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Doubleday
July 2015
On Sale: July 7, 2015
Featuring: Adolf Tolkachev
336 pages
ISBN: 0385537603
EAN: 9780385537605
Kindle: B00OEXDLPU
Hardcover / e-Book
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True Crime | Non-Fiction Biography
From the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning history
The Dead Hand comes the riveting story of a spy who
cracked open the Soviet military research establishment and
a penetrating portrait of the CIA’s Moscow station, an
outpost of daring espionage in the last years of the Cold
War While driving out of the American embassy in Moscow on the
evening of February 16, 1978, the chief of the CIA’s Moscow
station heard a knock on his car window. A man on the curb
handed him an envelope whose contents stunned U.S.
intelligence: details of top-secret Soviet research and
developments in military technology that were totally
unknown to the United States. In the years that followed,
the man, Adolf Tolkachev, an engineer in a Soviet military
design bureau, used his high-level access to hand over tens
of thousands of pages of technical secrets. His revelations
allowed America to reshape its weapons systems to defeat
Soviet radar on the ground and in the air, giving the United
States near total superiority in the skies over Europe. One of the most valuable spies to work for the United States
in the four decades of global confrontation with the Soviet
Union, Tolkachev took enormous personal risks—but so did the
Americans. The CIA had long struggled to recruit and run
agents in Moscow, and Tolkachev was a singular breakthrough.
Using spy cameras and secret codes as well as face-to-face
meetings in parks and on street corners, Tolkachev and his
handlers succeeded for years in eluding the feared KGB in
its own backyard, until the day came when a shocking
betrayal put them all at risk. Drawing on previously secret documents obtained from the CIA
and on interviews with participants, David Hoffman has
created an unprecedented and poignant portrait of Tolkachev,
a man motivated by the depredations of the Soviet state to
master the craft of spying against his own country.
Stirring, unpredictable, and at times unbearably tense,
The Billion Dollar Spy is a brilliant feat of
reporting that unfolds like an espionage thriller.
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