I Spy
The spy exchange between the United States and Russia this past week reminded me of a persistent question--I consider it a persistent question, anyway--about the Cold War. Maybe Victor Davis Hanson, Claire, Matt Continetti, or Steve Hayes can provide an answer. Or maybe Ricochet members will offer some thoughts. Briefly put: Beginning now later than the middle of the nineteen-thirties, we now know, the United States was all but crawling with Soviet spies. Did any of those spies ever do the Soviet Union any real good? Or the United States any real harm?
In asking this question, I except one category of Soviet infiltrators, the nuclear spies. Klaus Fuchs, Julius Rosenberg--we know they provided Stalin with specific, unambiguous assistance, turning over technical material that advanced, very materially, the Soviet nuclear program. But what about all the other spies? The ones we read about in, for example, Witness, the magnificent autobiography of Whittaker Chambers, himself a former spy? Did they ever do the Soviets any real good?
The question first occurred to me back when the Cold War was still hot. Working in the White House during the nineteen-eighties, I got a good, close look at the workings of the federal government. Virtually all the "inside" or "confidential" information I came across was, to put it bluntly, junk. Who was up and who was down in this or that bureaucratic struggle. The State Department's latest effort to undermine U.N. Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick, who simply ignored it. The Treasury Department's most recent objection to reforming this or that page of a federal tax code that even then ran to many hundreds of pages. I myself held a security clearance of "Top Secret," and, performing background research before presidential trips abroad, I read CIA briefing materials on countries to which Reagan traveled. Only once--once--did I find in those briefing books, materials considered so sensitive that I was forbidden to leave them unattended in my office, even to make a trip to the drinking fountain--only once did I come across information I hadn't already learned from newspapers, magazines, and other public materials. That one instance concerned the extramarital proclivities of the prime minister of a tiny island nation in the Caribbean. I later learned that the prime minister's behavior was common knowledge to every diplomat on the island.
Again, I excepted specifically military information. Soviet spies in the Pentagon, I saw, could do untold damage. But spies in the State Department? Or the Treasury? Or, say, the Departments of Labor or of Health and Human Services? There was a good chance, I felt, that such spies would do the Soviets more harm than good, sowing in the Kremlin the same confusion that most of the federal government tended to sow here in the United States.
I may have been wrong, of course. But I still wonder. Victor? Claire? Anyone?
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Re: I Spy
Peter,
If you haven't already seen it, you'd probably enjoy this piece on spying by Malcolm Gladwell, who also wonders how effective it is.
May '10
Re: I Spy
What about "peace movement" infiltraters, who provided support--financial and otherwise--to the useful idiots in Western Europe in the early eighties? As John O'Sullivan has pointed out, they never did succeed in nudging through an election win, but they did have a hand in bringing out the crowds--and thereby made life more complicated for Reagan, Thatcher and co. vis-a-vis missile deployment.
Not technically spies, I know, but keep in mind this latest group was not much more than a bunch of letters-to-the-editor writers, which is not so different.
May '10
Re: I Spy
.....and what about the same phenomenon during the Vietnam War? I don't know.
Jul '10
Re: I Spy
The naval chief who spied for some 17 years gave away secrets probably equal to the Rosenbergs. The Japanese selling machining ability to the Soviets, allowing them to duplicate our silent sub screws made it immensely more difficult for us to follow and keep track of their newer subs, not to mention making their new hunter/killer subs that much more deadly.
Re: I Spy
Sure. Ames and Hanssen both did terrible damage. Among Ames' many betrayals (which led to the execution of many US assets), he compromised Gordievsky--
--and he also compromised Polyakov, leading to Polyakov's execution:
(Summaries from Wikipedia--and very incomplete.)
May '10
Re: I Spy
I've often wondered how much truth lies in the claim that Soviet infiltrators attempted to move our culture toward communism. The basic Marxist idea that the world is essentially a struggle between the haves and have-nots has certainly been accepted by a broad swath of Americans and has played powerfully in our politics. But it's difficult to judge to what extent this is a result of deliberate prodding from our enemies.
I don't doubt for a moment that the Soviets tried. It's generally accepted, I believe, that the Nazis also encouraged socialism in America.
While Nazis targeted labor unions, the theory goes that the Soviets targeted university professors and artists. It's plausible that the Soviets had significant success in affecting our arts (essential to cultural movements anywhere) because the majority of American artists (including musicians, authors, film-makers, etc) have always considered themselves cultural rebels and leaders into unexplored ideas. Professors likewise have a proclivity to think of themselves as avant-garde.
It's hard for one person to guage his or her affect on another's ideas, let alone one group on another. But pride makes a person easy to manipulate.
Re: I Spy
Oh, I think Soviet spies did a great deal of damage well beyond the nuclear thievery. One reason that the Soviet Union was able to arm, with up to date weapons, dozens of creepy regimes abroad from 1945 onward was to some extent due to its ability to steal U.S. military secrets, and often skip critical steps in development that allowed the Russian military to quite quickly expand and improve upon them.
Sometimes this had real life and death ramifications, like the Soviet supplied Egyptian SAM systems and anti-tank weapons that devastated the IDF in the Yom Kippur War's first 4-5 days, following a tradition that began at the end of WWII when an interned B-29 suddenly spawned the Tupolev Tu4 look-alike.
Much of Soviet submarine research was stolen.
The inability of the West to translate widespread Eastern European unhappiness over a half-century with Soviet hegemony to open revolt was in part due to both Russian infiltration of resistance movements, and lots of money supplied leftist groups in Europe who downplayed the Soviet threat. One could argue that the success of the Soviets in the 1930s to fool gullible Americans into offering them information translated by the 1950s into a general narrative that the Soviet Union was simply a form of socialism given to excess rather than a horribly murderous system—and such naivete often made it far easier for the Soviet Union to get away with its customary brutality.
Some Soviet brinkmanship, from the Berlin airlift to the sanctioning of the Korean aggression, was due to intelligence gleaned from American sources about likely initial tepid American responses. In short, one of the reasons why a backward failed system like the Soviet Union for nearly a half century was able to match American weapons with near parity was due to sophisticated Soviet military and industrial espionage; and in many of our most severe political crises, like the fallout over the stationing of the Pershing missiles, Soviet spies funneled money and used blackmail to help foment popular anti-American resistance.
So yes, Soviet spying was probably worth the cost and investment.
Edited on July 11, 2010 at 8:41amMay '10
Re: I Spy
Soviet spying must have been successful in numerous ways, one reason being the nature of the socialist commonwealth. Socialism is unproductive, indeed destructive. A socialist state requires for its prolonged survival the existence of a capitalist state, from which to copy and steal information. One of the many economic problems of socialism is pricing capital goods. Most capital goods are owned by the state under socialism and, therefore, are permanently non-exchangeable and, thus, permanently unlabeled with market prices. In order to cope with this problem, Soviet planners copied factor prices from copies of the Wall Street Journal, i.e., mooched as socialists off of the capitalist press. Socialism demands such parasitism.
May '10
Re: I Spy
Great line, and also helpful in explaining, say, the parity in healthcare worldwide. Where will the parisites turn once Obamacare kills the host?
May '10
Re: I Spy
...parAsites...
May '10
Re: I Spy
Also, it saddens me to report that many of the young educated Russians in this country - researchers, postdocs, graduate students - whom I don't suspect of being spies or anything like that actually actively despise the US and explicitly or implicitly glorify or simply emotionally and nationalistically relate to the old country... Many prefer not to seek the US citizenship even after years in this country; even, in some cases, having been married to Americans for years... They fall prey to the recent Russian lures and advances to former Soviet citizens. See one example at http://mon.gov.ru/pro/ved/uch/ (look for a couple of English-language entries in the long list of entries).
Re: I Spy
Thank you, Claire, thank you, Victor, thank you, Michael, thank you all. (And I just loved Michael Labeit's formulation: "Socialism is unproductive, indeed destructive. A socialist state requires for its prolonged survival the existence of a capitalist state, from which to copy and steal information."