CIA spies lose faith

With its grim John le Carré atmosphere, communist Eastern Europe in the late 1980s was a melancholy, out-at-elbow place. The Estonian capital of Tallinn crawled with Russian money-changers (‘Comrade, we do deal?’). The television in my hotel room was detuned from capitalist Finnish to Soviet channels, but I was able to pick up Miami Vice from across the Gulf of Finland. Guests were not allowed to visit the 21st floor, which officially did not exist. The KGB apparently had an office up there where they monitored Helsinki radio waves and the hotel’s 60-odd bugged rooms. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the wallet-thin Minox camera had been invented in Tallinn (by one Walter Zapp, in 1936). It was a favourite with Cold War spooks.

George Orwell had coined the term ‘cold war’ in 1945 to denote antagonisms between the capitalist West and the godless monolith that was Stalin’s Soviet Union. At its peak in the early 1960s the war involved botched assassination attempts and ill-fated East-West infiltration missions from Tehran to Guatemala City. In Scott Anderson’s analysis, the Cold War froze people’s ability to think, killed off interesting thoughts, interesting people and interesting ideas. In the end, he reckons, the United States was seen as just ‘one more empire that lied and stole and invaded’.

Fidel Castro’s own brand of Cold War balcony-ranting served merely to draw a line in the sand through the West Indies and beyond, which one crossed at mortal risk. Us or Them? Even Americans of moderation and decency were tempted to commit grotesque acts of political violence in the name of ‘free world’ values. Happily, such foolishness is over for the moment, but what a story it makes.