The Cold War started earlier than we think — and maybe never ended at all. Historian Calder Walton says understanding the US-Soviet conflict prepares us for this era of tensions with Russia and China.

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.

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.

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.

This episode of Horns of a Dilemma touches on whether the failure to properly anticipate and warn about the novel coronavirus constitutes an intelligence failure, what changes might be required in the intelligence community in the wake of the pandemic, and what type of investigation or inquiry might be appropriate in order to learn lessons and incorporate changes for both the intelligence community and the whole of government moving forward.

Spycraft has always excited people, with stories of daring agents using high-tech wizardry to bust terrorists in the act. But the reality is much less glamorous—and much more dangerous. As spying entered the 1960s, technology started to play a serious role in getting intel. 

Dan Snow meets Calder Walton for a martini and an overview of Russia's history of interference in foreign elections.