During the cold war were there any acts of cooperation or kindness between the soviet and western spies and / or spy agencies ?
I’ve read a lot about that era and can’t recall any. They didn’t kill each other out of hand, notwithstanding James Bond and other Hollywood fantasies, but otherwise were pretty hard-nosed with each other.
I don’t know whether to characterize it as “kindness”, “decency”, or “superstition”, but:
In March 1968, Soviet ballistic missile submarine K-129 sank in the Northern Pacific with the loss of all hands. The Soviets never could find or recover the sub.
The US commissioned a covert recovery ship, the Glomar Explorer, to locate and salvage the wreck. The ship’s cover would be exploratory deep-sea strip mining, but the real mission would be recovery of Soviet nuclear missiles and torpedos, samples of the submarine’s technology and equipment, and codebooks and orders.
They succeeded to a limited extent in July 1974, when the Explorer retrieved the forward third of the ship. This section of the ship at least partially fulfilled the mission objectives, but also contained the remains of six members of K-129’s company.
These unfortunates were given, by the CIA and the Navy, a full Soviet-style memorial service and military burial at sea. This was filmed, and a copy of the film along with the submarine’s ship bell was eventually given to the Russian government.
All sailors, even military ones who face each other in combat, have a common opponent that unites them: the sea itself. Although Operation Azoran was a very sneaky and audacious spy op, the folks involved had the decency to do the right thing by the victims of the accident that made it possible.