We're back with another edition of The Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Jasinski,
culture editor here at the Federalist. As always, you can email the show
at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on Twitter at fdr LST.
Make sure to subscribe wherever you've download your podcasts as well, and to
the premium version of our website. We're joined today by Calder Walton, one
of the world's leading scholars of intelligence, national security, and also an historian
at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. The author Calleder is the author of the
new book Spies, the epic intelligence War between East and West, such a
timely and important topic. Calder, welcome to the show. Well, thank
you so much for having me, Emily. It's great to be here.
Of course, I'm curious a little bit about how you ended up specializing in
the area of intelligence. I mean, a lot of people are have been
fascinated by these questions for years and the subject for years. For you personally,
what drew you to starting to study intelligence and to follow it so closely,
Well, it's a it's a great question, thank you, and it
is. You're quite right. It's an unusual field to be specializing in I
was, I guess, like everyone else had had ideas about intelligence and spies
from James Bond onwards. But more seriously, it was when I was an
undergraduate I read a book by Christopher Andrew called The madrocn Archive, and this
was the an expose a of the KGB's history using documents smuggled out of KGB
archives. And I read this and I was just absolutely fascinated by it because
it was what he managed to do was to make it accessible, make it
interesting, but yet at the same time rigorous. So I when met Chris,
and I'm a long story short, he's turned into my PhD supervisor.
He's a colleague of mine, briend mentor, and it was really following in
his footsteps. He's the one, more than anyone, who set up this
field of research, and he's been an inspiration in my career. So it's
about trying to demystify the role of intelligence in international relations. We all have
ideas about Mission Impossible and James Bond and that kind of thing, and yes,
there are certainly some extraordinary plots and twists and stories along the way,
but also there's a there's a much more significant and I'd say meaningful impact of
intelligence agencies for good and bad on both sides of conflicts in international relations.
And so that's been my motivation to study this and the concept of studying East
and West and the sort of raging one hundred year wars you're right about right
in the beginning, and in fact you've start in Ukraine. This is,
I mean, so incredibly timely. I want to ask what it was like
writing this book at a moment when you sort of have the West at increasing
tension with China and where you have former KGB agent flat App And I mean
even just this week there's leaks from the CIA in the Law Street Journal that
they knew about nord Stream, didn't think Ukraine had the capability to blow up
norwide Stream. So what is it like sort of sorting through this this mess
of competing leaks and information while there's a hot war and a cold war basically
in both arenas well. Difficult in one word, But it was actually a
result of the overload of information that was coming at us all over the last
you know, years about intelligence and national security and spies. That that that
was really what drove me to try to put this in a framework for both
myself to understand it, and I hope for for readers of the book and
listeners of it as well, to try to bring perspective and what we're seeing.
It seems that, you know, living through all of the Trump Russia
saga, I was frequently approached by news media outlets to say, well,
this is unprecedented, what's going on. As the more you look at it,
it's like, well, it's not actually the means that the Russia was
using to interfere, and you know, that's a it's an overwhelming conclusion of
the of the intelligence community and Congress that Russia did try to do that we
can leave aside the whole issue of what effect. I don't think anybody knows
that it had. But anyway, Russian meddling in elections goes right back.
And it was during the initial bit of the research of the book that I
found out that this has been going on at least since nineteen forty eight,
that there have been a similar sort of efforts on the Gremlin to basically exploit
the freedoms in the US electoral process in order to promote candidates that were favorable
to the Gremlin, so to get back to you a question that the book
was really grew out of my desire to give some sort of calm perspective about
this of what were we seeing unfold, But it became increasingly more urgent as
I wrote it. So you know, then we're living through COVID and then
the war in Ukraine, and to say nothing about China, and there's this
sort of significant debate that your listeners well know about it within academic and historians
and scholars and policymakers of are we in a new Cold War? Well,
when I was looking at this interviews with CIA officers about Russia and more importantly,
I would say China, it's as clear as day. So of course
we're in the Cold War. And actually it's the other way around. As
far as intelligence and national security is concerned. We're in a cold war and
the main thing is we hope that it doesn't turn hot. So suddenly,
when you see it from that perspective, it's like, oh, okay,
I think I really need to try to get this book out quicker as quickly
as possible in order to contribute to this public policy conversation. So that's to
get back to your regipal question. Very difficult to write a book that is
what's called contemporary history, where things keep changing, but the overall themes in
there remained the same. The most striking document I found during the research for
the book is is what I start the book with. I quoted at the
beginning, and this is a British intelligence report from an m I six officer
who is meeting with a Ukrainian exile and nationalist exile in neighboring Poland, and
he is the Ukrainian exile is begging for Western help to try to defend his
country from the Russians. He says that Russia's Russia only controls a small sliver
of the country around the railways, and that we need to push back,
and the M six officers says, well, we're going to try to do
whatever we can, but we're not going to intervene if that's going to spark
a actual war between the West and Russia and Emily. This document was written
in February nineteen twenty, two hundred years hundred years to the month from when
Putin launched his war. So it was one of those moments in my career
as a historian where I sort of had to read the document, reread it,
take a picture, send it to my wife and say are you are
you? Am I misreading this? And it is literally you change the name
in the report, you say, you know, you change the word bolshevik
um and Lenin for Putin, and it's the same underlying issues. Um.
It's quite striking. So as as I say in the in the early section
of the book, what's Old is New again? You know, this is
a replay in many ways of where we've been, and a replay in some
fascinating ways of even the sort of West's approach and how that you know,
it's it's hardly unprecedented for the West to, you know, topple, try
to do try to do a little regime change here and there over the course
of history. And so that's another sort of side of this coin. It's
that when you look at the sort of Russia collusion narrative that sprouted up after
Colonald Trump entered the primary there's an interesting character, Igor Denchenko, who is
the primary subsource for the Steel dossier, and Chenco. We learned from the
Durham Report it's actually suspected by the FBI of being a Russian agent, and
that wasn't even clear to the FBI when they started paying Danchenko as a subsource
in the Russian collusion investigation, which raises this big question. I think of
that's almost evidence in and of itself that the Russian strategy is just to throw
things at the wall, see what sticks destabilize the United States? Is that
a proper lens to view the entire Russia collusion kind of twenty sixteen saga through
At the end of the day, they were just trying to distabilize the US
even more than they were trying to promote or toppel regimes. I think that
you've had a nail on mad the way that I the you know, the
the entire sort of Steel dossier, which has been largely discredited. The details
have been discredited. Would I would say though, that the underlying issue of
whether Russia was seeking to interfere in the US presidential election, if you take
it at that level, it was correct the details. And then as you've
just pointed out, some of his sources were let's just say, a user,
perhaps a British term, a bit dodgy, and that's probably been polite.
I think that the issue is then you've identified this is whether Russian services
identifying that Christopher Steele was trying to collect intelligence on Russian interference in the election
of the Trump campaign, deliberately fed disinformation to Steel. And this is a
classic ploy and it goes again right at the nineteen twenties of slipping bogus information
false you know, creating forgeries and then slipping them out when there's a leak
of something important. The Soviet strategy, literally from the nineteen twenty two one
was was then to pollute the narrative by planting forgeries, so that the end
result is that the recipients don't know what's up from down, what's right from
wrong. And it's in many ways that you know, you have to sort
of begrudgingly admire it. It's an absolutely masterful strategy. The overwhelming thing about
this is what we're talking about here, really is covert action, whether it's
Western covert action, you know, the most extreme, as you mentioned coups
in far away lands and in the in the middle of the Cold War,
or what the Soviets and Russians that they called active measures. The thing is,
from both sides of the divide, those COVID actions only really work.
They're only effective when in the history shows this when they are pushing at grievances
and underlying issues that already exist in the society. So the KGB was fantastically
good in the nineteen sixties and seventies of identifying and inflaming by using forgeries and
so on, disinformation, inflaming domestic US race relations. Domestic US race relations
were already you know, literally in flames with riots and late nineteen sixties and
US cities, and what the KGB did was to make them worse. They
slip disinformation into into media to inflame. Particularly we can now see relations between
black communities and Jewish communities in the US. So this was a deliberate ploy,
but they were pushing at grievances in a society that already exists, and
that, I'm afraid is the somber conclusion that I come to when when we
talk about Russian meddling and interference in the US in our own time, is
that the wounds, if you like, in American society that Russia exploited,
that they're American maid And you know, I don't really have any politics.
I'm you know, one of these people that's in the middle and it just
it seems. And I should also say that I'm I was born in this
country, and I love this country. But we've got to the point where
we can't even agree on facts anymore. We're both both sides of the political
spectrum are so polarized that you know, we can't agree on basic things,
we can't agree to disagree. And I think that this is just a gold
mine for people that are headling in disinformation. I'll just mentioned one last point
that I had the extreme fortune to interview a former Soviet actually checked a check
Sbakian intelligence officer who specialized in disinformation. This was in twenty eighteen, twenty
nineteen. Unfortunately since then he's passed away. But we had a wonderful interview
of the course of an afternoon, and my concluding question was, you know,
if you were doing what you used to do working for the Eastern Block,
an Eastern Block intelligence service specializing disinformation, what would you think about today?
He said, it's just a golden age for a disinformation anyone. He
called himself a you know, my old job, he was a peddler of
lies, and he said, it's just, you know, we couldn't have
even dreamed about this that people. Social media allows for messages to be transmitted
quicker, more easily, and then also this extraordinary willingness on the on the
part of audiences to just accept as fact things that can be disproved. And
I'm saying this in a non political way, I hope, because it seems
to me to be true on both sides of the political spectrum on this country.
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podcast platform. Yeah. Absolutely, And especially historically, it's another odd parallel
when we talk about the Cold War and how Russian assets ascerbated inflamed tensions in
the United States in the West, something we also see happening is, you
know, back then, you'd have JEdgar Hoover or someone at the CIA having
informants involved and there, I mean, there are theories about how far this
went that are fantastical in Manson family in many many ways. But what you
see there is Western intelligence doing the same work and inflaming those tensions. You
know, the FBI informants that we know, for instance January six, like
politics aside on that. You know, obviously that was largely an organic I
mean, I was reporting live from there, largely an organic thing. It
didn't need to be stoked by the FBI. But we know the FBI did
have informants there now it's reported in the New York Times. So it's also
a parallel in the sense that what you have is, even as Russian intelligence
is trying to inflame tensions in the West, Western intelligence agencies that that sort
of long brewing argument about how you need to separate the intelligence from the apps,
they still can't do that, even after you we have, you know,
decades of Cold War history in the rear view mirror. That's so,
I think that's right. I mean, I think on the issue of the
FBI running informants, it would also perhaps you can look at it the other
way around. Which is, if the FBI didn't have eyes on the ground
at an event such as that, wouldn't that be a failure on their part.
So it's this absolute you get to the core of it, of this
balance between security on the one hand and civil liberties on the other hand.
So and being so you know, being a half American half British person,
I can sort of see both countries as it were from afar. And one
of the striking things, of course, is that in the US we do
not have an equivalent of what written has the m I five. M I
five's powers compared to the FBI are much more expansive. The FBI is,
for all intents and purposes, a law enforcement agency. It does, and
it has an intelligence component and has had for good and bad, with colossal
abuses of power historically, as you point out, But it's powers are nothing
like that of m I five. M I five doesn't have powers of arrest,
but it is not driven by a prosecution in mind. It is,
if you like, a sort of It collects intelligence on preventative threats and people,
things that pose national security threat and those might most of those historically don't
go anywhere near a court and that's unlike the FBI. So what I would
say to you and your listeners is that the US does have that buffer of
the FBI being driven with one eye towards a prosecution, and at least that
it means that there isn't as broader powers for investor to give investigations that I
think would alarm a lot of Americans. This debate your listeners might remember about
whether the US should set up a domestic intelligence agency that crept up after nine
eleven, and I think I fear that when the next cataclysm does occur,
and unfortunately it will, history shows there will be another major national security disaster
to I predict that this debate of whether the US should create a domestic intelligence
agency, because law enforcement and intelligence are two separate things, I think that
will raise its head again if we focus specifically on Russia, Putin in particular,
there's all kinds of speculation, and it goes beyond speculation about his perspective
on all of us, or his conduct and all of us, given his
personal history with the KGB. But you also right about Stalin, and you
know, Parson, one of the difficult things about modern Russian history is just
like parsing understanding the different kind of interpretations of Marxism, of Stalinism, of
Leninism, of Putinism and all of that. So when we're trying to just
like trying to understand Vladimir Putin, trying to understand through the lens of the
KGB and through the lens of the sort of Russian history that he's most attached
to, committed to what's important in now, well, a couple of things
struck me as I was watching events closely in Russia, as with so many
people. The first thing, think about it this way. The head of
Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service, Sir j. Narishkin, his name is so this
equivalent of the director of the CIA, the head of Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service,
is also the head of the Russian Historical Society. So you know you're
in a weird place when this would be the equivalent of the Chief of m
I six being the head of the Royal Historical Society, or the Director of
Central Intelligence being the head of the American Historical Association. So Putin looks back
on history, and his all and his agencies look back on history as a
means of propaganda. And what I found absolutely striking in the year before the
invasion, the Russian invasion, the war on Ukraine was actually how Stalin.
Within Kremlin sponsored publications, particularly by its intelligence services, Stalin re entered the
narrative. So, you know, for the first decade of this century under
Putin, Stalin had been a problem that was sort of you know, acknowledged
that there were abuses made. That's about as far as it went, and
you know, we need to get on with life going forward. That was
sort of the narrative within the intelligence services about Stalin's role in Soviet history.
But in about twenty nineteen twenty Stalin started to reappear, and it was ominous
for those of us that were looking at this in sort of my new detail.
But to your point, how do we think about Putin? How do
we think about Stalin? Well, in my view, there are absolutely striking
similarities as as regarding the use and abuse of intelligence. So Stalin, one
of the most brutal dictators in history, was convinced that he was the supreme
chief intelligence analyst. He didn't need his intelligence agencies to tell him what was
going on. He was his own intelligence assessor. So there was no room
for what's frequently called telling truth to power that didn't exist in Stalin's court,
and in fact, on the contrary, telling truth to power in Stalin's court
could well end your life. Now, Stalin, we now know from Soviet
records, was chiefly responsible for arguably the greatest disaster in Soviet history, that
is, the mishandling of intelligence before the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union,
a disaster the changed world history. The Soviet intelligence services provided him with ample
warnings about the imminent Nazi invasion, and he dismissed them all. At the
time, your listeners will remember that Stalin and Hitler were in a non aggression
pact, effectively allies carving up swathes of Europe. Stalin believed that Hitler would
portray him. They were in their non aggression pact. Well skipped forward and
the spectacle that we saw of Putin in the National Security Council meeting on the
eve of his is war in Ukraine. You will remember this bizarre prerecorded meeting
in which he, amongst other things, humiliated his head of Foreign intelligence,
the SVR, the man I just mentioned who was? It seemed pretty clear
going off script, and I think at one point somebody said no, no,
we haven't got to that bit yet, as evidence of the fact that
it was all being choreographed. So this is, it seems to me,
the same underlying issue, which is an authoritarian I think now we can call
Putin a reasonab we call Putin a dictator who uses his intelligence services in order
to provide information that they want to hear to confirm, not challenge their views.
And this is something inherent within that kind of model of government, if
you like. And it's a good reason why people like Stalin and people like
Putin are making such bad decisions because the intelligence that they've provided with isn't challenging
their views. It can't. People are literally afraid of being killed. So
it's the same underlying problem as I see it. That is really interesting,
and it raises this question of you know, China, pre industrial China,
you know, throughout much of the Cold War, China was you know,
not on the level of the United States and the Soviet Union, or at
least in the United States. And now China's this high tech, basically security
state and has sort of in some ways had the benefit of watching America learn
from its history with intelligence, from watching Russia either learn or not learn from
its experience with intelligence. And I wonder what you think, China, what
lessons do you think, if any China has internalized from this hundred years,
the century long history now that we see manifest in their current strategy. Well,
it's a it's a huge question. And I sort of really turned to
China at the end of the book because, as I point out, this
is a this is history that is unrolling right in front of us, in
front of our eyes. So I can't kind of come to a conclusion.
But this is if you like this sort of the cliffhanger of like, Okay,
if this is the history of Russia and intelligence of the West, wait
to hear about China. China. It's the same underlying issues of as Russia
right now. Of course, Putin and She have declared on the eve of
the war in Ukraine that they are in an alliance with quote unquote no limits
in which there are no areas that are Forbiden. They are this is at
an extraordinary alliance both with that both they both have the aim of overturning the
US led international order established at the end of the Cold War. They're going
about it in very different ways Russia as a kind of negative You know,
if the US is doing badly, then Russia's doing well, China projecting a
positive alternative to the US world order. But the thing is, and this
is where I think that the analogy with the Cold War is so striking.
So when I was researching this later sections of the book, the archival records
effectively dry up, and I had to rely on interviews, and I had
some. It was fortunate enough to have some exclusive interviews with particularly former m
I six officers with deep experts on China and very recently as well, and
they told me a story that was pretty chilling, and it's the same as
what Russia did. After nine to eleven, the US government was overwhelmingly geared,
of course, to counter terrorism in the War on Terror. Its national
security resources were plowed into encountering very serious Islamist terrorist plots. But in the
meantime, what was happening about the so called research and Great Powers. Well,
US intelligence community was warning this hasn't gone away, but there simply wasn't
enough resources or on the agenda policymakers, this is something that will have to
come later. We're dealing with very urgent threats here during the War on Terror.
It's been one interview interview told me that in two thousand and five,
So this is, you know, really the height of the US counter terrorist
operations. In two thousand and five, the Chinese Ministry of State Security the
MSS, effectively declared war on US intelligence and from that point on marshaled all
of their best resources and officers into defeating US intelligence in China with the aim
of supplanting the US from Southeast Asia. This was all taking place below the
surface when the US was distracted consumed by the War on Terror. And it's
here I think that we find it such a striking parallel with the onset of
the Cold War after nineteen four five. During the Second World War, US
intelligence, British intelligence overwhelmingly geared with defeating Nazi Germany, and so was Silin
himself. Of course, more Soviet citizens died than any other country. But
what was Stalin also doing during the Second World War? He was conducting a
Clandestein cold Clandestein offense intelligence attack on his Western allies, written in the US,
stealing all of their secrets, including the atomic bomb while they were looking
away. So what this picture that emerges is the US government and all of
its resources. It is very good at doing one thing at once, so
Second World War, defeating Hitler's third right, war on terror, counter terrorist
operations. But the US is not so good at doing two things at once,
thinking about the Soviet Union and taking preventative measures during the Second World War,
or thinking about resurgent great powers during the War on Terror. And this
strategy on the part of Chinese intelligence, it follows a Chinese saying, which
I can share with your listeners. I will not attempt to do the Mandarin,
but it can be roughly translated as watched the fires on the other side
of the bank burn, which allows you to avoid entering battle. So the
US was consumed by the War on Terror, and internal Ministry of State Security
MSS deliberations from the time were and this is a quote from an interviewee marked
with glee to see the US mired in the counter terrorist operations in the Middle
East. Suddenly, when you look at it from this perspective of what China's
and Russia's intelligence services were doing, Suddenly, this period when we were talking
about economic development would allow China to become a responsible player on the world stage,
it begins to look very different. It seems to me that when you
look through the intelligence and security lens, seems pretty clear that China had no
intention of being a playing by the existing rules. It wanted to supplant them.
And it's now that this is being revealed it again, it's it's an
intelligence onslaught that it's already happened that we're now catching up with, just like
it was with the Soviets, as it now is with the Chinese. You
know, I saw a headline I swear was ripped out of the papers in
like nineteen sixty two this week, which was about the alleged Russian or Chinese
see really could be from nineteen sixty Yeah, Chinese spy, Yes, the
Chinese spying operation UM in Cuba, chiese in painting. Just this week UM
met with leaders in under US where it's, oh my gosh, I mean,
it just feels like the fifties in the sixties, which had just severed
relationships with Taiwan, UM and we're getting right back into you know, history
and patterns that are just so incredibly familiar. You've written about the extent the
scope that would likely surprise even people who are generally aware of what China has
been up to of their intelligence operation. Um, you know, through the
lens of their alleged basing Cuba, they outreach via bout the road. What
should people know about the scope of China's intelligence operation right now? Well,
my overall conclusion is the looking at this and I should say that as I've
already indicator, but I think it's worth just emphasizing that this has been there
aren't There's a similar to the level of records that you can study with China
today. And the key thing is that we also don't have defectors that are
known in any way. And hopefully there are defectors from the Chinese intelligence if
if the US intelligence community is doing his job, hopefully there are defectors who
have revealed the secrets of Chinese intelligence. But at least in the public domain,
we don't have similar defectors as we did in the Soviet period or indeed
or Russia today. So this is necessarily more tentative. But the way that
it has been described to me and it seems fair looking at all the information
in the public domain that's available. Chinese intelligence is like the KG beyond st
roids, This is taken to a whole new level. And Chinese intelligence also
has a very different services have a very different conception of intelligence that even the
Soviets or the Russian said. This is not simply an effort to target particular
individuals and to recruit people in that way. This is the Chinese intelligence services
employ what's called a thousand grains of sound approach, hoovering up collecting intelligence across
domains in multiple different ways, in the cyber realm, in the in the
in the physical realm, all all with the objective, at least in the
earlier, earlier part of this century, of stealing as much scientific technical intelligence
from the US as possible in order to challenge the US and its position in
the world. On the Cuba piece, I've got an article coming out,
i think later this week on this that brings some of his some perspective to
it. It's you know, Mark Twain said that history doesn't repeat yourself,
but it does rhyme. Well, the rhymes here, as you've just suggested,
Emily, they're pretty striking looking to Cuba. Of all places, we've
been here before, so Cuba being the key strategic stronghold for the Soviet Union
in the Cold War, as the listeners, I'm sure no. But less
well known is that after the Cuban missile crisis, with a sort of a
great standoff between East and West in the Cold War. Less well known is
that right after that, Soviet intelligence established an enormous eavesdropping facility in Cuba,
signals intelligence collection facility in Cuba, and this was the biggest sigin to signals
intelligence base in the world during the Cold War, and it's area or farms
and antenna were all directed towards the US. Very little has been revealed about
what the product its product was during the Cold War, but we do know
what the KGB was able to achieve through similar intercept stations from within the US
itself, from from Soviet embassies in New York, Washington, and San Francisco,
and at key points. For example, the Soviet the KGBS, by
simply putting aerial masks on their embassy in Washington, was able to intercept short
short wave radio communications that at one point they managed to get hold of the
messages of the US National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger that were being relayed from the
White House via Andrew's Air Force space to the Air Force one the plane that
was carrying the Secretary of States and National Security Advisor Henry kiss over to Europe.
These were short wave burst communications that the KGB intercepted, and they were
able to eavesdrop on Kissinger's most intimate conversations, including, as I write in
the piece, those of his conversations with his fiance. So this is an
example of the kind of thing that we know the Soviet intelligence was able to
do through aerials picking up short waves. We can only imagine what they were
able to achieve from the enormous base in Cuba directed at major US military bases
in southern Florida. The same, it seems to me, would apply today,
but even more so in terms of China's cyber capabilities from Cuba. But
I would like to just you know, I think looking at the history,
it is necessary to I think pump the breaks about some of the heated discourse
of this, which is to say, we've been here before, we've done
this, we know what it involves. And I'm entirely convinced that the technical
wizards and people at NSA know all about the Chinese facility there, and we
would hope are taking countermeasures so from interviews I've had with people over that since
that story is broken, is very much the feeling that this is something that
has been known about within the intelligence community beforehand, we in the public didn't
know about this, So historical perspective can help. Also, let's just say,
deescalate some of the sort of natural, but I think overblown fears of
what this space would achieve. But the parallels. The broader point that I
really would like to just emphasize to your listeners is that the broader point is
this is just another example, a piece in the puzzle of how China Undershe
is looking from his perspective, and it's always useful to, I think really
important to try to empathize with how it looks from an opponent's perspective. What
he sees himself doing is containing US influence on the on the world stage.
So he says, you know, if the US can set up eavesdropping installations
and send spy flights right next to China in the South China Sea, then
why can't we, as the world's you know, effects of new superpower do
the same in America's bankyard, Which is just the same rational that chreas chef
head during the Cold War, before the Cuban missile crisis. So there we
are. We've been here before we and what's old is new again, as
let's said at the outset. Well, actually that's a good place to wrap
up on my final question for you. I'm so fascinated to know how you
read modern media reports and historical media reports as well differently. I mean that's
one of the I have to imagine first of all, like exhilarating and intriguing
parts of this, but also just um, you know, in some ways
maddening parts of all of this to try to disentangle you know, for instance,
the Wall Street Journal report we started talking about, where it seems clearly
that the CIA was talking to the journal or people affiliated with the CIA,
and then you have to compare that to what you know, maybe Seymour Hirsh
reported and what it is just like incredible. Um. But to your point
about the Cuba operation, Um, it does seem like what's been conveyed intentionally
by CIA in the media is that you know, we're NSA. Is that
there's a sense of calm, that you know, this is under control,
we are aware of this, um. And I just wonder you know how
you approach um your media, given your the breadth of knowledge that you have
about how media is often used for good and bad by folks in the intelligence
community. Well, I think that my overwhelming sense is to approach whatever issue,
you know, whatever scandal arises, and there does seem to be a
scandal pretty much every day in terms of spying and espionage. But it's an
overwhelming sense of modesty and humility because what we're seeing play out in real time
right now is guarantee the tip of a much larger iceberg, and that it's
when you look at it historically, you can see what was taking place in
the public domain about a particular spy scandal, some of the impamous spy scandals
in the early Cold War, the Cambridge five. You know what was known
at the time about these traitors, and then what was going on what was
known in the public domain at that particular time, and then you look at
the dossiers and you understand what was going on below the surface that is only
made light of day recently with the classification. So my feeling is perhaps I'm
inherently a skeptic and a cynic and a My family would probably say, yes,
a bit jaded, but I I'm very cautious about this rolling the rolling
news and to say, and I would politely suggest to your listeners that we
can say with confidence and guarantee that what we're seeing play out right now is
only the tip of a much larger iceberg, and that it's only in due
course that will know what's going on, and it will be a fascinating,
perhaps even an impossible job for future scholars to try to weave all the pieces
together for what we're seeing play out in real time. Everything does seem to
be getting quicker right now. That's certainly the case. I don't know if
it's just social media, but I don't know. You look at some of
the records from the Cold War and it's almost you know, I never want
to say this about the Soviet Union, but it was also simple then and
now it's just things are moving so quickly and there's so many scandals that it's
hard to keep up, which is why I think I'll leave it. I'll
leave one I think striking passage I read from a Soviet defector KGB defector,
and he he specialized in disinformation KGB disinformation, which you've already talked about,
you know, specializing in exploiting existing grievances within US society, and he testified
in Congress in the seventies about the nature of Soviet active measures. And again
you reread that old testimony that basically had been forgotten about in light of events,
goes to our own time, and it's just striking the same strategy,
different tools. Anyway, one of the members of Congress quite rightly, so,
okay, well, this is what the Soviet strategy as, what can
we do about it? What is the best way to protect Americans from this
sort of insiduous the strategy on the part of the intelligence services. And so
it's quite simple. You need to read widely. So Americans should not trust
their news from any one source. They should read multiple different news from multiple
different outlets, and to think about things critically. And it's like it couldn't
be more important message today of think about things critically, think about especially online,
who's putting that information out and what agenda might they have for putting it
out. That was what from the horse's mouth former KGB officers said about the
Soviets, And it seems to me the same as true with Russia. And
China today called their wall is an historian at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and
the author of the new book Spies, The epic intelligence War between East and
West. Calder thank you so much for joining the show. Thank you for
having me. I really enjoyed it. Absolutely you've been listening to another edition
of The Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emil Jasinski, culture editor here at The
Federalist. Will be back soon with more. Until then, be lovers of
freedom and anxious for the friend