Will I love Spies?

I was drawn to Walton because he shows the CIA and other services evolving over decades, almost like living ecosystems.

What I valued most was how he highlights technology’s growing role in shaping intelligence work—how tools and data became as decisive as human agents. That perspective mirrored my own fascination with labyrinths: systems that adapt, feed on complexity, and reshape themselves in response to pressure.

Walton’s history is sweeping yet precise, and it left me seeing the intelligence world as something organic, not static—a reminder that secrecy and technology co-evolve, often faster than our ability to control them.

The secret world has been my area of research and writing for several years, so this account of the 100-year saga of intelligence rivalry between Russia and the West puts my writing about undercover WW2 operations in its proper context.

More than that, the century-old secret East-West war helps to make sense of the Russia-Ukraine war that started in February 2022. Always gripping, the stories hold the attention, partly because much detail is consigned to the many pages of notes. When reading a book like this, I often find as much value in the footnotes as in the main text,… show more.