OPINION:
Igor Gouzenko, Oleg Penkovsky and Oleg Gordievsky are not names that immediately come to mind when thinking about the people who influenced the outcome of the Cold War. Unless you’re a president or prime minister who benefited from their secrets or a counterespionage agent who tried to unmask them, you’ve probably never seen their names before.
Gouzenko was a cipher clerk for the GRU, the Soviet Union’s military intelligence agency. He defected in September 1945, informing Western governments that Stalin’s spies had stolen atomic secrets from the Manhattan Project.
Penkovsky, the deputy head of the GRU’s foreign section, began sharing Soviet secrets with the CIA and MI6 in 1961. His espionage helped President John F. Kennedy manage the Cuban missile crisis to a peaceful conclusion.
Mr. Gordievsky, a KGB agent disillusioned by Moscow’s crushing of the Prague Spring, later provided British intelligence invaluable insights into the Kremlin’s thinking as the Cold War reached its climax.
Such defectors and spies who helped the West — and U.S. and British agents who worked for the Kremlin — populate the pages of Calder Walton’s engrossing overview of the “intelligence war” that raged within the Cold War but did not conclude with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Today, Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Xi Jinping’s China are waging an asymmetrical onslaught of spying, subversion and sabotage against Western governments and commercial interests that will intensify, the author warns.
Mr. Walton is an expert on the history of intelligence at the Harvard Kennedy School. “Spies” is a page-turning tome that meets the imperatives of both narrative and analytical writing. Backed by prodigious primary source research, its revelations will leave you entertained, astonished and unsettled. If truth is stranger than fiction, then the history of spycraft detailed in these pages is far more enthralling than anything in the James Bond film franchise.
“Spies” is meant as a “corrective to the overwhelming lack of public policy understanding about the history of intelligence,” Mr. Walton writes. With so many declassified records available today than there were decades ago, intelligence should no longer be a “missing dimension” of 20th-century statecraft and diplomacy.
Yet the author concedes that “most of the time, intelligence was not decisive in international relations.” Therein lies the strength of Mr. Walton’s work; he does not overstate the importance of his subject but rather weaves the work of clandestine services into the larger tapestry of military, political and economic history.
The West — by which the author means “a collection of ideas and alliances, and a form of government centered on liberal democracy” — played catch-up from the start. During the war, Soviet spy rings infiltrated the highest levels of the Roosevelt administration and British intelligence agencies with ease.
The U.S. and U.K. had no such assets in the Kremlin. Stalin stole more secrets from his allies than his Nazi enemies. Still, the ability of the KGB and GRU to collect intelligence was often undermined by the Kremlin’s inability to accurately assess it. Stalin’s suspicions and paranoia thus prevented him from acting on clear evidence that Hitler was about to invade the Soviet Union in June 1941.
U.S. and British records are riddled, too, with catastrophic intelligence failures. The Cambridge Spies operated for years before being detected. The damage took decades to fully uncover. Remember Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen? They are merely the most notorious names on the list of Americans who gutted the CIA or FBI from within.
Washington and London always had more difficulty piercing the Soviet Bloc than vice versa. Behind the Iron Curtain lay closed societies suffocated by domestic surveillance. The West’s openness, by contrast, was a source of its vulnerability. This lesson is not lost on Beijing.
Mr. Walton renders a necessarily harsh verdict on covert operations (or active measures, as they’d say in Moscow) during the Cold War. The CIA and KGB meddled in elections, toppled governments and attempted assassinations, which “did little more than antagonize relations between East and West and damage the societies and economies” of the targeted countries. The most chilling passage in “Spies” deals with one such operation in Africa.
At a national security committee meeting on Aug. 18, 1960, President Dwight Eisenhower turned to his CIA chief, Allen Dulles, and said the democratically elected leader of Congo, Patrice Lumumba, should be eliminated. “Though he did not care who pulled the trigger, Eisenhower wanted Lumumba dead,” Mr. Walton concludes.
Lumumba, wrongly suspected of being on the Soviet payroll, was murdered by his political enemies, not the CIA’s reluctant assassin. The outcome pleased Washington nonetheless. With U.S. support, Mobutu ruled Congo, renamed Zaire, for three decades. He was a tyrant, but he wasn’t a communist. In Washington’s eyes, that’s what mattered.
A criticism: “Spies” needed more structural analysis. Mr. Walton does not ignore structural causation, but he doesn’t systematically engage with how capitalism, ideology or racism influenced decision-makers. Still, Calder Walton has made a significant contribution to our understanding of the recent past.
As our attention spans supposedly shrink, as we waste hours scrolling past headlines designed to spike our emotions rather than intellects, this sturdy book of more than 600 pages is worth every minute.
• Martin Di Caro hosts the “History as It Happens” podcast for The Washington Times.
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Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West
By Calder Walton
Simon & Schuster
688 pages, $21.99
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