Editing Cold War espionage (section)

==Historiography==
{{Further|History of espionage}}
After 1990s new memoirs and archival materials have opened up the study of espionage and intelligence during the Cold War. Scholars are reviewing how its origins, its course, and its outcome were shaped by the intelligence activities of the United States, the Soviet Union, and other key countries.<ref>Raymond L.  Garthoff, "Foreign intelligence and the historiography of the Cold War." ''Journal of Cold War Studies'' 6.2 (2004): 21-56.</ref><ref>Michael F. Hopkins, "Continuing debate and new approaches in Cold War history." ''Historical Journal'' 50.4 (2007): 913-934.</ref>  Special attention is paid to how complex images of one's adversaries were shaped by secret intelligence that is now publicly known.<ref>Paul Maddrell, ed. ''The Image of the Enemy: Intelligence Analysis of Adversaries Since 1945'' (Georgetown UP, 2015).</ref>

The Soviet Union proved especially successful in placing spies in Britain and West Germany. It was largely unable to repeat its successes in the 1930s in the United States.  NATO, on the other hand, also had a few successes of importance, of whom [[Oleg Gordievsky]] was perhaps the most influential. He was a senior KGB officer who was a double agent on behalf of Britain's MI6, providing a stream of high-grade intelligence that had an important influence on the thinking of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. He was spotted by [[Aldrich Ames]] a Soviet agent who worked for the CIA, but he was successfully exfiltrated from Moscow in 1985.  Biographer Ben McIntyre argues he was the West's most valuable human asset, especially for his deep psychological insights into the inner circles of the Kremlin.  He convinced Washington and London that the fierceness and bellicosity of the Kremlin was a product of fear, and military weakness, rather than an urge for world conquest. Thatcher and Reagan concluded they could moderate their own anti-Soviet rhetoric, as successfully happened when [[Mikhail Gorbachev]] took power, thus ending the Cold War.<ref>Ben Macintyre, ''The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War'' (2018). [https://www.amazon.com/Spy-Traitor-Greatest-Espionage-Story/dp/1101904194/ excerpt]</ref>