by James Risen
First published 2004
This dramatic account exposes the CIA-KGB intelligence battles that defined the final decades of the Cold War. A thirty-year CIA veteran teams with a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist to reveal the covert operations that stretched from Moscow's sewers to Baghdad's back streets. The story begins during the "Year of the Spy" when CIA agents in Moscow started dying one by one. Milt Bearden led America's secret war in Afghanistan against the Soviets, backing local forces to drive out the occupying army. Washington recalled him to head the Soviet/East European Division just as the Berlin Wall fell and Eastern Europe erupted in revolution. The authors interviewed hundreds of operatives from both intelligence services to reconstruct how spies evaded surveillance, survived violent ambushes, and ran double agents across hostile territory. Their investigation uncovers secret communication channels between rival agencies and covert missions in Berlin and Prague during the pivotal autumn of 1989 when the Soviet empire collapsed.
Genres: history, 20th-century, non-fiction, 21st-century, military-history, espionage
Vibes: dramatic, fast-paced, thought-provoking
Tropes: enemies-to-allies, investigative-journalism
Setting: Afghanistan, Baghdad, Berlin, Moscow, Prague
Period: Cold War, 1989
592 pages · Mass Market Paperback · Presidio Press