SPIES

A thorough history of a century of conflict between Britain and America and the East.

A serious scholar and lucid writer, Harvard historian Walton, author of the three-volume Cambridge History of Espionage and Intelligence, maintains that the Cold War began with the 1918 Soviet coup and is still in progress in the digital world. Taking advantage of recently declassified documents, the author delivers a vivid account of intelligence skulduggery, mostly familiar to history buffs but no less deplorable in the retelling. Despite a dystopian government and threadbare citizenry, the Soviet government’s proclamation that they were building the first truly just society galvanized idealists around the world. This gave them a permanent spying advantage because many Westerners volunteered their services. Stalin feasted on their avalanche of intelligence but acted as his own analyst; wildly paranoid, he regularly dismissed vital information. The Cold War followed with occasionally spectacular but mostly uninspiring and often disastrous operations, from the overthrow of unsympathetic governments to American officials’ near-psychotic obsession with Cuba to unwinnable wars and Soviet moles. At the same time, unhappy Russians occasionally defected or passed on their nation’s secrets. Walton emphasizes that the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991 did not include the KGB, which reconstituted itself as an agent of revenge against the West. “It was from this bitter revanchist stew in Russia that Putin emerged,” he writes. Putin’s efforts to make Russia great again may not be going well, but his intelligence service’s strategy of hijacking the internet to spread disinformation and influence American elections may be its most successful operation. In the final chapter, Walton focuses on China. Not crippled by a command economy and more technologically sophisticated, it is vacuuming up American secrets with a remarkable efficiency. Throughout, the author is incisive in his analyses, and the seven-page glossary of relevant acronyms will help readers keep track of countless global agencies and organizations.

A gripping, authoritative work.