Near and Distant Neighbours is the first ever substantiated and complete history of Soviet intelligence Based on a mass of newly declassified Russian secret intelligence documentation it reveals the true story of Soviet intelligence from its very beginnings in right through to the end of the Cold War Covering both main branches of Soviet espionage - civilian and military - Jonathan Haslam charts the full range of the Soviet intelligence effort and the story of its developmentin cryptography disinformation special forces and counter-intelligence In a tragic irony an organization that so casually disposed of others critically depended upon the human factor Due to their lack of expertise and technological know-how from early on the Soviets were forced to rely heavily on secret agents instead of the more sophisticated code-breaking techniques of other intelligence agencies But in this they were highly successful recruiting spy rings such as the infamous Cambridge Five in the s Had it not been for Soviet espionage againstBritains code-breaking effort during the Second World War Stalin might never have won the victory that later enabled him to dominate half of Europe Similarly espionage directed at his allies enabled the Soviets to build an atomic bomb earlier than expected and to take calculated risks in post-wardiplomacy such as his audacious blockade of Berlin which led to the Berlin Airlift Khrushchevs denunciation of Stalin in alienated many of the foreign friends so valued by the Soviet intelligence services It also made new recruitment of foreign agents much more difficult as the USSR rapidly lost its glamour and ideological appeal to potential supporters in the West during the s However the gap was finally bridged through exploiting greedy and disloyal Western intelligence officers using blackmail and bribery - and with great success In fact it was theultimate irony that the KGB and GRU had never been more effective than when the Soviet Union began to collapse from within.
