Calder Walton: Intelligence and the Reality of Russia & the New Cold War

0:28This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci, and this is Open Book, where I talk with some of the brightest minds out there about everything surrounding the written word, from authors and historians to figures in entertainment, neuroscientists, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Sorry, I can't resist. Before we get into today's episode, if you haven't already, please hit follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a review. We all love a review, even the bad ones. I want to hear the parts you're enjoying or how we can do better.

1:04You know, I can roll with the punches, so let me know. Anyways, let's get to it.

1:16Did the Cold War ever end? The thought of that question is pretty frightening, isn't it? As far as intelligence and national security are concerned, my guest today, Calder Walton, thinks we're in a new Cold War. And if we're not careful, that Cold War could become hot. Calder has great insight on the East and West, and he's an important person to listen to if we want to understand this. Let's go to the conversation.

1:49So joining us now on Open Book is Calder Walton. He's a renowned intelligence and global security scholar. He's also a historian at the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government, which is obviously an alumnus of the law school there. Although when you bring that up, it's like humble bragging. So I'm not really allowed to bring that up anymore. But you wrote this amazing book, which we're going to get into right now called Spies, the Epic Intelligence War between the East and West. I learned so much in your book. I'm very grateful for you writing it, also the contribution of it. There's a lot to unpack there, but let's start with you.

2:26Why did you become so interested in intelligence and in the acquisition of military and civil intelligence? Well, first and foremost, thanks for having me here, Anthony. It's great to be with you on Open Book. How did I get interested in this? Well, as an undergrad, I read a book called The Matrokin Archive, which was this expose about the secret history of the KGB. And it was written by the person that then became my doctoral supervisor, now friend and mentor, Christopher Ander in Cambridge. And I went to him and he's really the most incredible scholar and mentor, very humble. And he said, look, there's more research than we can possibly do in a lifetime on all of this.

3:09So if you want to do a PhD, you know, you're pushing it in open door. So Anthony, that was just one thing that led to another. When I was doing my PhD in Cambridge in England, he said, would you be interested in writing, helping me write on a part-time basis, doing research for MI5's official hundred year history? I said, let me think about that for a minute. So that took about a nanosecond to say, yeah, that sounds like an incredible opportunity. All right. So that begs the following question. Okay. Who does it better, right? Nobody does it better. So is it MI5, MI6? Is it the KGB or the GRU as they're called now?

3:44Is it the CIA? Who does it the best? I think that begs the question, what do we mean by it? If we're talking about stealing secrets, intelligence collection, the vast hoovering up of intelligence, you've got to say that's the KGB historically. And who knows about Russia today, China today. They do it, it, if we mean acquisition of intelligence. Yeah. Stealing of secrets, replication of military technology. Exactly. Knowing what we're doing before we know what we're doing. That's it. But if we're talking about if it means not only the collection of intelligence, but then analyzing it and disseminating it and getting it to decision makers that actually are going to listen to it, that's definitely not the autocratic regimes, Soviets in the past, Russia, China today.

4:31That's Western liberal democracies. And I'd say that Britain, I would say this, but being from the UK, but historically, the British intelligence community is punched far above its weight on the international stage. Remember, they had the imperial system going as well, right? So the British had the Commonwealth. That's right. They've been able to use that system to their advantage, right? Ian Fleming and John Le Carre explained that to all of us over the years. And they were bang on. And the thing about John Le Carre is that he was both an MI5 and an MI6 officer. He knew what he was talking about.

5:02But in terms of today, the bulk capabilities, nothing can come close in the West to the US intelligence community with its resources. Right. Plus the NSA. 18 different agencies. Yes. So I think we've got Space Force now. Yep. And so, yeah, nothing comes close. NSA and GCHQ in the UK literally intertwined across the Atlantic with systems codependent. I'm assuming you have. Have you ever looked at the presidential daily brief, an archived one? Yep, for sure. And some of them are declassified from, and I use them in the book in the 1960s. Yeah, they'll declassify one. So I'm going to say a couple of things to you.

5:42I want you to react to these things because you're talking to somebody that when I read the brief for the first time, I was alarmed by the brief. I found that I found three. I'm going to say three things to you. I want you to react to all three. OK, the CIA analyst that briefed me, he said to me that there are workhorses in the government and show horses in the government. OK. And you'll know very quickly who the workhorses are, Anthony, and who the show horses. Do you agree with him? I'm going to sort of try to put it perhaps in more diplomatic terms. you always need to have the people that are at the front of the house and then the back of the house.

6:14But I can see where you're going with this. I think I know who perhaps the rest of the intelligence community would probably regard the CIA as the show horse. Is that right? I think so. I do think so. Okay. Because you've got a lot of stuff going on behind - You also say that presumably a lot of, as usual, people that call others show horses, there might be a tinge of jealousy there. Let's perhaps say that. Okay. Well said. The other thing that was said to me and I want you to react to is that, man, here's what we think we know, but a lot of stuff in that brief is proportioned, meaning it's percentages.

6:47We have a 50 % chance that this is correct. We have a 70 % chance that this is correct. It's not like Hollywood, Calder, where, okay, you know, Bin Laden is in the house and here's how we know, and now we're going to send a SEAL team to get him. I mean, there was a lot of vagary and a lot of uncertainty in the decision-making process. Is that correct, based on your research? Both historically and I have to say that is really good to hear in a weird way. And I'll explain why. The worst thing to do would be to be presenting analysis and to give the customers, in this case, you, a false sense. No, there was none of that.

7:22Exactly. If it's intelligence, if we're in the intelligence business, there aren't certainties. This operates in an area of gray, right? And I think that the yardstick of a decent analysis is saying, being honest and saying, we just don't know. this might be a 51 % chance, 49 % chance, what have you. As long as the customer, you, is aware of the risk inherent within that analysis of like, we are operating within the gray. As you said, it's not like Hollywood, where it's like, I mean, there have been, let's be honest, some in the recent past, some extraordinary intelligence failures on the part of the CIA and briefings, you know, George Tennant's slam dunk, we all remember that about WMD.

7:59That's an example of where the caveats about the reporting and the analysis are like airbrushed out. And it's presented in a way that doesn't reflect the dubious, not dubious, the risks inherent. So that's reassuring to me from my perspective that you were given all those health warnings. Yeah, so that's part of it. Can I ask a follow-up though? I mean, did that then lead the, I mean, I imagine as a customer might be like, well, why are you giving me this then if you don't know what the. Well, that's interesting because what I would say and what was said to me in sort of the preamble of the briefing was that there's just so many things that we don't know, but these are the things that we're worried about or these are the things that are going to reach the president's desk where he's going to have to make a decision or in some day she will have to make a decision.

8:45But you're going to be making this decision with some shots being fired in the dark. You won't actually know and we don't actually know. And so all of that's accurate, right? I think this is important for our listeners and viewers because I want them to read your book. I'm going to give away some of the plot lines in your book, but I want them to read your book because your book is so compelling about the reality of the situation, not the fictionalized stuff that people will read or even watch in the movies. You've got real life situations going on, life and death situations. And what we both know is a lot of guesswork in it.

9:20Isn't that the case, Calder? That's absolutely, you summarized it really well, Anthony. So it's two levels. the world of espionage and this wilderness of mirrors as it's been called nothing is 100 so the yardstick for you on the u.s side the yardstick for the most confidence you can have in an assessment is i believe the phrase is highly confident but not even very high confidence for me yeah something like this okay which to the layperson doesn't actually sound that i mean you're you're a you're a lawyer you remember anthony i'm a recovering lawyer as well i should say but you remember the legal it's not it's not close to beyond reasonable doubt no that that level no yeah we're it we're groping in there and this this is what we think seems likely to happen uh that's the reality of intelligence the other the other thing is of course if if an assessment if a problem lands on the president's desks as the as the phrase goes it's never going to be an easy decision it's only the tough things land on the president because it would have been resolved by one of the other 5 ,000 people in his government.

10:22And then the last thing from the first briefing that I had was it's always a tough decision. And so it looked prima facie that the capture and the death of Osama bin Laden and the capture of the intelligence assets from his home was a net positive, but it also had consequential collateral damage. We upset a sovereign nation, Pakistan. We probably had to give them more aid as a result of that. We also upset the region because it's a very tough neighborhood. You don't want the U.S. who's perceived to be an imperialist going into sovereign nations without their permission. And so that set alarm bells off in the Middle East, probably set us back diplomatically.

10:59So every time the president's making a decision or she's making a decision, there's some good things that can come out of it, but there's also going to be some collateral damage. Is that a fair statement based on your assessment? Absolutely. I think that time and time again, we see through our history is the, particularly the U.S. with all of its power and might, you know, during the Cold War does something in order to solve a particular problem. And then that sets off a cascade of known, not even known unknowns, unknown unknowns, you know, just, and again, I think that's the duty of an, of a, of the intelligence community is to warn about what are likely future scenarios where there could be what we're talking about here, Anthony's like thing, a blowback where one thing leads to a succession of other events, and then it blows back on the U.S.

11:45in some way or another. Exactly. So we always have that risk, okay? Do you think the Wall Street Journal, journalist, is going to be returned soon? I am afraid very, my study of Russia, past and present, makes me think not anytime soon. Not anytime soon, right, because there's so much going on. There's so much going on. I think what seems to me what they're trying to do is to set up a hostage swap. Yes. Well, they're saying that he's a spy. Obviously, I'm going to take the other side of that and say that he's not a spy, but they're saying that because they want to trade a spy for a spy. I understand what they're doing.

12:28I think it's really important for listeners to note that it's actually prohibited under U.S. law for the CIA to use U.S. journalism as a cover. Yeah, well. They did it in the past a couple of times. So the idea that he is the Wall Street journalist is a U.S. spy is nonsense. Oh, and I obviously believe that. All right, now I'm going to test one more thing on you. Then we'll talk a little bit about the book and have some more fun. This is going on. I'm in the hot seat here. In the hot seat. Okay, so in the 1930s, I don't remember the exact date, but Henry Luce, who was the founder of Time Magazine, was in Russia.

13:02This predates the war, okay? But Stalin is now in charge. Trotsky is dead. He is talking with him at dinner. He says he's going to smash the United States into a million pieces. And Luce says, well, how are you going to do that? He said, well, you don't understand. I'm going to use the KGB. I'm going to use our disinformation programming. I'm going to use the wave of lies. You're a mongrel nation. You're not unified by one race or one genealogy. There's multiple bloodlines and a result of which there's a lot of ethnic and tribal hatreds in your country. and I'm going to smash you to smithereens using this campaign of disinformation.

13:41We won't need to take over the United States. The United States will fall from within. Now, what he got wrong at the time was the love that my grandparents had for the country, immigrating from Italy and others. What he got wrong is that they were all focused on their own economic aspirational opportunity and less on hating upon each other, although there was biases and prejudices as there has been tribally for a time immemorial. Okay. What he also got wrong was the great unification that the U.S. would have during the war and then in the post-war environment. And since we talk about stovetops in your book and chimney, you know, stovetops coming out of the houses, we, we were stovetopped into the media where it was fairly centralized.

14:25So the information that was washing over the United States was fairly centralized. So we all had uniform or mainstream ideas. But that's no longer the case. You and I know, very well chronicled in the book by Catherine Belton, Putin's People, he server farms and creates these core identities, uses this age old theory from Stalin, from the KGB to create tribal disinformation, ethnic hatreds, sow unrest in the United States, push the Brexit agenda on the UK citizens, make them feel nationalistic, make them feel racial sympathies towards themselves and against others. He's doing the same thing in France.

15:06And because of this splintering of the media, it now seems to be working. What Stalin said was going to work 100 years ago, Calders, that didn't work, but it now seems to be working. What's your reaction to all that? Well, I don't. So I agree with what you just said. I don't know the specific about Henry Luce in the Soviet Union, but what Stalin was talking about and then was been repeated by subsequent Kremlin leaders. These are the so-called Soviet active measures. This is what in the US, what we would call, or in the COVID action. So these are dirty tricks, political warfare, we call it. And Russia, past, going all the way back to Stalin, probably even the Tsarist regime, actually, are the past and present masters of disinformation.

15:51So I had the privilege, when I was writing the book, interviewing a former Czech, a Czechoslovakian intelligence officer who defected to the US in 1969, just after the Prague Spring. He saw Soviet tanks rolling in and said, I need to get out of here. He specialized in the Czech intelligence service that worked for the KGB essentially as a satellite service. He specialized in disinformation. He and I asked him, okay, so with this, you know, what you were doing in the 1960s and even before, compared to where we are now. And he just put his hands up and said, this is the golden age for people. He said, what I used to do is I was a professional peddler of lies.

16:31I would seize upon targets in US audiences, like you just mentioned, Anthony, that silence race relations and domestic race relations in the US. He said, I would seize upon that and I would exploit it. And he said, this now social media environment that we're in, this is would have been a godsend. I couldn't have even dreamed of something like that. So not only in terms of volume, it's easier and quicker, cheaper than ever before, as Purgosian and his troll farms revealed. It's quicker than all of those things than ever before in history to spread disinformation. But there's also this thing that's going on in particularly here in the US, it seems to me, of just being willing to believe objectively false information.

17:14So that's changed. And I don't know if that is the social media environment of something's going on in our sort of cognition. That's something for like behavioral scientists, psychologists to get into. It's interesting. I mean, all of that seems to be happening contemporaneously while we are trying to fight back the beast, right? Because you and I both know that we've got to be right a thousand percent, right? We have to go, we had about a thousand. We have to be right every time. They only have to be right once. Exactly. Exactly. An impossible task, I would say. Okay. So let's go to your book, okay, which is a fascinating book about this war between the East and West.

17:50I want to address Vladimir Putin for a second. Is Putin the master spy of the narrative that he conjured up for himself? Oh, it's a great question. I would argue absolutely not. So he makes much of his KGB past that he worked for the KGB's Foreign Intelligence Department, the first chief directorate. He was stationed in Dresden, as your listeners may be aware, and he witnessed firsthand, as the story goes, of the collapse of the Soviet Union around him. OK, so he has made much of this in the 1990s and when he got into power. In fact, Dresden was a sideshow for the KGB in East Germany. The real action was up in Berlin.

18:32OK, that's the first thing. The second thing is I've got a very good authority from a CIA source interviewed on the condition of anonymity that they that he has good information, reliable information that Putin wanted to become a deep cover, so-called illegal. OK, this is the Russian Soviet and Russian deep cover operatives like like in the series, like the TV show, The Americans that you may have seen. Great show. Yeah. Yeah. He wanted to become one of them and failed the language test. So since then, he's tried to peddle this image of both him as a master spy and then also as the KGB, as the sort of master intelligence service.

19:12It was second to none in the world in terms of intelligence collection, stealing secrets, bribing people, exploiting them, you name it, blackmail. But in terms of analysis, the whole system never allowed for robust telling truth to power. You see that from Stalin's time through to Putin today. And I think, let me put it this way. Putin, his foreign intelligence director at the moment, the SVR, which is the successor to the KGB, his foreign intelligence director, Sergei Naryshkin, is also the head of Russia's historical society. So that's like the director of the CIA being the head of the American Historical Society.

19:53What's going on there? Well, what's going on there is some pretty weird use of history and making Russia's intelligence services in the past seem more successful than they were. Scratch the surface. Not only is Putin not the master spy that he wants to be, but also some of the massive Soviet intelligence successes in the past. They were actually owed more to the dedication of the communist agents handing over secrets that they had than the tradecraft of Russia's intelligence services. And we see it, Anthony, we see it closer to our own time with Russia's intelligence services. You know, after 2016, there was a perception and Russian election meddling, not getting into the whole thing of like the actual impact of that on the election.

20:35But it was certainly unambiguously the case that Russia was on Putin's orders trying to do that. After that, we had some narrative, particularly in the US, of sort of Putin as the master puppeteer. But actually, there's been a succession of incredible Russian intelligence failures under his watch. deep cover spy networks being wound up. And then the most disastrous decision that he made that seems pretty clear to me is an intelligence failure is his decision to invade Ukraine in 2022. This is a colossal intelligence failure and Putin is primarily responsible for it. Is he winning or losing that war?

21:09Ukraine, to be determined, I'm afraid. But I still agree with what CIA Director Bill Burns said at the outset of the war, which is, this is a war that Putin can't afford to lose. Okay, he's nailed his reputation to it. It's everything. I don't see how he's going to allow this to go badly for Russia. And I fear, my worst fear is about the use of a tactical nuclear weapon to get a victory out of a defeat. So the better that Ukrainians do, the more encircled Putin feels now by NATO, the more the chances I think he's going to do something drastic. And I'm particularly worried about the Zafirisian nuclear power plant.

21:51Yeah. Well, I know they've been calling on that now for several months because of all that. But let me just ask you this. Do you feel, I want to phrase this properly, is he in peril now, no matter what the outcome is? Because it has not really gone well for him optically, not in the world of public opinion, not in the internal unrest been displayed in the Soviet Union for the Russians, former Soviet Union, also the Pergosian situation. Has he been sufficiently personally imperiled at this point? For his rule? I mean, he's certainly been damaged. But again, he's not going to, it's not like we're just going to see Putin go, okay, you know what, that was a mistake.

22:30No, he can't afford to do that. No, we know that. The maker and the breaker in this whole situation will be China. So I don't think actually, Putin, you mentioned in terms of the perception internationally, sure, you know, this is a catastrophe from our perspective for Putin. Why would he do this? But then first and foremost, it's the maker and the breaker of whether it's a failure or not will be Xi in China. And then look at the non-aligned, so-called non-aligned countries, the global South and their perceptions, a lot of whom are sitting on the fence. So it's not, you talk to others from other places in the world outside of Europe and North America, it's not as clear cut as the conversation that you and I have just had, I think.

23:09This is a tremendously cynical thing to say, but bear with me. Success for Joe Biden? Is it a success for Joe Biden of where the war is going? What has unfolded over the last, call it a year and a half? Yeah. I think that it's been remarkable to see U.S. leadership again. I speak as a European and it's just like, where was America for so long? We don't need to get into that, Anthony. No, no, we can get into it because here's what happened. We both know it. When Clinton left, we had still very high standing in the world. He was producing a budget surplus. He was running the world off the George Kennan bipartisan commitment to leadership and freedom and containing autocracies around the world to the best of his capability.

23:59And Bush and Cheney, they blew it to pieces because they got the gun off the bird going into Iraq. Big intelligence failure there, but it was also designed to help President Bush win re-election. They wanted that war. They wanted that war before Labor Day of 03 because they wanted him to get re-elected. Okay. And so they knew that that would galvanize the American people. And so this is unbelievable levels of cynicism. and you and I both know this, but maybe some of our listeners need to hear it again. We went to war without a tax increase, the first time in US history that we created a war like that without a tax increase.

24:33And we blew a hole in our budget that we never recovered from. We're 25 trillion into that budget deficit now as a result of that bad strategic planning and allowing the Congress to lose the fiscal discipline. And unfortunately, and this saddens me, but you and I both know people in the agency. This is right out of the writings of bin Laden. Bin Laden said in 1998, 99, he'd hit America. America would overreact, spend trillions of dollars bombing mud huts and sand pits, and he would weaken the American empire. And so right now he's dead, but it's probably three nothing bin Laden top of the fifth inning because everything he said that we were to do, we did.

25:16And we have a more divided country. We have the Patriot Act, which gives us less civil liberties. We have this national security state and the NSA overseeing everything, which may or may not make us safer in some ways, but certainly less free. So here we are. What am I missing, sir? No. And then you throw in the economic disaster of 2008 into the mix. I'd like to just also pick at a thread that the way that you've just laid it all out there, that for Putin, I mean, the damage that the decision to go to war in Iraq has caused, not just for US foreign policy and perception of the US, but also for people around the world like Putin, who saw the US evolved expressly in regime change.

26:01And what you look at Putin's speeches from back then, you know, once the honeymoon period of counterterrorism was over, and it was over pretty quickly, by the way, with Putin's regime, what could he point to? He said, well, this is a regime that just does what it wants, the US. And if you look at Putin's Munich security speech in 2007, he's calling for an overhaul of the post-Cold War international security system. He said that the US is an empire. It's using freedom and democracy as a way to boss other countries around. He says, that's not true democracy. Anthony, it's basically the same speech as he gave on the eve of the war in Ukraine with Xi, that joint conference.