The Cold War: Arms and Espionage
The weapons and intelligence race that fed a decades-long conflict
Onstage September 6 through October 14, 2018 at Lantern Theater Company, Tom Stoppard’s Hapgood centers on the intrigue and espionage of British intelligence officers operating during the late days of the Cold War.
When World War II ended, two superpowers emerged: the United States and the Soviet Union. Even while fighting together on the side of the Allies, the two countries distrusted each other. The U.S. was wary of communism and Stalin, and the Soviet Union resented America’s late entry into the war. In postwar Europe, the Soviet Union installed communist regimes in the Eastern Bloc countries it liberated, while the U.S. and Great Britain worked together to support capitalism and the democracies of Western Europe. The U.S. offered aid to countries rebuilding after the war; Russia refused to allow its allies to accept this help.
In 1949, the U.S., the UK, and their western allies formed NATO to protect against Soviet influence and aggression, while the Soviet Union and its eastern allies formed the Warsaw Pact. That same year, the Soviet Union successfully tested their first atomic bomb, setting off an arms race that increased tensions dramatically. The U.S. developed and tested a hydrogen bomb, creating a 25-square-mile fireball. The Soviet Union did the same. American civilians, worried about the threat of Soviet domination and nuclear devastation, built bomb shelters in their homes and trained their children to duck and cover.
The Cold War eased after Stalin’s death in 1953, then reignited when the Cuban Missile Crisis placed Soviet missiles just off American shores in 1962. Through it all, the threat of mutually assured destruction demanded an uneasy peace; knowing the destruction the nuclear weapons in both countries’ growing arsenals would bring, neither country was willing to make the first move.
Tensions cooled again in the 1970s, when Nixon attempted diplomatic solutions rather than militarized ones, and the two countries signed a treaty promising not to build more nuclear weapons. This détente, however, did not last. When Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980, he adopted an aggressive stance toward Russia, and a new arms race began on a new battlefield: space.
Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, or Star Wars, was a research program aimed at building technologically advanced, laser-based weapons and defense systems that could intercept ballistic missiles high above the Earth. The program was enormously expensive and ambitious; after several years and billions of dollars, no space weapons were developed. But creating weapons was only one goal: it was also a form of economic warfare, attempting to force Russia to overspend on defense in order to keep up.
The arms race demanded that each side have an idea of what their opponent was working on, and espionage was an important tool in gathering that information. The CIA and the KGB spied and surveilled, sending sleepers and double agents overseas to gather intel on the enemy. The U.S. and UK spies were technologically advanced, using codebreakers, bugs, and spy planes, while the Soviet Union favored direct intelligence gathering by agents. This low-tech method was extremely effective, and their extensive spy network was operational through the fall of the USSR and beyond.
Neither side was immune to espionage disasters, though. The U.S. dealt with moles, with Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen simultaneously selling U.S. secrets to the Soviets, while the Soviet Union suffered high-profile defectors. One of the most famous was Vitaly Yurchenko, a KGB colonel who defected to the U.S. when he thought he was dying. For months, he enthusiastically shared Soviet secrets, keeping a pad by his bed in case he remembered something overnight. But after finding out he was healthy, he became disillusioned, and one day simply walked out of a Washington, D.C. restaurant and into the Soviet embassy. The Soviet Union welcomed him back, despite knowing about all the secrets he divulged, thanks to Ames and Hanssen’s reports.
Hapgood is set during the Cold War’s end days. American intelligence and their British allies continued to spy on what Reagan dubbed the “Evil Empire,” but the Soviet Union’s new leadership knew the end was near. Mikhail Gorbechev worked to democratize Russia and allowed the communist regimes in eastern Europe to fall in an attempt to revitalize Russia’s economy. After the USSR broke up in 1991, the Cold War was essentially over. But old spy habits were hard to break. According to Stella Rimington, who was part of the first friendly visit between MI5 and the KGB, the waiters at their Moscow dinner were spies and the dinner was recorded.
“Suddenly we didn’t care at all,” she said. “There was a hysteria around the table so we all started saying various things that caused the waiters to twitch and raise their eyebrows. It was quite the weirdest day of my life.”
Hapgood is onstage at the Lantern September 6 through October 14, 2018. Visit our website for tickets and information.
