Russia

Calder Walton is interviewed about the defection of the Russian cipher clerk, Igor Gouzenko, in September, 1945, who revealed to Canadian authorities a web of Soviet espionage spun throughout Canada, with threads running through atomic military research, Canadian parliament, and across the world — in Washington DC, London, and Moscow. Seventy-five years later, we can observe how this single defection sent ripples and cracks throughout the global military and political landscape.

Calder Walton recounts the history of World War II which shows that Britain and the United States were in a Cold War with the Soviet Union before they knew it. The same is true today: Britain and the United States are in a Cold War with Russia whether policymakers in London and Washington like it or not.

Matt Chorley is joined by two experts on Russia — Dr Jonathan Eyal from RUSI and Dr Calder Walton from Harvard — to dissect the Russia report, published by the British Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee, and look at the country's history of interference abroad.

Calder Walton writes that autocratic regimes — China, Russia and Iran — have been using social media to try to influence U.S. public opinion. History reveals how and why a one-party regime used disinformation to salvage its reputation following a disaster — the Soviet Union's 1986 Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe, whose history also reveals how such disinformation can be countered.

The KGB was the notorious strong arm of the Kremlin. Run afoul and you died. Learn all about them in a podcast featuring a discussion of Calder Walton's article, "Spies, Election Meddling, and Disinformation: Past and Present," which appeared in the Brown Journal of World Affairs.

Dan Snow is joined by Calder Walton to talk about whether there was a huge intelligence failure around the outbreak of the pandemic, but also whether our intelligence communities are properly organized to realistically evaluate the real nature of the threats to our societies. He also has a bold idea to help avoid a future recurrence.

Calder Walton describes four ways how intelligence services are certain to contribute to defeating COVID-19 and why pandemic intelligence will become a central part of future U.S. national security.

This article, an exercise of applied history, has two aims: first, to understand the history of Soviet disinformation, and second, to make sense of Western efforts to counter it during the Cold War. Doing so provides policy-relevant conclusions from history about countering disinformation produced by Russia and other authoritarian regimes today.

Emily Whalen reviews Anatomies of Revolution by George Lawson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

Calder Walton  analyzes Brexit's cascading series of repercussions for British intelligence.  He recommends that the UK invest in cyber/digital intelligence as a way out of the strategic intelligence quagmire that Brexit has placed it in.