Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West
Calder Walton (Simon and Schuster, 2023), 672 pages, notes, index.
Lucky are the people interested in intelligence history, for they are living in a golden age. Since the mid-1990s, when NSA and CIA jointly released the VENONA documents and other Cold War–era archives began to open, scholars have produced a steady stream of books that have changed the public’s understanding of the role of intelligence in international affairs and how, especially, it affected post-1945 diplomacy. The quantity of new material shows no sign of diminishing—memoirs and new releases (whether authorized or not) continue to give researchers plenty to chew on.
Much of this material, however, has been used for limited studies, such as biographies, case histories, or chronicles of individual intelligence services. What has been lacking, and what Harvard-based intelligence historian (and former English barrister) Calder Walton provides in Spies, is a book that ties together the histories of the major intelligence services. Walton’s contribution is a survey of the development and operations of the Russian intelligence services, and then their competition with British and US counterparts, during the past century. It is a valuable work, but not quite as authoritative as Walton may have hoped.