That thing about the tin and what it says on it

The Secret State?

28/07/2010 at 08:29 (Perspectives) (Anna Chapman, Cold War, Peter Hennessey, Russian, spies, The Russian State)

A Russian beauty who is glamorous, successful and something of a social butterfly, check; with friends in high places and a dark secret, check. Kidnapped by and later fell in love with a man with a bullet in his head called Renard? Errr, not quite.

The saga of Anna Chapman et al could have fallen right out of James Bond, so you can understand why there is such a racket around the whole debacle. But should the incident also make us consider our own defence system? Or perhaps you think that we’re already doing too much?

We regularly hear reports of how Britain is turning into a nanny state where the government has a prescription for everything, even if it seems to solve nothing. But perhaps it is a matter of necessity. As a long series of unfortunate events happened to America, causing it to continuously step up its defence system, we watched on the sidelines and did the same. Because even though these events didn’t occur in Britain, they demonstrated a need for preventative protection. And we weren’t alone.

In this particular story, the element of surprise is near impossible to pinpoint. For the majority of us, the second guessing between Russia and the Allies ended with the Cold War, or at least that’s what we’ve been told in our history lessons. But how can this be the case if Russian spies, and their counterparts, aren’t just for conspiracy theorists, novelists and film makers; when in fact, they can be publicly traded like goods on the stock market?

All this espionage would have been taken as a given in the days of the Cold War. But equally, over protection was also expected. So if we remain highly defensive and still employ espionage, have we exited the Cold War? Or is it simply because we are now able to trade spies publicly that it can no longer be the Cold War? Or perhaps it’s just that we have moved into a new era, one which is tending towards the Hobbesian state of nature. In which case we have the unfortunate fortune of expecting a life that will be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and long.

Incidentally if you do want to read about the meticulous preparations that went on behind the scenes of the Cold War, you can find them in an updated version of Peter Hennessey’s book “The Secret State”.