[.ca] Battleground Berlin: CIA vs. KGB in the Cold War (ISBN 0300078714)

From Amazon.com:
Battleground Berlin is the product of an unprecedented collaboration between two veteran intelligence officers--one with the CIA, the other with the KGB--who worked on opposite sides in postwar Berlin. With the help of journalist George Bailey, they have told what will likely stand as the definitive account of those remarkable years. The KGB had the advantage of existing, in one form or another, since the Russian Revolution, while the CIA was a fledgling agency. But KGB agents and analysts were under chronic pressure to twist their intelligence reports for political reasons, which evened the scales somewhat. Armed with information from numerous interviews, access to previously secret documents (many reproduced in the book), extensive research, and their own recollections, the authors roam the existing Cold War literature, correcting lies and false conclusions, putting rumors to rest, and exposing ignorance--in short, setting the record straight. They provide definitive accounts of many key episodes, including the double defection of Otto John, the head of West German counterespionage, and the famous tunnel incident of 1955-56, in which an American tunnel into the Soviet sector was exposed by a highly placed informant and then "discovered" in an elaborate ploy to protect the agent. Battleground Berlin is a remarkable amalgam. It is a fascinating, sometimes gripping spy story, complete with safe houses, forged identities, double agents, and street-corner rendezvous; it is also a scrupulously researched piece of historical scholarship and analysis.

The Second Cold War:
Gorbachev's 'glasnost' and 'perestroika' made much more harm to Western Intelligence than any ideological campaigns of his predecessors. Only once before, namely during the WWII, did Stalin manage to trick the West into believing in 'comrades in arms' and 'Allied powers' slogans of Soviet politics. It resulted in thousands of people, who hated Bolshevism, to be forcefully returned to the Soviet Union after the war, where they were either shot or sent to Gulags. Simultaneously, Western intelligence services were paralised by many moles successfully operating on all shores of the Atlantic and Pacific. As a result, Stalin was awarded "A Man of the Year" title by the Life magazine twice (1939 and 1942), and Gorbachev became a Noble Prize (for Peace?!) winner in 1990. What did Mikhail Sergeevich do for this award? Deceiving the West with his 'glasnost' concept, he managed to convince many leaders that the Soviet Union started to move in the direction of the open, democratic society. At the same time, the CIA suffered the heaviest blow of all times duting the 1985 Year of Spy with most of its officers ambushed and expelled, and secret agents arrested and shot. Surprisingly, the number of Soviet moles within the CIA and the US government did not decrease after Senator McCarthy's fierce anti-Communist campaign. Names are well known, but I would like to stress that the most recent case dates back to 2002! So since the Soviet Union under Gorbachev-Yeltsin-Putin started its ideological attack, the number of officers at the Soviet/Russian desk of many Western intelligence services had been dramatically reduced. The budgets allocated for balancing KGB-SVR operations in Europe and Americas were either cut or withdrawn. RFE/RL was moved to Prague, and its staff now consists of only a fistful of journalists. It is virtually unoperative and is being justfully criticised by both American and Russian politicians. In 1983 Burton Gerber, then head of the CIA's SE division, started secret cooperation with the KGB, authorised by his bosses. In the 1990s first writers and journalists 8late John Costello, as an example), and then the CIA officers started to queue to be nominated Soviet KGB collaborators in "bashful projects of unseen openness". David Murphy, former head of the CIA's SR division, notoriously known for his multiple faux pas (take Nalivaiko and later Nosenko cases, for example) co-authored this book, which gives no credit at all to American intelligence, but fully acts in the interests of Soviet propaganda. I was very much surprised to see such respectable analysts and archivists as Hayden Peake and Oleg Gordievsky praising the book in their earlier reviews. Maybe, it was fashionable in 1997, but then followed Bearden's production in 2003 (Milton Bearden is another former CIA's Soviet/East European chief), so the suit became dangerous. I guess the only way to stop it will be to publish Rem Krasilnikov's book, recently appeared in Moscow. Former Soviet KGB General claims: 'the Cold War will never be over!'