An undeniable, unpleasant, and intriguing truth: The Soviets were usually much better at espionage than either the Americans or the Brits. German fascists, who once upon a time also had a substantial fan club in the West and a ruthless police state at home, didn’t do nearly as well as less sophisticated Russians. The Anglo-Americans improved as they got bigger and more battle-scarred, but they never replicated the successes that the Soviets had so often. Calder Walton, an American academic at Harvard who trained at Cambridge University with Christoper Andrews, perhaps the most renowned scholar of spooky things, limns well in Spies the enormous advantages the Soviets had early on, after World War I, and into the 1940s. Moscow could then rally communist idealism and anti-fascism to its cause. As Walton wryly notes, "On the eve of World War II, thanks to its Cambridge recruits, Soviet intelligence perversely had more graduates of British universities than Britain’s own intelligence services, MI5 and MI6, whose few officers had military backgrounds, not university educations."
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