Calder Walton: History Is More Interesting Than “007”

Ernest May Fellow in History and Policy Calder Walton has had a lot to write about since starting his fellowship this year. An expert in intelligence history and implications for intelligence communities and policymakers today, Walton has written several articles that connect his research with recent headlines on Russia’s interference in U.S. elections. “From my perspective,” says Walton, “The more someone studies intelligence history, the more one sees echoes from the past.”

Walton has had an interest in intelligence history since reading histories of Cold War espionage by the world’s leading intelligence historian, Christopher Andrew. While working on his Ph.D. at Trinity College, Cambridge, Andrew offered Walton the opportunity to help him research the official history of the British Security Service, MI5. It took him “about a nanosecond” to accept.

“This is an exciting area where one can do a lot of original research, because new records are always being released,” says Walton. What he found, however, was not the intense action of a James Bond novel.

“There was no such thing as a ‘license to kill,’ for example,” says Walton. “Fleming invented Bond as a sort of escape from the monotonous reality of filing and looking up information and so on, which he experienced working in British intelligence.”

But the declassified British and American intelligence records available are, to Walton, “really much better than any spy novel or James Bond story.”  For Walton, the interest also lies in what these records can tell us about the uncertainties of the present. This, he says, is exemplified by the recent focus on ties between Russia and members of the Trump team.

“This isn’t actually the first time that U.S. intercepts have revealed the Kremlin’s meddling and penetration of the White House,” says Walton. He cites the Venona decrypts, which revealed an astonishing level of infiltration by the Soviets into the U.S. government. Among those implicated, were two high-ranking officials appointed by FDR’s Administration.

Still, Walton cautions against taking these parallels at face value. “We need to be careful about making broad analogies,” he says. “But helping policymakers understand these similarities is an incredibly important role for historians to play.”