In this post, I am going to be looking at John L. Gaddis’s article Intelligence, Espionage, and Cold War Origins. Gaddis is best known as a post-revisionist/orthodox-leaning Cold War historian, but in this article, he specifically analyses intelligence. He asks why it has often been treated as a marginal topic in Cold War scholarship, despite being central to how the conflict unfolded. What struck me while reading this article is how he frames espionage not as an isolated world of spies and secrets, but as something that reveals the structures, strengths, and weaknesses of entire political systems.
One of Gaddis’s most interesting points is the imbalance between Soviet and Anglo-American approaches in the interwar and wartime years. While Roosevelt and Churchill refrained from spying on their Soviet ally, the USSR was laying down deep infiltration networks that would deliver spectacular results in the 1940s. Klaus Fuchs, Kim Philby, and others gave Moscow unprecedented access to nuclear developments and Western strategy. Gaddis is careful to note that this was less about superior Soviet genius than about patience and the ability to exploit ideological sympathisers and invest in the long-term. The West, by contrast, underestimated the need for such infiltration, whether out of hubris or the pragmatics of alliance politics. This juxtaposition raises questions about Western assumptions of moral superiority and the costs of that restraint.
At the same time, Gaddis highlights how the West’s attempts to penetrate Soviet society failed almost entirely. The combination of Philby’s betrayal and the closed nature of the USSR meant that the CIA’s dreams of infiltration collapsed quickly. Instead, the CIA had to find other ways of exerting influence, such as shaping elections and labour movements in Europe. Even there, success was uneven as it could steer outcomes but consistently failed to predict turning points, like Tito’s break with Stalin or the outbreak of the Korean War. Codebreaking successes like VENONA should have been a game-changer, but secrecy meant they were underused. What is made extremely clear is that the usefulness of intelligence doesn’t simply lie with having the information but is about whether political leaders can interpret and act on it. Stalin’s dismissal of Allied warnings in 1941 is a perfect example as the problem was not a lack of information, but distrust of the source.
This leads into one of Gaddis’s most insightful claims, which is that intelligence reveals as much about the systems that use it as it does about the events it describes. Democracies, for all their struggles with secrecy, may be better placed to interpret intelligence critically because of pluralism and scrutiny. Autocracies can be brilliant at infiltration but are crippled by self-deception and are unwilling to hear truths that don’t align with ideology. This distinction feels crucial because it links the world of espionage to politics in general, going above the usual spy narrative.
Another important strand in Gaddis’s article is his critique of the McCarthy era. He doesn’t downplay Soviet penetration and is clear that the Rosenbergs and Hiss cases were not fabrications, but he argues that McCarthyism poisoned the field, deterring serious scholarship and encouraging caricature rather than analysis. The result was a distorted public memory, where espionage became either scandal or silence rather than a field of historical enquiry. This connects to a wider theme I’ve noticed in intelligence history, how secrecy and political agendas have long determined not just what gets told, but how it gets framed.
Gaddis ends by calling for a different kind of intelligence history, one that distinguishes between “necessary” and “sufficient” causes, and that integrates intelligence into the broader currents of policy and world events rather than treating it as a self-contained world. This is a useful provocation to resist the temptation of spy stories for their own sake, and instead to think about how intelligence shaped, and was shaped by, the decisions of statesmen, institutions, and ideologies. For me, it emphasises the need to think about sources more deeply. Instead of just looking at the “what” of intelligence history (the facts and events), we need to pay more attention to the “how” (how we know what we know, whose stories get told) and what this can reveal about history.
What I took from Gaddis in this article is that Cold War intelligence was about the structures of trust and suspicion, the politics of interpretation, and how openness or closedness in a society affects how information is used. In that sense, studying intelligence becomes a way of studying systems themselves and a reminder that espionage is not peripheral to historical narratives, but one of the best mirrors of them.
telling tales 