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This event is provided to IWP by the Kosciuszko Chair as a Military Lecture in Honor of General Walter Jajko.
About the Lecture: The lecture is a primer on “peacetime” Soviet technological espionage that separates the matter into three periods: The 1920s to World War 2, the end of World War 2 to the 60s, and the 1960s to the end of the Soviet Union. It covers the motivations behind Soviet industrial espionage, its structure, its scope, the methods employed, and the Western vulnerabilities that the Soviet Union was able to take advantage of. Drawing parallels between the Cold War and the current geopolitical situation, the lecture comes to the conclusion that the Soviet technological espionage apparatus developed iteratively over the course of decades of experimentation until it affected every stage of the Western technological production process. This Soviet espionage was successful in large part because of Western naivety, policies of appeasement, and the unwillingness of Western nations to prioritize their security over the pursuit of commercial advantage by conducting trade with the Soviet Union.
About the Speaker: Conrad Bertez spent his undergraduate years at Yale focused on macroeconomic business cycles. Afterward, he worked in Switzerland as a journalist covering international finance. He then studied international economics at the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics, which led him to work as an economist at J.P. Morgan’s Europe, Middle East, and Africa emerging markets desk. There, repeated interactions with U.S. economic statecraft initiatives sparked his interest in international relations and geopolitics. Driven by a desire to contribute to U.S. international economic policy, he then spent a brief period at CSIS, where he primarily worked on issues relating to economic coercion. He is now studying at the Institute of World Politics to better understand the national security factors that drive U.S. economic statecraft initiatives.
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