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Spies in the Family is a memoir that intertwines the career of Dmitry Polyakov, a senior GRU officer and spy, with her own childhood as the daughter of Paul Dillon, the CIA case officer who managed key parts of Polyakov's career.
The memoir has a kind of sepia tinged romanticism, the privileged life of a child of American empire in Rome, Delhi, Berlin, and Mexico City. Dillon has a breezy attitude towards the world of espionage, which makes this approachable but also leads her to just brush past some astounding history, like that two presidents of Mexico were CIA assets (see LITEMPO for details).
Polyakov is by far the more interesting part of the book. By Dillon's telling, based on interviews with surviving CIA case officers and Polyakov's family, Polyakov was a war hero who was disgusted by Krushchev's erratic and brutal behavior, on top of the inefficiency and oppression of the Soviet system. He believed that accurate information would help the Americans, who in his estimation were decadent and unstrategic, avoid risky moves which could escalate the Cold War to a hot one.
At first, Polyakov's attempts to make contact were deflected by the paranoia of CIA counter-intelligence chief James Angleton who believed that every defector was part of a massive plot to feed the US fake intelligence. Once Angleton's iron grip was broken, Polyakov began producing massive amounts of valuable information. He was the CIA's crown jewel, until he retired, and was eventually betrayed by both Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames, and executed for treason.
This book is interesting, but I think the attempts to blend the memoir with the intelligence journalism weaken the story, which is strong enough to stand on its own. The Billion Dollar Spy is twisty and paranoid enough to be a le Carré thriller. The Moscow Rules is another breezy memoir, but one about spycraft by people who did it. Because as both Polyakov's career and death illustrate, intelligence work is about the people who keep the secrets, and what happens when they decide their ostensible cause is not the one they care for.
The memoir has a kind of sepia tinged romanticism, the privileged life of a child of American empire in Rome, Delhi, Berlin, and Mexico City. Dillon has a breezy attitude towards the world of espionage, which makes this approachable but also leads her to just brush past some astounding history, like that two presidents of Mexico were CIA assets (see LITEMPO for details).
Polyakov is by far the more interesting part of the book. By Dillon's telling, based on interviews with surviving CIA case officers and Polyakov's family, Polyakov was a war hero who was disgusted by Krushchev's erratic and brutal behavior, on top of the inefficiency and oppression of the Soviet system. He believed that accurate information would help the Americans, who in his estimation were decadent and unstrategic, avoid risky moves which could escalate the Cold War to a hot one.
At first, Polyakov's attempts to make contact were deflected by the paranoia of CIA counter-intelligence chief James Angleton who believed that every defector was part of a massive plot to feed the US fake intelligence. Once Angleton's iron grip was broken, Polyakov began producing massive amounts of valuable information. He was the CIA's crown jewel, until he retired, and was eventually betrayed by both Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames, and executed for treason.
This book is interesting, but I think the attempts to blend the memoir with the intelligence journalism weaken the story, which is strong enough to stand on its own. The Billion Dollar Spy is twisty and paranoid enough to be a le Carré thriller. The Moscow Rules is another breezy memoir, but one about spycraft by people who did it. Because as both Polyakov's career and death illustrate, intelligence work is about the people who keep the secrets, and what happens when they decide their ostensible cause is not the one they care for.