H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-16 on Walton, Spies110 min read

Spies! What a great title! I could feel the ground shift within the first few pages of Calder Walton’s blockbuster accounting of the twentieth century “epic intelligence war between east and west.” Cold War historiography is again on the move and Walton, who is the assistant director of the Belfer Center’s Applied History Project, at Harvard University, has ushered it in with a bang, or perhaps, more accurately a thump, as the book comes in at 672 pages. This includes 122 pages of notes and a glossary. He is also in the process of developing a website that will serve as a companion for the book and will include several teaching resources.[1] 

H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum

Roundtable Review 16-16 

Calder Walton, Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West, Simon & Schuster, 2023. ISBN 978166800694

2 December 2024 | PDF: https://issforum.org/to/jrt16-16 | Website: rjissf.org | Twitter: @HDiplo

Editor: Diane Labrosse
Commissioning Editor: Sarah-Jane Corke 
Production Editor: Christopher Ball
Pre-Production Copy Editor: Katie A. Ryan

Introduction by Sarah-Jane Corke, The University of New Brunswick. 2

Review by Jonathan Nashel, ‎Indiana University, South Bend. 8

Review by Kenneth Osgood, Colorado School of Mines 13

Review by Kevin Riehle, Brunel University London. 27

Review by Alexandra Sukalo, Naval Postgraduate School 31

Response by Calder Walton, Belfer Center, Harvard University. 36

Spies! What a great title! I could feel the ground shift within the first few pages of Calder Walton’s blockbuster accounting of the twentieth century “epic intelligence war between east and west.” Cold War historiography is again on the move and Walton, who is the assistant director of the Belfer Center’s Applied History Project, at Harvard University, has ushered it in with a bang, or perhaps, more accurately a thump, as the book comes in at 672 pages. This includes 122 pages of notes and a glossary. He is also in the process of developing a website that will serve as a companion for the book and will include several teaching resources.[1] 

Just last year I was telling my second-year cold war [hi]stories class to be on the lookout for a grand shift in the historiography that I was confident was about to unfold.[2] Historiographical shifts are easier to track these days. We know they tend to occur when we have a dramatic change in the international environment or when a substantial new document collection surfaces from the depths of an archive. In this case we owe the emergence of a neo-neo-neo-neo-orthodox interpretation of the Cold War—I too get confused by the neos—to none other than Russian President Vladimir Putin and his murderous policies in Russia and abroad.[3] Gone are the days of Glasnost and Perestroika. Today hope has been replaced by fear as Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has forced the West to confront the ghosts of Cold Wars past. Always on the front lines, historians are only too happy to pick up the hammer and sickle and run with it. And Walton is now at the head of the pack.

In line with these events, he has offered us a new orthodox history of the Cold War, albeit with a dollop of revisionism on the side. I say this because, as we all know, orthodox Cold War scholars have generally located the origins of the conflict in the post-war period.[4] Revisionist scholars, who argue that the Cold War stemmed largely from American domestic forces, largely locate its origins in the early twentieth-century with the emergence of Wilsonian internationalism.[5] Then of course comes the post-revisionist school of thought, or the first neo-orthodox interpretation, depending on your political orientation, which is best exemplified by noted Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis.[6] And now we have Walton’s fourth iteration. Like post-revisionist scholars before him, he threads his needle by relying on several different themes brought forward in each of the earlier interpretations. Like many, albeit not all post-revisionists scholars, he also relies more heavily on orthodox arguments than revisionist ones.

Walton makes three arguments throughout the book. First, picking up on a couple of revisionist arguments, he suggests that the Cold War started before orthodox scholars imagined. In this vein he also argues that the war was driven by Russia’s political, economic, and military weakness and Soviet insecurity rather than its strength. Then reversing the argument made by revisionist historians, he suggests that the United States waged the Cold War in response to external factors while the Soviet Union fought the Cold War for internal reasons (8).

His second and third arguments reinforce points made by latter-day conservative historians. He suggests that the Cold War did not end in 1991 and indeed is still ongoing.[7] Third, again in line with this argument, he argues Russia’s hundred-year intelligence war should provide us with a stark warning about what we can expect in a new “Cold War” with China (8-9). It is impossible to miss the new call to arms in that emanates from much of the manuscript. As Jonathan Nashel points out “the past and present collide…in Walton’s book.” This, friends, is par for the course in cold war historiography.

Although Walton argues that this book is not a history of the Cold War, I would argue it should be understood us such. Intelligence historians have fought for too long to have their work included as part of the larger historiographical debates to avoid coming to terms with a book this significant. As Kenneth Osgood argues, Walton’s book is “an extraordinary book that should be widely read—and debated.” It is a serious work of intelligence history and a monumental achievement. I could not agree more.[8]

In Spies, Walton also argues in order to come to terms with the Cold War, which he believes has lasted for the hundred years, we must go beyond Putin to understand that this conflict is one between the East and the West. The result, according to Nashel:

is a compendium of. . . short histories, evocative tidbits, and events from the Russian Revolution to 2022, one that details the immense role that intelligence played in determining relations between the West, which is confined here to Britain and the United States, Russia, and China. 

Anyone teaching a course in intelligence history will find a copious amount of useful information in the text. According to Nashel this includes “new details of the spy wars between the West and its Communist adversaries.” Walton has discovered: 

Russian archival records showing Stalin’s support of former Vice President Henry Wallace’s quixotic campaign for president in 1948, and records of Putin (emulating [Soviet leader Joseph] Stalin’s assassination of the exiled revolutionary Leon Trotsky) seeking to assassinate Aleksandr Poteyev, a Russian spy who had defected to the US and was living the life of Riley in Miami.

In his review of Spies, Osgood provides H-Diplo readers with a well overdue intelligence historiography primer. Students of intelligence history are well advised to familiarize themselves with his notes, which are truly a gift to the next generation. Osgood argues that Walton demonstrates how “essential intelligence history is to understanding modern international relations.” Walton, he argues, has provided an international history that embraces “multiple sources, multiple archives, work of synthesis, existing literature and original research.” 

According to Osgood, the significance of his work is fourfold. First, he argues that:

it is an international history, incorporating Russian, British, and US perspectives and sources. Second, it is both a work of synthesis, reflecting a vast historical literature, and an impressive work of original research, drawing on dozens of archives and collections.

Third, “it addresses the activities of a wide range of intelligence agencies from all three countries—going beyond the well-known CIA, KGB, and MI6 to incorporate domestic, signals, reconnaissance, and military intelligence organizations—including some that most people have never heard of.” Finally, he suggests that while “many intelligence histories focus on either operations and espionage or analysis and impact on policy, Walton engages the full scope of intelligence work.” He concludes that while any one of these tasks would have been formidable, Walton does all this in a single volume, with a brisk and captivating narrative that covers more than a century of history. This is an astonishing feat. It should, he suggests, “establish his reputation as one of the world’s leading authorities on intelligence history.” 

Yet despite his positive review Osgood also argues that Walton’s approach is not always even handed since he “frames Russian intelligence activities as an aggression from start to finish.” Picking up on the conservative themes in the book, Osgood points out that “time and again, he uses the word ‘assault’ to describe Russian intelligence and espionage activities in a way that is reminiscent of orthodox interpretations of the Cold War.” He believes that this paradigm should be interrogated on two fronts. His arguments are well worth a read. 

Alexandra Sukalo also highlights the strengths of Walton’s book while pointing to a couple of areas of disagreement. She argues that “while Walton’s second and third arguments regarding the continuation of the Cold War after the Soviet collapse and the threat posed by China brook no challenge from [her], his first claim regarding when the Cold War began is not so cut and dried.” Underscoring the revisionist position, she points out that in earlier histories of the Soviet Union “prioritized rooting out domestic enemies over conducting foreign operations.” More importantly, perhaps, she argues that this theme continued well into World War II. In the post-war era, she suggests that Stalin was not immediately concerned with spreading Communism across Europe, nor does she believe that Stalin considered the Soviet Union to be at war with the West in the immediate post war years. 

In making these arguments, she points to newly released Politburo documents. As mentioned above, documents are another important factor that can push us to revise existing scholarly arguments. The interpretive differences between Osgood, Sukalo, and Walton are important and will not doubt shape the historiographical wars over the origins of the Cold War/cold war in years to come. 

In our final review, Kevin Riehle provides a more critical analysis of Spies. He finds the book “overtly ideological.” As noted above, one cannot get past the first few pages without noting Walton’s conservative and neo-orthodox stance on the Cold War. However, Riehle suggests that Walton’s characterization of both Stalin and Putin goes beyond how traditional scholars might define them, arguing that “the narrative is full of caricaturist terms that portray Putin as a malevolent former KGB officer who is bent on ruling the world.” The interpretative disagreement over Putin may well mirror, and be as controversial as, those over Stalin.[9]

Unlike the previous three reviewers Riehle also argues that Walton’s book contains little that is “historically new.” This he argues limits its value for academic and scholarly audiences. Here Nashel, Sukalo, and Osgood disagree. All point to new information they found in the book. For his part, Riehle concedes that the book will be of great value to the lay reader.

In his response to his reviewers, Walton makes a good case for his interpretation of several of the points raised by his peers. This includes his defense of the conservative terminology he incorporated in his book. He reminds us of the saying frequently attributed to Woody Allen, “Just because you are paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you!” Second, he also addresses Riehle’s argument that the review includes little that is new. His highlights his depiction of a Russian attempt to kill a former Soviet official, in Florida, which was subsequently picked up by the New York Times.[10] As Walton revealed to me,[11] holding this story so close and then finally revealing it in the book, was one of the most difficult situations he faced in his scholarly career. 

As our roundtable on Calder Walton’s new book Spies suggests, the debates over the historiography of the Cold War/cold war are far over. As intelligence scholars enter the fray, I imagine that these discussions will continue for generations to come. And that, my friends, is a very good thing. 

Contributors:

Calder Walton is Assistant Director of the Belfer Center’s Applied History Project and Intelligence Project. He is one of the world’s leading experts on the history of intelligence, national security, and geopolitics. Calder’s latest book, Spies. The Epic Intelligence War between East and West (Simon & Schuster US/ Little Brown UK 2023), is a best-selling exposé of the history of Russian intelligence, described as “riveting” by the Economist and “a masterpiece” by University of Cambridge History Professor (Emeritus) Christopher Andrew. Calder’s research builds on his first (award-winning) book, Empire of Secrets. British Intelligence, the Cold War and the Twilight of Empire (Harper-Press 2013). While pursuing a doctorate in History at Trinity College, Cambridge, England, and then a Junior Research Fellowship also at Cambridge University, he was a lead researcher on Professor Christopher Andrew’s unprecedented official history of the British Security Service (MI5), Defend the Realm. The Authorized History of MI5 (Penguin 2009). 

Sarah-Jane Corke is the Co-Founder and past President of the North American Society for Intelligence History (NASIH) now renamed the Society for Intelligence History (SIH). She is an associate professor of history at the University of New Brunswick. Her first book, US Covert Operations and Cold War Strategy: Truman, the CIA and Secret Warfare, was published by Routledge in 2008. Her second book, which she edited with Mark Stout, is Secrets on Display: Stories and Spycraft from the International Spy Museum, University of Kansas Press (forthcoming, April 2025). Her third monograph, The Nine Lives of Patricia and John Paton Davies, was awarded a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) grant in 2022. She is also working on a history of the Director of National Intelligence. 

Jonathan Nashel received his PhD in American History from Rutgers University. His book Edward Lansdale’s Cold War was published in 2005 by the University of Massachusetts Press. He has two forthcoming essays: “Cord Meyer, the Gray Man of the CIA,” in Simon Willmetts, ed., Agents of Influence: The Cultural Politics of Espionage Washington: Georgetown University Press; and “The Bonding of Allen Dulles and James Jesus Angleton,” Sarah-Jane Corke and Mark Stout, eds., Piercing the Veil: Intelligence History and the International Spy Museum University Press of Kansas, 2025.

Ken Osgood is Professor of History at Colorado School of Mines. His publications include: Total Cold War: Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad (2006); The Cold War after Stalin’s Death: A Missed Opportunity for Peace? (edited with Klaus Larres, 2006); The United States and Public Diplomacy: New Directions in Cultural and International History (edited with Brian C. Etheridge, 2010); Selling War in a Media Age: The Presidency and Public Opinion in the American Century (edited with Andrew K. Frank, 2010); and Winning While Losing?: Civil Rights, the Conservative Movement, and the Presidency from Nixon to Obama (edited with Derrick E. White, 2014). 

Alexandra Sukalo is an Assistant Professor of Modern Russian History and Security Policy at the US Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. She is a historian of Russia and Eastern Europe and completed her PhD at Stanford University. Her research and teaching focus on the Russian and Soviet intelligence and security services, the Russian and Soviet military-industrial complex, as well as the Russian and Soviet nuclear and ballistic missile programs. She is currently finishing a book manuscript on the Soviet Union’s domestic intelligence and security services under Lenin and Stalin. Her work has been featured in the Washington Post, War on the Rocks, and the journal of Intelligence and National Security. She previously worked as a Eurasian military analyst for the Department of Defense.

Kevin Riehle is a Lecturer in Intelligence and International Security at Brunel University London. He spent over 30 years in the US government as a counterintelligence analyst studying foreign intelligence services, retiring in 2021 as an associate professor of strategic intelligence at the National Intelligence University. His next book, The Russian FSB: A Concise History of the Federal Security Service, will be published in early 2024.

While reading Calder Walton’s engaging and massive Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West, I noticed that his history was constantly bumping up against our frenzied and spy-obsessed present. Consider a recent and all-too depressing story in The New York Times on the state of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Not content with corrupting every sector in the country, President Putin is now whitewashing the Soviet past and effectively brainwashing its youth to support his regime. Tucked into the story was this aside:

The Ministry of Education and Science releases a constant stream of material, including step-by-step lesson plans and real-life examples—like a video of a student concert that used poetry, dance and theater to explain the history of Russian foreign intelligence.[12]

This small scene fits well with Walton’s larger argument about the heavy-handed ways in which Soviet Russia conceived and wielded its intelligence forces, bludgeoning its spies (and citizens) into received ideological conformity. Challenging this ideology was also quite dangerous. Consider that when Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was informed by the NKVD of Adolf Hitler’s plan for a German invasion of the Soviet Union—and just days before his forces did so—Stalin responded back to his intelligence services with this handwritten note: “You can tell your ‘source’ in German airforce headquarters to go f[*]ck himself. He’s not a ‘source,’ he’s a disinformer. J. Stalin” (65).

A few days later, and while reading Walton’s sharp summary of Robert Hansen, the creepy FBI agent who spied on behalf of the Soviets for decades, I learned that Hansen had just died. The New York Times’s obituary for this American traitor included this exquisite little detail: “He grew up obsessed with James Bond, collecting spy gadgets and even opening a Swiss bank account.”[13] But, of course.

Spies is a compendium of these kinds of short histories, evocative tidbits, and events from the Russian Revolution to 2022, one that details the immense role that intelligence played in determining relations between the West, which is confined here to Britain and the United States, Russia, and China. Walton builds from a series of classic and recent histories of intelligence agencies. These are listed on his website[14] and reflect a larger body of scholarship in the context of twentieth and twenty-first century battles between the Russians and the West. Making extensive use of US, British, and Russian sources, the book is a veritable “who’s who” and “what happened when” account of this history. Further, Walton doesn’t just chronicle previously documented events with new source material; his research has uncovered new details of the spy wars between the West and its Communist adversaries. These include finding Russian archival records showing Stalin’s support of former Vice President Henry Wallace’s quixotic campaign for president in 1948, and records of Putin (emulating Stalin’s assassination of the exiled revolutionary Leon Trotsky) seeking to assassinate Aleksandr Poteyev, a Russian spy who had defected to the US and was living the life of Riley in Miami. Shortly after Spies was published, The New York Times added details to this attempted assassination attempt by Putin with a multi-sourced and multi-authored article, “Russia Sought to Kill Defector in Florida.”[15] The past and present collide so much in Walton’s book that it is easy to imagine the need for him to endlessly update his work, perhaps ending up as the Sisyphus of intelligence historians, forever adding new events, linking them to their historical precedents, only to find new materials appearing each and every day that require additions or reconsiderations.

As noted, this is a big book, 672 pages to be precise. It is designed for both a general readership and for specialists looking up details or new source material. There is a certain old-fashioned feel to this work as it involves (mostly) men fighting real and imaged wars. Walton also sees national characteristics influencing the way each country viewed intelligence: the Soviets were forever convinced that the West sought to destroy their revolutionary state, with Putin adopting this view in his Russian “mafia state” (478); the British viewed intelligence matters in a casual, understated way and then adjusted, often poorly, to being a second-tier power after World War Two; and the US gingerly dipped its toes into the world of intelligence before WWI and then grappled with the supposed requirements of an “American Century” after 1945. It’s only fitting, then, that spying’s “greatest hits” are included here. This includes a series of famous spies including Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Alger Hiss, Kim Philby and the Cambridge Five, and Oleg Penkovsky, and well-told tales before and after World War Two, including the Enigma Decrypts, the Venona Project, the U-2 spy plane, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Iran, Guatemala…the list goes on and on until the present.

Walton also discusses individuals who have slipped into the proverbial mists of the past. Aficionados might be the only ones to recall Judith Coplon, a Barnard graduate turned Soviet agent who later became tangled up in New Left politics of the 1960s, or Michal Goleniewski, a Polish intelligence officer who helped catch a British naval attaché who was spying on behalf of the Soviets. In short, there are an awful lot of names in this work because, well, there was an awful lot of espionage taking place. The charm here is that even though Walton covers so much subject matter, his throwaway lines beg for more. Who knew that Marilyn Monroe said that General Hoyt Vandenberg, the second director of the CIA, was one of three men she wouldn’t mind being shipwrecked with (141)? Or that Kim Philby’s portrait hangs today in the Memory Room of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Services building (191)? And while the Soviets are portrayed as obsessed with spying, and were often quite careless about it, they were at times quite inventive. For instance, George Kennan, then US ambassador to the Soviet Union, discovered that his office had been bugged in the embassy. Labelled “The Thing,” it was a “small wireless bug embedded inside a wooden replica of the Great Seal of the United States….The seal had been a gift, presented by Soviet schoolchildren, to [then US ambassador] Averell Harriman at the end of the war” (243-44).

Walton’s book has three main arguments: that the Cold War started earlier than is conventionally understood, with the Russian Revolution as the origins of this conflict; that the Cold War did not end in 1991, thus the West has a Russian problem, not a Putin problem; and that the West is in a new Cold War with China. None of these claims are particularly startling, but he details each with such specificity and with an avalanche of sources that he is able to make a convincing case for each one. There is also an overarching view that “Russians are bad” and the “West is naïve.” Walton doesn’t ignore the multitude of examples of Western ruthlessness and casual indifference to the others to further its ideological and economic goals, especially after World War Two (see, for starters, Congo, Chile, and Vietnam). Still, he does not view the West’s efforts as having been filled with the ideologically driven paranoia that marked Soviet actions (the CIA’s James Jesus Angleton shared this psychological malady with his Soviet counterparts). Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s comment that the US was “willing to help people who believe the way we do, to continue to live the way they want to live”—and its converse—is also Walton’s overarching view of how the US acted after WWII.[16] But as presented in this book, Russian misdeeds, perfidy, and ruthlessness make Acheson and other Western cold warriors look like Boy Scouts on steroids in comparison.

Any book that covers such a large history will have sections that specialists will find wanting more. There is only so much that any author can discuss in one book, after all. The discussion of Operation Mongoose—the assorted plots the CIA concocted to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro—is a condensed history, and I wish that Walton had explored it further. He uses good, useful sources but has also relied on Seymour Hersh’s understanding of these events. Hersh’s book is filled with bombshells, but it has received more than a few mixed reviews.[17] Walton does not mention, for instance, that President Kennedy was sending out peace-feelers towards Cuba at the same time his administration was engaging in covert operations. This was partly due to internal conflicts within Kennedy’s Administration, but also reflects the lack of a coherent policy.[18] I wish that Walton had discussed the CIA’s covert funding of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and its attempts to squash the publication of books that exposed and critiqued their operations (e.g., Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade), as well as surreptitiously bankrolling assorted anti-Communist journalists and various pro-western magazines and conferences.[19]

Even with its immense size and scope, Walton notes that his history is far from complete. While discussing Dmitri Polyakov, the Soviet spy who provided the West with information on the growing estrangement in the 1960s between the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, he adds that “specific details about how Polyakov’s intelligence was fed into the briefings given to [Secretary of State] Henry Kissinger are still classified. Documents in the Kissinger papers and the Nixon presidential library are riddled with redactions” and thus a full reckoning is not possible (360). We know the sad coda to this espionage moment, as Polyakov was outed by Aldrich Ames, a CIA double agent, and later executed by the Soviets.

As fascinating as this book is, it would have been improved by the inclusion of photos…and lots of them. When Walton writes, “a photo from the [Yalta] conference shows Stalin looking across a crowded round table at [President Franklin D] Roosevelt, to whose left sits Hiss,” (109), or that Igor Gouzenko, a Soviet cipher clerk who defected to the West and “later spoke publicly about the terror of Stalin’s regime…wearing a paper bag over his head to protect his identity,” (136) one is reminded of Russian playwright Anton Chekhov’s proclamation, “show, don’t tell!” Also, a “cast of characters” at the front of the book would have been handy as there are hundreds of names here. A more detailed glossary of the various intelligence agencies would have been useful, as this work swims in acronyms. Readers should also be aware that reading this book requires some effort: one needs to jump back and forth from text to endnotes, and then at times to the book’s website to see how Walton is constructing his argument. And there are times when the conclusions seem unwarranted. While this is by no means a core component of his section on Vietnam, Walton writes that President Lyndon “Johnson, however, was not interested in creating another Great Society in Vietnam like the one he was attempting to implement at home,” (363). This is contradicted by Johnson’s Johns Hopkins Speech of 1965, where he announced, “The vast Mekong River can provide food and water and power on a scale to dwarf even our own TVA.”[20]

By the end of the book there have been so many buggings, illicit meetings, document dumps, snafus, and fevered imaginings by both the West and the Soviet Union, that the spy wars take on the quality of Mad magazine’s “spy vs. spy” comic strip. Yet, and of course, real lives were forever altered by these events, and often for the worse. It is easy to ask, then, what did this all accomplish? Walton concludes by arguing that the widespread use of spying by Soviet Russia required a response by the West. Each time the West sought better relations with the Soviet Union (during the Second World War, the era of détente) and after 1991 with the Russian Federation, the spying and subterfuge by the Soviet officials and then Putin simply continued apace. Clearly, the West was conducting espionage against the Soviets all along too, but not on the same level or with the same intensity. In the last section of the book, Walton views China with a very skeptical eye, offering a seven-point plan to combat Chinese intelligence as the PRC seeks to dominate the rest of the twenty-first century (543-545). For good or ill, since espionage is central to our world, Walton will always have more material to work with as espionage is central to our world today.

The simple title of Calder Walton’s latest book, Spies, might suggest another installment of the Jason Bourne franchise–or possibly a popcorn addition to the “airport bookstall” school of intelligence historiography.[21] On the contrary: this is serious work of intelligence history and a monumental achievement. Scholars of the Cold War and international relations should reckon with all that is recounted here. It is an extraordinary book that should be widely read–and debated. Though we should sing its praises, and loudly, we also should engage and perhaps challenge a few of the book’s overarching themes. I will do both below.

Spies calls attention to the changing nature of intelligence history. For many years the field was peculiar and lopsided. “A rather weird historical sub-field,” Hugh Wilford aptly dubbed it.[22] Though espionage is an ancient and global practice, most research on the history of intelligence focused on the Cold War era, on the United States, and on just one entity in America’s vast intelligence apparatus, the Central Intelligence Agency.[23] Against this US-centric background is another oddity. In terms of the number and impact of researchers and institutions, the UK has been the locus for scholarly work on intelligence history–so much so that one American historian of intelligence, Richard Immerman, cheekily described it as “The British Invasion.”[24] In the United States, the subfield was blunted by prejudices in academia against intelligence research. History departments everywhere were already disinclined to political, diplomatic, and military history, and so readily dismissed writings on intelligence as mere “popular” history.[25] Even though evidence abounds of the acute, wide-ranging, and often damaging impact of intelligence activities on societies everywhere, exploring that impact provoked jeers and disapproval from many academics.[26] Consequently, in contrast to most historical subjects, more intelligence work has been published by journalists,[27] current and former intelligence officers,[28] independent researchers,[29] and amateurs[30] than academics.[31] Furthermore, intelligence history has long been stuck in a race and gender time-warp, with the overwhelming volume of work published by white men.[32]

Much of this is changing. Even a cursory glance at the journal Intelligence and National Security–now in its thirty-eighth volume–reveals a rich, complex, and interdisciplinary academic literature.

Intelligence history is experiencing a renaissance of sorts, including its own cultural turn. Many works now explore race, class, culture, gender, and even critical theory.[33] In addition, while studies of the United States still predominate, the intelligence activities of many more nations are receiving scholarly attention. Even so, limitations remain. Those studies that do extend their gaze beyond Langley tend to convey the perspective of a single country, and often of a singular government agency. The broader field of diplomatic history has long since internationalized, involving multinational research in multiple languages, and incorporating multiple perspectives, but the subset of intelligence history has been slower to follow suit. In part this is because the quest for documentation of a single intelligence entity or operation can be so all-consuming that incorporating international research can make a project almost insurmountable. Still, a cruel irony remains. Almost by definition intelligence involves interactions between foreign societies, but there are precious few international histories of intelligence.[34]

Calder Walton’s work bucks all these trends, excepting gender and national origin. (He is British.) Spies demonstrates how essential intelligence history is to understanding modern international relations. It is especially remarkable in four respects. First, it is an international history, incorporating Russian, British, and US perspectives and sources. Second, it is both a work of synthesis, reflecting a vast historical literature, and an impressive work of original research, drawing on dozens of archives and collections from the US, the UK, Russia, Canada, and Ukraine. It is also based on about sixty interviews with policymakers, defectors, and intelligence officers from an array of countries. Consequently, Spies is full of new revelations and insights, particularly with respect to Russian intelligence from the Bolshevik revolution to the present. Third, it addresses the activities of a wide range of intelligence agencies from all three countries – going beyond the well-known CIA, KGB, and MI6 to incorporate domestic, signals, reconnaissance, and military intelligence organizations–including some that most people have never heard of.[35] Fourth, whereas many intelligence histories focus on either operations and espionage or analysis and impact on policy, Walton engages the full scope of intelligence work.[36] Any one of these tasks would have been formidable enough. That Walton does all this in a single volume, with a brisk and captivating narrative that covers more than a century of history, is an astonishing feat. It should establish his reputation as one of the world’s leading authorities on intelligence history.

There are many remarkable details in this book, some of which have been revealed by Walton for the first time, some unearthed by other researchers. My copy of Spies is littered with exclamation points. It is a notation I write in the margins whenever I encounter a detail or interpretation that I find surprising, interesting, or noteworthy. Walton’s recounting of Russian/Soviet intelligence produced a lot of these points. In 1941, Soviet intelligence accurately provided Soviet leader Joseph Stalin with warnings about Germany’s impending invasion (BARBAROSSA). Unwilling to hear the news, Stalin responded by telling the source of the intelligence “to go f— himself” (65). In 1943, while negotiating at the Tehran conference, Stalin bugged President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s quarters and read transcripts of his private conversations every morning (108). In 1948, Stalin closely followed and “colluded” with the presidential campaign of Henry A. Wallace, the former vice-president who ran as the nominee for the Progressive Party that year. Wallace may or may not have been an agent, but he was a “Soviet tool,” Walton concludes (155). One could readily make the same argument about Donald J. Trump, and Spies includes a damning summation of his campaign’s connections to Russian intelligence (505-511).

A history from the vantage of intelligence yields new perspectives. For example, Walton cleverly reinterprets the Watergate affair, which ended the presidency of Richard Nixon, as a domestic intelligence operation. “The most powerful government to fall because of a presidentially sanctioned covert action was…Nixon’s own,” he writes (331). Walton also reassesses John F. Kennedy’s short three years in the White House, rightly underscoring the paramount importance of covert action to JFK’s foreign policy. Kennedy authorized 163 covert operations, just seven fewer than his predecessor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was in office five years longer (315). Although Eisenhower’s presidency is often characterized as the CIA’s “golden age,” he was hardly the Cold War’s most enthusiastic covert warrior. Kennedy’s warm embrace of covert operations revealed his “dark side” and the “ugly reality” of his presidency (316). It is a useful corrective to the still overly heroic perceptions of the “Camelot” years. From the perspective of intelligence, Kennedy shares an awful lot with President Ronald Reagan, who tripled funding for covert operations and waged secret wars throughout the developing world (386).

The most impactful feature of the book is not any single interpretation or revelation, but rather the cumulative effect of Walton’s hundred-year chronicle. He catalogs a relentless tale of chicanery and destruction at the hands of US, UK, and Russian intelligence services worldwide, with particularly devastating consequences for the Global South. Although much of this will be familiar to those who are well versed in intelligence history, synthesizing it together in one volume drives home the ruthlessness and pervasiveness of intelligence interference in the domestic affairs of sovereign states. Many foreign policy experts erroneously conceptualize intelligence as an accessory, or a side feature, to foreign policy On the contrary, intelligence activities often constitute discrete foreign policies in their own right, and often with a greater and longer-lasting impact than other dimensions of national power.[37] As the Russian president and former KGB officer Vladimir Putin is reported to have said of intelligence: “One man’s effort could achieve what whole armies could not. One spy could decide the fate of thousands of people.”[38] Putin was being Putin, of course. But he was not entirely wrong in noting the power of intelligence activities to affect ordinary peoples’ lives.

As Walton progresses through the narrative, he proffers many nuanced and insightful conclusions. Too much of the popular intelligence history, and no small subset of the academic literature, hews to extremes. Unbalanced indictments or celebrations of intelligence activities are everywhere, especially but not exclusively in the popular literature. Thankfully, Walton eschews these reductionist temptations. There are successes and failures on all sides of his multifaceted story.

Yet his approach is not consistently so even handed, and we should dig deeper into one of the book’s central themes. Walton frames Russian intelligence activities as aggression from start to finish. The story he tells is “the history of Russia’s epic, hundred-year intelligence war against the West” (13). Time and again, he uses the word “assault” to describe Russian intelligence and espionage activities in a way that is reminiscent of orthodox interpretations of the Cold War.

This framing makes sense, but only to a point. Taking a century-long look, Walton shows that from the Bolshevik revolution to the present, intelligence has been central to the Kremlin’s foreign and domestic policies. Ever since Vladimir Lenin created the Cheka, Russia’s intelligence apparatus grew and evolved, with changing names and bureaucratic structures, but it had a consistency of purpose: brutally suppressing dissent at home and espionage and subversion abroad. Even during the brief period of democratic reforms in the 1990s, Russia had many well-placed spies including, in the persons of Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen, who were in the heart of CIA and FBI counterintelligence (respectively). As the last Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, was negotiating the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty with Ronald Reagan, and as the first Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, was exchanging toasts (and chugging vodka) with his American counterpart, Bill Clinton, Ames and Hanssen were passing classified documents and computer disks to the KGB (410-414, 418-423).

In this respect, the intelligence-gangster state constructed by Putin appears to be the logical culmination of many decades of espionage, subversion, propaganda, and violence. Near the end of Walton’s 548-page chronicle, the meddling in the US elections in 2016 and the deployment of “hybrid warfare” against Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine since 2014 seem essentially like business-as-usual for the Kremlin. Over this long sweep of history, there were indeed many intelligence “assaults.” A trail of blood flows from Lenin to Putin.[39]

That being acknowledged, the assault paradigm should be interrogated on two fronts. First, at several key junctures Russian intelligence activities did not seem that far outside the bounds of prudent intelligence gathering. Walton frames Soviet espionage in the 1930s and 1940s as part of an unprecedented and unilateral attack on the West. The “Kremlin’s wartime intelligence assault” against the US and UK “constituted an attack on their sovereignty” (125, 150). But was it? Given the self-evident hostility of other great powers to the Soviet state–surely Stalin remembered well the allied invasion of his country in 1918–deploying spies to assess potential threats seems less like an assault than a sensible pursuit of national security. A dispassionate observer might reach a similar conclusion with respect to Soviet espionage on the Manhattan Project. Walton again frames this as part of a “broad assault” on US and British science and technology (113). But was it an assault to infiltrate a program to develop a weapon that could instantaneously vaporize whole cities? Surely any head of state with knowledge that a foreign power was secretly developing a new capacity to kill hundreds of thousands of people would urgently want to understand¾and counter¾such an existential threat.

What is odd is not that Russia spied on its allies, but that the allies did comparatively little to spy on Russia. Stalin had made a pact with German leader Adolph Hitler, invaded Finland, annexed half of Poland, occupied a third of Iran, starved Ukraine, and more. There were good reasons to view him as a potential threat to be monitored closely. The VENONA decrypts attempted as such, but Walton stresses that the American and British governments paid much less heed to collecting intelligence on the USSR than they should have. To be sure, as Walton notes, Soviet espionage inflamed relations with the West and contributed to the origins of the Cold War. Whether it was an unwarranted or uniquely aggressive assault, however, remains an open question.

Which brings us to the second challenge to Walton’s assault paradigm. From a strategic standpoint, much of Russian intelligence gathering was no more nor less an “assault” than American and British attempts to surveil Russia during the Cold War. But Walton deploys the book’s assault framing asymmetrically. When the Russians did it, it was an aggressive attack, but not so when the US and UK did the same. Yes, Russian active measures posed (and still pose) a threat to democracy and to the sovereignty of governments all over. These can very well be categorized as “assaults.” But so too can similar activities by the US and Britain, whose spy services overthrew or conspired against a host of governments, including, we should not forget, the Soviet Union and its clients. When the CIA’s Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) parachuted guerillas behind the Iron Curtain to conduct sabotage or broadcast black propaganda to stir up opposition to the Kremlin’s rule, it was clearly attacking the sovereignty of foreign governments, however repulsive their character. It is not moral equivalency to say so, either. The OPC was nothing if not clear about its intent.[40]

We also should reconsider the implications of using the language of warfare to interpret intelligence operations. It is easy to understand why Walton frames his narrative as the tale of an “intelligence war,” because intelligence officials and policymakers themselves so often used militaristic language themselves. A 1954 report on CIA covert action by James R. “Jimmy” Doolittle is frequently quoted for a reason. It justified “aggressive covert psychological, political, and paramilitary” operations using the logic of total war: “It is now clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost. There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply.” When the Doolittle report championed covert operations to “subvert, sabotage, and destroy our enemies,” it was clearly approaching intelligence as an alternative form of warfare (emphasis added).[41] Even so, one wonders if too loosely parroting this language shortcuts analysis. It reinforces a militaristic paradigm for intelligence operations that may inhibit more strategic and nuanced thinking, and too easily legitimizes and facilitates all manner of subversive conduct on the unsophisticated grounds that “this is war.”

The full weight of Walton’s international story calls for a more nuanced assessment. The picture seems less like a one-sided assault, or even of an intelligence “war,” and more like an intelligence manifestation of the security dilemma, in which the deployment of intelligence resources to advance the security of one country appears threatening to another, stimulating a cycle of intelligence responses and countermeasures that fuels mutual distrust and exacerbates tensions.[42] A self-perpetuating cycle of espionage provocations escalates conflict, rendering all parties less secure. This points to a larger policy problem. Policymakers often conceptualize intelligence defensively, as a means for ascertaining or responding to threats. But rarely do they consider how espionage might stimulate new threats or worsen existing ones. We need a better understanding of how intelligence contributes to threat perceptions, complicates international relations, and compromises international cooperation and security. By providing us with the first truly international history of the espionage conflicts of the last century, Walton’s work provides an essential starting point for exploring such matters.

It seems petty to call out the handful of factual errors in such an ambitious book, as the CIA’s in-house review of Spies does pedantically, for they do not meaningfully detract from its contribution.[43] Similarly, it would be cruel and unfair to critique a book of such sweeping scope for acts of omission. Invariably Walton had to make many painful deletions to keep this project from becoming a seventeen-volume history. Still, one might decry the absence of the FBI’s COINTELPRO operations from the narrative, as the bureau’s harassment of peace and civil rights groups under the guise of anti-Communism exemplify intelligence abuses in the West that continue to warrant a reckoning.[44] One can also lament that intelligence operations to influence and manipulate culture and ideology are largely missing from Spies, especially given the extensive historical literature on the CIA’s cultural Cold War.[45]

One might also wish that Walton had more fully engaged with the politicization of intelligence in American and British domestic politics, such as that related to the wars in Vietnam and Iraq.[46] These issues impact his argument that Western democracies proved more adept than the “sycophantic Soviet system” at utilizing unorthodox intelligence assessments (292). Walton might be right in this judgement, but the political manipulation of intelligence information in democratic states suggests that the observation should be qualified. Similarly, Walton’s contention that “the greatest contribution that British and US intelligence made to the Cold War was to help prevent the outbreak of a hot war, World War III” seems overstated (23). At key moments intelligence failures and shortcomings nearly produced nuclear war, as in Cuba 1962 and during the Able Archer wargame in 1983 (279-97, 402-5, 610-11n24).[47] It was not intelligence, but the prudent restraint of Soviet and American leaders, that kept those incidents from provoking Armageddon. As CIA Director Robert Gates observed, “the most terrible thing about Able Archer was that we may have been at the brink of nuclear war and not even known it” (404). That was hardly a case of intelligence preventing World War III.

To raise these questions is not to discount the monumental achievement of Spies. Each paragraph of the book represents a mountain of research. At every turn, Walton provides compelling interpretations that demonstrate the salience of this kind of intelligence history to our understanding of a host of international developments. Spies is a book that should be on the shelf of every student and scholar of modern international history.

Intelligence services typically have two roles: to provide information to decision makers that will inform their decisions and to act as covert executors of the resulting policies. How successful they are at those two missions varies depending on the complexity of the intelligence question being asked, the skill level of the people working in the service, the relationship between the intelligence service and the supported decision maker, and the geopolitical environment in which they operate. Multiple books have discussed the fluctuating levels of persuasiveness that intelligence has had on decision making. For example, Christopher Andrew’s For the President’s Eyes Only addresses the US intelligence community in the Cold War, and Raymond Garthoff’s Soviet Leaders and Intelligence discusses the Soviet equivalent.[48]

Calder Walton has attempted to combine both into a single volume, weighing the influence of Western intelligence (US and UK specifically) successes and failures against those of the Soviet Union. Analyzing primarily the activities of the two sides’ foreign intelligence services—MI6, CIA, and the KGB and its predecessors—Walton tells the story of the competition that raged between them from the founding of the Bolshevik regime in 1917 until the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. By taking on such a lofty goal, Walton’s narrative by necessity glosses over many aspects of that history. Consequently, this book is best suited for a non-expert audience rather than for historians or academics. There is little that is historically new in the book, despite occasional comments about recently declassified material or interviews Walton conducted with intelligence officials for the book. The interviews and declassifications reinforce already widely available stories rather than adding to the existing knowledge about the Soviet-Western intelligence competition.[49]

For example, Walton claims that the case of William Weisband, a Soviet recruited agent who compromised the success of breaking Soviet codes in the Venona program, remains “largely unknown, even to devoted students of intelligence history” (163). In fact, intelligence historians are well aware of the Weisband case, which has been noted in several prominent books on Soviet intelligence,[50] and was even the subject of a television documentary in the United States.[51] Nevertheless, outside the intelligence history academic world, Weisband’s activities are not as notable, and thus mentioning his case in this book is worthwhile.

The focus on a broader, non-expert audience is not a negative. A book on intelligence history written for lay readers has its place, and the book makes intelligence history accessible to a reading audience that may be unfamiliar with the long-running intelligence competition. Walton spices up those stories by describing the height, hair color, personalities, etc., of various intelligence players, and uses informal language, as in the claim that “[the National Security Agency] NSA was pissed” about the Berlin tunnel operation in the 1950s (236). Although the sources of these statements are unclear, the narrative style of the book makes this history real and relatable.

The book provides a running chronologic account of how intelligence activities fit into world events, such as World War II, the settling in of the Cold War in the late 1940s, the Soviet Union’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon, the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the heating up of the Cold War during the 1980s, and other global events. That is a worthy result. Not long ago, I taught an undergraduate course on the evolution of US national security policy from the end of World War II to the present. Most students had not encountered this history or the role of intelligence in it before or during their undergraduate program. Understanding when intelligence services have been influential, when they have been ignored, and when they have been unable to fulfill their mission at all throughout Soviet history is valuable for students and non-experts as they work to interpret current world events. Although a historical narrative does not predict the future, it can lay a conceptual foundation for what is happening today.

The book is a readable retelling of East-West intelligence stories. It accomplishes that objective, however, with a clear ideological agenda. Walton’s views are luminously apparent in the book. The first section that covers the pre-World War II period reads like a Dudley Do-right cartoon: the dastardly Russians play the role of Snidely Whiplash, trying to kidnap the poor damsel and take over the world, faced by the bumbling Americans and British who are righteous but incompetent. Although Walton’s portrayal of Western intelligence services during World War II is moderately more positive, it still shows the Soviet Union as, in President Ronald Reagan’s words, an “evil empire.”

A similar tone permeates the book, returning in force near the end in the description of Russian President Vladimir Putin. The narrative is full of caricaturist terms that portray Putin as a malevolent former KGB officer who is bent on ruling the world. He also calls Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) Director Sergey Naryshkin a “former dud” officer because his cover was blown in Belgium in the late 1980s (513). Naryshkin’s cover was probably actually blown by KGB officer Igor Cherepinsky, who defected from the same KGB rezidentura in Belgium in 1990.[52] While Putin and his circle certainly see the West as an avowed enemy, Walton’s characterization of Russia today is based on a media-driven interpretation of events with little nuance or depth.

Consequently, the book comes across as a mirror image of the SVR’s six-part series, Essays on the History of Russian Foreign Intelligence. The SVR’s histories, published between 1996 and 2006 under the direction of three successive SVR directors, show Soviet intelligence as insuperable heroes and Western intelligence services as belligerent villains.[53] Walton does nearly the opposite, demonizing the Russian side, while not necessarily heroizing the West but showing its warts as well. The difference between the SVR series and Walton’s book is that the SVR revealed new information, albeit in a heavily slanted portrayal.

In addition to the lack of anything new, another reason why this book is not for historians is Walton’s imprecision with facts. The book is riddled with factual errors, especially related to how Soviet intelligence operated.

Walton makes a common mistake with the names by which Soviet state security was known, stating that the Unified State Political Directorate (OGPU) was renamed the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) in 1934 (54). In reality, the OGPU was subsumed under the already existing NKVD as a new directorate, the Main Directorate for State Security (GUGB), in 1934, giving the People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs control over the full range of state security functions, from foreign intelligence to internal political investigations to border guards. The tug-of-war between state security and internal affairs missions continued throughout the rest of Soviet history and persists even today.[54]

Later, Walton states that the KGB Eighth Chief Directorate “confusingly changed its name to the sixteenth” (249). However, the creation of the Sixteenth Directorate in 1972 was not a name change, but a division of the Eighth Chief Directorate into two, with the Eighth retaining communications security and encryption missions, while the new Sixteenth was responsible for signals intelligence collection and reporting.[55] Those two directorates were recombined in 1994 with the creation of the Federal Agency for Government Communications and Information (FAPSI), and then divided again in 2004 and its pieces subsumed under the Federal Security Service (FSB) and Federal Protective Service.

Walton makes a spurious comparison between Soviet state security personnel numbers and the staffs of what he labels equivalent organizations in the West. He compared the UK MI5 and MI6 staffs, which consisted of a few hundred officers in 1947, with the KGB (or MGB, as it was called then), which he estimates as having 200,000 staff in the early 1950s, in addition to the GRU (125-6). He cites those numbers to show the lack of priority that the United Kingdom placed on intelligence and security in the early post-war period. However, those British agencies are not comparable to the KGB. Soviet state security at the end of WWII still controlled large troops units that protected Soviet territory. Soviet state security also ran border guards, which traditionally comprised the largest portion of its personnel strength, as well as prisons and labor camps. MI5 and MI6 never commanded large troop units, did not control prisons, and did not protect the United Kingdom’s borders, so comparing their personnel numbers agency-to-agency is meaningless. A more accurate comparison would require including the UK Home Office, portions of the Ministry of Defense, Scotland Yard, and other law enforcement agencies.

Walton states that Soviet tanks rolled into Prague in 1948 when a communist government was installed there (151). However, no Soviet military forces entered Prague in 1948. The communist takeover of the Czechoslovak government was done through political means, not military force, and tanks did not roll in the Prague streets until 1968. Walton also confuses the phrase “near abroad” with the Soviet Bloc (151). The phrase “near abroad” was coined after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and is limited to the non-Russian former Soviet states, not the Eastern and Central European states that the Soviet Union occupied after World War II.

Regarding more modern times, Walton states that the GRU conducted an assassination attempt on Aleksey Navalny in 2020 (512); it was actually the FSB. Walton also writes, “we cannot know what intelligence Putin was receiving before his decision to invade” Ukraine in 2022 (512), but implies the intelligence probably came from the SVR (514). There is, in fact, information publicly available about at least some of the intelligence that Putin received in the run-up to the Ukraine invasion, and Walton even mentions the responsible element, the FSB Fifth Service, a few pages later (519).[56]

Nevertheless, despite ideological leanings and frequent imprecisions, the book admirably describes the difference between intelligence collection and covert operations and the risks that come with the latter. More importantly, it tells in an accessible way the broader story about the role that British, American, and Soviet foreign intelligence services played in the East-West rivalry that continues even today.

In his groundbreaking book, Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West, historian Calder Walton takes on the monumental task of telling the story of the shadow war the Soviet Union, and then the Russian Federation, waged over the last century against the West. Though Walton defines the West as “a collection of ideas and alliances, and a form of government centered on liberal democracy,” he focuses on the United Kingdom and the United States, which were the primary targets of the Soviet Union and the leading intelligence powers of the period (6). Neither the United Kingdom nor the United States remained on the defensive, however, and both quickly responded in kind to the attack by the Soviet intelligence service. What follows is a gripping tale that places intelligence and intelligence practitioners at the center of the Cold War in a way that has typically only been reserved for singular events, such as the Cuban Missile Crisis.[57]

As the first comprehensive history of intelligence in the Cold War, Walton’s work is valuable for both specialists and casual readers alike. His study is exhaustive in its breadth and insightful in its erudition, and yet is written in such a way that it is easy to forget that this is not a spy novel by John le Carré. It is difficult to imagine how Walton could have successfully provided the “context” of Russia’s secret war against the West in fewer than the book’s 548 pages of text, but readers should not be put off by its size. Walton cleverly parses the book into six, discrete, digestible sections which provide good background reading for those who are interested in the role of intelligence in particular Cold War events, or for any class on the history of intelligence, the Cold War, or twentieth-century American or Soviet history. The inclusion of such a work on a course syllabus is critical; as Walton notes, “intelligence continues to be missing from history books” and from the classroom (17).

There are many reasons why the study of intelligence is so often missing from history books, but it is in part because writing about organizations that are in the business of keeping secrets is not an easy task. Even the most resourceful of historians can find locating, accessing, and understanding the necessary documents to tell their story to be a challenge. Walton deserves our praise for writing about not only about one intelligence service, but three. His book is well researched and draws on an impressive array of primary and secondary sources, including materials from American, British, Russian, and Ukrainian archives. His use of both published and unpublished Russian-language materials is admirable and sets his book apart from other works on the Cold War, which far too often remain Western centric. While Walton was fortunate to access documents in both Russia and Ukraine prior to Russia’s February 2022 invasion, he would have obtained even greater insight into the tradecraft of the Soviet intelligence services with a visit to the archives of the other former Soviet Republics, which have rich documentary holdings directly pertaining to the subject at hand.[58] Perhaps his most important contribution to the preservation of Cold War history, however, are the interviews he conducted with former high-ranking US and UK government officials as well as intelligence officers. Personal anecdotes, undoubtedly from these exchanges, breathe life into the chapters while granting the reader unique access to the clandestine world of the American, British, and Soviet intelligence services.

Walton arrives at three primary conclusions in this monograph. First, he argues against convention that the Cold War began much earlier than 1945. He notes that Soviet officials in fact had waged a shadow war against the West since at least 1918, when the Bolsheviks endeavored to shore up their revolution. Second, Walton asserts that the Cold War did not end neatly with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Rather, because the new government of the Russian Federation failed to thoroughly dismantle the Soviet intelligence services, the KGB continues to live on, as the intelligence services today carry out the same mandate of protecting the regime from both internal and external threats. Third, Walton draws parallels between Russian and Chinese intelligence services and their tradecraft. In doing so, he warns the readers that while history may not repeat itself, we should learn from the imaginative approaches of the intelligence practitioners of the past to better engage in the intelligence war with China, which has already begun.

Playing with periodization is a common tactic historians employ to glean new insights about the past. For example, in Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914-1921, Peter Holquist offers an innovative interpretation of the Soviet Union’s origins.[59] By asserting that the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution were not discrete events but rather points along a common continuum, Holquist situates the Soviet Union, its revolution, and subsequent civil war within the European postwar experience. Walton offers a similarly original explanation of the West’s tumultuous relationship with the Soviet Union and then the Russian Federation with his novel periodization.

By extending the time frame of the Cold War in either direction, Walton makes the case that the Soviet Union and its successor, the Russian Federation, have been engaged in an intelligence war against the West that has spanned almost one hundred years and continues to this day. With this view in mind, Washington’s efforts to reset the relationship periodically with Moscow seems naïve and overly optimistic at best, especially when considering Russia’s ongoing cyber war on the West, attack on democratic processes worldwide, and invasion of its sovereign neighbors. Walton draws this same conclusion in his penultimate chapter, where he notes that the West has a Russia problem that is unlikely to be resolved any time soon (515).

While Walton’s second and third arguments regarding the continuation of the Cold War after the Soviet collapse and the threat posed by China brook no challenge from this reader, his first claim regarding when the Cold War began is not so cut and dried. As Walton notes in his introduction, which discusses the origins of the Soviet intelligence services, Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin established the Cheka, the predecessor of the KGB, as the “sword and shield of the revolution” and to protect the regime at home from the Bolsheviks’ enemies (26). Even though the Cheka was legally unconstrained, and Lenin granted its leader, Felix Dzerzhinsky, carte blanche to arrest and execute whomever he wished, the organization was small, and its capabilities were limited for much of the 1920s and 30s. From 1917 to 1922, the brutal civil war demanded the Bolsheviks’ complete attention, and consolidating Lenin’s political power at home remained the top priority. This was not to say that there was not an interest in thwarting enemies abroad, particularly if they were aiding homegrown counterrevolutionaries, but the Soviet leaders at the time prioritized rooting out domestic enemies over conducting foreign operations because of limited resources. The emphasis on exterminating enemies at home was reflected in the expansion of the domestic departments of the Soviet intelligence services, which peaked during the Great Terror. The same cannot be said for the foreign intelligence department (INO). With only 122 men on staff in 1929, as Walton notes, the INO did not have the manpower to launch an offensive against all of the Soviet Union’s enemies abroad and the choice of which enemies to prioritize had to be made (40).

From its founding, the Soviet Union had many foes, and the United Kingdom and the United States certainly factored among them. The United Kingdom severed all diplomatic ties with the Soviet Union in the spring of 1927, and by December of that year, the Soviet press reported that war with the United Kingdom was imminent. Based on recently available Politburo documents and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s personal papers, it is evident that the Bolshevik leadership did not believe that there was any real threat of attack from the United Kingdom.[60] Rather, the leadership stoked the fear of war to further their own domestic political objectives. Soviet leaders’ fear that the West would encircle the USSR remained, but for much of the 1930s and early 1940s, more pressing threats lurked closer to home that commanded the attention of the intelligence services.

Germany, Poland, and Japan were high of high priority for the Soviets in the years leading up to the Second World War. The United Kingdom also factored into these concerns insomuch as Stalin feared that, through London’s encouragement or organization, Germany and Poland might attempt to claim territory in Eastern Europe. Throughout the 1930s the Soviet leadership became convinced that both Germany and Poland were preparing for war against the Soviet Union and that Japan could take advantage of the situation to seize land in the Soviet Union’s sparsely populated east. The records of the Soviet domestic intelligence services from this period are filled with efforts to locate and destroy the supposed vast networks of German, Polish, and Japanese spies that would provide intelligence and carry out sabotage attacks once the war began.[61] Therefore, Germany, Poland, or Japan with an expansionist vision, posed a more immediate threat to the Soviet Union than either the United Kingdom or the United States. By the late 1930s, the Cheka’s successor organization charged many of the Great Terror’s victims with being German, Polish, or Japanese spies, highlighting that these enemies remained a top concern for the Kremlin along with the homegrown saboteurs and counterrevolutionaries.[62]

Walton carefully details the Soviet intelligence forces assault on allied partners during the Second World War, but whether we should consider these attacks and those that followed the surrender of the Axis Powers as part of the Cold War is not settled. Stalin viewed the outbreak of the Second World War as confirming the Leninist-Marxist belief that imperialism inevitably gives birth to wars.[63] Though the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States formed an alliance, it was always uneasy. In his paranoia, Stalin remained convinced that the Soviet Union would find itself embroiled in a conflict with its former allies in the future. However, as Norman Naimark convincingly argues, Stalin did not enter the postwar period spoiling for a fight.[64] Stalin was in fact wary of doing anything that could provoke the United Kingdom or United States into declaring war, and he did not have the immediate aim of spreading communism across Europe (143). That did not stop Stalin from mounting an aggressive intelligence collection campaign to close the technology gap that had grown between the former allies, as Walton demonstrates.

Yet, did Stalin consider the Soviet Union to be at war with the West at that moment? Arguably, no. Amassing vast quantities of information on friends and adversaries alike was a priority of the Soviet intelligence services, and it occurred even when the Soviets did not see war looming on the horizon. For example, before the Polish national Michał Goleniewski agreed to spy for the Americans in early 1959, Soviet intelligence recruited him to spy on Polish intelligence operations. In the mid-1950s, when Goleniewski began to work as an illegal agent for the Soviet Union, the relationship between Poland and the Soviet Union was reasonably strong, although the long history of conquest and war between Poland and Russia meant that trust between the two was never absolute. The Soviet Union provided for Poland’s security, and in turn, the leaders of the Polish Communist Party acknowledged the Soviet Union’s influence in the region while also deferring to Moscow for guidance on how to structure and operate their own intelligence services.[65] Despite this close working relationship, the Soviet leaders did not hesitate to spy on the Poles, but this did not mean that they were at war with them.

A discernable turning point in the Soviet-American relationship occurred from 1947 to 1949. This is perhaps a more conventional starting point for the Cold War, particularly if we accept Naimark’s claim that Stalin was unconvinced that the settlement following the Second World War would pit the United States and the Soviet Union at war against each other. By that time, there is no doubt that the tenor of the relationship had changed. On the one hand, the Soviet Union increased its standing internationally. The Soviet Union had successfully supported the Czechoslovak Communist Party in its February 1948 coup, spreading its influence deeper into eastern Europe. In August 1949, it shocked the world with its first atomic bomb test, which ended the American nuclear monopoly. Yet, Stalin still found himself on the defensive. The establishment of the Truman Doctrine in March 1947 along with the Marshall Plan later in June 1947 clarified the United States’ vision for the postwar world. The successful execution of the Berlin Airlift a year later then showcased the West’s ability to achieve that vision. The creation of NATO in April 1949 reified the division of the world into two camps, making the stakes much higher than before.[66]

Historians generally agree that because of the skillful management and, at times, the sheer luck of diplomats and political leaders the Cold War did not become a hot war. After reading Walton’s book, it is evident that this is only part of the story. Walton reveals the critical role that intelligence played in averting both conventional and nuclear war while also showing how Russia’s ongoing intelligence war with the West is a continuation of the Cold War. In placing the practitioners of intelligence collection, analysis, and dissemination at the center of the story, Walton persuasively demonstrates that information gathered from dead drops, technical collection, and even meetings in cafes and restaurants between agents and handlers did just as much to keep the Cold War cold as the work of politicians.

Response by Calder Walton, Belfer Center, Harvard University

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