I should advise readers at the outset that this important monograph gets off to a bad start. A list of Russian intelligence jargon contains at least half a dozen disconcerting mistakes of one sort or another. The text was obviously completed in too much of a hurry, with little regard for consistency. An additional problem is that Jonathan Haslam seems to treat all the sources he uses as equally reliable, including books written by ‘former’ KGB operatives, sometimes with Western coauthors who lack the essential language skills. This is particularly relevant because, despite the blurb, Haslam has disappointingly little to say about the massive Soviet and post-1991 disinformation operations that are currently becoming almost as aggressive and dangerous as they were during the Cold War.

That said, Near and Distant Neighbours is worth reading for two reasons. Haslam rightly mentions that previous books on the subject have failed to cover in sufficient detail the activities of the Soviet military espionage agencies, notably what he calls ‘the Fourth’ and the GRU, and link them up with the exploits abroad of the KGB and its predecessors and successors (which, of course, were also to some extent military – I was a colonel – rather than civilian entities, though Haslam appears not to realise this). Sometimes the two sets of organisations cooperated with one another, but frequently there was friction and sometimes downright rivalry and hostility between them, as one would expect. In this connection it is surprising that the book contains not a single reference to even one of the books by Viktor Suvorov (a pseudonym), whose real name is mentioned only in passing.

The other reason why it is worth reading this study is the attention it gives to the role of codes and ciphers in Soviet security operations and the challenges of decrypting secret foreign messages. The author has much of interest to say about Russian pre-revolutionary as well as Soviet efforts in this crucial area, despite his concentration on HUMINT (human intelligence), as opposed to SIGINT (signals and electronic intelligence), a term he scrupulously avoids. How well lay readers of this magazine will understand the sections on this subject can be here tested by a quotation:

These intercepts had originally been encrypted with a numeric cipher superenciphered through the addition of a numeric key stream taken from a one-time pad. The British had introduced mechanical comparators as a means of breaking Enigma. A comparator was a device used to count the coincidences of words or letters.

Unfortunately, the implications for espionage in the digital age are not addressed, and there is no examination of the work of the Federal Agency for Government Communications and Information, now part of the extremely important Federal Protective Service of the Russian Federation.

All this is a pity, because Haslam’s conclusions deserve our attention and are worth quoting at some length. ‘Putin’s message in 1999 was twofold: reestablishment of order and restoration of the Soviet Union, not as a Communist entity but as an imperial stronghold. Inevitably, practices rapidly reverted to those of an era we had all thought dead and buried.’ He notes, ‘Instead of the Soviet Union’s collapse leading directly to the dismantling of the security organs, a decade later they had taken over the Russian Federation.’ A former KGB general is quoted as saying, ‘There is nobody today who can say no to the FSB … Communist ideology has gone, but the methods and psychology of its secret police have remained.’ The book ends:

We began with the emergence of the Cheka out of the dust of Russia’s ancien régime. We end with Russia incorporated by the diehards of the Cheka. Even the GRU has rediscovered a role hitherto lost in the mists of the past. The history of the Soviet intelligence services thus becomes not just an end in itself but also a vantage point into the story of the present, a state within a state retreating into the past with the destruction of pluralism and the recentralisation of power then exerting itself to determine the future through a process of stealthy expansion into the former territories of the Soviet Union.

If at least some of the readers of this book accept Haslam’s conclusions, the publication of his wide-ranging research, despite some weaknesses and gaps, should be warmly welcomed.