Strategic Intelligence in the Cold War and Beyond by Jefferson Adams (review)

At 142 pages before one reaches the back matter, this slender volume is more an essay than a book. Thus, one cannot realistically expect that the author, Jefferson Adams, will devote as much attention to the topics covered as one would expect from a longer work. One can also expect that some topics that merit attention will be passed over altogether.

After a brief introduction, the book is divided into seven chapters. The first chapter discusses the origins and activities of some of the key Western and Soviet-bloc intelligence organizations of the Cold War era, as well as the Israeli Mossad. The next chapter recounts some of the early post-World War II espionage developments—such as the discovery and uprooting of the vast Soviet espionage effort in the United States and elsewhere, thanks to the Venona decryption project and the cases of Kim Philby and the other members of the Cambridge Five. The third chapter focuses on some of the major events involving covert action or intelligence through 1979, including the 1953 Iranian coup, the Cuban missile crisis, the war in Vietnam, the October 1973 Arab-Israeli War, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Three Cold War spies—Gunter Guillaume, Robert Hanssen, and Ryszard Kuklinski—are discussed in chapter five, and chapter six is devoted to espionage in film and fiction. The penultimate chapter, “The Climax of the Cold War,” deals with intelligence and covert action in the 1980s from Central America to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Specifics include the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II, U.S. support for the Sandinistas, the Able Archer 83 military exercise, Soviet active measures, the Team B controversy over Soviet capabilities and intentions, and intelligence estimates of Mikhail Gorbachev’s prospects for keeping the Soviet Union intact. Adams concludes with a review of post-Cold War intelligence, including organizational developments in the United States, Russia, and Eastern Europe.

The most detailed treatment is of the evolution of the former Soviet-bloc intelligence services as their Communist governments were replaced (either permanently or temporarily) by democratic governments. Adams’s account focuses not only on the changes in names and responsibilities but also on the impact within the societies, including confronting the legacy of pervasive domestic surveillance and secret-police interference in the lives of citizens. Adams also notes the new relationships established with Western intelligence agencies—as illustrated by the Romanian foreign intelligence service’s turning over to the French security service a dossier indicating that former defense minister Charles Hernu once served as a paid asset of the Bulgarian and Soviet intelligence services.

A common, although unreasonable, complaint from reviewers is that the author failed to write the book the reviewer wishes the author had written, rather than the book he or she set out to write. What is reasonable to expect, however, is that a book’s content will match its title. In that vein, one might question, given the brevity of Adams’s monograph, his decision to allocate twenty pages to an examination of literary and cinematic spies. One might also question why Adams devotes such detailed attention to the year-long insignificant Burke’s Law television show but ignores much more celebrated films and shows such as The Ipcress File, I Spy, and Patrick McGoohan’s Secret Agent (titled Danger Man on British television).

Much of those twenty pages could have been employed to fill in the most notable gap in the book: the limited treatment of the role of technical collection in Cold War strategic intelligence. Beyond some discussion of the U-2, Adams makes some brief references to the Corona, the KH-11, and Soviet Zenit satellites. But he offers no significant analysis of the impact of those and other imagery satellites on the end of the missile gap, arms control, or other applications. Signals intelligence (SIGINT) and its communications intelligence (COMINT) component do get several mentions—with regard to the Berlin tunnel...