My Amazon Review of Calder Walten's "Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West"

 Intelligence Wars

I normally frown on long books, but Calder Walten’s book weighing in at 688 pages is an exception. In this deeply sourced book Walten covers the 100-year East vs. West spy war starting with the formation of the Cheka in 1918 and its nontrivial influence on history. Like it or not the West has been at war with the Russians from the beginning and if you want a later date for the start of the Cold War you can use 1943 with the emergence of the Cambridge Five occupying high posts in the British security services and the atomic spy ring at Los Alamos.

The initial Soviet target was the British, but with the U.S. recognition of the USSR in 1933 the way was open for the NKVD and the GRU to establish outposts in the U.S. via their embassy and consulates and with the formation of AMTORG, the Soviet trading corporation. From this modest beginning came high placed spies including Alger Hiss, Lawrence Duggan Laughlin Currie and Harry Dexter White. And working with the U.S Communist Party, an error in tradecraft, the Soviets recruited the Rosenberg spy ring. Indeed, had Henry Wallace become President his choices for Secretaries of State and Treasury were Duggan and White, respectively making for a true horror show.

For the most part both the U.S. and Britain were oblivious to the Soviet threat through World War II. A case in point is that the atomic spy, physicist, and German communist Klaus Fuchs was cleared by British intelligence. In fact, the British were prohibited from spying on the Soviets and the U.S. OSS was riddled with Soviet Agents. On the U.S. side the one hero in the piece was FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover who was alert to the spying threat. (See: Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Howard Blum's "In the Enemy's House: The Secret Saga of the FBI Agent and the Code Breaker who Caught the Russian Spies")  Based on the information coming from his spies, atomic spies, Stalin authorized the start of the Soviet nuclear program while the Battle of Stalingrad was going on. Stalin was thinking ahead to the postwar rivalry.

 

As good as Soviet spying was on Britain and the U.S. it objectively failed with respect to Germany because Stalin refused to believe the warnings coming from his intelligence apparatus. He even ignored the clear warnings from his super spy in Japan, Richard Sorge. (See: Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Owen Matthews' "An Impeccable Spy: Richard Sorge, Stalin's Master Agent )

 

So successful was the Russian spying, especially through to the efforts of Cambridge Five member Kim Philby as MI6 liaison to the CIA, was that Stalin knew about America’s intelligence efforts before President Harry Truman. Indeed, Kim Philby was best buddies with James Angleton, the head of the CIA’s counterintelligence division.

 

This is not to say that the U.S. and Britain were asleep. The U.S. developed Oleg Penkovsky as an asset in Moscow. He was extraordinarily helpful during the Cuban missile crisis by informing Kennedy about the limited number of missiles that were operational in the Soviet Union. The British had Oleg Gordievsky, a high KGB official, who while in London briefed both Gorbachev and Thatcher on the eve of their first meeting in 1985. ( Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Ben Macintyre's "The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold )  It was also Gordievsky who alerted the West that Russia truly feared that the U.S. was about to launch a preventive war during the Able Archer exercises in late 1983. Reagan took note of that and cooled his hot rhetoric that came from his “Evil Empire” speech earlier that year.

 

Walten also tells of the CIA’s paranoia in fearing nationalist uprisings as the vanguard of a communist revolution in the global south. Big mistakes were made in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. However, he does not that it was the weak Chilean economy and the army and not the CIA who overthrew Allende in 1973. Both the CIA and the KGB were playing cat and mouse with each other in that country.

 

Walten covers far more than spies. Aside from HUMINT, he discusses signal intelligence (SIGINT), electronic intelligence (ELINT) and image intelligence (IMint). I learned that Dr. Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid, came up with the idea of using high resolution photography that became the basis of first the U-2 spy plane and later satellite imagery. The U-2 that was shot down over Russia in 1959 was accomplished through the use of a proximity fuse that was obtained from the Rosenberg spy ring.

 

I also learned that the dissolution of the Soviet Union did not turn off Russian spying. The KGB reformed as the FSB and the SVR and used such highly placed agents as Aldrich Ames in the CIA and John Walker in FBI counterintelligence. The damage these two caused was incalculable including the fingering of Gordievsky who escaped Russia by the skin of his teeth.  It seems that Clinton did not care about intelligence, but the new Russia plowed ahead. Walten discusses how the War on Terror diverted resources away from Russia and China to the West’s detriment.  Of course, it goes without saying that the Russian security services played a nontrivial role in the 2016 and 2020 elections. However, he does note the U.S. success in calling attention to Russia’s planned invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 which prevented a Russian false flag operation.

 

Walten ends his book with a discussion on China whose Ministry of State Security represents a far greater threat than the KGB/GRU ever represented. China’s espionage is across the board that involves stealing corporate secrets, cyber warfare, SIGINT, and the use HUMINT, in particular involving Chinese nationals in the U.S.  Remember the Russians were never an economic threat; China is thereby defending against its commercial spying critical.

 

Calder Walten’s well-written book is true public service. He highlights the fact that we live in a dangerous world where, as they say, eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

For the full Amazon URL see: Intelligence Wars (amazon.com)

My Amazon Review of Adam Hochschild's "American Midnight: The Great War..............."

Red Scare 1917-21

I thoroughly enjoyed Adam Hochschild’s book on the Spanish Civil War (See:Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Adam Hochschild's "Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939"  ) and was very hopeful that his book on the crushing of civil liberties during and immediately after World War I would be as good. Unfortunately, I was disappointed. To be sure Hochschild does a very good job in covering the era, but I believe he over does it. It is one civil liberties violation after another with the evil Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and his Bureau of Investigation aide J. Edgar Hoover ferreting out socialists, Wobblies, communists, labor union organizers ad Black Americans coming home from the war. The author leaves no doubt in the reader’s mind that he is man of the Left.

It is too much and ignores the real scare that was facing Americans, the very deadly influenza pandemic. Simply put, his book lacks context and he leave out the fact that part of the fear of Bolshevism was based o the fact that Lenin and Trotsky took Russia out of the war to the very real detriment of the American soldiers arriving in France. Further he doesn’t go into detail about the breakup of socialist party into a socialist and a communist faction.

Nevertheless, I learned much from the book. Hochschild shows the full extent of press censorship accomplish by Postmaster General Albert Burleson. In those days magazines were distributed by mail and the postal authorities had the ability to suspend mailing privileges of any publication it deemed contrary to the Espionage Act.

I also learned of  Leo Wendell an accomplished government spy and provocateur entrenched deep in the labor movement. One of the leading red hunters of the day was the very anti-immigrant Senator Albert Johnson of the state of Washington. In 1924 he would go on to write the Johnson-Reed drastically restricting immigration.

Woodrow Wilson does nothing to stop the attacks on civil liberties and, in fact, he refuses to pardon of commute the sentence of Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs. It would take the election of Republican Warren Harding to commute Debs’ sentence many others. It was Harding who put an end the Red Scare.

One of the heroes in the book is Department of Labor official, Louis Post. He personally stopped a huge number of deportations and embarrassed Palmer before a congressional committee thereby hurting his presidential prospects.

In sum Hochschild has given us a sese of this sordid time in American history. However, it would have helped if spent more time on the lives of every day American were trying to live normal lives.

For the full Amazon URL see: Red Scare 1917-21 (amazon.com)

 

My Amazon Review of Howard Blum's "In the Enemy's House: The Secret Saga of the FBI Agent and the Code Breaker who Caught the Russian Spies"

Spy Catchers

In a time when our nation is worried about Russian influence Howard Blum brings us a page turning history of how the FBI and the forerunner to the National Security Agency ultimately tracked down the Soviet spy rings operating in America. The book reads like the best of the spy novels. His heroes are FBI agent Bob Lamphere, a hard-drinking kid from Idaho and code breaker Meredith Gardner, a nerdy language expert from Mississippi. In these two people we have a very successful integration of human intelligence with signals intelligence.

We learn that the Soviets understood the importance of an atomic bomb as early as 1940 and created Operation Enormoz to steal U.S. and British secrets with an elaborate spy network run by the KGB and staffed largely by American communists. Lamphere and Gardner get hints of this operation from coded transcripts of Soviet cables, but the single pad code system used by them was nearly impossible to break despite all of their efforts. Blum highlights that the U.S. code breaking operation was headquartered in Arlington Hall, a former girl’s finishing school in northern Virginia. It was largely staffed by female Ivy League graduates and one of them would become Gardner’s wife. Arlington Hall was the U.S. equivalent of Britain’s Bletchley Park.

Lamphere and Gardner get three major breaks. First as the German army was at the gates of Moscow, the Soviet repeat a pad, a real no no. Then in 1945 Igor Gouzenko a code clerk in the Soviet embassy in Canada defects with information suggesting a vast spy network and that was followed by Elizabeth Bentley’s defection in same year. She worked as courier for the KGB who transferred information from the spies to their KGB handlers. Further the FBI benefitted from illegal “black bag” operations and in one case seized cable transcripts from the Soviet consulate in New York.  Those transcripts became the basis of what is now known as the Venona Files. Soon Gardner was able to read the Soviet’s mail.

Thereafter the FBI learns that the Soviets had three spies at Los Alamos. The German physicist Klaus Fuchs who delivered the guts of the A-Bomb plans to his handler was arrested in Britain. Ted Hall a 19 year old “wunderkind” physicist was never arrested because the FBI couldn’t use the Venona transcripts as evidence. And last there was David Greenglass, a machinist, who delivers diagrams for the lens implosion portion of the bomb. Greenglass is Julius Rosenberg’s brother-in-law and it was Rosenberg who was running a vast spy ring designed to steal electronic and nuclear secrets. He appears throughout the transcripts under his code name, but is not discovered until 1950.

Julius Rosenberg along with his wife Ethel, become cause celebe’s among the American Left; both are convicted and sentenced to death for nuclear espionage. At the urging of both Lamphere and Gardner FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover wrote a letter to the judge to spare Ethel’s life, but to no avail. They both believed that Ethel played a small role in the espionage ring. In their disappointment both leave their agencies shortly thereafter.

Howard Blum has told a very important story in a very compelling manner. The reader gets a real sense of how hard counter-espionage work is and how important luck is. Nevertheless as baseball executive Branch Rickey taught us. “Luck is the residue of design.” I highly recommend “In the Enemy's House” for both nonfiction and fiction readers.

The full amazon URL appears at: https://www.amazon.com/review/R2O39QVVP5KM7S/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv