amna: For decades, the U.S. And
Russia have been locked in a war
of espionage and compelling new
details about those stealth
operations are now coming to
light.
Geoff Bennett recently spoke
with author Calder Walton about
the revelations in his new book,
"Spies, the epic intelligence
war between the east and west. "
geoff: Calder Walton joins us
now.
Thank you for being with us.
Calder: Thank you for having me,
geoff.
It's great to be with you.
Geoff: In the book, you write
about the 100-year intelligence
war between Russia and the west.
Of course, Russia has a long
tradition of espionage that
dates back to Peter the great.
The question is, why?
Why is spycraft such a vital
part of Russia's existence?
Calder: Well, it's a great
question.
I think that there are probably
lots of different answers.
The first and foremost is there
something inherent within
Russian DNA that makes that
makes Russians particularly
interested in susceptible to
espionage.
There could well be something in
that.
But I think more importantly,
geoff, the answer is that since
the early soviet days after the
bolsheviks seized power in
Moscow in 1917, the soviet state
was actually incredibly fragile
and weak.
And the early bolsheviks, Lenin
and Stalin, used intelligence,
foreign espionage, deception,
disinformation, as ways to punch
above their weight on the
international stage,
particularly against their
ideological enemies in the west.
So espionage was something
inherent within the bolsheviks,
who had been an underground
party before seizing power.
And then once in power, they did
what they knew best, which was
to continue on in the same
tradition.
Geoff: Well, fast forward to the
current moment.
What shohod we make of the
Wagner rebellion that aborted
mutiny against Vladimir Putin
recently?
Was that an intelligence failure
on the part of the Kremlin?
And what does it say about
Vladimir Putin's standing within
Russia?
Calder: I think we can
definitely say that it was a
colossal intelligence failure on
the part of Putin, his regime,
and his intelligence services.
Why didn't the Russian security
service know about this?
What does it say about Putin's
rule himself?
Well, first and foremost, there
was -- is a challenger to his
rule, it seems.
His rule has been dented for two
decades and counting, Putin has
ruled Russia with an iron fist,
literally often eliminating his
rivals.
That seems to be have been
challenged over the last weekend
by prigozhin.
I'm looking at events with a
degree of pessssism, I'm afraid.
History shows that a wounded
dictator is often a very
dangerous dictator.
Putin's regime and his rule
himself has been wounded.
Wiwi he now try to do something
dramatic in order to try to
prove his strength to the
Russian people and the rest of
the world?
I'm afraid that history suggests
it's exactly in those situations
where dictators lash out and do
something, quote unquote, bold.
Geoff: Returning to the book,
you write about a clandestine
operation in which Russia tried
to kill a CIA informant in Miami
who had been a high-ranking
Russian intelligence official.
And that represents quite an
escalation.
Russia trying to kill a valuable
informant for the U.S.
Government on American soil.
Tell us about that.
Calder: It absolutely does
represent a dramatic escalation
.
During the cold war -- and we
have to remember that Putin is a
former kgb officer, so his
worldview is shaped by his kgb
experience.
During the cold war, there was
always a bright red line by
which soviet intelligence would
not conduct assassinations on
U.S. Soil.
Europe and Britain were
different matters, and this
continued on into the
post-soviet era.
And Putin has, until this story
came out in my book, has adhered
to that bright red line.
He challenged that.
And D I showed in the book,
Putin and his intelligence
services were in the late stage
planning of an assassination on
U.S. Soil, a dramatic
escalation.
What does it say about him?
It shows that he was prepared to
take risks and that he was
emboldened.
My big question, which I have
not been able to answer, but
other investigative journalists,
I hope, are on the case, geoff,
is, did this risk calculation on
his part, has emboldened
behavior, contribute also to
Putin's risk calculation about
Ukraine?
This was in 2020, and it all fed
into this part of his
calculation about what he
thought he could get away with
on western soil.
Geoff: Let's shift our focus to
China.
What lessons can the west take
away from its experience with
Russia and apply to the new
superpower conflict with China?
Calder: The first lesson, it
seems to me from the first cold
war in the postwar years is that
western governments can
effectively be in a cold war
before they know it, before
they're prepared for it.
This was one of the things that
came through loud and clear in
my research for the book, that
in the postwar years, western
governments were thinking about
how they could try to continue
relations with the soviet union
in a good way.
And in fact, Stalin and his
intelligence services had
dramatically different ideas.
This, it seems to me, is exactly
the same position that we're in
with China at the moment.
In recent years, there's been an
attempt by which western
governments thought that through
economic development, China
would perhaps democratize.
When you look at and understand
the Chinese intelligence
perspective, there was no such
understanding that they wanted
to be part of the western club.
They wanted to completely upturn
the existing rules, and we're
seeing that play out.
The second lesson is that the
Chinese intelligence services
are like the kgb on steroids.
They conduct espionage in a far
more sweeping way than even the
soviet intelligence services
did.
And the third lesson, it seems
to me, geoff, is that although
history is important and I would
argue and I paint a picture in
the book about how we are in a
new cold war as far as
intelligence is concerned with
China, the answers to this cold
war don't lie in the past.
The future of this cold war and
the intelligence and national
security challenge for western
countries, including the U.S.,
from Chinese intelligence, lies
with commercial open source
intelligence.
I think that we need to set up a
new open source intelligence
agency specializing in
commercially available
intelligence, not clandestine
intelligence.
Geoff: Calder Walton.
The book is "Spies, the epic
intelligence war between the
east and west."
Thank you for being with us.
Calder: Thanks for having me on.