2026/01/01 by Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, Steven T. Usdin · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics #Intelligence, Security, War Strategy #Military History and Strategy
paper · doi:10.1162/jcws.a.1333
openalex publication_date 2026/01/01 · openalex created_date 2026/07/02 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/02
Calder Walton, Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2023. 688 pp. 34.99. Editor's Introduction: Calder Walton, the assistant director of a program at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government dealing with foreign intelligence operations, recently published a lengthy overview of the Cold War-era “intelligence war between East and West.” The book received a good deal of publicity and was favorably received in mass media outlets, but experts on the subject have found notable weaknesses in Walton's account. Three of the most prominent experts offer their perspectives here.Calder Walton has an ambitious agenda in Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West, namely, to document the “more or less” continuous effort by the intelligence services of the Soviet Union and, after 1991, the Russian Federation, to obtain secrets from Western, democratic countries, principally the United States and Great Britain. Even during periods when the USSR was allied with the Western powers, he contends, it treated them as adversaries. Thus, the Cold War started well before 1945 and did not end in 1991. Although the West was not always an innocent victim of Soviet spying, the conflict was asymmetric. The Soviet Union enjoyed inherent advantages from its tyrannical political structure, closed society, and networks of sympathetic recruits and enablers in the West entranced by the ideological fantasies of Communism.Although Walton's overall thesis is persuasive and he briskly marshals numerous examples from the decades-long war between Soviet and Western intelligence agencies, his account, almost of necessity because of its vast scope, often lacks crucial details. He has omitted numerous important operations and milestones and stumbled into several errors—sometimes of detail and a few of misinterpretation.Walton served as Christopher Andrew's research assistant on his monumental authorized history of the British MI5 counterintelligence service, The Defence of the Realm, during which he had access to a considerable cache of once-classified material.1 Not surprisingly, he has relied heavily on official records located in The National Archives of the United Kingdom in London. Given that, it is odd that several major examples of Soviet espionage against Great Britain are barely mentioned or entirely omitted. No author, of course, can detail every case, but Walton makes almost no mention of the first major Soviet spy ring uncovered by MI5, directed by William Ewer, a newspaper editor, who ran the Federated Press (FPA) in London. Although Walton identifies the FPA as a Soviet espionage front, he does not go much further, noting only that the ring was “rolled up,” but its members escaped prosecution because of MI5’s fear of “revealing intelligence.” Before the spy ring was broken up, it managed to penetrate the Special Branch of Scotland Yard.As Walton observes, failing to prosecute spies is a structural problem for counterespionage organizations in democratic societies. Many years later, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) declined to prosecute Theodore Hall for nuclear espionage because the only evidence against him was the Venona decryptions that the government was loath to reveal in court. Secret trials and summary executions are an advantage for governments uninterested in transparency; the rule of law sometimes constrains democratic government from telling the truth.Walton also does not mention successful British and U.S. infiltration of the home-grown Communist parties that severely limited the parties’ effectiveness. Maxwell Knight, who directed operations against both British fascists and Communists for MI5, never makes an appearance, even though his agents broke up the Communist-inspired Woolwich Arsenal spy ring and led to the conviction of a high-ranking British Communist, Percy Glading. That operation is entirely omitted. So too is the story of how a Soviet asset implicated in the case, Melita Norwood, was overlooked. She went on to serve as secretary to the head of the British nuclear weapons program, Tube Alloys, and turned over significant nuclear secrets to the Soviets. Walton does not mention her or her exposure many years later as the “granny spy” via the Mitrokhin files. Likewise, his discussion of counterintelligence operations in the United States ignores Operation SOLO, the FBI's recruitment of Morris and Jack Childs in the early 1950s as moles within the highest bodies of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) for almost thirty years, during which time they reported on nearly all facets of the CPUSA's relationship with the Soviet Union and its receipt of Soviet funds. Jack Childs was the one who put the FBI, belatedly, on the trail of Oscar Seborer, the fourth Soviet spy at Los Alamos. (By the time Childs delivered this startling information to the FBI, Seborer and his brother Stuart had fled to Moscow, and his nuclear espionage remained unknown to the U.S. public until 2019. He is also not mentioned in Walton's Spies.)When Walton turns to the United States, he not only omits some pertinent information, but makes numerous errors, some minor and others more substantive. It is not that he misidentifies spies or accuses innocent people of espionage. Rather, he has a tendency to say strange things, such as that “during the war, [Alger] Hiss became a special advisor on Far Eastern affairs to then secretary of state Cordell Hull” (p. 109). But in fact Hiss was not a Far Eastern specialist. He was chiefly an adviser on multinational relations, which led to his presiding over the founding of the United Nations (UN). Walton also mistakenly reports that Steve Nelson, the CPUSA district organizer in Oakland, spoke with a U.S. scientist in March 1943 and then met with the Soviet foreign intelligence station chief, Vasilii Zarubin. Nelson's actual espionage contact was not Zarubin but Petr Ivanov, a Soviet military intelligence (GRU) officer working under diplomatic cover at the Soviet consulate in San Francisco. Nelson met with Zarubin at a later date to receive money to help finance his espionage operations. Walton calls George Koval “the GRU's officer in Los Alamos,” and claims that the Soviet nuclear bomb “was prepared according to the ‘recipe provided by Koval’” (p. 119). This is nonsense. Koval had no connection with Los Alamos. Instead, as Walton later accurately notes, Koval worked at the Oak Ridge facilities dealing with uranium separation and the polonium moderator for the Manhattan Project (the secret U.S. wartime effort to build a nuclear bomb).Similarly, Walton's summary of the Hiss case is not entirely accurate. He maintains that when Whittaker Chambers testified before the House Un-American Affairs Committee (HUAC) in early August 1948, “he publicly accused Hiss of being a Soviet agent (p. 139).” But in fact Chambers in his initial appearance before HUAC testified only that Hiss had been a secret Communist. Not until later, in a deposition in a libel case brought by Hiss, did Chambers add the much more serious accusation of espionage that was amplified in Chambers's later testimony. Walton writes that Henry Wallace's staff in 1948 “included none other than the Soviet atom spy Ted Hall (p. 156).” This is simply untrue. Hall was never on Wallace's staff. Walton also repeats the undocumented and nonsensical assertion by a former Soviet intelligence general Pavel Sudoplatov that Soviet intelligence agencies operated a “clearinghouse for classified material coming out of Los Alamos [at] a drugstore in Santa Fe” (p. 117). Nothing in Sudoplatov's account of Soviet nuclear espionage should be regarded as credible.Walton also repeats the often-made mistake of identifying Harry Dexter White as the first head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) after the Second World War. In reality, the first head (managing director) was Camille Gutt, a Belgian economist and political figure. White was appointed American Executive Director, a member of the IMF's executive board (every member-state got one). Walton makes yet another mistake in claiming that “although [Elizabeth] Bentley produced voluminous leads for the FBI, not one resulted in a prosecution” (p. 138). Actually, two of those she named, Edward J. Fitzgerald and William Remington, were prosecuted and convicted, albeit not for espionage but for related charges. Nor is it true that William Weisband was the one who informed Soviet foreign intelligence about the Venona Project (the highly classified program to decrypt Soviet espionage communications). The evidence is that Soviet officials received word of the existence of the project within a year-and-a-half of its creation, prior to Weisband's involvement with the project. Walton also is misguided in claiming that “the brains behind Venona in 1945 was [Meredith] Gardner.” Although Gardner was the crucial figure in recreating the Soviet code book, he was serving as a highly talented linguist. The process of stripping the encrypted messages of the random numbers that made possible Gardner's work was undertaken by a team of cryptanalysts. Morris and Leona Cohen, who fled the United States in 1949 and took refuge in Moscow, never “ran a sophisticated deep cover Soviet spy ring [in Great Britain], as they had in the United States” (p. 227). In the United States they had been largely couriers; in Great Britain, as Walton correctly notes later, they were radio operators supervised by Konon Molodyi, the Soviet spy who worked under the cover name Gordan Lonsdale.No one writing about the often shadowy world of espionage is immune from error. Like others who have written about this topic, we have made our share of mistakes. But the number of errors in Walton's account—some the result of sloppiness, some the result of a failure to gauge the credibility of sources—is disconcerting. We have focused here on Soviet espionage from the 1920s to the 1950s, the era we know best. Although there is some value in considering covert operations such as the U.S.-backed coup in Iran in 1953, the failed Bay of Pigs operation in 1961, and other active measures, as aspects of the conflict between the USSR and the West, Walton's inclusion of them in a book about “Spies” conflates two very different activities.Walton has undertaken a challenging task in attempting to cover such a long period of time and such different activities as espionage and covert actions. Despite the unfortunate number of errors, his account of the origins of the clashes between Soviet and Western intelligence agencies in the 20th century is both sensible and useful. His book would have been far more coherent and tighter had he limited his ambition.Calder Walton has taken on an immense challenge in Spies, galloping through a century of deceit and deception that the book's subtitle correctly calls the “epic intelligence war between East and West.” The broad sweep of Walton's book, combined with his stature and the prominence of the intelligence scholars and practitioners he cites, ensure that Spies will be treated as a definitive account of covert conflicts that have helped shape history.Curious readers, professionals, and policymakers will come away from Walton's book with a sense of the continuity of Soviet and Russian espionage from the 1920s to the 2020s, as well as the asymmetric nature of the intelligence threat Russia and China pose today to open societies. 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