Calder Walton

Intelligence historian and commentator Dr Calder Walton explains how the West and Russia have been waging a spying war for more than a century.

Walton says today’s stories of espionage, election meddling, disinformation, assassinations, subversion, and sabotage are far from new. The Kremlin has been using the dark arts to equalise the balance of arms between East and West before, during and after the Cold War. Walton says the Cold War started long before 1945. Western powers began to fight back after World War Two, deploying their own propaganda and intelligence networks and pioneering new spy technologies.  The story ranges from the streets of St Petersburg in 1917, to the beaches of Normandy, coups in foreign lands and the troll factories of present-day Moscow.

Walton is editor in chief of the forthcoming three-volume Cambridge History of Espionage and Intelligence, and author of Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, Cold War, and the Twilight of Empire. He is assistant director of the Applied History Project at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and a regular commentator on intelligence and national security on both sides of the Atlantic.