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:
“Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine;Mthey are the life, the soul of reading!—take them out of this book, for instance,—you might as well take the book along with them;Mone cold external winter would reign in every page of it; restore them to the writer;Mhe steps forth like a bridegroom,—bids All-hail; brings in variety, and forbids the appetite to fail.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“War. Fighting. Men ... every man in the whole realm is in the army.... Every man in uniform ... An economy entirely geared to war ... but there is not much war ... hardly any fighting ... yet every man a soldier from birth till death ... Men ... all men for fighting ... but no war, no wars to fight ... what is it, what does it mean?””
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)
“I cannot think that espionage can be recommended as a technique for building an impressive civilisation. It’s a lout’s game.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)