Jonathan Haslam

This book is an attempt to describe the history of Soviet intelligence and counter-intelligence, from creation of the Cheka to the fall of the USSR. It is based to a large extent on new Russian sources in addition to the more ‘classical’ western sources.
I haven’t read any other similar studies on the topic, so it is hard to compare it to the other books, but taken “as is” I think it is not very good and biased. The biasness maybe not intentional but appears from the fact that the author relies too much on the sources supplied by Russian intelligence agencies, which open their archives quite selectively to show them in a good light.
There are a few minor errors as well, for example:
• Boris Lago-Kolpakov is in reality is Lago-Ozerov
• Naming Spanish POUM members “Trotskyists” goes only from Soviet and related sources. Actually they fell apart with Leo Trotsky before the war and calling them that shows author’s bias in general reading
• Yevhen Konovalets was killed not by a bomb in a cake but in a box of chocolates.
• To see anti-Soviet movements in Baltic and Ukraine as only pawns of foreign intelligence agencies is at least a bit strange

Another major problem with audiobook is that narrator doesn’t know Russian a bit and says all names and places so wrong, you have to check with print version.
One of the minor interesting stories I haven’t been aware of is about Yuri Totrov, who worked with open data long before it become mainstream.
One crucial breakthrough was in realising that the agency’s bureaucracy, not unlike Totrov’s own, was a creature enslaved by habit. To a bureaucrat, change was always disruptive and to be avoided. So when an officer was assigned to a particular mission, the tendency was to place him at the same rank as his predecessor. More than that, from bureaucratic inertia, intelligence officers were then allocated the same apartments, even the same car, as previous incumbents.
Totrov’s first challenge was to build the model. This was followed by a slow process of testing and fine-tuning until he felt confident enough to present his conclusions. The old hands, including his superiors, took some convincing, however, as they steadfastly believed they always knew best and that intuition guided by direct experience in the field was a far better guide than systematic research. “Unfortunately,” Totrov recalled, “even one of my chiefs, not wishing to make a special effort to get into the essence of the system, for a long time could not believe that with its help one could with surgical precision establish which people belonged to CIA.” The system worked even on those under deep cover.
The model contained twenty-six indicators that in combination enabled the identification of an officer from CIA under cover as a genuine foreign service officer (FSO).
… (plus d'informations)