Today, Explained - The new Cold War

Episode Date: September 5, 2023

The Cold War started earlier than we think — and maybe never ended at all. Historian Calder Walton says understanding the US-Soviet conflict prepares us for this era of tensions with Russia and China. This episode was produced by Amanda Lewellyn, edited by Matt Collette with help from Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Patrick Boyd and Rob Byers, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Cold War between the U.S. and the USSR was a golden age of espionage, theft of nuclear secrets, the CIA, the KGB, spies passing information. They penetrated top-secret British and American nuclear facilities and provided Russian scientists with highly detailed information on America's development of the atom bomb. And then the Cold War ended, right? Or maybe not. Maybe it got bigger.

The Wall Street Journal just reported that Chinese citizens had been gate-crashing American military bases. Meanwhile, in China, the once secretive Ministry of State Security just got on social media to mobilize the Chinese public against espionage. On Today Explained, a historian who got access to some recently declassified archives says we get two things wrong about the Cold War. The beginning and the end. That's coming up. BetMGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas.

That's a feeling you can only get with BetMGM. And no matter your team, your favorite player, or your style, there's something every NBA fan will love about BetMGM. Download the app today and discover why BetMGM is your basketball home for the season. Raise your game to the next level this year with BetMGM, a sportsbook worth a slam dunk, an authorized gaming partner of the NBA. BetMGM.com for terms and conditions.

Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. Calder Walton is a historian of espionage and intelligence. And yes, that is every bit as cool as it sounds at Harvard's Belfer Center. In a new book called

Spies, he argues that we misunderstand the Cold War, that in fact, it started a lot earlier than we thought. This is a big claim, and it's one that he's prepared to back up. Well, this book became something of a quest for me over the last six years to travel to different places and to use different archives, both from the Soviet bloc, the former Soviet Union, and Western countries. So I went to the presidential libraries across the U.S. I went to archives in the UK, I interviewed people in Europe, and I used Russian archives and Ukrainian archives. But most

importantly, I used a tranche of previously top-secret KGB material that had been smuggled out of the Soviet Union as it collapsed, and now parts of it are publicly available in Cambridge in England. So this is a treasure trove of KGB secrets that it has to be said Putin's regime does not want out in the world. So using these records allowed me to have a look at what the Soviet intelligence services were doing from the 1920s onwards, and then also marry that up, weave it together with what Western intelligence services, the British and the Americans, were doing. The picture that emerges, Noelle, is a completely one-sided fight.

The principal Western power that the Soviet Union was obsessed with, the great enemy, was Britain at that time, not yet the United States. The Soviet Union and Soviet intelligence services were effectively waging a cold war against Britain during the 1920s and 1930s. They were recruiting agents who became absolutely decisive in the later period of what we considered to be the conventional cold war. Now, what was surprising for me is the motivation of some of these agents, some of the most infamous spies in Western powers, the five Cambridge spies in particular. The man who was chiefly responsible for recruiting first Kim Philby

and then the other members of the Cambridge Magnificent Five was probably the ablest controller the KGB ever had. They'd seen the way that the Depression had devastated the British working class. They'd watched the hunger marches pass through Cambridge. They'd watched the rise of Nazi Germany. And they all came to the conclusion that A, capitalism was not going to be able to cope

with the coming crisis and that B the democratic nations weren't being able to stand as a bulwark with the rise of fascism and that the only possible hope against this rise of fascism was Moscow. These were ideologically motivated, committed communists, graduates of Cambridge University in the 1930s, who, with skillful tradecraft from their Soviet handlers, case officers, applied to join the British Civil Service. They aced their entrance exams. And as the Second World War approached, they were like moles within the British government, with access to some of its most sensitive information.

During the day, Philby trained recruits in the uses of propaganda. At night, he helped himself to the secret information contained in MI6 files. This meant that during the Second World War, Stalin and his spy chiefs knew more about British secrets and US secrets than often the Western governments knew about each other. It was a totally perverse situation. Thanks to Kim Philby, the Russians knew the identity of most of the MI6 agents operating in Europe.

A network of spies embedded within America and Britain's secret atomic program had been stealing research secrets and sending them back to Moscow. So all this time before World War II, the USSR is spying on the Brits and the Americans. Are the Brits and the Americans spying right back? They are not only not spying right back, the U.S. government didn't even have a foreign intelligence service before the Second World War. When the OSS, the predecessor of the CIA, was established during the Second World War, its primary mission was to defeat Hitler, defeat the Axis powers. And the long-term lingering threat of the Soviet Union was a very, very low priority. Little wonder then that we find out that Soviet intelligence penetrated the OSS from top to bottom.

OSS was very well infiltrated, penetrated by the KGB. The head, for example, of the Latin America Division of Research and Analysis section was a KGB agent. I think it's fair to say that OSS was, I'm afraid, the most penetrated intelligence service in history. Incredible, because we think of, I mean, as Americans, we think of our own country as being the one who's reading everybody's mail, listening to everybody's phones.

And, you know, in recent history, we've had our moments, certainly. But the idea that we weren't up to speed is incredible to think about. That's exactly right. The U.S. government did not have a dedicated signals intelligence agency. It did collect signals intelligence, so decrypting communications,

but it did so through different branches of government. There wasn't something that your listeners may have heard of, the NSA, a dedicated signals intelligence station. That was created in the 1950s. And Pearl Harbor and the surprise attack on the US by the Japanese grew out of a catastrophic intelligence failure, a good deal of which is explained by the fact that the U.S. government did not have a dedicated signals intelligence agency. We interrupt this program to bring you a special news bulletin. The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, by air, President Roosevelt has just announced. The attack also was made on all naval and military activities on the principal island of Oahu. Did the West ever catch up to the USSR in terms of spying?

Absolutely. And this is the thing about particularly the US. It might take a while to get going, but once it gets going, it really gets going. And soon in the 1950s, the US government, particularly under Eisenhower, was throwing resources at intelligence collection that made it difficult, if not impossible, for the Soviets to catch up. So, after a succession of failures of trying to recruit human spies and trying to parachute spies behind the Iron Curtain, after those failures, Eisenhower administration, the CIA, came up with pioneering new ways of collecting intelligence on the Soviet Union, one of which was the U-2 spy plane.

To minimise weight, the plane was fitted with just two wheels. The engine modified to work in the thin air of high altitude. And on board, a revolutionary camera that could capture images of Soviet missile batteries from the edge of space. Within a year, the U-2 CIA pilots, overflying and photographing this immense country proved one thing, that the reports of the Soviets' massive bomber production had been greatly exaggerated. I would phrase it simply as this.

The greatest success on the part of US intelligence and British intelligence during the Cold War was at key points to prevent the Cold War was a key point to prevent that Cold War turning into hot nuclear war. So the Berlin Wall comes down, the USSR falls apart, dissolves, and then is the Cold War over? It depends on whose perspective you're talking about. From the Western perspective, it seemed to be.

From the Russian government's perspective, absolutely not. The West says the Cold War is over. Russia says it's not. It used to be they were the only two that really mattered. But coming up, all eyes and ears on China. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend.

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connectsontario.ca The names explained. Today explained. We're back with Calder Walton. He's a Harvard historian of espionage and spying. Calder, you said we've been making some incorrect assumptions. The West has been assuming that the Cold War ended and then all of the other players moved on to other geopolitical problems? Well, that's, of course, what happened in many ways in Western countries, particularly the U.S. The Cold War was over. There was a sense of triumphalism.

This was, as was famously said at the time, the end of history. This was an era in which there was U.S. dominance in the world. But if we look at it from the other perspective, in Moscow, there was a sense of humiliation, of despair, of crisis. They were no longer a superpower. The Soviet Union ceased to exist. And in fact, Russia was hardly even a great power. It was from this stew of revanchist, bitter hostility that Putin emerged. Putin was a KGB officer, trained in the foreign intelligence branch of the KGB. He was stationed in East Germany, in Dresden. He famously saw the collapse of the Soviet Union around him while he was stationed in Dresden. He famously saw the collapse of the Soviet Union around him

while he was stationed in Dresden. In total disbelief, Berliners began gathering on both sides of the wall at the famous Checkpoint Charlie and other crossing points after the bombshell announcement in East Berlin. The news that East Germany was opening its borders for the first time since 1961 stunned the world and Berliners most of all. At one point, crowds engulfed the headquarters of the KGB and the East German Stasi. And as he later recounted, he called for backup from Moscow.

And in his words, Moscow was silent. He has effectively been trying to correct as he sees the catastrophe ever since. In 1991, the KGB ostensibly ceased to exist. Putin found new work in Leningrad, St. Petersburg, working for the regional government there. Leningrad was the gangland of St. Petersburg, the center of Russian mafia. His position in the regional administration government there made it inevitable that he would begin to interact with and, it seems, cooperate with Russian mafia leaders there. There were no real rules, there were no real laws. Of course, people bribed in order to get certain privileges.

I was told by people who are close to subject, you have to pay $100,000 in order to have a soup with them. Putin then, to everyone's surprise, in 1998, became the head of the FSB, the Russian Security Service. He incorporates the KGB's former tradecraft, its practices, all that it stood for into the FSB, and he also, at that point, fuses the FSB, the Security Service, with Russian mafia operations and money laundering.

The next year, to even greater surprise of everyone in Russia, including probably Putin himself, Yeltsin, ailing and in need of a safe successor, appointed this really not too well-known person, Putin, to be his successor in the Kremlin. Vladimir Putin is head of the new KGB. He's not a person Russians know, let alone love. But today he's prime minister, tomorrow maybe president. Since then, Putin has been trying to recreate the Soviet glory, a past glory for Russia. And perhaps most importantly, he's been fusing his rule of a small group of people with money laundering and Russian mafia organizations. One of the things we could not have predicted in 1989, 1990, 1991 as the wall is coming down,

no one really predicted the way the world would reorganize itself and that China would rise to the degree that it has. When does China come in here? Well, after 9-11, and this is really the picture that's emerging both in the documentary record through newly available records and through interviews, after 9-11, the US government and its allies understandably plowed overwhelming resources into counterterrorism. The elected branches of our government and both political parties are united in our resolve

to find and stop and punish those who would do harm to the American people. It is now my honor to sign into law the USA Patriot Act of 2001. At that time, Russia and China viewed this as an opportunity for them to pursue their grand strategies. For Putin, it was to correct the catastrophes of the past. And for China, it was to rival the US in Southeast Asia. This hasn't been, I think, properly acknowledged by historians and other scholars. In 2005, the Chinese intelligence service, the Ministry of State Security, declared war on the US.S. intelligence community. And after that point, through its best resources,

people, officers, technical capabilities, at destroying U.S. intelligence capabilities in China. Now, at least 18 CIA informants were killed or imprisoned in China after a spy network was dismantled. That's according to reports in the New York Times. Before we started losing these informants, we had extraordinary visibility into Chinese operations, government operations, whether intel, military. And after they rolled up these informants, it was almost a complete blackout, we're told. I mean, it's one of the most devastating intelligence failures in modern CIA history. How big are the Chinese intelligence services? Really good question. Really difficult to answer. The KGB at its height,

if you include officers and agents, had about a million people on the books overall. And I've been told that the Ministry of State Security well surpasses that. This is an enormous, enormous vehicle within China whose tentacles spread outside China to the Western countries themselves. U.S. officials confirm that Chinese citizens suspected of being spies have attempted to penetrate U.S. military bases in Alaska in recent months. China has been spying on the U.S. from various sites based in Cuba for years. Two U.S. Navy sailors are accused of betrayal, charged with sending national defense secrets to China for thousands of dollars in exchange. The biggest difference between the past and present is the

nature and the size of China's economy. The Soviet Union never had an economy to rival the U.S., but of course, China today, its economy is the only one on the planet that can rival the U.S. The biggest challenges will be for Western countries to use new capabilities like machine learning and artificial intelligence to understand data that they have collected on closed police regimes like Russia and China. This is the battleground of this century's Cold War, the race for artificial intelligence, machine learning, and quantum computing. So the old Cold War was which economic system, which political system, capitalism or communism, democracy or authoritarianism? Those are big existential questions. What's the end goal of the new Cold War today? Is it an existential thing? The race for artificial intelligence,

I could imagine that being limited to the economic sphere, but not necessarily existential. No, you're absolutely right. So we have to look no further than what Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, the leader of China, said on the eve of the war in Ukraine, where they held their press conference and issued a joint statement where they said that Russia and China are in an alliance and agreement with no limits. Xi Jinping called Vladimir Putin his dear friend, his strategic partner. Now, throughout history, what we find is that people, well-meaning people, read the speeches of authoritarian leaders and dictators and then try to sort of say, well, no, this is probably just rhetoric, that actually they probably don't mean that.

It turns out that actually Xi and Putin really mean what they say. They fundamentally reject the US liberal democratic order, and they are seeking to overturn the existing security architecture created by the end of the Cold War. They believe that Western democracy is in no true sense democracy because it doesn't allow other countries to have a share in the future of the world and their ideas. The attempts of a number of states to rewrite and reshape the world history are becoming more aggressive and by and large have an obvious goal, at least in relation to our society, to disunite, deprive us of guidelines, and ultimately to weaken Russia. They believe that authoritarian rule is the true sense of democracy and that their regimes, what they stand for, is a better version of the future, will be better equipped to deal with the challenges lying ahead in the 21st century. This is really genuinely what they

mean. And they are using their intelligence services as tools to fulfill that by stealing as much Western technology as possible in order to rival the U.S. and, as they see it, hopefully overturn its place in the world. And this time around, the West is spying back on Russia and China, yes? The West is spying back, and it seems with Russia, it seems to have done so spectacularly well. We believe that the Russians have put in place the capabilities to mount a significant military operation into Ukraine, and we have been working hard to prepare a response. Your listeners might remember that before Putin's war in Ukraine, the US government and the British government

declassified intelligence about Putin's war plans, which effectively removed his capability to maneuver and concoct excuses for launching that war. This was a spectacular intelligence success. I'm less optimistic, I have to say, about China, though. I think that the onslaught from China's Ministry of State Security, which undermined and sabotaged U.S. intelligence collection in China, are not convinced that the U.S. has good intelligence on Xi's intentions or capabilities. You know, I always want to ask at the end of an interview, what are the mistakes of the past that we can avoid repeating? But if we don't have good intelligence on Xi, do we know what we need to not repeat?

It's a good question. I think that the burning question in Washington is whether she's intentions and capabilities, are they secrets or are they mysteries? And there's an old saying within intelligence circles that a secret is something that is knowable and can be discovered. A mystery is something that is unknowable. So we need to have reasonable expectations on mysteries. Now, the simple fact of the matter is we just don't know about Xi's decision-making process.

Who does he communicate his most secret intentions to? Clearly, a very small circle of people. And the idea that we would be able to hack into his communications or recruit an agent within his inner circle, this is on one level what an intelligence agency should be doing. But the idea of doing that in China today poses colossal challenges, and I would say remains a mystery. Calder Walton, his new book is called Spies. Today's episode was produced by Amanda Llewellyn and edited by Matthew Collette. It was fact-checked by Laura Bullard and engineered by Patrick Boyd.

I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained.