Espionage, subversion and sabotage are the tools of intelligence services weaponized against one’s foes – or in the case of Stalin during the Second World War, they were employed against his allies, the United States and Great Britain.
From the origins of the Cold War to today’s challenges posed by a rising China, America’s global competitors have unleashed an asymmetrical intelligence onslaught against its interests, stealing government and commercial secrets – none more significant than the atomic research of the Manhattan Project. In “Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West,” historian Calder Walton charts the superpowers’ dramatic victories and catastrophic failures in spycraft that shaped world history.
In this episode of History As It Happens, Mr. Walton, a scholar at the Harvard Kennedy School, says the U.S. cannot afford to make the same mistakes dealing with China that it made in the early Cold War with the Soviet Union. That is, when the war ended, the U.S. and U.K. were left scrambling to catch up with Soviet spy networks that had infiltrated the highest levels of their governments and commercial industries. Within a few years, the Truman administration had laid the foundation for the national security state. During the Cold War, however, the CIA and KBG wreaked havoc across the developing world, upending governments and assassinating politicians.
“China poses a much more complicated threat to the West than the Soviet Union ever did, because of China’s massive economic weight and integration with world markets. Once again, Western governments, while looking in one direction, have been the victim of an intelligence onslaught from China,” said Mr. Walton, who said that while the U.S. was understandably obsessed with counterterrorism activity after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, China asserted itself “covertly then overtly on the global stage.”
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