If you want to understand why the Cold War felt so anxious, so personal, and so corrosive to trust, you could do worse than start with Alger Hiss. Few figures better capture the era’s deepest fear: that the enemy wasn’t just out there, but might already be inside. For decades, Hiss was not merely a … Read more
Cold War espionage was not merely a contest of secrets. It was a struggle of belief systems, a conflict in which intelligence services functioned as guardians of ideology as much as collectors of information. From the late 1940s through the collapse of the Soviet Union, espionage was justified, shaped, and sustained by competing worldviews that … Read more
I have always thought of the Cold War less as a single conflict than as a long, anxious conversation conducted in whispers. It was a war without battle lines, without formal declarations, and—most strikingly—without a clear beginning or end. Instead, it unfolded in shadows: in embassy corridors, anonymous apartments, university common rooms, and government offices … Read more