serve National Interests in Kenya.

The Global Centre for Policy and Strategy (GLOCEPS), a think tank, provided the platform for Boinett to launch his book on 3 July 2025, in front of who is, or used to be, who in government and the intelligence industry in Kenya and Uganda. They included former heads of civil service Francis Muthaura and Sally Kosgei, NIS DG Noordin Haji and his two predecessors, PS Korir Sing’Oei, National Security Advisor Monica Juma, and Chief Guest Interior CS Kipchumba Murkomen.

Having assured ‘protection’ to the police to shoot people, Murkomen’s lamentation that political leaders operate without understanding Kenya’s national interests was an interesting contradiction that raised questions as to whether the CS understands ‘national interests’. And there was Uganda’s Philip Idro, a former Uganda spy chief who had worked closely with Boinett. Idro talked of being challenged to write about his experience.

No other writer has explained the rationale behind Moi’s new reformism. Early in the 1990s, Boinett claims “two tipping events would trigger a change in the security and political climate in Kenya”: the collapse of the Soviet Union and the killing of Robert Ouko. The two events, however, do not explain Moi’s confusion as to what had happened for the West to turn against him.

Moi, Boinett notes, was unhappy with the Special Branch for having failed to warn him of the looming geopolitical threats despite being publicly funded “to gather information about any person or about any foreign government’s plans to undermine Kenya … to discover everything on political, economic and national security issues before they became public knowledge.”

As a result, Boinett writes, Moi “was unimpressed because both the country’s foreign and defence policies had … been weak and less than effective largely due to poor advice provided by the Kenyan intelligence community. This, the President lamented, made him look bad in the eyes of our development partners…. He concluded by pondering why even the ‘SB’ had never taken the time to understand the Western World’s reluctance to support his government in the face of many threats since the end of the Cold War.” The problem for Moi therefore was the ineptitude of the intelligence community, which he then decided to reform.

Boinett is chairman of GLOCEPS, one of the think tanks that currently tries to make sense of geopolitical dynamics, but this service was not available in the 1990s when Moi was grappling with post-Cold War confusions. The Special Branch, it seems, understood its mission to be to fix ‘dissidents’ in Kenya and their possible foreign supporters, but not to understand international power shifts arising from the failures of Conceptual West idealism outside the West that had necessitated serious policy re-evaluations.

Among the big failures were the American war in Vietnam, the MPLA success in Angola, the overthrow of the Shah of Iran, stopping the Sandinistas in Nicaragua or even Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. Moi was therefore puzzled because he could not understand such shifts in geopolitical dynamics and so he blamed the existing intelligence community as a way out.

Moi, at least, realised the importance of reforms, which made him appoint Boinett, a trusted former ADC, and even to entertain pleadings from Daudi Tonje for long-term restructuring of national security mentality by creating a critical mass for future decision-making.

Moi was thus receptive to Tonje’s ideas of creating a National Defence College, similar to the ones in India and Britain. Its purpose, in Tonje’s mind, was to produce a critical mass of national policy makers who gain competence in national security matters through interdisciplinary training in order to eliminate narrow silo mentality in decision-making.

Participants were to be senior military officers of the rank of colonel and above or their equivalents in bureaucracy, the police, diplomats or officers from friendly countries. Within one year, participants were to receive joint training in decision-making, mastering world geopolitics, and acquiring exposure in grand strategy thoughts. Officers in police or related uniformed/security services, as well as Boinett’s new intelligence organ, found themselves at NDC.

In his reformist mood, Moi relied on and trusted the military. Boinett was to be the instrument of that reform and provide the president “with useful information.”

At the time of his appointment, Boinett was a Brigadier, but he had to resign in order to undertake the assignment of reforming ‘intelligence’ as a civilian. He became a believer in the civilian control of the intelligence service, and his book is largely about his struggles to reform and professionalise intelligence in order to provide the president “with useful information” using the NIS. In the process, he overpasses Kibati’s book in that Kibati had dealt mostly with the ‘how’ of ‘Special Branch’ activities, and Boinett, in contrast, goes beyond the ‘Special Branch’ to deal with the ‘why’ of reforms.

Boinett is candid on Moi’s weaknesses. After Mboya’s assassination, he writes, Moi blamed the communists “despite lack of evidence to the contrary.” After the 1982 failed coup, “with the runaway state consolidating power”, the Moi regime became increasingly repressive.

The ‘Special Branch’, as the identifiable instrument of brutality, led to “Game Change” in the 1990s as Moi struggled to understand what had happened to deprive him of the control of the country and the support of Western powers that he used to enjoy in the 1980s.

Believing that the ‘Special Branch’ was the problem that needed changing from a dreaded image of information extraction organ into an intelligence collection and analysis professional body, Moi had then turned to Boinett, his former ADC, to actualise his reformist desire and hope that he would not again be caught flat-footed.

Boinett’s book explains Moi’s shifting positions on security matters. One of his main challenges was to convince Moi and other key players of looming challenges.

Initially, Boinett writes, he had problems stopping cartels that sent rumours to the president as ‘sensitive’ information. The cartels “hit back … using the tribal card to malign some of our field officers and branding them as being disloyal opposition sympathisers.”

Moi, Boinett notes, “particularly loved the juicy reports that spoke to the political situation analysis” which he then used in political rallies. Still, Boinett managed to scatter the cartels, and some individuals “even offered to work as agents of the service.”

Thereafter, he writes, the reformed “intelligence machinery… now relatively effective, began to report on ethnic mobilisation in some parts of the Rift Valley and coastal regions.”

To get serious funding for training, and modernising and digitising the services, Boinett’s new machinery warned Moi that “the phenomenon of information implosion was unstoppable.” In 2002, the machinery convinced Moi that his appointed successor, Uhuru, was losing the election. Once he saw the evidence, the president mobilised and prepared the country for transfer of power to Mwai Kibaki. Moi wanted an orderly exit from office.

Boinett’s book is a good source of unusual information, despite challenges to be addressed if there is a second edition. The book needs index pages, correct repeated errors of referring to Kenya’s ‘post-colonial’ period as “post-independence”, implying that Kenya ceased being independent. In discussing the 1971 coup plot, he calls Joseph Ndolo, probably influenced by his King's African Rifles colleague Idi Amin in Uganda, as ‘Brigadier’ instead of ‘Major General’.

Although Boinett did a good job of ‘fixing spycraft’, he chose not to address some issues or to offer tantalising beginnings only to leave the reader hanging in expectation for more.

Probably not privy to the ‘Theory of the Politics of Kenyatta’s Death’, he is weak on the Kenyatta succession, whose death occurred in August 1978. In addition, he is silent on the 1969 oathing as well as court martial intrigues that followed the failed 1982 coup.

He writes of Hezekiah Oyugi running a parallel intelligence system and is silent on changes in defence thinking that took place at roughly the same time as reforms in intelligence.

Providing useful summaries, in point form, at the end of every chapter, Boinett has given the country reason to reflect on ‘spycraft’ and its role in promoting national interests, especially national security.

The military has some catching up to do — catching up with their former colleague, a ‘Brigadier’ fixing intelligence.