{"id":1980579,"date":"2023-07-23T05:15:02","date_gmt":"2023-07-23T09:15:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/cloak-and-swagger\/"},"modified":"2023-07-23T05:25:46","modified_gmt":"2023-07-23T09:25:46","slug":"cloak-and-swagger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/cloak-and-swagger\/","title":{"rendered":"Cloak and Style"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"float:left\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">6<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fcloak-and-swagger%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1980579&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><h2>An Epic Battle of \u200dEspionage: \u2062East vs. West<\/h2>\n<div>\n<p>An undeniable, unpleasant, and intriguing truth: The Soviets were usually \u2062much better at espionage\u200b than\u2062 either the\u200d Americans or the Brits. German fascists, who \u2062once upon a \u200btime\u200b also had a substantial fan club in the West and a \u2063ruthless \u2062police state at home, didn\u2019t \u2064do nearly as\u200c well as less sophisticated Russians. The Anglo-Americans improved as they \u200cgot bigger and more battle-scarred, but they\u2064 never replicated the successes that the \u200cSoviets\u200c had so often. \u200dCalder Walton, an\u200b American academic at Harvard\u200c who trained at Cambridge University with Christoper Andrews, \u200bperhaps the most renowned scholar of spooky things, limns well in <em>Spies <\/em>the enormous advantages the Soviets had early on, after \u200cWorld War I, and into the 1940s. Moscow could then rally communist \u200didealism and anti-fascism to its cause. As Walton wryly notes, &#8220;On the eve of World \u2062War II, thanks to \u2064its Cambridge recruits, Soviet intelligence perversely had more graduates\u2064 of British universities than Britain\u2019s own <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/huge-chinese-spy-rep-swalwell-was-sleeping-with-is-pictured-with-chinese-agent-who-spied-on-sen-feinstein-for-20-years\/\" title=\"HUGE: Chinese Spy Rep. Swalwell Was Sleeping With Is Pictured with Chinese Agent Who Spied on Sen. Feinstein for 20 Years\">intelligence services<\/a>, \u200dMI5 and MI6, \u200cwhose few officers had military backgrounds, not university educations.&#8221;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<h3>Real Espionage Victories<\/h3>\n<div>\n<p>Western \u200bintelligence services had real espionage \u2063and defector\u2062 successes against the Soviet Union and its satellites: the Soviet \u200dmilitary intelligence (GRU) officer Walter Krivitsky, who defected in 1939; the GRU cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko, who defected in 1945; a\u2064 KGB major, Anatoli Golitsyn, who walked into the U.S. embassy in Helsinki in 1961; the GRU officer Oleg Penkovsky, who \u2064worked in place during \u200dthe Cuban\u200c Missile Crisis providing significant information about Soviet\u200d shipments \u2063to\u2062 Cuba\u200b and Nikita Khrushchev\u2019s intentions; and Adolf Tolkachev, a Russian electronics, radar, and avionics engineer \u200dwho provided voluminous information\u200d about Soviet combat aircraft, radars,\u2063 and missiles, who was \u200cbetrayed by a defecting ex-CIA officer, Edward \u2064Lee Howard, and the CIA case officer Aldrich Ames \u2062(who betrayed Tolkachev first\u200d isn\u2019t clear). Oddly, Walton \u200ddoesn\u2019t mention \u2062Tolkachev, whom the Soviet-East \u2064Europe (SE) Division chief, Burton Gerber, described at the time of his arrest\u200d in 1985 as the &#8220;agent who paid for Langley\u2019s entire budget.&#8221;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>But the Soviets had a\u2062 lot more agents in more productive places. And they did so, \u200beven in the 1930s, when Stalin\u2019s terror was <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/everything-wrong-with-covid-science-has-been-wrong-with-climate-science-for-longer\/\" title=\"Everything Wrong With COVID \u201cScience\u201d Has Been Wrong With Climate Science for Longer\">killing large numbers<\/a> of Soviet intelligence officers, sowing fear in all of the \u200dsecurity \u200dand\u2062 intelligence organizations. &#8220;In\u200d 1938, the INO [the foreign-intelligence branch of the NKVD, the KGB\u2019s predecessor] was in such a \u200dstate of decimation and disarray that, for 127 consecutive days, it did\u2064 not \u2064forward a \u200csingle intelligence report to Stalin.&#8221; Nonetheless, they carried on, as did their spies.<\/p>\n<p>As Walton puts it: &#8220;Due to his \u2062spies in the West, \u200bwhen Stalin\u2062 met Churchill and Roosevelt at successive wartime conferences \u2062of \u2064the Big Three, he was better informed about \u2064them than they ever were of him. Stalin\u2019s intelligence about the Western leaders, with whom he was negotiating, probably \u200bsurpassed that of any leader in history.&#8221; The Soviet leader even came fairly \u2062close\u2062 to having \u200dcabinet members \u200das \u200cspies. Larry Duggan, a Harvard-educated foreign service officer, and Harry Dexter White, a Harvard-educated economist, were both Soviet agents; Henry Wallace, Franklin Roosevelt\u2019s third-term\u2064 vice president (1941-1945), once remarked that if he\u2019d become president he would have appointed Duggan secretary of \u200cstate and White Treasury secretary. The ever-sickly FDR could have easily dropped\u2063 dead before Harry Truman became vice president. Stalin\u2019s\u2063 spies inside \u2064both the British and American atomic-bomb programs are \u200cwell known. Walton\u200c nicely connects \u200ball the dots\u2063 of how all the Soviet machinations came together to penetrate\u200b both the\u200b British and American nuclear programs. The \u200cSoviets certainly would\u200c have figured the bomb out on their own,\u2062 but their agents made everything more efficient.<\/p>\n<p>And everybody\u2019s favorite Soviet spies, the Cambridge Five\u2014Donald Maclean, \u2062Guy Burgess, Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross\u2014were just a stellar Soviet success\u200c that left a lot\u2062 of folks on the Western side dead. These \u2064spies obviously didn\u2019t change the USSR\u2019s denouement, but in the spy-vs-spy wars there\u200b is\u200b nothing else like them. Walton covers this well-trodden ground proficiently, allowing the reader to see how painfully inept\u200b so many were and how good Philby in particular was as a mole.\u200c Walton helped to write the MI5\u2019s official one<a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/house-gops-commitment-to-america-agenda-gets-mixed-reviews-from-conservative-experts\/\" title=\"House GOP\u2019s \u2018Commitment to America\u2019 Agenda Gets Mixed Reviews From Conservative Experts\">-hundred-year history<\/a>: He\u2019s \u200cworked his way through \u200ca mountain of counterespionage material, and when he\u2019s writing\u200c on\u200c counterintelligence in <em>Spies<\/em>, no one does it better.<\/p>\n<p>Regrettably, but perhaps understandably, Walton doesn\u2019t really touch\u2064 on much of the nuts-and-bolts of daily operations\u200d of Western, mainly\u2063 Anglo-American, and Soviet-empire espionage \u200d(he throws in \u200dPutin\u2019s Russia and China at the book\u2019s end, the \u2063latter a bit \u200bawkwardly). \u2062That is, the mundane espionage and covert-action\u200c stuff \u2064that actually \u2062formed most of the officers in the\u2062 field, for better or \u2063worse, and gave institutions their esprit. That\u2019s a world scholars, unless they have\u2063 been \u200cspooks, really don\u2019t have access to\u200b since \u200boperational files aren\u2019t usually released (in Washington, those \u2064files aren\u2019t subject to the Freedom of Information Act; Langley will never \u200cvoluntarily release \u200bthem). Comparing routine espionage\u2062 and covert action would give a different, \u2063less heart-pumping picture of\u2063 the great struggle between the West and\u2063 the \u2064Eastern Bloc. The best title for that clash might be: \u2064&#8221;He who lies less, wins.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>What I witnessed toward the end of the Cold War certainly appeared to have gestated decades earlier. In the mid-1980s, I started \u2064rummaging \u2063around \u2063the Directorate of Operations&#8217; (DO) archives. A <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/cloak-and-swagger\/\" title=\"Cloak and Style\">newly\u2062 minted case officer<\/a> with \u2064some time on my hands, I wanted to get a better grasp of what the clandestine service\u200b did overseas.\u200d Getting \u2064the\u2063 necessary signatures for file \u2064requests, even on once-sensitive covert actions, wasn\u2019t difficult. Once overseas,\u200c however, \u200dI\u200b saw how the written record often didn\u2019t match reality. There\u2064 were many reasons behind the tenuous connections. But one \u200dcould boil them down to essential causes:\u2064 The number \u2063of case officers needing to\u200d recruit agents didn\u2019t match the number of \u200daccessible foreigners who had meaningful secrets \u200band \u200bwere willing to engage in espionage against their own countries. The numbers were way too small to sustain the global deployment \u2064of American operatives who \u200dneeded recruitments to rise through the ranks.<\/p>\n<p>When\u2064 confronted with this insoluble situation, what did patriotic Americans do? They cheated. Some officers, often the fast-trackers \u200dwho grafted onto the\u200d system like remoras on a shark, cheated\u200b rapaciously. Soviet-East Europe Division case officers, who liked to view themselves as\u2062 the\u200d elite of the service, were at an acute disadvantage\u200b in this &#8220;scalp-counting&#8221; system \u200bsince their targets weren\u2019t accessible for\u2064 &#8220;development&#8221; and recruitment behind the Iron\u200b Curtain. An officer could only\u200d get\u2064 so many bonus points for &#8220;denied-area operations,&#8221; no matter how\u200d well done. SE officers would need to lateral to an easy-recruiting division (Africa\u200d was \u2064a favorite, especially since\u2064 lonely, racially sensitive European\u2062 communist targets might freely associate with \u200dwhite American \u200b&#8221;diplomats&#8221;), where officers \u2064could \u2064always gorge themselves on money-hungry natives before returning to more challenging \u2062environments.<\/p>\n<p>Throughout the Cold War,\u2062 CIA case\u2064 officers\u2062 recruited mostly worthless and \u2062mediocre agents. This\u200c doesn\u2019t negate the duel \u2063that Walton ably describes with the \u2062Soviet Union; it does, \u2064however, change how one should view how most operatives saw America\u2019s most holy cause. The most &#8220;accomplished&#8221; CIA officers could be the \u2064most dishonest\u2014fighting the good\u2064 fight against the Soviet empire\u200c was usually way\u2063 down their\u2063 priority list.<\/p>\n<p>And testimony from Soviet and Eastern European defectors and former\u200b intelligence officers suggest the situation\u2014the intertwining \u2064of fact and fiction in\u2062 espionage and\u2064 covert action\u2014was much \u200bworse behind the Iron\u2064 Curtain.\u2064 Totalitarian systems \u200bare built on lies. (Americans can fib ardently in closed environments, but guilt and\u200c sunshine do pour in\u200c through the cracks.) Mendacity and fear are systemic. Communist societies\u200d are conspiracies in\u200b perpetual \u2064motion.\u2063 KGB intelligence, when it \u2063wasn\u2019t derived from one of its great spies but harvested through the routine work of\u200c the thousands of officers overseas,\u200d could just be layers \u2063of half-truths, bent this way or that by ideology, and flat-out lies.\u200d As Walton remarks\u200c about Vladimir Putin, \u200b&#8221;Like Stalin \u200bhimself, Putin is responsible for a colossal intelligence failure. His decision \u200cto invade Ukraine in February 2022\u2063 ranks \u2062alongside \u200dStalin\u2019s miscalculation before Hitler\u2019s invasion as an epic strategic failure. \u2026\u200b Unless or until Russian\u2014or Western\u2014records are\u200b one day released, we cannot\u2064 know what\u200c intelligence Putin was receiving \u2062before his decision to invade. We can, however, make some educated guesses. It seems likely that, as\u200c with Stalin before him, the nature of Putin\u2019s sycophantic court guaranteed that he received\u200b intelligence that confirmed, not challenged, his thinking.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Reading Walton, who cleanly connects all the dueling \u200dspies and counterspies, no\u2063 matter how convoluted the story (the so-called wilderness of mirrors),\u200b one marvels at the human \u2062spirit, in\u200b all \u200cits noble, wounded, and avaricious glory: Spies in hard-target, dangerous countries\u2064 continue to work \u200dwith Western\u2062 intelligence services, which too often \u200baren\u2019t especially \u2063adept at running their agents \u2063inside police states. During the Cold War, working with America and Great Britain was usually a death sentence. I once\u2063 asked a first-rate Soviet ops officer, an erudite, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/remembering-james-caan-he-played-hotheads-roughnecks-while-exposing-their-humanity\/\" title=\"Remembering James Caan: He Played Hotheads &#038; Roughnecks While Exposing Their Humanity\">soft-spoken man<\/a> with superb \u2062Russian who\u2019d handled directly and indirectly a number of Eastern Bloc agents, \u200bwhether they knew their awful odds.\u2062 He\u2064 thought yes, word gets\u2063 around, but the countervailing \u200bforces\u2014hatred of communism, the grinding cruelty of miserable people, and sufficient self-confidence and\u200b courage to overcome the espionage \u2063equivalent of Russian roulette\u2014propelled them\u200b forward. \u200dSometimes \u200bgreed entered in, but not\u200b profoundly, not like\u2064 with Americans. \u2062Deep down, he suspected, most of the assets knew they\u200b were \u2063going to \u200ddie, badly.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tied to accessible primary material,\u200b Walton focuses on the spies, and other means\u200b of intelligence collection, \u2064that made some\u200b difference in the intelligence battle if not necessarily in the larger struggle between two warring civilizations. If you take away all of the \u200dtechnical intelligence\u2014the electronic <\/strong><strong>and satellite-delivered\u200c information on our\u2062 enemies\u2014those moments really \u200caren\u2019t many. Walton does \u200ba good, though not elegant, job of relating the \u2063times where \u2064clandestine human intelligence might have made a \u2064difference. His accompanying general history can be conventional \u2063and occasionally too ideologically revealing of the author (show\u2063 don\u2019t tell). He\u2019s quite good recounting the\u200d evolution of Anglo-American and Soviet signals intelligence, where the West has\u2062 always had an advantage. Walton is at his best recounting the spy-vs-spy \u200cstruggle, where espionage and counterespionage lethally collide.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s always a challenge for scholars (journalists are just hopeless):\u200b How do you tell the \u200bstory of spies without the clandestinity\u2063 of \u2063it all imparting to the\u2063 reader a\u200d strategic\u200c importance that it doesn\u2019t deserve? For the most part, Walton maintains his \u2064balance, losing his high-altitude, historic\u200c reach only when the\u200c story \u2064really starts to excite\u200c him, when the Cold\u2064 War \u200bcrescendos\u200b or the spy-vs-spy duel gets bloody. Walton goes \u200clight in discussing \u200bCIA covert action, even though it at \u2062one time dominated the\u2062 agency\u2019s \u200bCold War \u2063operations.<\/p>\n<p>He made the \u200cright choice.\u2062 Espionage and covert action don\u2019t meld\u200b well, though they can, at times, productively\u200c overlap. As\u2063 Walton puts it, \u2063a\u200c bit hyperbolically:\u2062 &#8220;The\u2064 most successful \u2062covert\u200d action during the Cold War\u200b was that conducted\u200d by the \u200bCIA to support the anti-Soviet\u2063 insurgents in Afghanistan \u2063\u2026 Most covert actions, however, were not as successful \u2026 They\u2063 did little more\u200c than antagonize relations between East and West \u200cand damage\u200b the societies\u2063 and economies of Third World countries targeted.&#8221; Walton is surely right about \u200bAfghanistan (he gives honorable mention to the CIA\u2019s vastly smaller, less consequential\u200b role in Poland after Solidarity and the Pope arrived).\u2063 He doesn\u2019t appear to know, however,\u2062 that senior DO officers tried first to stop and then to slow the delivery of\u200d Stinger missiles to the mujahideen, deeming them too provocative to introduce against the Red Army. The\u200b CIA\u2019s greatest Cold War success owed more to obstinance among\u2062 hawks at the \u200dPentagon.<\/p>\n<p>Walton ends on a disconcerting\u200c note since he thinks \u2062that &#8220;the age of a secret\u2062 service is over.&#8221; An honest\u2063 historian could rightfully review the history of MI6 and the CIA and question whether all the<em> Sturm und\u200d Drang<\/em> gave us\u2064 all that much; \u2064read regularly the Presidential Daily Brief, supposedly the\u2063 crown jewel for the intelligence community\u2019s analysts, and one question inevitably comes\u200b to mind:<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Is\u2064 this it?&#8221; Open-source information,\u2062 as Walton correctly notes, is \u200cusually much more important.<\/p>\n<p>But there is one\u2064 thing about which\u2062 we can be absolutely certain: Secret services will not die. Our imaginations, \u2063the promise of getting into our \u200denemies \u200dand our\u2063 allies\u2019 knickers will keep feeding the bureaucracies, even in the most debt-ridden, virtuous Western democracies. \u2062After all, clandestine services cost so little compared with tanks, aircraft, missiles, and ships. And\u2062 the \u2064illusion, well, it\u2019s just too exciting.<\/p>\n<p><em>Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and \u200cWest<\/em><\/p>\n<p>by Calder Walton<\/p>\n<p>Simon \u200b&#038; Schuster, 688 pp., $34.99<\/p>\n<p><em>Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA \u2063case officer, is a resident scholar at \u2062the Foundation \u200bfor Defense of Democracies.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>were outmatched by the Soviets in espionage. Despite their once substantial fan base in the West and a brutal police state, German fascists couldn&#8217;t match the less sophisticated Russians.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1966,"featured_media":1980580,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[544],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1980579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-free-beacon"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1980579","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1966"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1980579"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1980579\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1980580"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1980579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1980579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1980579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}