Jonathan Haslam, Near and Distant Neighbors: A New History of Soviet Intelligence. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015. xxiv + 367 pp. $30.00

The Soviet intelligence and security services had a prominent voice within Soviet policymaking circles and were also powerful instruments at its disposal, no matter who the incumbent. What is interesting, though, is the degree to which scholarship has often concentrated on the domestic security dimension more than external operations. To an extent, this is because of the way foreign espionage and internal security were largely the duties of a single agency—known as the KGB during the final decades of its existence—and the former was often subordinated to the latter. For the Cheka, the first Bolshevik security agency, the primary operations abroad were focused on watching, suborning, and even killing émigrés and other political challengers, rather than the usual intelligence-gathering operations we might expect. The scant amount of scholarship on the Soviet foreign intelligence service has tended, not least given the arcane nature of the subject, to come from defectors or...