Untangling the web of deception

This is perhaps the most amazing non-fiction spy book that has ever appeared during or after the Cold War. There is little doubt that all intelligence historians interested in the past 50 years of espionage games played by the CIA and the KGB will read it as we did — in one take:

A day in the 1990s must count as one of the extreme low points of CIA counter- intelligence. When this KGB provocateur and deceiver concluded a lecture to CIA staff personnel in their Langley auditorium, the audience — all professional American intelligence officers — rose as one, eager-faced and thrilled, to give Yuri Nosenko a standing ovation.

What a wonderful grand finale! And this is not a story about some withered human wreck who passed away years ago and is hardly remembered, but about a living, healthy US intelligence veteran. And the writer’s name is not Philip Agee or that of another service whistleblower. On the contrary, Dr Tennent H. (‘Pete’) Bagley is one of the most respected and knowledgeable experts on Soviet espionage, a former high-ranking CIA officer who devoted more than 20 years of his life to fighting communism and its agents.

Who could have expected that a mere four years after the successful publication of a major work, The Main Enemy, subtitled ‘The CIA’s Battle with the Soviet Union’, by Bagley’s former senior colleague, Milt Bearden (with James Risen), a 30-year veteran of the CIA’s clandestine service and former chief of the Soviet/ East European division at the time of the collapse of the USSR, Spy Wars would appear and claim on almost every page that much of what has been written up to now, stated and even asserted under oath by CIA officials, is in fact naive, utterly insensitive, blindly biased, unprofessional — in short, paranoid!

The Nosenko story is known to everybody in the business, but it is presented here in a totally different light.