Spy Wars

May 1, 2007
The spying game just goes on and on. Two years ago we read Victor Cherkashin's "Spy Handler: Memoir of a KGB Officer", his account (with Gregory Feifer) of how Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames were recruited by the Soviets in the final years of the Cold War. Now Bagley, who was himself a CIA counterspy for over two decades and ended his career as CIA head of Soviet-bloc counter intelligence, tells the oft-toldbut never completely understoodtale of Yuri Nosenko's 1964 defection to the United States. Bagley provides plenty of details about the Nosenko case, since he was one of the agents to debrief the Soviet defector. The details in this candid account can sometimes be overwhelming, but Bagley tells his story with an authority that can only come from living the life of a spook for years and years. Was Nosenko a true defector or a KGB "plant"? Bagley comes down on the side of the latter opinion, but his story has enough twists and turns that the real truth may never be known. And that is what makes this book especially intriguing. For most collections.Ed Goedeken, Iowa State Univ. Lib., Ames

Copyright 2007 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 2007
Bagley, who oversaw the CIA's operations against the KGB in the 1960s, takes us deep inside the cold war spy game. He focuses on a notorious case, one he was intimately familiar with: Yuri Nosenko, the KGB officer who approached the Americans in May 1962, offering to divulge secrets to the CIA. Over the next few years, Nosenko supplied the U.S. with plenty of information, including some interesting tidbits concerning Lee Harvey Oswald's time in the Soviet Union. But Bagley, who directly supervised the Nosenko case, eventually became suspicious of the Russian agent and began to suspect that Nosenko, rather than a turncoat, was a KGB plant, spying on the Americans in the guise of a traitor (the debate rages to this day). Bagley doesn't pull any punches here, and readers expecting the usual KGB-as-villain, CIA-as-hero story are in for a whole lot of surprises: Bagley reveals that the good guys were just as duplicitous, traitorous, and nasty as the villains. The spy game has never seemed quite so dirty nor the CIA so villainous.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)