Calder Walton’s “Spies” is a riveting history of espionage
Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West. By Calder Walton. Simon & Schuster; 688 pages; $34.99. Abacus; £25 In June 1941 Josef Stalin received a warning from the NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB, that a Nazi attack on the Soviet Union was imminent.
“You can tell your ‘source’ in German air force headquarters to go fuck himself," was the Soviet leader’s response. “He’s not a ‘source’, he’s a disinformer." The invasion came a week later. The anecdote is one of many gems unearthed from the archives in “Spies", a lucid history of the intelligence contest between America, Britain and Russia.
The author, Calder Walton, is an accomplished historian, having contributed to the authorised history of MI5, Britain’s domestic security service. He is also the assistant director of an intelligence programme at Harvard University that attracts current and retired spooks, lending his book both scholarly clout and an insider feel. “Spies" explains how espionage and covert action shaped the cold war, but its enduring message is the folly of failing to realise you are in an intelligence war in the first place.
In December 1917 Vladimir Lenin founded the Cheka, the secret police, to terrorise the enemies of the Bolshevik revolution and steal secrets abroad. It quickly grew to be 100,000-people strong and used news agencies, trade missions and companies to spy across Europe. In the early 1930s Russian spies burrowed deep into Western governments.
The most notorious moles were the Cambridge Five, who rose high in MI6. (One of them, Kim Philby, briefly wrote for The Economist.) Western democracies were often oblivious. In 1929 Henry Stimson, America’s secretary of state, shut down the country’s codebreaking agency on the basis
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