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Rating: 
Summary: Necessary reading for the espionage historian
Review: 4 1/2 stars.As the several reviews above have noted, this is the biography of Alexander Orlov, the pre-WWII Soviet foreign intelligence general whose flight from the reaches of the NKVD was broadly and mistakenly believed by the Americans (and most Soviets) to be a genuine defection. Costello and Tsarev, through reference to genuine KGB archives, convincingly show that belief to be completely incorrect, as Orlov deceived the West for many years. This book, as it states on the cover, was the first history of espionage by a Western author actually based upon KGB files. Discussions from an earlier document request to the KGB by Costello led to a surprising agreement for him to co-author this book with his KGB press office contact, Oleg Tsarev, shortly before the failed coup attempt and fall of the Soviet Union. Tsarev was given wide latitude in utilizing and disseminating information from the KGB files on Orlov and his various colleagues and agents. Furthermore, Costello takes academic-level care to document accurately all sources for all facts and assertions in this book, a welcome contrast with the cursory, sometimes conclusory books by other British so-called "historians" of espionage such as West, Knightly and Pincher. The primary discovery made by the authors was that while Orlov did indeed flee to the U.S. with his family, he never genuinely defected. In 1938 during the height of the purges within the Soviet military and intelligence services, Orlov received cryptic instructions to rendezvous with another NKVD officer on a ship. He failed to keep that meeting, knowing it to be a trap to return him to Moscow for execution and fled to North America. Upon arrival in Canada, Orlov wrote to Stalin and NKVD chief Yehzov and set forth a simple blackmail to insure that he did not suffer the fate of Ignace Reiss, an NKVD deserter caught by his former service's assasination squads. Orlov listed the various operations he had planned or worked on, including political assasinations and kidnapping, the theft of the Spanish gold reserves to Moscow and the development of spy networks throughout Europe (along with a list of sixty Soviet agents) with the implied promise that this information would be released to Western intelligence services if he were assasinated or kidnapped. Both the Soviets and Orlov kept to their bargains. Orlov was able to stay hidden in the U.S. for fourteen years before immigration problems and his release of a book condemning Stalin brought Orlov to the attention of the FBI and CIA in the early 1950's. Although interrogated extensively by American intelligence, he substantially downplayed his seniority, participation and knowledge of NKVD activities and never disclosed the names of dozens of Soviet agents who had infiltrated into Western governments, keeping loyal to communism to the end. The authors state that the CIA had substantial doubts about the true extent of knowledge that Orlov was disclosing, but somehow were never able to bring enough pressure upon him to divulge that information. The major disappointment of this book (through no fault of the authors) is that aside from the revelation that Orlov deceived the U.S. for so many years, that there are no other major revelations. The authors do reveal many significant previously unknown details from KGB files concerning Orlov's involvement in the founding of the Cambridge spy ring (including the fact that Philby was the "first man' of the ring), the founding of the Rote Kapelle and his involvement in the Spanish Civil War as the NKVD resident and senior Soviet officer in the country. However, the Russian Intelligence Service refused to disclose any facts regarding agent names or missions that were never discovered by Western intelligence services, leaving readers impatient to know the identities of those sixty agents whose names were redacted from copies made from KGB files, particularly the completely undiscovered KGB Oxford spy ring. Hopefully, in not too many further years, the need to protect the individuals involved and operational strategies will no longer exist and the RIS will open up all of the KGB files. Deadly Illusions is a very interesting history of Orlov and soviet foreign intelligence operations, but readers expecting it to read like a Forsyth spy novel will be disappointed; it is not a difficult read, but not at all a quick one. The faults of this book are minor: Costello has a sometimes annoying habit of diverting the reader on tangents that, while not uninteresting, are not logically and relevantly tied to the preceding text. I also felt that the authors downplayed Orlov's role in political terrorism too much; aside from a somewhat limited description of Orlov's involvement in the NKVD assasination of Andres Nin, the leader of the anti-Soviet Spanish Republican faction POUM, the authors failed to emphasize Orlov's real role in establishing Soviet dominance of the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, via terrorism. Finally, I found Costello's admission of error with regard the main theory of his previous book Mask of Treachery (in which he claimed that Anthony Blunt was the "first man" of the Cambridge ring - see my Amazon.com review of Mask of Treachery) to be rather sparse and barely adequate. Overall, this is an extremely significant book that should be part of any espionage historian's library.
Rating: 
Summary: Absolutely First Rate; Scholarly and Absorbing
Review: I dont know much about John Costello but two of his books, Mask of Treachery and Deadly Illusions, are absolute gems. As well as being exciting to read, they are valuable resources on the underside of the cold war, the real business of espionage. The most exciting thing is how he takes us back through the mists of time to the beginning of the century to reveal how the Soviet espionage effort developed practically simultaneously witherh Russina Revolution. It has been fashionable for years to lampoon the communist witchhunts and McCarthyism of the early cold war but there was a massive sophisticated and implacably determined Soviet penetration effort throughout the world and it much it began long before WWII. The Cheka, the Comintern, the NKVD, the Rote Kapelle, the Spanish Civil War(which seems to have been the most affecting event, more than WWII, for a whole generation on both sides of the Atlantic), the Cambridge Spys, the forth man, the fifth man, the Rosenbergs, the mole-hunts that debilitated Western counter-intelligence services, it was a seamless continuum, real but hidden, that the world was and is still largely ignorant. Costello's bravura scholarship plus his relationship with former Soviet intelligence players make a valuable resource for all who would know how things really did occur in the defining political struggle of this century.
Rating:
Summary: Absolutely First Rate; Scholarly and Absorbing
Review: I dont know much about John Costello but two of his books, Mask of Treachery and Deadly Illusions, are absolute gems. As well as being exciting to read, they are valuable resources on the underside of the cold war, the real business of espionage. The most exciting thing is how he takes us back through the mists of time to the beginning of the century to reveal how the Soviet espionage effort developed practically simultaneously witherh Russina Revolution. It has been fashionable for years to lampoon the communist witchhunts and McCarthyism of the early cold war but there was a massive sophisticated and implacably determined Soviet penetration effort throughout the world and it much it began long before WWII. The Cheka, the Comintern, the NKVD, the Rote Kapelle, the Spanish Civil War(which seems to have been the most affecting event, more than WWII, for a whole generation on both sides of the Atlantic), the Cambridge Spys, the forth man, the fifth man, the Rosenbergs, the mole-hunts that debilitated Western counter-intelligence services, it was a seamless continuum, real but hidden, that the world was and is still largely ignorant. Costello's bravura scholarship plus his relationship with former Soviet intelligence players make a valuable resource for all who would know how things really did occur in the defining political struggle of this century.
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