Dan Snow's History Hit - Russia & USA: The 100-Year Cold War

Episode Date: July 11, 2023

The Cold War was defined by the antagonism between two world superpowers: the United States and the Soviet Union. They relied on proxy wars, espionage, disinformation, assassinations and sabotage to undermine one another as part of a greater ideological battle between Western democracy and Communism.We typically think that the Cold War ran from the end of the Second World War until the collapse of the Soviet Union. But our guest today sees it quite differently. Calder Walton, author of Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West, argues that the Cold War is not a vestige of the past but part of an ongoing, 100-year struggle between East and West. How has this war changed over the years? And what does it mean for the future of Russian-Western relations? Listen to this episode to find out.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world-renowned historians like Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code DANSNOW. Download the app or sign up here.We'd love to hear from you! You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. The Cold War we're all very familiar with. It went from 1949 to 1991 with the end of the Soviet Union. Or did it? Was there a much longer Cold War, a sustained Cold War that both predated the Second World War and long outlasted the existence of the Soviet Union, a Cold War that we are still dealing with the consequences? And that would explain why the Cold

War so recently, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, seems to have jumped fully formed from its grave. Well, that's the argument of Calder Walton. He's a historian of intelligence and global security at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. He's been on the podcast before. We've discussed many topics. We went to a bar favoured by British intelligence operatives during the Second World War and drank martinis as he told me stories for the podcast about wartime espionage. This time we're talking about his theory that the Cold War really should be thought of as a 100-year struggle of Russia against the West. It's fascinating stuff that makes you think very differently about the last hundred years of history and explains a lot about the present. Enjoy. black unit. Never to go to war with one another again. And liftoff, and the shuttle has cleared

the tower. Calder, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having me back, Dan. It's great to be with you. It's great to see you, man, even though we're not drinking martinis this time, which is a real, real shame. Well, we'll have to do that again. Yeah, we definitely will when the good times return. Really interestingly, you identify the Cold War, not as coming out of the blue in 1945, but you take it all the way back. I guess Russia was always a geopolitical rival to the Brits in the 19th and early 20th centuries. When do you think the Communist Soviet Union and the West really started spying on each other and beginning this kind of espionage campaign

that's rumbled on for so long? Well, Dan, you hit the nail on the head. When you see it from the intelligence perspective, it's completely misleading to see this as something that happens in the post-war years. When the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in 1917, and then the Western allies intervened in Russia to try to depose them. This set the two sides of the geopolitical rivalry on a collision course, which only sort of manifested itself in the post-war years, really. But if we look at what the Soviet Union was doing with their spy agencies in the 1920s and 1930s, this was a one-way fight. The Soviets were far more successful and more advanced with their intelligence trade craft and their cold, aggressive, clandestine foreign policy than either the British or America.

You have to remember, Dan, that in the pre-war years, in the 1920s and 1930s, the US government didn't even have a dedicated foreign intelligence service. The CIA wasn't established until 1947. And the British, meanwhile, well, the myth of the British Secret Service was, of course, that it had agents across the world. But I'm afraid when we look at the reality of its own records, it was rather more pedestrian and few people on the ground, dare I say it, a man and dog operations in different corners of the world than this myth suggested. The Soviets simply could marshal more resources and better tradecraft than either Britain or the United States in the pre-war years. What were the Soviet aims? Were they

trying to extend the revolution or were they just trying to just sow dissent among their enemy? What was going on? There were many different aims. But of course, Lenin and then Stalin were guided by their reading of Marxism, Marxist-Leninism. And so they were trying to export the socialist or communist revolution worldwide. They saw the great imperial power of the time, Britain, as the inevitable Marxist enemy, and were trying to do everything they could to undermine Britain. Particularly, though, where the intelligence agencies were involved was, of course, to gather as good intelligence on their enemies, the British government, as possible, but also to steal as much scientific and technical secrets as possible from the Western powers in order to

use those secrets in the, as they saw, inevitable class warfare with the Western powers when that should arise. And this was industrial espionage. So across multiple domains, across multiple fields, hoovering up and collecting as much scientific and technical secrets as possible. We talked in the past, there's a kind of military and industrial strategy there. You and I have talked in the past about a kind of political strategy as well, where enemy powers or potential enemy powers seek to sow dissent, exaggerate partisanship, cause confusion and anarchy within a polity. There's been echoes of that more recently as well. Is that something that the Soviets are doing in this period?

It is absolutely something that the Soviets are doing in this period. In the 1920s in Britain, for example, instigating clandestine efforts. So subversion to instigate revolution through, yes, the Communist Party, but also left-leaning members of the Labour Party. This would be done through agents of influence, recruiting agents in well-placed positions of power in Whitehall, and also bankrolling subversive plots in Western powers. We can see from Soviet intelligence records, smuggled to the West. This is not me saying something that is akin to a Red Scare. This is actually a specific policy on the part of the Soviet secret police, the Cheka, which then became the OGPU, NKVD, and then KGB. During the Second World War, you claim that the Soviets seem to spend more time stealing intelligence from its allies, from the British and the Americans, than actually focusing on the Germans. Talk to me about that. It's an absolutely extraordinary turn of events, and it shows

really Stalin's true intentions. So Stalin saw the present war against the Third Reich and the fascist powers as the existential present conflict, but he was convinced through his reading of Marxist-Leninism that the inevitable long-term conflict would be against the Western capitalist powers after the defeat of the Third Reich. He therefore set about doing as much as he could, as I said, to steal scientific and technical intelligence from the Western powers. And the gift to him was that during the Second World War, the Western allies were totally consumed, obviously, by fighting Nazi Germany in the Third Reich. They were distracted,

which meant that Stalin was effectively pushing at an open door in terms of stealing on his allies. One of the more extraordinary documents I found during the research for this was a document from the British Foreign Office right after the Soviet Union entered into the Second World War. And the British Foreign Office put an embargo and mandated that from that point on, all British foreign intelligence collection on the Soviet Union would have to stop. And why did they say they would do that? Because allies don't spy on allies. That was the gentlemanly belief within the British Foreign Office. We are allies now. We're not going to do this anymore. Well, looking at Soviet intelligence records, we can show there was no such gentlemanly reservations on the part of Stalin. He infiltrated his agents like the Cambridge Five, the Cambridge spies, into the

most sensitive areas of the British government, and also recruited similar Ivy League spies, as I call them, on the other side of the Atlantic. But it was really, Dan, with the Manhattan Project, the Anglo-American project to build the world's first atomic bomb, where Stalin's espionage truly paid off. It meant that in 1945, when the Second World War ended, Stalin, thanks to his agents in the West, had obtained the plans of the Manhattan Project atomic bomb. And that espionage meant that when the Soviets, four years later in 1949, deployed their first nuclear weapon, it was a replica of the Anglo-American atom bomb project. This transformed international security. And I don't want to sound melodramatic, but world history

thereafter. I mean, it must have saved the Soviets billions and billions and accelerated their nuclear project by years that that intelligence all ended up on their desks. That's exactly it. I think it's fair to say that the Soviet government would have been able to create an atom bomb anyway. But you're absolutely right, Dan, that what espionage did was to accelerate the research and development. It meant that the Soviets didn't have to go through all the failed routes that the British and the Americans did in the Manhattan Project.

They could just shortcut things, throw resources in a way that they knew would work. This has echoes with espionage, both from Russia and China, closer to our own times, where the purpose of espionage for scientific and technical intelligence is to accelerate research and development projects. After 1945, did it come as a sort of surprise to Western intelligence agencies? Because presumably the Soviet agencies were all set up, they were ready to go. I mean, there was no real break or change of gear required at the end of the war. They just continued doing what they'd been doing in the West, whereas presumably the Brits and Americans

had to really galvanise themselves. That's exactly it. And that's really, when you see it from this perspective, the post-war developments that we all learn about from school onwards, you know, the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan and so on. Actually, these begin to look very different because they are being galvanized in a response to events that are being exposed, in particular espionage scandals that had already taken place. espionage scandals that had already taken place. You're absolutely right that the Soviets, it was business as usual. They carried on with access to some of the most sensitive secrets in the British and American governments, thanks to their spies. This basically meant, Dan, that if you put it this way, that Stalin was in the position of effectively being given a ringside seat to all of the major strategic decisions that the British and American governments took in the post-war years. He often knew more about the two governments, the British and the Americans,

than they did when they shared secrets amongst themselves. It was absolutely extraordinary when you see it from all of this perspective. You've identified some remarkable agents. Tell me about one of them. One of the most remarkable agents that really stood out in my research was Oleg Penkovsky. He was an agent being run by Britain's foreign intelligence service, MI6, and the CIA within Soviet military intelligence, the GRU. intelligence, the GRU. Listeners probably heard of the GRU closer to our own time as the service that's responsible for carrying out largely incompetent assassinations in our own time. The GRU military intelligence, the British and US intelligence agencies were running him deep with inside the GRU. And he was able to provide crucial intelligence in the late 1950s and early 1960s about the Soviet arsenal, including its

Soviet nuclear arsenal. His intelligence, codenamed Ironbark, became crucial for the US government during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. It's very easy to overlook his espionage in the declassified documents, but they are stamped, we can now see with the codename Ironbark at the top. All of the major assessments given to President Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis about Soviet missiles in Cuba had Ironbark stamped on their top, which meant that those briefings were derived in part against Penkovsky's intelligence. What we see, Dan, is during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a combination of traditional classic human intelligence, espionage from Penkovsky, and then technical intelligence

from U-2 spy planes. And they were combined and fused together. And it seems to me that this is really one of the key episodes of what Western intelligence agencies did during the Cold War, at that crucial moment when the Cold War could have turned hot into nuclear war. Thanks to, in large part, Western intelligence assessments, policymakers, particularly Kennedy himself, were able to reel back from the nuclear abyss. They were able to understand the Soviet missiles, when they were going to be operational, how long they had, and that gave Kennedy a crucial moment for negotiation with Khrushchev. You're listening to Dan Snow's History, talking about the long Cold War. More coming up.

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What is it that means we have so many notable examples of senior intelligence agents working for the other side? Like, what's going on there? What drives people to do that? Well, I think in the early part of the 20th century, in the 1920s and 1930s, into the post-war years, it was primarily ideology. So some of the most successful Soviet agents, like the five Cambridge spies, were driven by their ideological faith in communism. It has to be said, sort of squinting hazily from afar at Stalin's regime, they believed in what I think is fair to describe as a myth image of the Soviet Union, that it was for them an attractive,

ideological, intellectual panacea to the world of failed Western capitalism. So they were driven by ideology. I think in the later Cold War, the Soviet ideology, it was much more difficult to be a true believer when looking at the systemic corruption and decrepitude of Brezhnev's Soviet Union. And then in the later Cold War, it became about money. So some of the most infamous American traitors that were working inside U.S. intelligence, like Aldrich Ames or Robert Hansen in the FBI, they were driven by mercenary motives. They were guns for hire. They wanted cash. They wanted to have a bling lifestyle of Rolexes and girlfriends.

And they fancied themselves as James Bond's Soviet intelligence, played them like a fiddle and got devastating intelligence from them about US intelligence operations behind the Iron Curtain. How strange. Now the most brutal classified documents leak has come from this 21-year-old member of the Air National Guard who seemed to do it just because he wanted to show off to his mates in a kind of online chat room. That's exactly it. So the FBI over here in the US, they classify the motivations for why someone would betray secrets or become a spy, an agent, into an acronym, MICE. Money, ideology, coercion, and ego. So MICE. It's very rare that we find historically that it's any one single category.

It's usually a sort of combination of it. But the person that you just mentioned, I believe his surname is Tasharia, he was, it seems, driven by ego. So the E in mice. He was trying to show off to his friends in the chat rooms, as you said. The thing that I'm looking at very carefully with his story is there is perhaps an ideological component to it, which is, you find that I'm looking at very carefully with his story is there is perhaps an ideological component to it, which is, you find that, I'm afraid, on the hard right in US politics at the moment, an opposition to America's involvement in the war in Ukraine, and the hard right here having an affinity for what Russia stands for in some bizarre world turned upside down, buying into Putin's propaganda. So I'm looking very carefully to see if there was an ideological

component there, exposing what they regard as America's illegal and unjust war backing Ukrainians and having an affinity for Putin's regime. A strange mirror image of left-wing intellectuals of the mid-20th century. The world turned upside down. Look where we are. You can't believe it that it's the left on US politics that is supporting the war in Ukraine, fighting for freedom against tyranny. And it's the hard right that is embracing in many ways Russia's vision of a, it of what Putin describes as a war of civilization, of religion, conservative religions, of Russia being a white ethno-nationalist haven against LBGTQ. So this is all stuff that Putin is pumping into the airwaves in the US on the hard right, and it seems to be gaining some traction.

Speaking of that, your contention is that the Cold War never really ended because post-collapse of the Soviet Union, important elements within the Russian state continue to look at America and the West as adversaries, and the intelligence war continued. That's exactly it, that you see that despite the entire system collapsing around them in 1991, and ostensibly the KGB, the Soviet secret police, which have been the linchpin of the entire Soviet system for seven decades, that ostensibly disappearing. In fact, what we find is that it quickly reconstituted itself into Russia's new intelligence services. And in Russia in the 1990s,

in the so-called wild east, security and intelligence was given a disproportionate influence in the Russian government to prevent Russia disintegrating into chaos. That was how they sold it to their Western governments at the time, that we need to have a robust security establishment. But in fact, when we now look at the records, and in the book, I use some ones that just came out in 2021, 30 years after the events, we can see that it was from this sort of humiliation of Russia on the world stage, no longer a superpower, no longer a great power. It was out of that humiliation that Putin emerges in the regional government in St. Petersburg. And then in 1998, when to, I think, his surprise, he becomes the head of the FSB, the successor to the KGB. And then the year after, to even greater surprise,

when Yeltsin appoints him his successor in the Kremlin. And it's at that point, Dan, in 1999, 2000, when we have a fusion in the Kremlin between security intelligence, the KGB past, and then also, it has to be said, Russian mafia. And this is the missing element, that there's a lot of talk at the moment about great power competition, the resurgence of great powers, which sort of conjures up images of the Westphalian balance of power and all this kind of thing. Certainly, that's true that we are in a sort of resurgent great powers. But I think that that term needs to be used very, very carefully with regard to Russia. Putin was working for the St. Petersburg regional government in the early 1990s, regional government in the early 1990s, deputy mayor. He had a KGB background. His position in the local government placed him directly into contact with the Russian mafia. St. Petersburg

was Russia's gangland where organized crime thrived. He became actively involved in those circles. Some of the businesses that he ran were fronts for the Russian mafia in the early 1990s in St. Petersburg. When he becomes FSB director in 1998, a few years later, he fuses the Russian mafia and the Russian security service, the FSB. This isn't a question, Dan, of a few bad apples in the FSB. The FSB, since Putin's been in charge, is a vehicle for massive Russian corruption and money laundering. This is an instrument for his own personal enrichment and those of the Russian oligarchs. So this is why I think terms like great power don't do justice to the ugly reality of Russia under Putin. He runs the state more like a mafia syndicate

than he does a great power of the past. And I guess this is where we need to be very careful what we wish for here, because if Putin is replaced, it seems unlikely at the moment he's going to be replaced by a liberal champion, right? He may just be replaced by another, perhaps even darker version of what he is.

I'm afraid I have to agree with that. It seems to me that we all hope that there is a knight in shining armor somewhere in Russia that can lead it in a democratic way if Putin were removed by a coup or assassination. People like Vladimir Karamazov bravely resisting Putin's regime but are now in jail, or Alexei Navalny for that matter. The system, the systema that Putin has created, fusing the so-called men of force, Siloviki, and the state, I'm afraid will outlive him. He personifies much more repugnant trends within Russian government, its militarism, repugnant trends within Russian government, its militarism, its corruption, which means that if he was suddenly removed and someone like Nikolai Patrushev, another KGB goon, another head of the

FSB, now on Putin's National Security Council, if someone like that was to replace Putin, there would be minimal difference to Putin's policies. And in fact, maybe even worse, there would be minimal difference to Putin's policies. And in fact, maybe even worse, because he may even have a clearer head. Putin is far, far from the most hard line of the people who surrounds him in the Kremlin. In many ways, Dan, you know, it feels a lot like the records that were declassified about the Special Operations Executive, SOE, their proposal to assassinate Hitler in the Second World War. And actually, the chief of staff said, we don't want to do that, because actually Hitler

is the greatest guarantee of total defeat. If we got rid of Hitler, someone else with a clearer head might well replace him. What we need to aim for is total defeat. Now, Zelensky seems to be talking about total defeat of Russia. I just don't see how that's going to work with Putin's nuclear capability. I think that if he fears a total defeat is coming, he will resort to the use of a tactical nuclear weapon. Yes, I'm pessimistic as well with lots of evidence and expertise as you, but I'm very pessimistic about that and very scared about that. I also feel that having talked to people in the military that try desperately to give Ukraine enough weapons to flourish, but not to inflict a deeply humiliating defeat on Putin. And you're trying to sort of flying by wire, it's an impossible task, but you're trying to both

give Putin a sort of golden bridge, as Julius Caesar would say, whilst enabling Ukraine to make substantial gains on the battlefield. It's just an impossible job. It's a balancing act. And to be perfectly honest, I haven't actually sort of seen this written down very clearly. Almost you kind of want a table. Maybe if your listeners know of one, they can send it to me. But at this point, what are the war aims for both sides? Ukraine's war aims and Russia's war aims and NATO's for that matter as well. And how do they change now that the counteroffensive seems to be underway from where the original war aims at the start of the conflict?

Does Putin still hold to his maximalist agenda of eradicating Ukraine as a state wholly says that it doesn't even exist? Is that still in his public statements? Or is there any inclination of any kind of room for a settlement? Meanwhile, Zelensky now is fighting, not necessarily defending himself for what happened originally, but of course, for all of the countless and brave Ukrainians who have given their lives. So what are the war aims? I haven't seen this written down very clearly. And it's an absolutely extraordinary position to be in to say, we don't actually know at this point. So we're in need of some informed analysis on this, I fear, Dan. Yes. Well, thank you, Calder, for providing lots of informed analysis on the Cold War, the

hundredth century of Cold War that has been going on between the rival intelligence services. What's the book called? Dan, the book's called Spies, the Epic Intelligence War Between East and West. Brilliant. Good luck with it. Thanks so much. you