Spy Handler: Memoir of a KGB Officer

From Publishers Weekly
It's not surprising that a book on spying would be tinged with irony. Midway through this gripping but soberly written expose on the Cold War spy game, the author, a former KGB agent, recalls some advice he gave back in the 1990s to former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, who wanted to know how Cherkashin was able to recruit CIA agents like Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen as KGB spies and whether it was possible to prevent treason. "The only way to be entirely safe is to remove people from intelligence gathering," Cherkashin offered-an intriguing comment given the recent renewed emphasis on human intelligence. But throughout the book, Cherkashin proves his point, showing just how porous these agencies are and how operatives deftly remain effective as spies for both sides. Recruited in 1985, Ames and Hanssen made the initial overtures to the KGB, and Cherkashin was there to receive them and their boilerplate motivations for wanting to cross over-money and a sort of renegade patriotism that resolves itself by punishing the very country they serve. While Cherkashin's relationships with Ames and Hanssen are explained, almost more intriguing is the picture he paints of a time when spying was predominantly a human intelligence affair ripe with sex and blackmail. The author, who clearly believes in respect for the enemy, sometimes sounds like an apologist for his country's actions, as well as the actions of Ames and Hanssen. But this lack of sentimentality is what makes the book stand out. 16 page photo pull-out. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From Booklist
Cherkashin, a retired senior KGB officer, working with Feifer, a former Moscow correspondent for Radio Free Europe, gives readers an insider's view of the spy business from just after World War II through the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. This is at once fascinating and chilling. Cherkashin emphasizes the painstaking, plodding nature of spy work, but he also spikes his account with the stuff of a le Carre thriller: secret meetings, paranoia over others' reactions, and tales of blackmail and seduction in the service of turning selected targets into KGB agents. Although the focus is on Soviet spycraft, Cherkashin's story--especially the recruitment and handling of Americans Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen--is interlaced with details about U.S. spying and counterspying. Cherkashin's perspective on Ames' and Hanssen's psyches and on what led to their downfalls is especially riveting. Read this not just as a spy expose but also as a social history of an especially volatile period in Russia. Connie Fletcher
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Book Description
Victor Cherkashin's incredible career in the KGB spanned thirty-eight years, from Stalin's death in 1953 to the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. In this riveting memoir, Cherkashin provides a remarkable insider's view of the KGB's prolonged conflict with the United States, from his recruitment through his rising career in counterintelligence to his prime spot as the KGB's number- two man at the Soviet Embassy in Washington. Victor Cherkashin's story will shed stark new light on the KGB's inner workings over four decades and reveal new details about its major cases. Cherkashin's story is rich in episode and drama. He took part in some of the highest-profile Cold War cases, including tracking down U.S. and British spies around the world. He was posted to stations in the U.S., Australia, India, and Lebanon and traveled the globe for operations in England, Europe, and the Middle East. But it was in 1985, known as "the Year of the Spy," that Cherkashin scored two of the biggest coups of the Cold War. In April of that year, he recruited disgruntled CIA officer Aldrich Ames, becoming his principal handler. Refuting and clarifying other published versions, Cherkashin will offer the most complete account on how and why Ames turned against his country. Cherkashin will also reveal new details about Robert Hanssen's recruitment and later exposure, as only he can. And he will address whether there is an undiscovered KGB spy-another Hanssen or Ames-still at large. Spy Handler will be a major addition to Cold War history, told by one of its key participants.


About the Author
Victor Cherkashin, a retired KGB colonel, was awarded the prestigious Order of Lenin. During his four decades working for the KGB, he was stationed at various times in West Germany, India, Australia, Lebanon, and Washington, D.C. Following his retirement, he began a private security company in Russia, which he still runs. He lives in Moscow. Gregory Feifer holds a B.A. and an M.A. in Russian Studies from Harvard. A former Radio Free Europe Moscow correspondent, Feifer lived in Russia from 1998 to 2003. He covered Russian politics for a number of publications, including the Moscow Times, World Policy Journal, and Agence France-Presse. He lives in New York City.


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A spy comes in from the Cold War, with eye-opening tales to tell. The son of a high-ranking Stalin-era NKVD officer, Cherkashin grew up one of the Soviet faithful; as a true believer in Communism, he writes, "I'd always felt the difficulties and cruelty I saw . . . were a necessary part of the work it took to shore up our socialist state." There's a certain old-school quality to him still, and when Cherkashin turns to telling tales about the well-placed Americans he recruited into the KGB, he reveals an evident pride in his ability to outsmart the assembled CIA, FBI, NSA, and other spooks arrayed against him and his colleagues. His star convert was, of course, Aldrich Ames, who revealed the names of more than twenty agents working inside the Soviet Union, helping dismantle a technologically sophisticated spy network and hampering the effectiveness of US intelligence worldwide. Ames was eventually betrayed, Cherkashin notes, probably by a Soviet agent who defected to what the KGB called "the Main Adversary." Similarly, most of the double agents working within American intelligence under Cherkashin's tutelage were exposed in time, just as most of the double agents working behind the Iron Curtain were caught. Though he proudly recounts episodes of trickery, deceit, blackmail, and the like as victories for his team, Cherkashin insists that the act of treason, as evidenced by such agents as Ames, Jonathan Pollard, Oleg Kalugin, Robert Hanssen, and Vitaly Yurchenko, is usually "committed to solve immediate personal problems and is rarely prompted by ideology." He also notes that it was easy to recruit Americans: just about every double agent under his care came to him willingly, driven by theusual human frailties. Just so, Cherkashin concludes, Americans now regularly betrayed by their own poor intelligence-witness, he writes, the mess in Iraq-should not be too quick to engage in "loud chest thumping" over winning the Cold War, for the Soviet Union, he argues, "ultimately collapsed under its own weight."Of much interest to serious students of espionage and spy-novel aficionados alike.


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