The Spy Who Saved the World: How a Soviet Colonel Changed the Course of the Cold War. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, May, 1992 by Tim Weiner

The official recognition of Penkovsky as the most valuable agent ever to come to the CIA from inside Russia should be evaluated in light of the CIA's treatment of others. As is now well known, the CIAs ability to deal properly with Soviet defectors had been, by the time of Penkovsky's trial, poisoned by the byzantine conspiracy theories of the agency's half-mad counterintelligence chief, James J. Angleton. A KGB officer who defected in December 1961, Anatoly Golitsin, quickly convinced Angleton that any Soviet who followed him would be a plant, and that there was a Soviet mole somewhere in the CIA's chain of command. Angleton tore the agency apart looking for the mole, ruining the careers of scores of CIA officers. He vigorously attempted to debunk Penkovsky; imprisoned an important defector, Yuri Nosenko, who came over in June 1962; and in time paralyzed the Soviet division. As David Wise demonstrates in his book, Molehunt, Penkovsky's capture may have been facilitated by the fact that the first CIA station chief in Moscow, Paul Garbler, who took his post in December 1961, knew almost nothing of the Penkovsky operation. He was not told that a "dead drop" (a secret location for passing materials to and from Penkovsky) was under KGB surveillance, though CIA headquarters had been told of that fact. Why was Garbler cut out of the loop? He had fallen victim to Angleton's paranoia and was tagged as a "potential Soviet agent." Penkovsky's place as an unparalleled Soviet spy was ensured by Angleton's attempts to discredit all defectors who came after him.

The Spy Who Saved The World is an important antidote to previous histories of the CIA that have accepted uncritically the reams of nonsense published in the United States and Great Britain about the Penkovsky case. It both benefits and suffers from its extensive use of transcripts from the CIA's Penkovsky files. Like most transcriptions, it is full of facts and devoid of deep thought. But it convincingly demonstrates that 30 years ago the CIA possessed inside information from a unique source that strongly suggested that the Soviet state was foredoomed. Had the CIA not gone down a thousand blind alleys searching for moles, it could have developed a clearer understanding of the enemy long before Soviet policy defeated itself. And had presidents and policy-makers achieved that understanding, some of the treasure the United States devoted to our costly standoff with that doomed state might have been saved, and our present fortunes vastly improved.