Ran across this 2015 review as I was flipping through old columns last weekend. Enjoy!
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How badly did U.S. “intelligence” mischaracterize the Soviet Union’s intentions, foreign relations, and capabilities? The “bomber gap.” The “missile gap.” “Monolithic” communism. Absurd overestimates of economic prowess. The “window of vulnerability.” That’s just a sample.
Threat-inflating analysts’ record regarding the Red Menace was abysmal. But spooks practicing their spycraft out in the real world made plenty of blunders, too. One screw-up cost Adolph Tolkachev his life.
The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal (Doubleday; 312 pages; $28.95) chronicles the frenetic mission of a tragic traitor. Author David E. Hoffman writes that Tolkachev was a “leading designer” at the Moscow-based Scientific Research Institute for Radio Engineering, a facility responsible for “Soviet military radars, especially those deployed on fighter aircraft.” Married, with a son, and born in the Kazakh Republic, he was respected and highly placed in the Evil Empire’s “defense” complex. And his pay was well above the average wage earned in the U.S.S.R.
But Tolkachev was deeply disillusioned. Soviet culture, he wrote to the CIA, had become mired in “impassable, hypocritical demagoguery” and “ideological empty talk.” The tale of his wife’s parents — victims of Stalin’s purges of the late 1930s — fed his disgust with what Hoffman calls “a party-state that congratulated itself on its greatness but that had, over decades, become a dystopia.”
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