The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Dead Hand comes the riveting story of the CIA's most valuable spy in the Soviet Union and an evocative portrait of the agency's Moscow station, an outpost of daring espionage in the last years of the Cold War. Drawing on previously secret documents obtained from the CIA, as well as interviews with participants, Hoffman reveals how the depredations of the Soviet state motivated one man to master the craft of spying against his own nation until he was betrayed to the KGB by a disgruntled former CIA trainee. No one has ever told this story before in such detail, and Hoffman's deep knowledge of spycraft, the Cold War, and military technology makes him uniquely qualified to bring listeners this real-life espionage thriller.
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Community Reviews
You get a good sense of the tension & intrigue involved with the running of Tolkachev as a spy, and there’s an adequate amount of character development w/r/t both Tolkachev and the CIA. But the pacing definitely could have been stronger. In retrospect, it seems there might have been a natural arc to Tolkachev’s career as a spy, but as I read the book I found myself just moving from moment to moment, issue to issue. “Will they or won’t they give him a certain model of camera to work with?”—that sort of thing. I don’t think Hoffman did the greatest job putting it together as a narrative. Crises appear and then simply dissolve into air; small questions are given lots of time, without enough sense of why they merit it. It holds together, and I never had trouble getting into it, but it could have been stronger.
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