The Cold War between the US and the USSR was a golden age of espionage, theft of nuclear

secrets, the CIA, the KGB spies passing information, they penetrated top secret British and American

nuclear facilities and provided Russian scientists with highly detailed information on America's

development of the atom bomb. And then the Cold War ended, right? Or maybe not. Maybe it got bigger.

The Wall Street Journal just reported that Chinese citizens have been date-crashing American

military bases. Meanwhile, in China, the once secretive Ministry of State Security just got on

social media to mobilize the Chinese public against espionage. On today's plane, a historian who

got access to some recently declassified archives says we get two things wrong about the Cold War,

the beginning and the end. That's coming up.

It's today explained, Abnoel King. Calder Walton is a historian of espionage and intelligence. And

yes, that is every bit as cool as it sounds at Harvard's Belfer Center. In a new book called

Spies, he argues that we misunderstand the Cold War. That in fact, it started a lot earlier than we

thought. This is a big claim and it's one that he's prepared to back up.

Well, this book became something of a quest for me over the last six years to travel to different

places and to use different archives, both from the Soviet block, the former Soviet Union and

Western countries. So I went to the presidential libraries across the US. I went to archives in

the UK. I interviewed people in Europe and I used Russian archives and Ukrainian archives,

but most importantly, I used a tranche of previously top secret KGB material that had been smuggled

out of the Soviet Union as it collapsed and is now parts of it are publicly available in Cambridge

in England. So this is a treasure trove of KGB secrets that it has to be said Putin's regime

does not want out in the world. So using these records allowed me to have a look at what the Soviet

intelligence services were doing from the 1920s onwards and then also marry that up weave it

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