A former KGB officer I once interviewed in Moscow in the 1990s aired a common complaint among Soviet spies: their bosses never trusted them. No matter how good the intelligence they passed on, little seemed to happen as a result.
The ghost of one of the most notorious spies in history, Richard Sorge, would surely have agreed. As a Soviet agent in Tokyo, Sorge warned Stalin that Hitler was about to invade the Soviet Union in June 1941. But the Soviet dictator suspected Sorge was a double agent and dismissed him as a brothel-running “shit”, according to Stalin’s biographer Stephen Kotkin. Disowned by Stalin and denied the chance of a spy swap, Sorge was hanged by the Japanese in 1944, only to be declared a Hero of the Soviet Union 20 years later.
One of the strongest explanations for why the west won the cold war is because democracies are better at processing information. Inevitably, given the inward-looking nature of their regimes, autocrats look at the world in fairground mirrors. Almost everything they see is distorted by palace politics — and accurate information is all too often discounted. Democracies can suffer from some terrible blind spots of their own (illusory weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2003, for instance) but the free flow of conflicting views allows them to respond rapidly to changing circumstances and correct errors. The information that fuels their decisions is more trustworthy and useful.