AI Is Replacing 007 in the Espionage Arms Race
A conversation with Harvard’s Calder Walton about spies, lies and big data.
Berlin, city of spies.
Photographer: John MacDougall/AFP/Getty Images
Folks who think about such things tend to look at the great espionage battle between the US and the Soviet Union as covering the four decades of the Cold War — the heady days of the Rosenbergs, the Wall, the Cuban Missiles and the owlish George Smiley. But in truth, as Calder Walton reminds us in his remarkable new book Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West, a struggle that began after the Russian Revolution in 1917 is with us to this day.
Walton obsessively and entertainingly documents this century of the clandestine warfare, and reminds us that this contest didn’t waver during the brief enemy-of-my-enemy Alliance during World War II or in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet collapse, a period “Slow Horses” author Mick Herron memorably calls “the blissful break when the world seemed a safer place, between the end of the Cold War and about ten minutes later.”