This week, the third in our August book pod series, a tale of epic war — not the hot war of mutually assured destruction, or the Cold War of U.S.-Soviet history, but the silent intelligence war that has been going on since the very creation of the Soviet Union. It didn’t end with the collapse of the Soviet Union. It’s ongoing, expanding, becoming more dangerous… and there’s a real question as to whether we are winning.
Calder Walton’s Spies, the Epic Intelligence War between East and West is at once fascinating, depressing and terrifying. Of course, there’s a lot of history, a few scoops, some shocking revelations… but what’s most worrying is that both Russia and China share a commitment to destabilizing the United States, and they are working on fertile ground. It’s not just Hunter Biden’s footsie with Chinese intelligence. Or Donald Trump’s revelations of classified information. It’s the fact that America and Europe’s openness is lending itself to manipulation in unprecedented ways.
The 2024 elections are coming. Do we really know what the Russians are planning for us? Or the Chinese? Are we ready?
HIGHLIGHTS
When did the U.S.-Soviet intelligence war really begin?
CW: My motivation was to try to correct what we see in the history books [suggesting] this is a post-war development. Actually, when you look at it from the activities of the intelligence agencies, particularly Russian intelligence, Soviet intelligence, well, from 1917 when the Bolsheviks seize power in the Soviet Union, and then when the Western allies decided to intervene in the Russian subsequent Civil War, the two sides, the Bolsheviks and Western capitalist powers were, it seemed to me, on an ideological collision course waiting to happen.
But what we find is that when you look at what Soviet intelligence services were doing, they were already in this ideological conflict from the 1920s onwards. And it just took the subsequent years, and then during the Second World War and after it for the Western powers to realize that they were actually in this struggle already. They just didn't realize the full components and proportions of it. So by the end of the Second World War, and this is quite appropriate,given the film Oppenheimer, the end of the Second World War, the Soviets had stolen the plans for the US Anglo-American atomic bomb project. So by the time they detonated it, Stalin already had those plans from his spies, deep inside the Manhattan Project
Has anything changed since the end of the Cold War?
CW: As far as the Kremlin's concerned, the Cold War never finished. This is a battle, a struggle, a war that turned out the wrong way as far as Putin's Kremlin is concerned, and actually in the 1990s as far as the intelligence services were concerned. So for Russian intelligence, the Cold War never finished. And in fact, Russia being humiliated on the world stage in the 1990s, no longer a superpower, was arguably even more aggressive than ... its services were even more aggressive towards the great enemy, the United States, than they were in the later stages of the Cold War.
And it's exactly out of that sort of revanchist stew, bitter stew that Putin emerges in the 1990s to become FSB director in 1998. And then to the surprise of everyone, including probably himself, to become a Russian leader and the way that he receives intelligence and understands intelligence and uses it.
It’s not just Putin who’s committed to this war, correct?
CW: I would argue historically and present day, it's inherent to all autocratic regimes that, and we find the same, the little we have of the publicly available information in the West about Chinese intelligence. And we should say first and foremost, we don't have defectors that we know about in public from Chinese intelligence, hopefully defectors exist and are spilling the beans to Western intelligence services. But we don't have the same level as we do for Russian intelligence in the public yet. But you can see how the frightening prospect of Xi potentially making enormously significant geopolitical decisions on the basis of intelligence, which by default, by necessity, by the structural system of his rule, autocratic rule, the Ministry of State Security, its principal civilian intelligence service, is not going to be giving Xi intelligence, which says that he is wrong. And I've got this from interviews from CIA officers with deep expertise on China, that confirm that essentially it's a similar model of the Soviets in the past and Russia today.
How is Putin’s disaster in Ukraine affecting China’s Xi’s thinking?
CW: I can't see how Putin's miscalculation, the war in Ukraine, I can't see how that is not playing into Xi's calculation over Taiwan. But as we all know, it is the one, Taiwan is the one, quote unquote, legacy issue that Xi has left to solve. So this isn't going to be something that he's just going to sort of forget about and go, "Oh, nevermind about that". This is hugely important. As important for Xi, I would argue, as Ukraine is for Putin.
When I was finishing writing the book, I went to Hong Kong and actually wrote the final chapter about China. Much of it while looking out over at the skyline in Hong Kong. And it seems to me that Hong Kong also provides another way, another process by which Xi could have his designs on Taiwan, not necessarily with a military takeover, but by osmosis, it becomes so incredibly economically impossible for Taiwan not to be part of the Chinese economic sphere, that through a slow processor of osmosis it becomes Chinese… and that's what we saw with Hong Kong, step by step, step by step, step by step. And then suddenly as the world saw during Covid, the passing of draconian national security laws, and all of a sudden the Hong Kong that I traveled to last year when finishing
What’s the best story in the book for you?
CW: It's the five Cambridge spies for me. So the spies who were recruited by the KGB's predecessor in the 1930s, and then during the Second World War, while the British government and the US government were looking elsewhere, and consumed by the war against Hitler's Germany, well, Soviet espionage masterfully inserted them, the Cambridge Spies, deep inside the British establishment, the foreign policy establishment. Kim Philby, the notorious Cambridge Spy, managed to become the head of the department in MI6 that was dealing with Soviet espionage. So the person in charge of MI6's operations to try to find Soviet spies was himself a spy. And looking at the records now, you can see how Philby outmaneuvered people within MI6 and within MI5 and used his involvement in those cases to then warn other Soviet agents that the net was closing in on them.
Putin's narrative is that when the first two members of the Cambridge Spy Network, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, when they defected in 1951, the suspicion was cast onto their friend Kim Philby. And in the Putin's narrative, in Kremlin's narrative today, Philby managed to sort of fend off British intelligence, and stoically didn't give anything away. Complete and utter nonsense as you can now see from records. When Maclean and Burgess defected and nobody knew where they'd gone to, Philby knew that his friendship with them was going to cast suspicion on him. And what does he do? He writes a letter to the head of MI5 and the head of MI6, and he says, these two guys, they actually might be Soviet spies, and they maybe even had one going back to Cambridge, maybe one recruited the other.
Now Philby knew that it was actually he himself who had recruited them, but this was an attempt to deflect attention away from him and onto them. What's the result? Philby lied to everyone. He lied to the British, he lied to his friends in Britain, he lied to the Americans. He also screwed over and threw under the bus his fellow Soviet agents. He also almost certainly lied to the KGB and never told them about what he actually did. So it's little wonder that when Philby gets to Moscow in 1963, he finally defects, it takes 14 years for the KGB to invite him into their headquarters. They didn't trust him at all. So this explodes the myth image that he was this master spy, that the KGB sort of welcomed home to a hero's ... absolute nonsense. They gave him a cheap little apartment in Moscow, and he basically drank himself effectively to death.
McCarthy saw spies behind every bush; but there were spies behind a lot of bushes, no? They had an impact on American security and American society…
CW: McCarthy got it wrong. The people that he named, almost none of them were actually Soviet agents, but he was not wrong about the underlying principles. Soviet spies were real, and they were inflicting serious damage on US national security… So Dany, to get back to your point though, is this something that Russian services are still seeking to do, to exploit?
I mean, what we're really talking about here is how they plant the seeds of disinformation or use, to use the KGB's term, useful idiots in Western countries to whip up a frenzy. Absolutely. And the thing is, what's changed with all of this, is the environment, the social media environment today compared to the past, where it's just much quicker and easier for Russian services or any hostile service, to spread disinformation and then get people, particularly in this country, and I do love this country, but in this country in particular, to then believe objectively falsifiable nonsense, as truth. So that's the unhappy position that we seem to be in today, I'm afraid.
Should we be worried about Hunter Biden’s ties with Chinese intelligence?
CW: The thing that you learn about studying the history of espionage and disinformation, is that we need to be very humble or have some ... pump the brakes whenever a big scandal emerges. Now, history shows that what appears in the public domain is generally the tip of an iceberg, and there's a lot more going on. So is it possible that this is a serious national security issue? Yes. Do I have proof to say that? No. Is it ... what I would urge your listeners to think about is, hostile states like Russia and China who are after all in an alliance with no limits, will use every opportunity they can to confuse and to discredit the US government. So I would always, always think that when a big scandal emerges, is there a hidden hand? Who is releasing this information? And what is their vested interest in doing so?
The striking thing is the West’s inability to play the long game…?
CW: The short termism in the US, and indeed in my native country, the UK, is staggering when compared to both, obviously China, but also Russia. Putin has been around for three decades. He's seen however many prime ministers and presidents come and go, and yet he's been able to pursue a grand strategy that is continuous. Little wonder then that we find ourselves spinning around in circles chasing our tails, while Putin has been this steady hand, and then compared to Xi now, we've got more of the same. So I think that short termism is an illness that needs to be cured, certainly in this country, and I would argue in Europe and Britain as well.
Russian election interference; it didn’t start in 2016. Tell the 1948 story?
CW: So Henry Wallace, former vice president who Truman had fired for being too left wing, he was running as an independent in 1948. And there's always been this question Marc within the sort of specialized literature, was Wallace a Soviet agent? Doesn't seem that he was actually ever recruited. They didn't, as far as I can tell, the Soviet intelligence didn't give him a code name, which is revealing. He doesn't appear, seem to appear under a code name in the Venona decrypts that I mentioned earlier. But what we can now say for certain is, that in 1948, as he was preparing his election platform, running against Truman as an independent, he was secretly a corresponding, and I hate to use this word, but I think it's true, colluding with Stalin about what platform's, political platform's agenda would be useful for Stalin, for him, Wallace to include in his intellectual campaign.
So we've got the correspondence going between them through the Soviet ambassador in Washington, with Stalin's handwritten ... characteristic, handwritten notes in his pencils saying, this isn't so useful. Present more on that. And then they had a plan that that Wallace would write a public letter outlining how friendship with the Soviet Union could be created. And then Stalin, according to the plan, would publicly respond to that letter. It all went to plan. Now what happened? Wallace dismally lost that election. Okay. So the net result was nothing for Stalin. And then there's this absolutely horrendous footnote to the whole thing, which is, after that, then Wallace continued to write to Stalin. He never replied, and he writes to his foreign minister and says, we've got enough from this guy, we don't need to bother anymore. Let him go.
And election interference… not just in America, correct?
CW: I've had this story coming at me in every direction for about the last year, from people within, that I know and highly respect, within Canadian intelligence and national security circles, saying the US media isn't reporting on this, but there is a significant effort of election interference in Canada. So finally, I think that the US media is giving this the attention that it deserves, and of course what happens in Canada, there's no reason why it won't be happening here. So I think, to my mind, we were, in the last presidential election, we were getting worried about the existence and operation of deepfake. As far as I know, that didn't really play out. That's the one area that I'm really very concerned about as we go forward, up to 2024, deepfake operated by both Chinese and Russian intelligence, on social media. I think that this is ... I can't see how this isn't going to be significant, put it that way. So to answer your question, yes, there's a deliberate effort on the part of Chinese intelligence just as there is with Russian intelligence to interfere in Western elections.
How good do you think we are in our counter-intelligence, and our own propaganda wars?
CW: Certainly in the Cold War, I think that both the British and the US were extremely effective at promoting propaganda, or if you wanted to use another term, disinformation. Disinformation always suggests that there is a falsehood. And so I think that's not right to describe what the British and US intelligence services were doing in terms of a narrative, a public narrative, about what the West stood for. They would forge documents occasionally, we saw that they would forge documents to discredit the Soviet Union. That's definitely disinformation. Are they as good? Well, unfortunately, you get up against the same problem, then past as it is now present. And that is it's fundamentally much more difficult to disseminate propaganda, influence operations in a closed police state, than it is in a free democracy. They hold all the cards, the things that we cherish, our freedoms in the West are exactly what makes us vulnerable to these things, but we don't want to change any of that because that's of course what makes the West what it is.
One way I'd look at this, and perhaps just leave this for your listeners to consider, is that in the 1980s, a KGB officer who specialized in disinformation, or what they called active measures, testified in Congress, and he was asked ... okay, he laid it all out, what the KGB was doing, what kind of disinformation they were doing, how they would seize upon so-called wedge issues within the US domestic audiences, race relations, that kind of thing, how they would exploit them. So he laid it all out there, and then the question was, "okay, well what do we do about it?" And he said ... this is Stanislav Levchenko, he said, "Well, what Americans need to do is to read widely, you need to not accept one source of news. You need to read as much as you can about a story, and be aware and or be alert to the idea that somebody planting that information has an agenda". And it seems to me that that is just the same today as it was then. Don't get your news from one single source, read widely and think critically. And that I think is the best antidote we can have.
Leave us with a shocker?
CW: So Alexander Poteyev is a spy who the CIA recruited deep inside Russian intelligence, and he was working in the so-called illegals directorate, that's to say Russian operatives, deep undercover, like the series The Americans, if you remember that. So these are Russian intelligence operatives blending in, living under aliases or what they call legends in Western countries. He was the one who disclosed the existence of, amongst other secrets he betrayed to the C I A, the existence of a network of Russian illegals operating in the United States. And they were arrested in 2010. And this included, if you remember Anna Chapman, the rather glamorous, femme fatale as she was, and they were swapped in a spy swap, with Western agents being swapped, going the other way. And the caught Russians spies going the other way. Soon after, needless to say the CIA exfiltrated, their agent Poteyev to the West, and he has been living under an alias ever since.
Now, the year after he disappeared, it was blindingly obvious who the spy was, because all of a sudden he disappeared, a Kremlin spokesman said, the year after in 2011, we know who the traitor is and we're going to be sending a Mercader, which is a reference to the Soviet assassin who killed Trotsky in 1940. So they said, we're going to send an assassin
But part of this, of course is making, as the Kremlin sees a traitor, as we in the US, a brave hero who betrayed secrets about Putin's regime to the West. The strategy is to make him a terrified for his life. So there was no secret that the Kremlin was trying to do this. But what I showed through two exclusive interviews, with CIA officers who wish to remain anonymous, is that that in 2020, Russian intelligence was in late stage planning of an assassination plot to kill him on US soil. And the proportions of this, the significance of this really can't be overstated. Throughout the Cold War, and up until that point, there had always been a bright red line that Russia wouldn't conduct assassinations on US soil. Britain, something different, as we saw with Litvinenko, if you remember, assassinated using polonium laced tea in Central London
And there have been a spate of assassinations in Europe as well, but never in the United States. And this was a red line that, it seems now we can say with confidence that Putin was prepared to step over, and actually conduct an assassination on the US soil. It was thwarted by US intelligence, and I'm reliably told that the CIA spy is now somewhere else entirely, living under a different alias. So it really showed the murderous intentions of Putin's regime. It seems to me incredible story.
Full transcript here.
SHOWNOTES
WSJ Weekend Book Review: "Spies "Review: War in the Shadows (June 25)
The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West (The Cipher Brief, June 6 2023)
Russia Sought to Assassinate an Informant in the US (June 19)
What Comes After Putin's Russia. The West Should Beware (Time, June 2)
China Has Been Waging a Decades-Long, All-Out Spy War (Foreign Policy, March 28 2023)