Spy versus Spy: the CIA and the KGB
Any thrilling spy movie always involves a conflict between the intelligence agencies of Russia and the USA; it’s practically a genre on its own. From the James Bond series, to the Jason Bourne blockbusters, to serious films like the Good Shepherd and Munich, these stories involving some very tense relations between the two Cold War superpowers always play on the cloak-and-dagger world of international espionage.
But how did this spy game begin? What event took place that led the remaining post–World War II superpowers to create, fund, and release into the wild these agents whose specters haunt our imaginations?
It all began with the Cold War. In 1947, Harry S. Truman created the CIA as a means of gathering all foreign intelligence in one department, while the KGB was created in 1954 as a military service after its preceding agencies didn’t meet the needs of the Soviet Union at the time. These two intelligence agencies would then embark on several missions that would affect the world.
After World War II, the Soviets wanted to enforce the orthodoxy of the international communist movement while the United States went of the defensive, countering the Soviet push by adopting containment, which was to stop the spread of communism. This lead to the Truman Doctrine that divided the world into two—democratic countries versus totalitarian regimes—and the Marshall Plan that would fund Western European allies like Germany and France but was not able to break through to the Eastern half which was controlled by the Soviet Union.
Intelligence or the knowledge of each other’s plans was vital at this time, as both countries were readying themselves for a new war, thus heightening the tension and increasingly making intelligence gathering dangerous. This gives operatives and agents their special status because people who were recruited to these intelligence agencies had to have very specific qualifications. These agents had to gather intelligence on the intention of the opposing side, and stealing military and technological plans were high priority. Information was a highly valued commodity and men and women died for the knowledge that they had, especially when it came to nuclear weapons. There were infiltrations, sleeper agents, all the while trying to stay undetected because if they were discovered, the consequences would be catastrophic.
Though it sounds extremely exciting (and it is!), these people were handling very sensitive information that affected many lives negatively. These underground involvements led to countries falling into the hands of dictators, being split into two (North and South Korea), and the lives lost because of the vested interests of a few are immeasurable. So despite its glamorous appeal, espionage is not all tailored suits and dinner parties; in fact, they are carried out by the highly trained soldiers of these intelligence agencies in a silent war that is still being waged up to this very day. However, with technology becoming more and more sophisticated, who knows how information is being gathered by these spies in this day and age.
Spy versus spy, indeed.
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