Calder Walton’s Spies takes us inside the West’s long intelligence war with Russia
Tom Rogan
In his new book Spies, historian Calder Walton takes us inside the expansive, enduring, and sometimes brutal intelligence war between East and West.
A professor at Harvard University, Walton led the research for Christopher Andrew’s 2009 authorized history of Britain’s MI5 domestic intelligence service, The Defence of the Realm.
Spies, however, takes a far broader view of the West’s long intelligence war with Moscow. Beginning in the early 20th century with the Russian Revolution, Walton shows his readers how the cultural roots of the modern Russian intelligence apparatus were forged under the Tsar and then the Bolsheviks.
This is the Russian intelligence services’ culture of deception, near nonexistent morals, and very questionable alignment with the actual interests of the Russian people. The author notes, for example, how “Lenin also used the Cheka to terrorize the Russian Orthodox Church. That is again sanitized from Putin’s version of the past today, which makes much of the connections between ‘Chekists’ and religion – Russia’s ‘spiritual security.'” Walton rightly observes that “Putin is framing Russia’s war in Ukraine as a ‘holy war.'”
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As World War II rages, we learn how the U.S. and British foreign and intelligence services were thoroughly penetrated by the Soviets, most notably by the catastrophic betrayal of the so-called Cambridge Five. As the Soviet NKVD intelligence service used any possible measure to steal Western secrets, their Western counterparts were reluctant even to spy on Moscow. The effort to detect spies within the Western intelligence architecture was beyond pathetic.
Indeed, Spies regales us with how the U.S. wartime OSS intelligence service returned a Soviet code book to the Russian Embassy that one of the OSS’s more enterprising officers had acquired from Finland. It’s an example of the arrogance and foolish idealism that defined the West’s early strategy toward Soviet-related intelligence activity. The Soviets may have been wartime allies, but they should never have been considered friends. Fortunately, we see how Stalin’s arrogant paranoia prevented him from making more use of the stunning human intelligence portfolio that had been offered up to him.
The postwar Marshall Plan helped get the U.S. equipped to deal with the Soviet intelligence threat. The CIA suddenly had the alignment of money and mission to get inside the East and steal Moscow’s secrets. Walton cleverly draws out individual stories to show both the imagination and occasional idiocy that defined this long spy war. To its credit, Spies reaches beyond Europe and America to Africa and Latin America. In doing so, the book illuminates the global nature of the Cold War intelligence battle. This global focus is something otherwise excellent histories sometimes neglect.
Nor does Walton allow the prospective glamour of human intelligence operations distract him from other intelligence fields. Signals intelligence, the decoding, interception, and exploitation of communications, rightly earns a significant focus throughout the book. So also does the all-too-critical use of intelligence by various politicians in varied crises. The book’s examination of intelligence in relation to the Cuban Missile Crisis stands out here. And Walton surely cannot be accused of acting as a propagandist for Western intelligence services. His treatment of their failures is rightly scathing.
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Moving into the contemporary era, Walton shows how the war in Ukraine underlines a great and enduring failure of the Russian intelligence model. Namely, its politicization and associated inability to embrace objective analysis. While analysis is sometimes politicized in the West, such as with the CIA’s patently defective investigation of the so-called Havana Syndrome, Russian intelligence analysis is inherently politicized. As with the current head of the SVR foreign intelligence service, Sergey Naryshkin, where officials have sought to strengthen analytical efforts, they are slapped down. And so, as with the prewar Ukraine intelligence briefings afforded to Vladimir Putin, Russian analysis is all too often designed to reinforce biases and make the boss happy. This is not a recipe for success.
Toward its conclusion, Spies also offers consideration of the major new Cold War in intelligence activity: that between the U.S. and China. The takeaway is clear: espionage exists for a reason and is here to stay for a reason – its service at the intersection of security, politics, and power.
Rich in detail and accessible in prose, Walton has delivered a book from which experts and amateurs alike will find much to learn.
Spies is published by Simon and Schuster.