{"id":84586,"date":"2024-01-18T07:51:35","date_gmt":"2024-01-17T20:51:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=84586"},"modified":"2024-01-18T07:51:35","modified_gmt":"2024-01-17T20:51:35","slug":"from-the-bookshelf-spies-the-epic-intelligence-war-between-east-and-west","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/from-the-bookshelf-spies-the-epic-intelligence-war-between-east-and-west\/","title":{"rendered":"From the bookshelf: \u2018Spies: the epic intelligence war between East and West\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n

Recent Russian efforts to interfere in US elections, track down and eliminate defectors and other \u2018disloyal elements\u2019, 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.<\/p>\n

Early on, Moscow\u2019s clandestine operations were traditional \u2018cloak and dagger\u2019, 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\u2019s intelligence agencies at centre stage. Members of the military-security elite, the siloviki<\/em><\/a>, have become Russia\u2019s new nobility.<\/p>\n

In Spies: the epic intelligence war between East and West<\/em><\/a>, 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\u2019s current war of aggression on Ukraine. Walton has spent his career studying intelligence agencies, is an assistant director of the intelligence project at Harvard\u2019s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and has published extensively<\/a> on security issues.<\/p>\n

Walton\u2019s 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 centre of the machine and would serve as the model for Eastern European intelligence agencies for the next century.<\/p>\n

Following the signing of the 1919 Versailles peace treaty, the US and the UK busied themselves downsizing their intelligence gathering. The US didn\u2019t 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 \u2018gentlemen don\u2019t read each other\u2019s mail\u2019. Equally short-sighted, the British ambassador in Moscow in 1936 refused to allow MI6, Britain\u2019s foreign intelligence service, to open an office there on the grounds that it \u2018was liable to cause embarrassment\u2019.<\/p>\n

World War II kicked off with three enormous intelligence failures: Britain\u2019s miscalculation that Japan would attack Singapore by sea rather than land, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin\u2019s unwillingness to heed warnings of Hitler\u2019s plans to invade the Soviet Union, and the US\u2019s failure to anticipate Japan\u2019s attack on Pearl Harbor.<\/p>\n

The aftermath of World War II marked a repeat of the mistakes of the 1920s. During the war, the paranoid Stalin had allocated vastly more resources to spying on his Western allies than on the Nazis, and by the end of the war the Soviets\u2019 enormous intelligence machine had a staff of 200,000. Western intelligence, again, had focused on Germany and was poorly prepared to take on Stalin\u2019s network of embedded agents. At the start of the Cold War, the US and UK had few Russian speakers and fewer moles. As Walton describes it, they were \u2018bringing toys to a gunfight\u2019.<\/p>\n

It took revelations of deep Soviet penetration of Western intelligence agencies to alert US President Harry Truman to the realities of the Cold War. In 1947, Congress approved the National Security Act, which established the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council, marking the beginning of the Truman doctrine and US efforts to contain Soviet expansionism. In 1952, Truman also established the National Security Agency, which would become one of the world\u2019s largest intelligence organisations.<\/p>\n

Walton\u2019s account includes some of the best-known clandestine operators of the Cold War. In the 1950s, the Swedish industrialist Boris Hagelin supported the US and its allies by selling them superior encryption machines, while providing other governments with lower-grade technology. The ideologically driven British intelligence officer Kim Philby spent years leaking top secrets to the Soviet Union, while the KGB\u2019s Oleg Gordievsky secretly helped US intelligence agencies to understand the thinking of their Soviet counterparts.<\/p>\n

Walton concludes with an important chapter on China, the greatest intelligence challenge of the 21st<\/sup> century. As with Russia, China\u2019s key weakness lies in the chasm between its massive capacity to gather intelligence and its much weaker ability to analyse and use it. The Soviet intelligence bosses had difficulty talking truth to power. At times they were afraid to tell their leaders the truth, and at other times\u2014as when Stalin was warned of Hitler\u2019s imminent invasion\u2014their advice was simply ignored.<\/p>\n

Walton provides a timely reminder that under Xi Jinping, with a politburo and Central Military Commission stacked with loyalists, China\u2019s top leaders are likely to suffer from a similar problem of warped intelligence. This greatly increases the risk of miscalculation.<\/p>\n

The principal lesson from Walton\u2019s book is that Western intelligence agencies should never again allow themselves to be caught unprepared. 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. Walton\u2019s lucid account is a must-read for intelligence professionals and the politicians who control the purse strings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Recent Russian efforts to interfere in US elections, track down and eliminate defectors and other \u2018disloyal elements\u2019, and plant disinformation using social media are nothing new. Rather, they are the continuation by modern means …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1230,"featured_media":84589,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[599,3749,2385],"class_list":["post-84586","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-cold-war","tag-kremlin","tag-new-cold-war"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nFrom the bookshelf: \u2018Spies: the epic intelligence war between East and West\u2019 | The Strategist<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/from-the-bookshelf-spies-the-epic-intelligence-war-between-east-and-west\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"From the bookshelf: \u2018Spies: the epic intelligence war between East and West\u2019 | The Strategist\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"  Recent Russian efforts to interfere in US elections, track down and eliminate defectors and other \u2018disloyal elements\u2019, and plant disinformation using social media are nothing new. 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