BOOK REVIEW: Spies (The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West)
By Calder Walton. Simon & Shuster, New York, hard cover. 672 pp with notes, bibliography and index. US$34.99
The best espionage novels are peopled by protagonists like George Smiley and Holly Martens and Alden Pyle, living in shadowy worlds where there are no absolutes, where betrayal is a matter of course, where decisions may deliver consequences no one expected or wanted, where the consciences of the operatives are on raw display. Their authors, Graham Greene and John le Carre and to a lesser extent Ian Fleming (before his Bond character became a burlesque) wrote about what they knew because they had inhabited this spy world themselves, particularly John le Carre when he was still David Cornwell, working for England’s MI6 in post-World War II Germany at the height of the Cold War.
This world of danger and betrayal and disillusion in large measure really existed and still may do if this exhaustive chronicle of the espionage contest between east and west by Calder Walton is to be believed. It has the ring of veracity. There are murders and treacheries galore. Walton, a historian at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, is one of the world’s leading scholars on espionage, author of a commissioned history of MI6, Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War and the Twilight of Empire. He is general editor of the multi-volume Cambridge History of Espionage and Intelligence to be published by Cambridge University Press.
The Soviet Union and the West unleashed hundreds, perhaps thousands of spies on each other. Too often, they included people like the infamous Cambridge Five – Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross – who rose to influential positions in UK government and espionage while betraying their country – and the US as well – for decades. They may well have been the most damaging traitors in modern history, except that on the Soviet side, the military intelligence colonel Oleg Penkovsky and the KGB double agent Oleg Gordievsky spent decades feeding their own Russian secrets to the Americans – who in turn were betrayed by the CIA’s Aldrich Ames and the FBI’s Robert Philip Hanson…