Publisher's Synopsis
When Vladimir Kuzichkin walked out of the Soviet Embassy in Teheran in June 1982, heading for asylum in the west, he was a major in the KGB with a highly sensitive and important job in the espionage branch of the Soviet Secret Service. By dint of dedication and competence, he had at the age of thirty-five risen to a position that placed him at "the cutting edge of covert espionage" in the KGB's First Chief Directorate engaged in illegal operations. In this book, he breaks all the rules of secrecy to explode the myth of the vaunted espionage as he offers a uniquely intimate portrait of life in the KGB.
For the first time, with a keen eye for detail unmatched by any other defector accounts, Kuzichkin records the everyday organization of a Soviet intelligence officer. He describes how he was recruited and trained and how finally he was sent to the field in Iran, then still under Soviet rule. There he matched wits with the Shah's secret police, the SAVAK, and witnessed the Ayatollah Khomeini's revolution and the turmoil that followed. He reveals many of the secret tricks of KGB tradecraft - the techniques of inserting and servicing illegals, of shaking off surveillance, of creating false identities. He also gives a vivid almost comic account of a bungled KGB attempt to kill the Shah, and reveals many previously unknown details of the KGB's takeover in Afghanistan.
But perhaps most startling of all is Kuzichkin's account of the KGB as an organization rotting from the top, the helpless servant of a mercenary Communist party rife with corruption, nepotism and petty bureaucracy, all of which have contaminated the Soviet intelligence service as well. Simply by letting the facts speak for themselves, he demolished the myth of an invincible KGB fostered by popular fiction, the image the West has of a vastly powerful and sophisticated intelligence apparatus. Instead, he describes the KGB as a privileged elite organization set apart from the rest of society, the demoralized instrument of an unprincipled corrupt government. It is a devastating portrait of the decline and fall of the Soviet empire in which the KGB played so decisive a role.
