INTELLIGENCE WARLessons for Today’s Cold War 2.0 with Russia, China
The decades-long battle between Western intelligence services and the Soviet Union offers important lessons for the ongoing national security threat posed by Russia and China. Intelligence expert says both seek to topple U.S. from atop world stage, with Beijing’s blend of money, influence, all-hands-on-deck approach posing bigger threat.
The decades-long battle between Western intelligence services and the Soviet Union offers important lessons for the ongoing national security threat posed by Russia under President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer, and for the rapidly emerging threats from 21st-century China, according to a new book.
Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West, written by Calder Walton, assistant director of the Intelligence Project and the Applied History Project at Harvard Kennedy School, examines the Soviet intelligence program that was for decades more aggressive and often, more sophisticated than the West’s. As the just-released film “Oppenheimer” reminds us, even the top-secret U.S. effort to build the atomic bomb during World War II was compromised from the start by Soviet spies, who eventually delivered those plans to Josef Stalin.
Today, U.S. and U.K leaders agree that China represents the greatest intelligence threat to the West. Chinese hackers are suspected of accessing email accounts of the U.S. State and Commerce departments in June (including that of U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns, a former HKS faculty member), and U.S. officials also believe they planted malware in networks controlling power, water, and communication at military bases. Those incidents, along with the discovery of a Chinese spy balloon hovering over U.S. military sites earlier this year, provide an insight into what Walton calls an “epic intelligence war” beginning between China and the West. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Christina Pazzanese:Almost at every juncture, Soviet intelligence seemed to be a few steps ahead of U.S. and British intelligence services in the 20th century. Why was the West often caught so flat-footed?
Calder Walton:You’re absolutely right. Western services, certainly the British and the Americans, were really flat-footed at key strategic moments, looking the wrong way or consumed by other threats. The Soviet Union last century, and Russia today, have viewed Western powers and these two countries in particular, as a continuous threat — even when relations ostensibly improved.
We saw this during the Second World War, when the Soviet Union was, at least ostensibly, allies with Britain and the United States. Stalin, of course, never viewed the Western allies in the same way we did him, never as a true ally. This was equally the case during détente, the thawing of relations in the 1970s; it was certainly the case in the 1990s, and then, the post-9/11 period, during the war on terror.