Cold War espionage describes the intelligence gathering activities during the Cold War between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Because each side was preparing to fight the other, intelligence on the opposing side's intentions, military, and technology was of paramount importance. To gather this information, the two relied on a wide variety of military and civilian agencies. While several such as the CIA and KGB became synonymous with Cold War espionage, many other organizations played key roles in the collection and protection of the secction concerning detection of spying, and analysis of a wide host of intelligence disciplines.
Soviet espionage in the United States during the Cold War was an outgrowth of World War II nuclear espionage, and Cold War espionage was depicted in works such as the James Bond and Matt Helm books and movies.
| Date | Topic | Event This list is incomplete; you can help by editing it. |
|---|---|---|
| 1941-08-10 | Nuclear espionage | USSR ! The GRU reestablished contact with Klaus Fuchs, who transferred from the British Tube Alloys program to the US Manhattan Project in 1943. |
| 1942 | Nuclear espionage | USSR ! US communist Jacob Golos placed the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg cell of engineers in direct contact with Soviet intelligence operatives in New York. |
| 1944 | Nuclear espionage | USSR ! Yuri Modin began leading the Cambridge Five ring of atomic spies. |
| 1946-12-20 | VENONA Project | US ! Meredith Gardner's codebreaking discovered the Soviet spying within the Manhattan Project. |
| 1949 | Nuclear espionage | USSR ! A Mossad agent assumed, seeing CIA agent James Jesus Angleton dining with Cambridge Five mole Kim Philby, that the former had turned the latter into a triple agent. |
| 1959-06 | Corona (satellite) | US ! Discoverer 4 was the first CORONA satellite with an IMINT camera. |
| 1959-10-15 | Active measures | USSR ! Ukrainian politician Stepan Bandera was assassinated on KGB orders. |
| 1960 | 1960 U-2 incident | US ! Pilot Francis Gary Powers' Lockheed U-2 spy plane was downed by a Soviet SAM (he was convicted of espionage & exchanged in 1962 for spy Rudolph Abel.) |
| 1962-10-26 | Cuban Missile Crisis | USSR ! Under the pseudonym of Aleksandr Fomin, the KGB Station Chief in Washington proposed the crisis' diplomatic solution. |
| 1964 | Operation Neptune | USSR ! A ruse was used to indicate West Germany's spies remaining from WWII had been exposed. |
| 1985-03-23 | Military Liaison Missions | US ! On a mission to photograph a Soviet tank storage building, US intelligence officer Major Arthur D. Nicholson was killed by a Soviet soldier. |
Famous quotes containing the words cold, war and/or espionage:
“I have been told, that in some public discourses of mine my reverence for the intellect has made me unjustly cold to the personal relations. But now I almost shrink at the remembrance of such disparaging words. For persons are love’s world, and the coldest philosopher cannot recount the debt of the young soul wandering here in nature to the power of love, without being tempted to unsay, as treasonable to nature, aught derogatory to the social instincts.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I have agreed to go into the service for the war ... [feeling] that this was a just and necessary war and that it demanded the whole power of the country; that I would prefer to go into it if I knew I was to die or be killed in the course of it, than to live through and after it without taking any part in it.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“He hadn’t known me fifteen minutes, and yet he was ... ready to talk ... I was still to learn that Munshin, like many people from the capital, could talk openly about his personal life while remaining a dream of espionage in his business operations.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)