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Summary: I LOVE SPY BOOKS
Review: This is another terrific spy book that is worth reading. Was completeley drawn in by this one !!! Another Cold War era book I would recommend is the one by Benjamin Weiser titled " A Secret Life" about a Polish Colonel ( Ryszard Kuklinski ) on the Polish General Staff who passed on some 40,000 Warsaw Pact and Soviet documents to the CIA from 1972 to 1981.
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Summary: The CIA KGB Game
Review: This is the story gathered through hundreds of interviews with both US and USSR players of the battle between the CIA and KGB in the closing days of the Cold War, 1985 through the collapse of the Soviet Union.Part I, Year of the Spy tells of the efforts to "turn" KGB agents, Government officials and high-ranking military and subsequent contacts by their American controllers. We're told of the constant surveillance of embassy officials, the training of new agents, tricks for eluding tails. Surprising to me was the involvement of spouses who often accompanied the agents on "runs" or otherwise aided the agents. In training there would be surprise arrests that would seem real to the agents, they would include a roughing up by FBI agents. The test for the agent was to hold back his CIA connection.
Starting in 1985 a string of our moles were arrested by the KGB. Despite ridicule of James Jesus Angleton whose paranoia about moles inside the CIA was legend, it appeared now that his paranoia was well-placed.
The luring of moles, their exchanges of money and information at drop points are covered from both sides. For example meticulous planning has gone into a "run," i.e., CIA meeting with a KGB agent to exchange money, needs, information. The story is told by the US agent arriving at the drop site, having shaken his KGB tail; the same story is then told by KGB officials who are setting him up and the capture of the spy (a scientist in this case).
Almost at the same time, June '85, Aldrich Ames was meeting in DC with his Russian handler, delivering to him the name of every spy he knew. He did this because John Walker, US Navy man, had been arrested in May as a Russian spy. Ames feared Walker had been fingered to the FBI by someone in the KGB that the CIA had previously "turned." He didn't want the same fate.
In their recruitment efforts the CIA always had to be on the alert for "dangles." These were spies trying to be double agents. Some of the Russians turned for money, some for ideology, a hatred for the Communist system. Edward Lee Howard was a CIA agent who was fired by the CIA and who betrayed us out of his anger over what he thought was unfair treatment. He eluded capture and escaped to Russia with help from his wife, his training in eluding tails, and the incompetence of the FBI.
There were constant turf wars between the FBI and CIA which sometimes got in the way.
Robert Hanssen (FBI) started spying in 1979. Among information turned over to the KGB was his revealing to them the spy tunnel under the Soviet embassy in DC.
There were many more tales of recruitment, capture and sometimes execution. Part II, Afghanistan. In December 1979 Russia invaded Afghanistan. They were fearful of the country coming under the sphere of the US, further completing the ring around the USSR.
When the British decided decades earlier to withdraw from Afghanistan, the cost of marching out was horrific, 16,000 men were reduced to 1 left standing
After the loss of 15,000 soldiers, in 1986 Gorbachev decided enough was enough. He wanted to get out, but how to do it without looking like the US in Vietnam or with the costs the British incurred.
US efforts helped Gorbachev reach his decision to exit. We had been pouring in money and arms. The destruction of a huge Russian arms depot was pivotal in firming up his mind as was the introduction of Stinger missiles and advanced anti-tank weapons, both of which produced spectacular results.
They managed the withdrawal at a minimum loss of life. Then began the tribal chiefs dislodging the puppet leader in Kabul and the jockeying amongst themselves for leadership. Part III, Endgame. The story here is the winding down of the Soviet Union, starting with tearing down the Berlin Wall, the role of the East German secret police, STASI and the interplay with the CIA. The dissolution of Reagan's Evil Empire, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Rumania and the Baltic states; the fragility of the new Russia and its near fall to reactionary forces, the emergence of Yeltsin. Aldrich Ames was arrested in 1994 after 20 years of spying. A Russian agent provided enough information but no name, enabling the CIA to identify him. A group within the CIA had spent years trying to locate the leak that James Jesus Angleton was sure existed. Robert Hanssen was arrested in 2001 after 22 years of betrayal, his capture also aided by Russian agents. The author Milt Bearden was close to all the activities he recounts. He concluded after a thorough analysis of times and dates that there must be another mole yet to surface within the CIA. I found much of the book exciting. After all, this wasn't fiction; these were real people and events.
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Summary: An exceptional insight into the endgame of the Cold War
Review: This reviewer served in Embassy Pakistan for two years from the week the author arrived in mid-1986 as Chief of Station, Islamabad.
In a government career that spanned twenty-five years, he was, without a doubt, the best Agency operator and manager ever encountered. Looking back on events, what was accomplished under our watch was not only important, it was truly exciting. This book, especially the middle third that deals with the war in Afghanistan, is right on the mark. In fact, I learned things in this book that I never knew about at the time as I did not have the "need to know." This book has a very important story to tell on a critical junction-point in the resolution of the Cold War told by the man at the tip of the spear. In all areas where I have direct knowledge, there is not one instance where I felt he was less than totally objective. Most remarkably, he made what he did seem effortless and, more importantly to me, he did it with elan. His troops relished every minute of every day -- unless they dropped the ball. One lapse and there was all hell to pay. The seriously broad scope of this book is such that, clearly, there was simply not enough pages to encompass all the many peripheral stories that might have been mentioned. Anecdotes and telling detail abound throughout but there are many more tales that could have been told that would make the reader drop the book in sheer glee. Of the many that do make it into the text, the one on the exchange of cables between the field and Langley on the "specifications" for mules delivered to portage materiel into the Afghan war zone, is, without a doubt, a classic. For those of us then in Islamabad who fought in Viet Nam and saw it as a correct but completely mishandled affair by both the Pentagon and Capitol Hill, we all understood on that crisp, Fall day in 1986 when a Stinger missile brought down the first Soviet aircraft, that their arrogant adventure in Afghanistan was the death-knell of their perverted philosophy and totally-flawed and simplistic system. One had to be there. To date, for the armchair warrior, this book is as close and as good as it gets.
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