Soviet Intelligence and the Cold War: The "Small" Committee of Information, 1952?53

During the Cold War, when huge armies remained frozen along the frontiers between the adversary blocs, intelligence agencies acquired extraordinary importance. Some have argued that diplomatic historians, who lack access to intelligence materials, will not be able to write a definitive Cold War history, especially on the Soviet side. Some historians question this assumption. For instance, John Lewis Gaddis and John Le Carré argue that even if intelligence had not existed, few events in the history of the Cold War would have come out differently.1 The authors of a recent volume on the KGB contend that in most Cold War crises, “Soviet intelligence [was] better, often vastly better, than that available to the West.” But the same book led one reviewer to conclude that the ability of the Soviet Politburo “to make sense of the political intelligence … was impaired by their own ideological blinders and an incurable addiction to conspiracy theory.”2 In other words, Stalin and his successors had excellent spies, but they were of limited aid in waging the Cold War. Clearly, any study of the relationship between political leadership and intelligence services confronts two questions: the character of intelligence estimates and their impact on political leadership.