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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…
