[2011]

Intelligence was a major strand in the Cold War for East and West alike. The two sides started from different positions, with very different standards of openness and secrecy. Soviet intelligence could exploit the West's relatively open society and draw on the wide swathes of information available from it, while the West was confronted throughout by the Soviet regime's ferocious level of secrecy. Yet both gave high priority to their intelligence effort. Soviet secrecy made the West depend extensively on it, while despite Western openness the Soviet regime could not believe anything it had not learned by covert means.

Intelligence's institutional positions also differed greatly in the two systems. In the Soviet Union it was part of the ruling elite, while in the West it had some bureaucratic independence from policy and (in the United States) could speak with varied voices. The Soviet system was ruthless and professional in collecting Western secrets and protecting its own but was weak in assessing what they meant. The United Kingdom and United States for their part went some way to redress the information imbalance by drawing on their Second World War intelligence standards and applying them to the post-war Soviet target. But for both sides the struggle to acquire knowledge of the adversary remained a mixture of success and failure up to the end. It was a continuous struggle on a quasiwartime scale between the two intelligence systems that were in some ways replicas of each other, and in others as different as the regimes they represented. This was the intelligence war, in some ways a model of the Cold War as a whole.

But what difference did it make? This chapter focuses on intelligence's product and its effects on its governments’ politico-strategic policies. This was not intelligence's only influence on them: it had other applications with less direct top-level effects, and these are summarised here. But the effects of its information and assessments are the main subject. The examination of the subject is limited. The chapter refers to the ‘East’ and ‘West’ but restricts itself mainly to the United States and United Kingdom plus some comparisons with the Soviet Union, omitting allies and satellites. China is also ignored. I hope it will encourage more extensive commentary elsewhere.