Tinker, Tailor, Soldier...(The CIA's Russians)(Book Review)

I am a Soviet officer. I wish to meet with an American officer with the object of offering certain services. Time: 1800 hours. Date: 1 January 1953. Place: Plankengasse, Vienna 1. Failing this meeting, I will be at the same place, same time, on successive Saturdays.

What would prompt a Soviet officer to pass such a note to the Americans, knowing that he was putting his life at risk? In "The CIA's Russians" (224 pages. Naval Institute Press), John Limond Hart, who worked for the CIA from the beginning of the cold war until his retirement in 1973, examines the personalities of four of the CIA's Soviet agents. Recalled a few years later to prepare a report on one of them, he gained access to CIA files on several others as well. Before he died last year, he completed this book based on his extensive research. While the CIA reviewed the manuscript and deleted any information still deemed classified, the result is a mesmerizing look at the usually faceless Russians who decided to switch sides and, in three of the four cases here, returned to Moscow only to be caught, tried and shot.

In a foreword, former CIA director William Colby praises Hart's "professional analysis of a relationship that has been left too long to novelists and sensational journalists." It's true that Hart's experience in running covert operations on three continents infuses his narrative with an aura of authority--and, most importantly, accuracy-- that others may lack. But he recounts stories and skillfully paints scenes that could easily have appeared in popular spy novels. Truth may not have been stranger than fiction, but sometimes it was at least as strange.

Take Pyotr Popov, who wrote the note quoted on the left. Raised in a rural family, Popov seethed with resentment about Stalin's relentless persecution of the peasantry. Although he rose to the rank of colonel in the GRU, the military-intelligence service, and was assigned to sensitive posts like Vienna and Berlin, his superiors scorned him--with good reason. He had no personal skills and never recruited anybody. Once he started working for the CIA, his handlers discovered that he couldn't remember names and meeting places, or even navigate public transportation in a foreign city. But they stroked his bruised ego and helped him support both a wife and a mistress. In return, he came through with critical information about the GRU's Austrian operation. By contrast, a total bumbler like "Mikhail," a GRU agent in France, racked up huge debts with a ...