Espionage also known as spying is something humans have done for thousands of years from the early times when kingdoms fought for territory, resources, or slaves. Spies would sneak their way into enemy territory and gather information for their allies about things like what resources the enemy has or how many warriors and what tactics they will use in war. Spies that were successful at accomplishing their mission would return to their home as heroes with important knowledge that could make the difference between winning and losing during a war. However the life of a spy was and still is risky as those who are caught would usually be imprisoned but most of the time they would be executed. The job of a spy is to find out information as governments and businesses often hide their most important information allowing only a few trustworthy people mohave access to these things so spies are hired by enemies of these people to find out this information and bring it back to them. Spies are a very important piece of arsenal during a war for a government as having access to confidential information of your opponent and being one step ahead of them can win a war. A great example of this would be the Mongols who thanks to spies were able to conquer most of Asia by using spies on horseback to collect information throughout the continent and bring it back to Genghis Khan so that they could adapt their war strategies to defeat the different kingdoms of Asia. As said by the book Spy : Discover the world of espionage spies can even change the course of history.
the cold war was known as the golden age for espionage. If the cold war had turned into an actual war then all this espionage would have been a secondary support so that the armies that actually went to war would be well prepared against the enemy, however since this was a cold war and no fighting actually occurred espionage took a central role throughout the cold war because it made each of the competing parties feel as if they have an upper hand on their opponent in case an actual wear were to break out. This caused there to be a huge amount of money and resources invested into espionage.Much of the information that was being searched for by spies were military positions, resources, and tactics that would have been used if the cold war had developed into an actual war. For example the United states wanted information on soviet technology such as new tanks that were being developed in case that a war broke out they would know how to defend themselves before they went into actual battle. During this time period there were two dominant espionage agencies. In the United States of America there was the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) which not only organized espionage on the US’s part but also took care of ensuring that the “free world” was protected from the communists. In what is now known as Russia but used to be called the Soviet Union there was the KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti) which was overall the slavic version of the CIA as it served the same purpose . The KGB was successful in collection scientific and technological information on revolutionary improvements in encryption, jet propulsion, and radars.
Though the information that was obtained through espionage didn’t commonly make itself useful throughout the cold war however there were a few instances where the information that was obtained by spies proved itself to be valuable one of these examples would be during the cuban missile crisis. In the early 1960’s a colonel of the soviet military intelligence called Oleg Penkovsky. Oleg Penkovsky’s knowledge on the Soviet’s military resources, strategies and plans helped president John F. Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crises as the information that was received helped the CIA and the American government and military to calculate the missile capacity of the soviets and what Nikita Khrushchev (Soviet leader at the time) was willing to do. This gave the americans an advantage because it is not only important to know what the enemy is capable of doing but also the intentions and limitations so that it is easier to pinpoint any weaknesses and one of the Soviet Union’s weaknesses was the paranoia that the soviet government had of a nuclear attack by Nato.
Through time as governments began to understand each other more through espionage some of the tension between opposing parties was lost. This is because during the cold war people didn’t want to be surprised as having knowledge on what will happen gives everyone a sense of confidence and security, because of this some historians belief that spying could have been one of the factors that contributed for the lack of a full on war between communism and capitalism.