The Foreign Service Journal, May 2016

74 MAY 2016 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL are inseparable, if not interchangeable. Putin makes only a handful of appearances in Institute of Advanced Stud- ies Professor Jonathan Haslam’s history of Soviet intelligence, Near and Distant Neighbors . But if Russia is Putin, and the KGB (where Putin began his career) remains a “state within a state,” then a KGB history is also a Putin pre- history of sorts. For Haslam, Russia’s his- tory is rooted in “a primitive political culture originating in medieval despotism.” Very little has changed over the course of the Soviet period and into the present day, including the use of political assassination. The author focuses solely on foreign intelligence, including both political and military intelligence (the KGB and its pre- decessors, on one hand, and the GRU on the other, known in Moscow as the “near and distant neighbors,” respectively, of the book’s title). Lenin created the Extraordinary Com- mittee (or Cheka) as early as December 1917 as a bloody cudgel in Russia’s Civil War, and its early tentative efforts in for- eign intelligence were directed primar- ily against “angry and impatient exiles,” rather than foreign governments. In Europe, Soviet spies and White émigrés engaged in reciprocal campaigns of assassination, terrorism and disinfor- mation, with the regime getting the better of the fight. The fledgling Soviet regime prioritized defeating its enemies over relations with the “soon-to-be-extinct- anyway” Western governments (who not surprisingly took umbrage with the targeted killings of émigré guests on their territory). In these tales of espionage derring-do from a bygone age, Haslam finds continuity with the present, notably in the 2006 poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in London and Russia’s surreptitious military incursions into Crimea and Ukraine. In these tales of espionage derring- do from a bygone age, Haslam finds continuity with the present, notably in the 2006 poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in London and Russia’s sur- reptitious military incursions into Crimea and Ukraine. The intelligence services only rose in importance during the Stalin period, but Haslam finds their successes systematically undermined by paranoia, misguided ideology and internal mismanagement. Foreign intelligence scored its greatest success against the “main (capitalist) enemy,” Great Britain, in the 1930s through the recruitment of the Cambridge Five, but failed to penetrate the inner circles of the Nazi regime. More disastrously, Stalin’s purges deci- mated the intelligence services on the eve of war, setting off internal chaos and leaving prized agents such as the Cambridge Five either cut off from their handlers, or under an inevi- table cloud of suspicion. Foreign intel- ligence never created an analysis cadre to complement operations, while military intelligence analysis was disbanded in the 1930s. The Great Leader presumably did not need the facts to get in the way of a good idea. In the Cold War era, Soviet intel- ligence continued to prioritize human intelligence over technical capabilities, where it fell increasingly behind the West. In 1948, Soviet agent WilliamWeisband, who translated Soviet communications at Arlington Hall Station (now the site of the Foreign Service Institute), notified his handlers that the Americans were break- ing nearly all of the Soviet Union’s codes. While the Soviets used this intelli- gence coup to change their communica- tion systems, they did not invest long- term in the sector. There was no Soviet National Security Agency to counter growing U.S. technical capabilities. At the same time the regime’s ideology became increasingly bankrupt in the post-Stalin era, diminishing returns in the field of human intelligence. The narrative thins out in the late Soviet period and, regrettably, very little attention is devoted to U.S. spies Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen, although these histories have been well-covered by other authors. As Haslam draws mainly on Russian-language sources, we can assume less is available from this period. The author acknowledges that he relied on Russian sources released during the Putin era, which were intended to glo- rify the intelligence services. Regardless of the original intent of the sources, Haslam weaves them into a damning account of tactical successes, but inevitable strategic failure in perpetuating one-man rule. Aspiring tyrants take note. n James Morris has been a Foreign Service officer since 2004. He has served in Moscow, Frankfurt, Kapisa (Afghanistan), Bishkek and Washington, D.C.