Spies
The epic intelligence war between East and West
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
The riveting story of the hundred-year intelligence war between Russia and the West with lessons for our new superpower conflict with China
'A masterpiece' CHRISTOPHER ANDREW, author of The Defence of the Realm: The Authorised History of MI5
'The book we have all been waiting for' BRENDAN SIMMS, author of Hitler: A Global Biography
'Gripping, authoritative... A vivid account of intelligence skulduggery' Kirkus
Espionage, election meddling, disinformation, assassinations, subversion, and sabotage - all attract headlines today about Putin's dictatorship. But they are far from new. The West has a long-term Russia problem, not a Putin problem. Spies mines hitherto secret archives and exclusive interviews with former agents to tell the history of the war that Russia and the West have been waging for a century. Espionage dark arts were the Kremlin's means to equalise the imbalance of arms between the East and West before, during and after the Cold War. There was nothing 'unprecedented' about Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential election. It was business as usual, new means for old ends.
The Cold War started long before 1945. Western powers gradually fought back after the Second World War, mounting their own shadow war, deploying propaganda, recruiting intelligence networks and pioneering new spy technologies against the Soviet Union. Spies is an inspiring, engrossing story of the best and worst of mankind: bravery and honour, treachery and betrayal. The narrative shifts across continents and decades, from the freezing streets of St. Petersburg in 1917 to the bloody beaches of Normandy; from coups in faraway lands to present-day Moscow, where troll farms weaponise social media against Western democracies. This fresh reading of history makes Spies a unique and essential addition to the story of the unrolling conflict between Russia, China and the West that will dominate the twenty-first century.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Waldron (Empire of Secrets) presents an authoritative appraisal of 100 years of intelligence operations between Russia and the West. Drawing on declassified records in American, British, Russian, and former Soviet bloc intelligence archives, Walton contends that the espionage of the Cold War was just another step in a still-ongoing covert conflict that began with the Russian Revolution of 1917—though it took the West until the Cold War to realize the extent of Soviet infiltration, which Walton argues was as real as Senator Joseph McCarthy alleged during the Red Scare of the 1950s, despite most of McCarthy's specific claims being "inaccurate and overblown" and his "purges" unnecessary for national security. ("Between 1947 and 1956, 39,000 federal employees were sacked and or resigned.... In Britain, the total for the same period was just 124," and most were reassigned, not fired.) Still, Walton contends that Russian intelligence operations outpaced the West, pointing for example to Soviet espionage inside the U.S. atomic bomb project. He concludes with lessons to apply to the struggle now unfolding between the U.S. and China, and warns against "a new Chinese red scare." This is an encyclopedic yet entertaining dossier on the people, organizations, and events that shaped one of the 20th century's defining ideological battles. (June)
