The Great Cold War: A Journey through the Hall of Mirrors (review)

Several years ago, in the Spring 2004 issue of the Journal of Cold War Studies, I made a plea for more attention to the roles of intelligence activities and assessments in historiography of the Cold War. Gordon Barrass, who served as chief of the Assessments Staff of the Cabinet Office in London and was a member of Great Britain's Joint Intelligence Committee in the latter Cold War years, has now provided a substantial contribution toward that end—a contribution foreshadowed in the subtitle of his book. In seeking to deal in some 400 pages with the ColdWar as a whole, he has necessarily had to be selective in his coverage but has sought to address large questions: "Why did [the Cold War] start? Why did it last as long as it did? And why did it end the way it did?" (p. 3). He seeks to deal with these questions throughout and then turns, in a brief concluding chapter, to what he sees as five myths about the Cold War.

Barrass has based his account on a wide selection of published sources, including some using recently available archival materials, with substantial use also of roughly 100 interviews he conducted with former Soviet officials and Western specialists on Soviet affairs and the Cold War. This approach has advantages but also hazards. On the whole, his approach has permitted him to provide a more lively and informative study, although regrettably the book contains errors that were originally made in works cited by the author or that are the fault of the author alone.

Barrass draws attention to intelligence assessments and the role of intelligence—and military strategic considerations—particularly in dealing with Western, but also Soviet, policies in Europe in the last decade of what he calls the Great Cold War. Barrass's book is, in some respects, more realistic than many accounts, although curiously he sometimes slights the diplomatic dimension. He has on the whole a good feel for the interaction of the two sides. Barrass is well aware of the importance of adversaries' perceptions and misperceptions, while also noting that sometimes adversaries are in conflict because of accurate perceptions of the objectives of the other side—as in the cases of both Iosif Stalin and Harry Truman (an instance he correctly cites).

The first myth about the Cold War that Barrass says "needs to be slain" is that "the Soviet Union was not ever a real threat to the West" (p. 401). He contends that, on the contrary, the USSR was a "serious threat"—and that unless such a threat was recognized, Western policymakers could not devise and carry out a necessary strategy, such as containment in the case of the Great Cold War. I would not disagree with the argument that the rationale for a strategy must be sufficiently convincing to gain necessary public support for that strategy and that the rationale must be, as Dean Acheson said, "clearer than the truth." But that is different from an intelligence assessment that the Soviet Union posed a serious threat. I would also not disagree with the judgment that the Soviet Union's policies posed a serious geopolitical threat that needed to be countered and contained, but Barrass should have been more precise. If the question is whether the Soviet Union ever posed a direct threat of launching a war against the West, the evidence makes clear that there was never such a threat. There were, to be sure, serious dangers that a large-scale war might break out through accidental or unauthorized actions. Some people also believed that Soviet-controlled global Communism, via its industrial buildup, political discipline, and even ideological appeal, posed "a serious threat," but I am sure that is not what Barrass meant to reaffirm. He does not explain what threat he regards as having been serious, but not seen as such.

Barrass's second "troubling" myth is the belief that "détente...