The Billion Dollar Spy by David E. Hoffman

Hoffman tells this amazing story with great skill and in minute detail. The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal by David E. His portrait hangs in CIA headquarters to this day.

There seems to be little question that Adolf Tokachev was the CIA’s biggest success story ever in human intelligence - at least among those the agency has revealed to researchers. Under the noses of his bosses and the KGB alike, he brazenly supplied photographs of many thousands of pages of top-secret data to the CIA, enabling the US to counteract every technical advantage achieved by the USSR in its most advanced combat aircraft.Īn assessment by the US government of Tokachev’s “production” placed the value at two billion dollars, and that was undoubtedly a conservative estimate. He served as chief engineer of one of several research and development institutes serving the Soviet air force. The Billion Dollar Spy was a Soviet engineer named Adolf Tokachev who provided the US with a prodigious volume of technical data about the USSR’s military capabilities from 1977 to 1985. You won’t be able to look at spycraft in what is called humint - human intelligence - the same way ever again. Hoffman‘s outstanding tale about one extraordinary Russian spy for the US and his CIA handlers is truly eye-opening.

Histories, and the crowded shelves of spy novels set during the era, offer a cursory and misleading view of the day-to-day reality as it was lived by the men and women who worked for the CIA and the KGB.

If you think you have a strong sense of how espionage was conducted during the Cold War, you’re probably wrong.

The Billion Dollar Spy by David E. Hoffman