It’s spy vs. spy vs. spy

U.S. presidential elections in the Cold War was against Ronald Reagan, whom the Kremlin regarded as the greatest single threat to the Soviet Union, which he probably was. So, in his various election bids, they did everything that they could, first, to undermine him, and second, to gather compromising material on him. They tried to dig up anything they could that would blacken his name, but they couldn’t find anything. And when that happened, they tried to do anything they could to support his opponents. Moscow sent a telegram to the KGB officers stationed in the U.S. saying essentially, “It doesn’t matter which party you get an agent in, Democrats or Republicans, but whoever it is must defeat Ronald Reagan.” None of this worked. Reagan won in a landslide. But the Kremlin’s strategy was clear: promote favorable candidates and undermine those hostile to Moscow.

There have been extraordinarily high-level penetrations of the KGB, and then Russian intelligence, into the U.S. intelligence community itself as recently as the 1990s with Aldrich Ames, who was, at one point, the head of CIA Soviet counterintelligence, and Robert Hanssen, who was in the FBI.

Even if this is nothing, the fact that we’re all spending so much time on this serves the Kremlin only too well in its long-term strategic aims.

Pazzanese: What can you tell us about the forthcoming book project, “The Cambridge History of Espionage and Intelligence,” that you’re co-editing with Christopher Andrew, the renowned British intelligence historian?
Walton: I’m thrilled to be leading this project, which will be a landmark three-volume study. There are about 30 chapters in each volume. The first volume is the ancient world and the medieval world; the second volume is from the Renaissance to the First World War. The First World War marked a major change in terms of the way the government gathered intelligence. And the third volume is from the First World War to present-day cyberwarfare.

I’m general editor of the whole project, and also volume editor of the third volume on the 20th century. I’ll be contributing at least three chapters and also an introduction and a conclusion. Once we’ve got all 90 chapters together, then, as the two general editors, we will be bringing the whole thing together and trying to answer a fundamental question: Looking at this whole enormous tapestry of history, what difference can we say intelligence has made to statecraft and warfare? That’s really the aim of the whole project. What difference has it made? Does it make a difference, and if so, how? When and why hasn’t it made a difference? And what are the broad trends and themes that will help us understand intelligence — how it can be used and how it can be abused or misused? We’re calling the project, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, “Intelligence from Plato to NATO.”

Pazzanese: Will any of the research be done at Harvard?
Walton: Yes, absolutely. I’m here and we’ve got obviously a wonderful collection of historians here. We’re hoping to involve a number of historians at Harvard. The project fits well with the public policy research of HKS — in this case, informing policymaking by learning from history. I’m excited to bring it to the Applied History Project at HKS, which I help to run, and also the Intelligence Project at HKS, which I’m part of. My aim is to use “The Cambridge History of Intelligence” to make HKS into a world-leading center for the study of intelligence history. “The Cambridge History” has a clear applied-history spirit to it in that it’s trying to understand what’s going on today by looking to the past. That’s really what we’re trying to do.

Christina Pazzanese is a Harvard staff writer. This article is published courtesy of the Harvard Gazette, Harvard University’s official newspaper.