From the author from the Pulitzer Prize-winning history The Dead Hand comes the riveting story of the spy who cracked open the Soviet military analysis establishment and a penetrating family portrait from the CIA’s Moscow station, an outpost of daring espionage in the last many years of the Cold War

While driving from the American embassy in Moscow within the night of Feb 16, 1978, the principle of the CIA’s Moscow place heard a knock on his car windows. A man within the curb handed about The Billion Money Spy: A True Story of Chilly Battle Espionage and Betrayal him an envelope whose material stunned U.S. cleverness: details of top-secret Soviet study and advancements in armed service technology which were totally unfamiliar to america. In the years that implemented, the man, Adolf Tolkachev, an engineer inside a Soviet armed service design bureau, used his high-level usage of hand over thousands of web pages of specialized secrets. His revelations allowed America to reshape its weaponry systems to defeat Soviet radar on the floor and in the air, giving the United States near total superiority in the skies over Europe.

Perhaps one of the most valuable spies to work for the United States in the four decades of global confrontation using the Soviet Union, Tolkachev had taken tremendous personal risks-but therefore did the Us citizens. The CIA had long struggled to recruit and operate providers in Moscow, and Tolkachev was a singular breakthrough. Using spy surveillance cameras and secret rules aswell as face-to-face meetings in parks and on street edges, Tolkachev and his handlers been successful for years in eluding the feared KGB in its own backyard, before day came when a surprising betrayal put all of them at risk.

Sketching on previously top secret documents from the CIA and on interviews with individuals, David Hoffman has created an unprecedented and poignant portrait of Tolkachev, a guy motivated with the depredations from the Soviet condition to understand the craft of spying against his very own country. Stirring, unstable, and at times unbearably anxious, The Billion Buck Spy is an excellent feat of confirming that unfolds like an espionage thriller.