The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West

BOOK REVIEW: Spies, The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West

By Calder Walton / Simon & Schuster

Reviewed by Cipher Brief Expert Daniel Hoffman

The Reviewer:  Daniel Hoffman is a former senior officer with the Central Intelligence Agency, where he served as a three-time station chief and a senior executive Clandestine Services officer.

REVIEW: In Spies, The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West, Assistant Director of Harvard Belfer Center’s Applied History Project and Intelligence Project, Calder Walton masterfully weaves together geopolitics with a comprehensive and fascinating history of cloak and dagger espionage.  Walton lifts the veil on the multifarious clandestine operations Russia and the West conducted against one another for over a century.  

The book makes major contributions to the study of espionage, most especially by highlighting the importance of leadership.  The book recounts that it was Vladimir Lenin who broke ground on the “hundred-year intelligence war” with the West by creating the Cheka Secret Police, which enabled the Bolsheviks to solidify their control over the State through informants, blackmail, and “Red Terror.” The Cheka also supported the Soviet’s bloody “pacification” of Ukraine by creating fake Ukrainian nationalist groups to lure exiles to the Soviet Union, where they were arrested, tortured and shot.

There is a strange irony, which Walton describes, of how Western intelligence services enjoyed great successes against Nazi Germany, including strategic deception at Normandy and sensitive collection on Hitler’s war plans, but then utterly failed to collect on the Soviet Union.

Stalin’s greatest intelligence failures however, were in relation to Nazi Germany, the most notorious of which was to ignore threat reporting on the Barbarossa invasion.  Walton expertly draws a straight line to Putin from Stalin’s massively successful wartime espionage against the Soviet Union’s erstwhile Western allies, including expansive penetrations of U.S. and British intelligence services, government agencies, and the Manhattan Project

The author deftly outlines how the Cold War began for Stalin, decades before the U.S. 1947 National Security Act created the CIA.  But thanks to a special relationship with the UK and commitment from war-time leaders like Churchill and Eisenhower, the U.S. and UK were able to level the score with Venona code breaking and other daring espionage operations.  In 1953, legendary CIA Case Officer George Kisevalter recruited Soviet military intelligence (GRU) officer Pyotr Popv, who Walton estimates saved the U.S. government billions of dollars in military research and development. 


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Walton’s exceptional historical analysis is arguably at its best when describing the Cuban Missile Crisis including the impact of U2 spy flights, for which DCI McCone rightly advocated, as well as the source reporting (HUMINT) obtained from GRU officer Oleg Penkovsky. 

Expounding on a lesson applicable to today’s war between Russia and Ukraine, Walton highlights Penkovsky’s valuable reporting on not only the Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal, but more importantly for resolving the crisis, Soviet Premier Krushchev’s strategy. As great a success as the resolution of the October crisis was, Walton emphasizes the limitations of intelligence, including that the West had failed to detect the Soviet transfer of 40 medium range missiles and 43,000 troops to Cuba in 1962. Intelligence never gets to certainty, only levels of confidence.

Walton also dives into the art of intelligence, especially creating a climate of telling leadership what they need to know especially when it is not what they want to hear.  Going back to KGB Chairman Vladimir Semichastny, who was appointed in 1961, for his loyalty “over competence,” Russia has suffered from a politically biased and subservient culture in its intelligence services.

Gorbachev’s intelligence reform designed to create a process for objective reporting was, like so many of his other efforts, doomed to failure.  Indeed, as Walton points out, one of the leaders of the failed KGB 1991 Coup, Sergey Surovkin, went on to become Putin’s “butcher of Syria” and later, led Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Walton delivers a virtuoso analysis of the role of intelligence in détente, the Sino –Soviet split, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. He outlines the most notorious spy cases on both sides and with great intellectual honesty and notes where there are gaps, including how the Soviets learned that KGB Officer Oleg Gordievsky was spying for the UK.


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Walton’s coverage of Soviet and later, Russian propaganda holds great value for understanding Russia’s efforts under current Russian President Vladimir Putin to use asymmetric espionage as a comparative advantage. Walton rightly emphasizes the confluence between KGB disinformation about the U.S. being responsible for AIDS just as China claimed falsely that the U.S. was responsible for COVID.

Walton’s final chapters focus on China and the “New Cold War” and make a compelling argument for a second volume focused on the history of espionage between China and the West.  

If there is a silver lining in the dark clouds of conflict and competition between autocracies and democracies, it’s Walton’s great skill in removing the scales from the readers eyes so that we are all better able to understand the historical and ongoing role of intelligence in some of the greatest threats to our national security.

Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West earns a prestigious four out of four trench coats.

 

 

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