A Century of Skulduggery --- The daily cat-and-mouse of foreign intelligence often makes leaders lose sight of the big picture.

"Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West

By Calder Walton

Simon & Schuster, 672 pages, $34.99

Espionage, subversion, Russians, Britons, Ukrainians. Who is the betrayer? Who the betrayed? Calder Walton's "Spies" begins with a Ukrainian agent's report to British intelligence. "The Russians admitted," Mr. Walton writes, that "they could only hold on to Ukraine by force and that Ukrainians were 'generally hostile to them and their ideas.'" We are in 1922, rather than 2022, but continuity across the past is a major theme of Mr. Walton's ably constructed, well-written and widely grounded study of the past century of East-West intelligence conflict.

The author, a scholar at the Harvard Kennedy School, traces the beginning of the Cold War (correctly) not to 1945 and the end of World War II, but to 1917 and Russia's Communist Revolution. Likewise, far from ending with the fall of the Soviet Union, Mr. Walton's book takes the story up to the present. "Although Russia professes to be a 'great power,'" he writes, "its leaders have always been keenly aware of its short-comings compared to its Western rivals."

Mr. Walton argues that Soviet intelligence services broadly failed to provide their leaders with accurate analysis -- a tendency that has been repeated in the case of events in Ukraine. This dysfunction owes much to the confirmation bias you find in autocracies, especially those that torture dissidents. But, as "Spies" makes clear, Soviet intelligence activities were also essentially tactical and operational, not strategic. In the Soviet Union, strategy was fixed from high above -- indeed, by ideological decree -- leaving scant opportunity for informed analysis. Western intelligence agencies, by contrast, often had clear tactical and operational deficiencies but tended to be more effective in strategic terms.

Mr. Walton pays the greatest attention to the American-Soviet rivalry, which would come to dominate the second half of the 20th century. But he begins with the Anglo-Russian intelligence rivalry. In "The Secret Adversary" (1922), her second novel, Agatha Christie has a character declare: "Bolshevist gold is pouring into this country for the specific purpose of procuring a Revolution" and "the Bolshevists are behind the labour unrest." Many in Britain believed this, and there was an element of truth to it. The failure, in the early 1920s, of Communist hopes for rapid global revolution would change the nature of the Soviet intelligence assault, but not its purpose.

The author argues that Stalin's internal purges of the Soviet ranks in the 1930s "effectively institutionalized intelligence failure." In fact, they were more damaging to the Soviet NKVD -- the predecessor to the KGB -- than Western counterespionage, which emerges in this book as inadequate. "NKVD officers," Mr. Walton writes, "feared death when providing any intelligence that contradicted [Stalin's] thinking. . . . Under Stalin, the NKVD's foreign intelligence branch, the INO, did not even have an analytical department. In 1938, the INO was in such a state of decimation and disarray that, for 127 consecutive days, it did not forward a single intelligence report to Stalin."

Germany was the chief benefactor of this ineptitude, when it faced off against the Soviet Union during World War II. Stalin had hoped that the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact, which had been signed in 1939, would ensure that the non-Soviet powers destroyed one another, leaving Stalin as the fulfillment of Communist millenarianism. He neglected British and NKVD warnings about a likely German attack and was taken by surprise when, in 1941, Hitler tore up the agreement and invaded. This made Stalin paranoid about his allies later in the conflict.

Just before the invasion, Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess, had undertaken a quixotic solo mission to Britain. The Soviet leader understood this to be an attempt at negotiation designed to isolate the Soviet Union. So, too, Stalin worried in 1942 that Churchill was seeking a separate peace with Hitler. Even after Russia joined the Grand Alliance against the Axis, Stalin assumed this arrangement could never be sustained after the war -- almost the definition of a self-fulfilling prophecy. His suspicion of his allies led him to press on with the intelligence offensive, and he overestimated how firm postwar British hostility to Communism would be.

These high-level failures by the Soviets helped offset the terrible problems for the West created by Soviet fellow-travelers among their own populations. The damage repeatedly done by spies like Guy Burgess, Kim Philby and others emerges vividly in Mr. Walton's history. Yet the author suggests that Western leaders misapprehended the threat, because they could not hold two concepts at once. While understandably rejecting McCarthyism, with its Stalin-like tendency to see foreign spies everywhere, they overlooked the actual scale and seriousness of Soviet penetration of their governments.

Mr. Walton presents infiltration as a distinctive Soviet tool, and argues that practices of accountability made such subterfuge less common in Western intelligence agencies. To the author, this is a key difference between Western spies and Russian spies. In the Soviet and Russian intelligence systems, there was never any sense of legality or accountability.

Mr. Walton makes his case very well. Possibly "Spies" could have done with less material on well-known individuals and topics such as Philby and the Cuban Missile Crisis and, instead, increased coverage of the pre-1941 history, as well as the naval dimension. But this big book has no longueurs, and even gains momentum as it turns to the present day. Events in Ukraine serve as a capstone to Mr. Walton's centurylong story, though he knows that the Cold War between Russia and America will not be the story of the 21st century. Accordingly, he looks to shed light on America's rivalry with China.

China's security services, the author notes, share certain tendencies with Russia's. Both systems were developed during the Soviet era, and both serve authoritarian regimes. The Chinese, like the Russians, rely on infiltrating the enemy -- and, now, on cyberwarfare. Thanks to a yearslong hack of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, he writes, Chinese intelligence has potential blackmail material on countless Americans: "a database of potential kompromat for recruiting American spies of which the KGB could only have dreamed."

For Mr. Walton, the price of security is eternal vigilance. Today's peaceful coexistence is only a tactic by a Chinese regime that can plan for long-term advantage. The West may have had the strategic upper hand during the Cold War, but Chinese strategic culture emphasizes patience, structures, processes and practices. All these habits benefit from stability and unity, and the West currently is not brilliant at those. Indeed, in certain countries, there seems to be a tendency to undermine and even rhetorically trash one's own intelligence services.

Some leaders expect the confirmation of their views, and a few major Western strategic failures of recent years reflect wishful fantasies about the possibility of engagement -- notably in the case of North Korea, but also in that of Mr. Putin. More centrally, the extent to which China and Russia would come to cooperate was inadequately planned for by Western leaders. Again, this reflects a lack of political attention to intelligence warnings.

"Spies" argues that Western intelligence professionalism benefited from an essentially orderly and accountable sociopolitical context. Whether that will be the case in the future is unclear. By reminding his readers that there is a continuing threat, Mr. Walton pushes to the fore questions about political and governmental effectiveness. This makes the character of leadership important.

In the case of understanding intelligence, leadership means appreciating strengths and weaknesses, content and contexts, overt meanings and possible implications. The politics of bravado, hunch and intuition will not do. Instead, as with military strategy, leadership involves the assessment of risk and the ability to think things through and plan forward in many contexts. Let us hope we have not forgotten these skills.

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Mr. Black is the author of "A History of the Second World War in 100 Maps" among many other works." [1]

1. REVIEW --- Books: A Century of Skulduggery --- The daily cat-and-mouse of foreign intelligence often makes leaders lose sight of the big picture. Black, Jeremy. 
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 24 June 2023: C.7.