The Sword and The Shield by Christopher Andrew is perhaps the most complete history of an intelligence agency ever written. Having first read the second volume The World was Going Our Way, The KGB and the Battle for the Third World, I resolved to expand my knowledge by reading the acclaimed first volume. There is no getting around the fact the The Sword and the Shield is an extremely tedious and somewhat cumbersome read. The author constantly exposes the reader to hundreds of sources, agents, and operations that are hard to keep straight. The author also expects that the reader will have a high degree of knowledge about the Cold War and the Soviet Union, and for that reason I do not recommend this book to readers unfamiliar with those topics. Because of the tediousness and seriousness of the topic I have only awarded the book 4 stars.
That being said, for anyone interested in studying intelligence or the Soviet Union, this book is a must read. The author successfully promotes the claim that the KGB and the Soviet Security Apparatus was much more crucial to the survival and promotion of the Soviet State than recent experts on the Soviet Union have claimed. He does this by tracing the history of the Soviet Intelligence from the Bolshevik revolution until the dissolution of the Soviet State in 1991. Perhaps the most interesting part of the book is the early history of the KGB which is mostly unknown to students of the Cold War. The KGB from the 1920s until the mid 1950s and early 1960s was perhaps the most successful intelligence agency agency of its time. Achieving high level penetrations of government institutions in almost every western country, while at the same time assassinating and terrorizing opponents of the Soviet State both domestic and abroad. The earlier successes of the KGB did much to enhance the reputation of the KGB as the brutal and and brilliant intelligence service that it is often portrayed as in today's popular culture. The TV show The Americans as well as recent movies such as Salt are current examples of the KGB's mythical status in popular culture. Despite the KGB's early successes the author portrays the KGB as much less efficient than the official histories of the KGB and its successor agency, The SVR, would suggest. For all the KGB's success western intelligence agencies, particular the agencies of the United States and Great Britain, had largely leveled the playing field by the 1960s. The KGB collected immense amounts of intelligence, yet often failed to produce objective analysis of the intelligence it collected due to fears of subverting the widely held beliefs and biases of senior party officials. The KGB also spend enormous amount of time and effort countering ideological subversion from dissidents in the Soviet Union, including Jehovah's witnesses, members of the protest movement Solidarity, and prominent intellectuals critical of the Soviet State. The author suggests that the pursuit of individuals who did not prove a serious threat to the Soviet State was a waste of time and resources. Perhaps the most frightening aspect of the book was the ingenious methods soviet intelligence used to convince individuals in positions of power to spy or work for the Soviet Union. Threats of violence, sexual blackmail, harassment, "false flag" operations, and even love from spouses who were KGB officers were used to compromise and convince intelligence targets. In some ways the book could even be considered a manual of how the KGB compromised and recruited intelligence targets. The ruthlessness of KGB blackmail operations reached the point where targets sometimes committed suicide to escape the clutches of the KGB.For anyone interested in the history of the Soviet Union and the methods of the KGB this book is essential to understanding the role and function of the KGB in the Soviet Union.
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