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In the wake of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, international observers, policy-makers and strategists have all been asking a similar question: how did we end up here? Calder Walton demonstrates that, to understand the present, we must understand what intelligence historians have described as the ‘missing dimension’ of the past. Spies traces the ‘intelligence war’ fought for more than a century between Russia and ‘the West’ (namely, the United Kingdom and the United States) to show that successive Russian leaders have placed intelligence on the offensive to compensate for the country's internal weaknesses. The focus on intelligence leads Walton to an alarming conclusion: the West has a Russia problem, not simply a Putin problem.

The book is organized into six parts that unfold around a century of evolving clashes between Russia and the West. In the process, the book complicates the dominant periodizations of the Cold War as taking place between 1945 and 1991. The first part ambitiously situates the origins of the Cold War in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the highly asymmetric intelligence capabilities between East and West—the result of the emergence of Russia's modern intelligence services in the 1920s. The bulk of the book focuses on the Cold War proper. In charting the transition of the relationship with the Soviet Union from wartime allies to Cold War rivals, Walton stresses that it is hard to imagine how the US and UK could not have responded with grand strategies of their own, considering the scale of the Soviet Union's intelligence assault on its own allies during the Second World War (p. 137). While the first decade after the Cold War saw the genesis of institutionalized intelligence collaboration among the West, with the birth of the Five Eyes alliance, the asymmetry of secret arms continued to favour the Soviets and their network of well-placed ‘illegals’ and agents, such as the infamous Cambridge Five.

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