CLOAK & DAGGERThe Spies Should Go Back into the Cold
Recent Russian efforts to interfere in US elections, track down and eliminate defectors and other ‘disloyal elements’, and plant disinformation using social media are nothing new. Rather, they are the continuation by modern means of an intelligence war that has been going on since 1917. Following the end of the two world wars and the Cold War, the US and the UK reduced their intelligence capacity when they should have been countercyclical, gearing up for the inevitable next intelligence challenge.
A review of Calder Walton, Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West
Recent Russian efforts to interfere in US elections, track down and eliminate defectors and other ‘disloyal elements’, and plant disinformation using social media are nothing new. Rather, they are the continuation by modern means of an intelligence war that has been going on since 1917.
Early on, Moscow’s clandestine operations were traditional ‘cloak and dagger’, but recently the intelligence war has evolved to encompass cyberwarfare, artificial intelligence and a range of hybrid tools and operations. The rise to power in 2000 of Vladimir Putin, who himself rose through the ranks of the KGB, has put Russia’s intelligence agencies at center stage. Members of the military-security elite, the siloviki, have become Russia’s new nobility.
In Spies: the epic intelligence war between East and West, Calder Walton provides a detailed history of the role of covert operations in the struggle between Russia on the one hand and the United Kingdom and the United States on the other, from the Russian Revolution to Moscow’s current war of aggression on Ukraine. Walton has spent his career studying intelligence agencies, is an assistant director of the intelligence project at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and has published extensively on security issues.
Walton’s history is one of contrasts, of Soviet and Russian guile versus Western lack of preparedness and naivety. Following World War I, Soviet intelligence-gathering took off, with leader Vladimir Lenin building a sophisticated intelligence machine to spy on adversaries both in-country and abroad. Cheka, the Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Sabotage, was at the center of the machine and would serve as the model for Eastern European intelligence agencies for the next century.
Following the signing of the 1919 Versailles peace treaty, the US and the UK busied themselves downsizing their intelligence gathering. The US didn’t even have a dedicated intelligence agency, and when Secretary of State Henry Stimson closed down his code-breaking department in 1929, he famously announced that ‘gentlemen don’t read each other’s mail’. Equally short-sighted, the British ambassador in Moscow in 1936 refused to allow MI6, Britain’s foreign intelligence service, to open an office there on the grounds that it ‘was liable to cause embarrassment’.
