Espionage In The Cold War

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The cold war was not necessarily a shooting war like the ones that many of us have lived through over the last fourteen years. The tension and geopolitical implications of an overt action or reaction would shape relations between The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the United States (US) for over 40 years. This work will serve to identify the most effective method of espionage used by each nation throughout the Cold War. In addition to the aforementioned, it will also express which nation was able to more effectively employ espionage practices in order to gain strategic advantages throughout the entirety of the Cold War. The primary purpose of espionage was to gather information and intelligence about the enemy, their military …show more content…
The USSR was smart in how they chose to employ their spies. Initially, they acquired the services of men in Britain to spy on Britain and collect on their nuclear secrets. The intent was to try and glean information that the US might have been sharing with Britain. This was why the USSR re-established contact with Klaus Fuchs, a German-born, British citizen who had spent time working on “Tube Alloys,” the British atomic bomb project, and who had worked with the Soviets in the past. After working there for some time, Fuchs left to go to work on the Manhattan Project, a nuclear research program that was led by the US (Rhodes, 1995, pp. 51, 57, 63). The USSR gaining access to this information is just one example of how they were able to conduct espionage during this time. The information that was collected by Fuchs has been said to have been some of the more valuable information that the USSR gained on the Manhattan Project. The employment of foreign agents from outside the USSR that desired to, or who already had covertly defected to the East, proved to be the most effective and frequently used method of espionage by the …show more content…
It was a project that was headed by the U.S. Army's Signal Intelligence Service (SIS), later codenamed VENONA (a word with no special meaning), whose aim was to decipher, and possibly exploit, encrypted Soviet diplomatic communications (Venona Project). This program ran for 37 years and was a collaboration of efforts with both the US and British intelligence services. There were thousands of messages that were being intercepted and the messages were eventually categorized into five different versions of subscribers to the messages; similar to how one could choose to sign up to be on an email distribution list today. The categories of subscribers included trade representatives and the Soviet Government Purchasing Commission, diplomats i.e., members of the diplomatic corps in the conduct of legitimate Soviet embassy and consular business, the KGB, the Soviet espionage agency, GRU the Soviet Army General Staff Intelligence Directorate and attachés abroad, and GRU-Naval Soviet Naval Intelligence Staff (Benson,
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