Book Review - ”Spies” by Calder Walton

If espionage is a game of shadows, Calder Walton has turned on the floodlights. “Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West” is not just another Cold War history. It is a sweeping narrative that spans a century of covert operations, false alliances, ideological battles, and the bruised egos of superpowers. Walton, a Harvard historian and one of the world’s foremost experts on national security and intelligence, manages the difficult task of making a dense subject utterly readable, occasionally chilling, and frequently astonishing. It was published in 2023.

At over 600 pages, the book is ambitious—but Walton’s storytelling chops carry the reader through. He begins in the ashes of the Russian Revolution and ends with the gathering storm of U.S.-China tensions, drawing a straight, jagged line through decades of intelligence failures, ideological fervor, and silent wars fought with spies instead of tanks.

One of the book’s central takeaways is that Stalin’s USSR wasn’t a superpower because of its strength, but because of its weakness. Unable to compete with the West economically or militarily, Soviet leaders weaponized espionage to level the playing field. But this strategy often backfired. Walton is unsparing about Stalin’s refusal to listen to his own intelligence services before Hitler’s invasion in 1941, a catastrophic error that led to the deaths of more Soviet citizens than all other WWII casualties combined. Some would tell you it was sacrifice. No, it wasn’t. It was self-inflicted trauma, born of paranoia and a culture that punished truth-telling.

As Walton puts it:
“Stalin effectively institutionalized intelligence failure. NKVD officers feared death when providing any intelligence that contradicted his thinking.”

The book is peppered with quirky and sometimes unsettling details. Nikita Khrushchev, for example, could read but not write. Soviet spies often defected to the West, only to be disappointed by the very system they thought they were embracing. While the U.S. and Britain imprisoned most captured spies—some for as little as five years—the Soviet Union executed thousands, including the families and friends of suspected traitors. Only one person was executed for espionage in the U.S. over the entire Cold War. The asymmetry is stark.

The infamous Cambridge Five spy ring gets considerable attention. That a handful of upper-crust British idealists managed to steal high-level secrets for Moscow, right under the noses of MI5 and MI6, still boggles the mind. Kim Philby’s double life, including his stint embedded within American intelligence, reads like fiction except it’s all true.

On the American side, the CIA often appears more Keystone Cops than James Bond. The farcical attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, often mythologized as Castro’s brilliance in outsmarting them, are here reinterpreted as clear signs of CIA incompetence. Walton makes it plain: when intelligence fails, it’s not always because of enemy brilliance. Sometimes, it’s simply the result of bureaucratic bungling, political interference, or willful ignorance. And the CIA has plenty of that in its history.

A particularly sobering chapter is Chapter 12, which touches on the East/West’s covert meddling in Africa, including in Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana. For African readers, it’s a moment of reckoning. Nkrumah, like Lumumba (in Stuart A. Reid’s “The Lumumba Plot”) and Sankara (in Brian J. Peterson’s “Thomas Sankara”), deserves a modern, deeply researched biography. Walton’s brief but powerful account reminds us how the Cold War wreaked havoc on the Third World, not from hatred, but from paranoia. In the global tug-of-war between the U.S. and USSR, countries like Chile, DR Congo, and Afghanistan became expendable pawns.

“…the two superpowers and their allies used newly independent states in Africa as proxy battlefields in the Cold War… leaving a trail of destruction in their wake.”

It was not about loving or hating these nations. It was about denying the other side a foothold. And they both did it incompetently and to devastating effect.

Walton’s assessment of Putin is as scathing as it is accurate. He frames Putin as a man obsessed with the fall of the Soviet Union, guided more by revenge than ideology. For him, the West, especially the United States, is the primary obstacle to restoring Russia’s perceived greatness. His admiration for Soviet spycraft and brutality is not hidden; it’s his blueprint. I have seen someone here write that it is a good idea for Trump to have a good relationship with Putin’s Russia. That’s why the study of history is important. It is not as if this has not been attempted before. Ask Nixon, Reagan, or even Thatcher. For someone like Putin, everything should lead to the destruction of Western civilization.

The final chapters shift to the growing intelligence war with China. Walton is clear-eyed and alarmed: Chinese espionage today makes Soviet efforts look amateurish. The scale, scope, and sophistication of China’s operations are unprecedented. According to the FBI, a new China-related espionage investigation is opened every 12 hours.

And yet, Walton warns, the West may again be asleep at the wheel. To him, the Cold War never ended. It just mutated. He is of the opinion that the West was too quick to declare peace while the game was still on. For me, Russia and China got America exactly where it needs it—with Donald Trump at the helms. I looked up the reviews of the book, and I realized how many Trump supporters wanted to give it 5 stars until they got to the chapter Walton mercilessly tears into Trump and the way Russia may have helped his political rise. Which casual observer would not expect that response from the Orange man’s followers?

This book isn’t perfect. It skims past some pivotal moments, like the full significance of Sputnik or deeper exploration into Asia’s role beyond China. Looking at the vast history being compressed, it often feels like a lot of useful bits are glossed over.

Still, “Spies” demystifies the spy mythos, breaks down the history with surgical precision, and ties it all to today’s headlines. Walton reminds us that behind every cyber attack, every election interference, every regime change, there’s likely an invisible hand at play.

You don’t have to agree with all his conclusions. But you won’t walk away from this book without a clearer understanding of the dark currents shaping global affairs. The first week I started it, I told people in our book club on WhatsApp that it was a slow read. It picked up nicely and I am recommending this. It is deeply researched and alarming tale of the unseen war shaping our world.