The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal (Thorndike Press Large Print Popular and Narrative Nonfiction) - Hardcover

Hoffman, David E.

4.23

13,989 ratings by Goodreads

9781410482891: The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal (Thorndike Press Large Print Popular and Narrative Nonfiction)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1410482898 ISBN 13: 9781410482891

Publisher: Thorndike Pr, 2015

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From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "The Dead Hand" comes the riveting story of the CIA's most valuable spy in the Soviet Union and an evocative portrait of the agency's Moscow station, an outpost of daring espionage in the last years of the Cold War.
While getting into his car on the evening of February 16, 1978, the chief of the CIA's Moscow station was handed an envelope by an unknown Russian. Its contents stunned the Americans: details of top-secret Soviet research and development in military technology that was totally unknown to the United States.
From 1979 to 1985, Adolf Tolkachev, an engineer at a military research center, cracked open the secret Soviet military research establishment, using his access to hand over tens of thousands of pages of material about the latest advances in aviation technology, alerting the Americans to possible developments years in the future. He was one of the most productive and valuable spies ever to work for the United States in the four decades of global confrontation with the Soviet Union. Tolkachev took enormous personal risks, but so did his CIA handlers. Moscow station was a dangerous posting to the KGB's backyard. The CIA had long struggled to recruit and run agents in Moscow, and Tolkachev became a singular breakthrough. With hidden cameras and secret codes, and in face-to-face meetings with CIA case officers in parks and on street corners, Tolkachev and the CIA worked to elude the feared KGB.
Drawing on previously secret documents obtained from the CIA, as well as interviews with participants, Hoffman reveals how the depredations of the Soviet state motivated one man to master the craft of spying against his own nation until he was betrayed to the KGB by a disgruntled former CIA trainee. No one has ever told this story before in such detail, and Hoffman's deep knowledge of spycraft, the Cold War, and military technology makes him uniquely qualified to bring readers this real-life espionage thriller.

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Review:

'So gripping at times it reads like spy fiction' (Los Angeles Times)

‘One of the best spy stories to come out of the Cold War and all the more riveting for being true.’ Washington Post

‘A fabulous read that also provides chilling insights into the Cold War spy game between Washington and Moscow that has erupted anew under Vladimir Putin.’ (Michael Dobbs, author of One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War)

‘A gripping story of courage, professionalism, and betrayal in the secret world.’ (Rodric Braithwaite, British Ambassador in Moscow, 1988-1992)

'The Pulitzer prizewinning American journalist David E Hoffman has had access to CIA files and the result is an astonishingly detailed picture of espionage in the 1980s, written with pacey journalistic verve and an eerily contemporary feel.' (Ben Macinytre The Times)

'Essential reading for anyone who wants to know how the spy mind works.' (Ben Macintyre)

About the Author:

David E. Hoffman is a contributing editor at "The Washington Post" and a correspondent for PBS's "FRONTLINE." He was previously foreign editor, Moscow bureau chief, and White House correspondent for the newspaper. He is the author of "The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy," which won the Pulitzer Prize, and "The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia." He lives with his wife in Maryland.

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