Russian spies have moved into cyberspace. Their digital fingerprint is on the 2016 American elections, and all over the cultural wars. They find existing cracks in Western discourse, around Brexit or Black Lives Matter, for example, and seek to rip them still wider. Those online voices which amplify and distort, push and prod at already painful cultural sores? Many of them will be Russian intelligence trolls and plots practicing ‘astroturfing’, a technique whereby they push extreme versions of genuine views while obscuring their real identities. Social media might present new opportunities for Russian Intelligence, but as Calder Walton makes clear in his masterful survey of East-West intelligence wars, this is a novel iteration of ‘much older tradecraft: espionage, subversion and sabotage’.
Today’s Russian intelligence operations can trace their roots to the immediate aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution. One of Lenin’s first major policies after seizing power was the establishment of the Cheka, the secret police. Its initial function was primarily domestic; Russians were not going to terrorise themselves into becoming good citizens of Lenin’s utopia. However, it soon established a foreign intelligence branch. The Cheka was partly defensive – to guard against the backlash from the old Western imperial democracies. But it was also a tool for the spread of world revolution.
It was this second spoke which gave Russian intelligence such a huge advantage over its capitalist enemies. The Russians could rely on a seemingly endless stream of ideological converts, who saw the Soviet Union as the vanguard of the revolution. Walton expertly guides us through the extraordinary penetration of American and British Government secrets in the 1930s and 40s by ideologically motivated spies such as the Cambridge Five. He argues convincingly that these agents were successful despite the occasional bungling from their Russian handlers, and the utter havoc wreaked upon Stalin’s intelligence operations by his violent purges in the late 1930s. The spies’ extraordinarily good intelligence was also under-used by Stalin, whose ‘crippling paranoia’ led him to distrust his best assets.
In the early stages of the Cold War, the intelligence war was emphatically asymmetrical. The democracies, who at this stage were squeamish about infiltrating the Soviet Union for reasons both ideological and practical, had not a single significant agent behind the Iron Curtain. In 1945, so vast was the gulf between the intelligence capabilities of the Soviets and their erstwhile allies, ‘[The] British and the United States were essentially bringing a bow and arrow to a gunfight]’.
Walton follows the fightback, through the successful decryptions of Soviet telegrams and into the post-Stalin years. He finds the continuity between pre-Soviet and post-Soviet operations. The scale of the book, which covers more than one hundred years of tit-for-tat espionage and subversion, is hugely ambitious, and Walton is a knowledgeable and insightful guide. The broad sweep means that some stories, inevitably, feel underplayed and big characters are introduced and forgotten all too quickly. But the breadth of the book also allows Walton to come to some fascinating conclusions about Vladimir Putin, a man whose politics and personality were forged in the vicious world of Soviet espionage. Intelligence is at the heart of his court, which he runs like a mafia don.
After five hundred fascinating, authoritative and dense pages about Russia and the West, Walton throws a grenade onto the page. ‘The West’s future balances on a knife edge,’ he says. We are in the opening salvoes of a new and epic intelligence war. This time, our adversary is China, and its strategy is to overwhelm Western counterintelligence by the volume of the espionage onslaught – from Chinese companies and individuals as well as Government agencies. SPIES is not just a powerful book of history; it is sounding a klaxon for the future.
Antonia Senior is Historical Fiction reviewer for The Times and is working on a history of the Cambridge Spy Ring. Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East And West by Calder Walton is out now in paperback.
