In this interesting book Jonathan Haslam describes the institutional history of both civilian (KGB) and military (GRU) intelligence directorates in the Soviet Union, from the early days of the revolution and the Cheka to the eventual collapse in 1991. He is mainly interested in the experiences and activities of Soviet “illegals”, or Soviet citizens abroad who were in contact with local people of influence, not openly associated with embassies and other Soviet institutions, but secretly communicating with Soviet intelligence agencies. The newly formed Cheka feared “counterrevolution”, which took it in pursuit of retreating White forces and former imperial officials and people of privilege now largely in Europe (p. 42). Interestingly, the Cheka maintained a greater interest in its own exiles and domestic critics than in the powerful foreign states that presented a much greater threat to the precarious Soviet state. Soviet security officials and high leaders were heavily preoccupied with their own internal rivalries and vendettas. Among other disturbing traditions, this too, Haslam concludes, has endured in contemporary Russia. The stunning murder of former FSB official Aleksandr Litvinenko in London in 2006 for Haslam was part of this history, another example of Moscow’s willingness to pursue “vengeance” over adherence to the customary restraints of international relations (p. 5).

Haslam explains the use and evolution of both human intelligence and cryptology in the Soviet Union, although he tends to be more interested in people than computers. Stalin was as well, he argues, which left the Soviet Union comparatively unprepared to compete with the Americans in the emerging era of applied mathematics and computer technology. There were some important Soviet successes in this area, like the running of an electronic intelligence base in Lourdes in Cuba from November 1963, as well as several smaller stations protected by Soviet diplomatic premises in the United States. Overall, however, “codes and ciphers” were secondary in Soviet strategy to human intelligence (p. 235). A greater problem by the 1970s, and especially important because of this reliance on human beings, was a “crumbling of faith in the revolution at home,” which left Soviet officials abroad increasingly susceptible to the temptation of betrayal in the form of financial incentives, career dissatisfaction, or “honey traps” (p. 215). This also left the Soviets increasingly less able to attract sympathizers in positions of authority from rival states, such as the “Cambridge Five”, that proved useful in the Stalin era. “In short, the most effective agents were believers”, suggests Haslam, and the decay of the Soviet Union and its vision influenced both the Soviet “residents” abroad and their contacts (p. 84).

Haslam’s most common and lively approach is biographical. He introduces, based on his extensive reading of recently published Russian journal articles, books and document collections, odd but often intriguing characters and their unusual lives and occupations. Fyodor Karpovich Parparov, for example, lived in Germany in the 1930s, ran an export business, and successfully charmed a lonely wife of an official in the German Foreign Ministry. Her cooperation with Parparov allowed Moscow access to numerous communications produced by German diplomats in the 1930s (p. 47). Boris Bazarov, the replacement for a hard-drinking predecessor in New York who was killed in a bar fight, successfully became connected to State Department officials and people close to President Roosevelt before he was recalled to face arrest and execution in the purges (pp. 129–130). Yakov Golos, one of the founders of the U.S. Communist Party, managed to serve as a close aide to Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau (pp. 132–133). GRU agent Masha Dobrova somehow travelled on an American passport for several years in the early 1950s in Western Europe before settling in New York as a cosmetician, where her unlikely task was to befriend wives of powerful American officials. She was discovered by the Americans in 1963 and threw herself out of a window to her death (pp. 200–201, 224). Haslam also assembles fascinating material on damaging double agents, who in many cases revealed the identities of agents to the other side and thereby doomed them. Dmitrii Polyakov was one such figure (pp. 223–227). He rendered his services to the Americans for years and revealed the identities of countless Soviets abroad and Americans working for the Soviet Union, until his identity was finally confirmed by an American who was also busy betraying his employer (Aldrich Ames of the CIA, the head of counterintelligence at the CIA from 1985 to 1993). Many other American officials were eager to offer their services to the Soviet Union. Haslam shares material on statisticians and mathematicians at the National Security Agency, U.S. Army officials, Robert Hanssen of the FBI, John Walker at the naval base in Norfolk, and others.

All of this makes for fascinating reading, although Haslam might more effectively relate these many episodes to the historiography on foreign policy, international relations, and the Cold War. In places the author makes large claims without informing the reader of the larger context and debate: Khrushchev put missiles in Cuba, for example, because he was misled by a secret channel of communication between Georgii Bol’shakov and Robert Kennedy that confirmed his views about the weakness of the U.S. President (pp. 200–204); the Soviets miscalculated and were tricked by the Americans into foolishly invading Afghanistan in 1979 (pp. 245–46). His many biographical sketches are surely accurate and always interesting, but they still can be interpreted as relatively insignificant in comparison to the larger set of conceptions, anxieties, and misperceptions that provide the context to the history of foreign policy and international relations. The failure of Soviet intelligence to understand the nature and timing of the German threat in the 1930s, for example, might be better understood with a more general discussion of Soviet views about British ambitions in Eastern and Southeastern Europe, and Stalin’s fears of Western attempts to provoke conflict between the Soviet Union and Germany. Did information gleaned (or ignored) from intelligence sources even matter in this context?

Another perhaps fruitful topic and literature might be the world of socialist bloc cooperation and collaboration. Vladimir Putin, of course, famously worked in Dresden. Haslam describes the Soviet KGB compound in Karlshorst (Southeast Berlin) in helpful detail, but offers little generally on the role of the East German Stasi and the character of intra-bloc cooperation in intelligence (p. 180). Readers also might wonder about monetary matters, to the extent that the information is available, in both the Soviet Union and the United States. We can see from Haslam’s material what was and was not achieved; what perhaps mattered and what surely did not matter. So how much did the two sides pay for all this? Haslam sticks to his characters, however, offering a history of international relations and the Cold War told via their experiences and ideas. He offers considerable insight into an intriguing world, and this book will find many enthusiastic readers.