Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West

Abstract

Today’s intelligence efforts against Russia are just the latest chapter in over a century of intelligence competition, a theme that Calder Walton picks up here in his latest book, Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West. In November 2021, the Chief of the UK’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6), Richard Moore, talking to the Londonbased International Institute for Strategic Studies, referred to his service’s century-long efforts to understand Russia, which was at the ‘core’ of its work. Speaking in July 2023, more than a year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Moore was again eager to tease out the lessons of the past. The speech, given at the British Embassy in Prague, pointed to the crushing of the Prague Spring in August 1968, and the many Russians that were appalled. ‘They had’, Moore said, ‘no wish to be on the wrong side of history and the bravest of them acted on their convictions by throwing in their lot with us, as partners for freedom’ – a veiled reference to one of the service’s greatest agents, Oleg Gordievsky. Now, as then, Moore appealed to Russians to do the same. ‘Our door is always open’, he said. Spies is a detailed exploration of the covert intelligence struggle, fuelled, Walton tells us, by Russia’s paranoia and insecurity, rather than its strength. There are several key arguments included, which, although no surprise to academics in the field, will be of importance to the wider intended audience. First, the Cold War – often neatly packaged into dates somewhere between the late 1940s and 1991 – started much earlier, after the Bolshevik revolution. Walton points to the success of Russia’s intelligence services in the 1920s and 30s, and the naivety of the West to the threat. Second, the intelligence war does not end with the collapse of the Soviet Union; this should, he argues, be seen as a temporary blip, with today’s activities of Russia’s FSB, SVR and GRU representing a continuation of what came before. Both West and East had significant intelligence successes; the Soviets achieved high-level penetrations into Western political, military and scientific circles, while the West secured significant technological successes (notably signals and imagery intelligence), and gradually caught up in recruiting disaffected officials in the East. Intelligence was, as has been observed elsewhere, a stabilising factor for both sides. But for the Soviets, intelligence politicisation – at its worst, the twisting of intelligence to fit preconceived notions – impacted assessment. ‘Soviet spies in the West’, Walton rightly observes, achieved what they did ‘despite, not because of, the Soviet intelligence services’ (p. 486). The KGB, as with Russia’s services today, were ‘not ten feet tall’ (p. 486).