THE PENKOVSKIY PAPERS

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating
Review: Colonel Oleg Penkovskiy, Russian war hero, senior officer in Soviet military intelligence, graduate of the Soviet staff college and the missile academy, rocked the
Soviet regime to its foundations by the effect of his voluntary spying for the West. Singlehandedly he sabotaged Khrushchev's threatened Berlin show-down in 1961
and his information lay behind President Kennedy's successful defeat of the Soviet Cuban missile threat in October, 1962. Experts assess Penkovskiy's achievement as
the greatest intelligence coup of modern times.

Penkovskiy was neither a paid agent nor an ordinary defector. He was a single-minded zealot who hated the Soviet regime, because he feared Khrushchev was heading
on a collision course for nuclear war. Three times he made his way to western Europe, using official Soviet missions as a cover for his espionage activity; three times
he went back to Moscow to get priceless information for United States and British intelligence. The drama of his life puts fictional spy stories to shame.

Until now Penkovskiy's remarkable feat was a secret, locked in the intelligence files of three nations. THE PENKOVSKIY PAPERS, smuggled out to the West two
years ago, here tell his story. Written by Penkovskiy while he was living his amazing double-life, they comprise an unprecedented revelation of how totalitarian power
works, showing the grim hold which the secret police "intelligence" organs still maintain on Soviet society, more than a decade after the death of Stalin. Besides
detailing the surprising worldwide operations of Soviet intelligence, THE PENKOVSKIY PAPERS give an intimate portrayal of the men at the top of Soviet society and
their conflicting drives for power-all rendered by an observer so close to the center of Mocow's power that he might easily have become himself one of its prime
movers.

THE PENKOVSKIY PAPERS are also the self-portrait of a remarkable man, driven to the ultimate act of revolt against the Soviet regime by his despair over the
irresponsibility of Soviet leaders. Viewed in the light of those days in 1961 and 1962, when Khrushchev risked world war with his missile adventure in Cuba, THE
PENKOVSKIY PAPERS offer an extraordinary insight on what a narrow escape the West, and the world, really had.