Books like The spy who saved the world by Jerrold L. Schecter

The Spy Who Saved the World tells, for the first time, the complete story of the life and legendary career of the greatest spy of the Cold War, Oleg Penkovsky, the highest-ranking Soviet military official ever to cooperate with the West. At the height of the Cold War, during 1961 and 1962. Oleg Penkovsky provided the CIA and MI6, the British Intelligence Service, with unusually reliable data on Soviet military intentions and nuclear strength. This information, channeled. directly to President John E Kennedy on a regular basis, was instrumental in assuring U.S. victory during the Cuban missile crisis. The authors base their startling and historic reappraisal of Oleg Penkovsky's career on thousands of pages of government documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. Never before has the tradecraft of spying been revealed with such dramatic force. Penkovsky offered himself to the West as a soldier of freedom. His own career in. the Soviet military had been stalled by the fact that his father had fought against the Bolsheviks during the 1917 Revolution, and he was obsessed by this legacy, which made him suspect in the U.S.S.R. For the CIA and MI6, Penkovsky was the ultimate inside source; his access to military secrets was unparalleled and his devotion to serving the West was unlimited. No other work has detailed in such spellbinding fashion exactly how the CIA "runs" its agents - or how. brutally the KGB hunts down its turncoats. KGB surveillance brought Penkovsky's work to an abrupt end in late 1962. The true story of Penkovsky's trial and execution is told here far the first time. Meticulously documenting the wealth of information that Penkovsky provided, Schecter and Deriabin conclusively refute one of the enduring myths of the Cold War - that Oleg Penkovsky was a KGB plant. Penkovsky's reporting of thirty years ago demonstrates that political and. economic failures were already eroding the foundations of the Soviet empire. The Spy Who Saved the World makes a vital contribution to our understanding of the ramifications and ultimate meaning of the Cold War and provides a fresh perspective an the fragmentation of the Soviet Union now reaching its climax.

First publish date: 1992