https://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/books/review/Thomas-t.html?smid=fb-share&fbclid=IwAR3DFCdKLxdD1th4r92OnDOqYywS1KJYo75lHfM4pKwyb_zQyFsqPRM8YNsThe above is a truly fair and balanced
New York Times review of my favorite book.
One of the book's main subjects is the well-documented fact that KGB officer Yuri Nosenko was sent to U.S. a few weeks after the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy (in Dallas on 11/22/63) to, for some unknown reason, mislead American Intel into believing the KGB had had nothing to do the accused assassin during the two and one-half years he'd lived in the USSR, and to, for obvious reasons, detract from what an earlier and true defector, KGB major Anatoliy Golitsyn, was telling the CIA about possible moles and triple-agents in U.S. Intelligence and in the intelligence services of some of our European allies.
With the help of "spiteful and under-endowed" CIA officers like Richard Kovich, Leonard MCCoy, John L. Hart and Bruce Solie, and now-verified Russian triple-agents and false defectors like Yuri Loginov, Vitaliy Yurchenko and Igor Kochnov, Nosenko eventually succeeded, unfortunately, not only in doing that but also in tearing apart the CIA's counterintelligence efforts against the USSR to such an extent that a CIA mole like Aldrich Ames could later betray America for nine years.
(Enter "Anna Chapman and the Eleven Dwarfs" spy ring which was finally rolled up by the FBI in 2010, and Edward Snowden, and ... )
Bottom line: Bagley's 2007 book
Spy Warsis a must-read for those of us who are trying to understand just how complicated and successful "KGB" counter- intelligence operations have been against (especially since 1959 when Department 14 of the Second Chief Directorate, the super-secret "KGB within the KGB" was created), and, ultimately, to figure out how a Putin-friendly "useful idiot" like Donald Trump could become our president in January of 2017.
The latter was at least partially due, in my humble opinion, to the plethora of anti-CIA and ant-FBI conspiracy theories the JFK assassination has given rise to over the past fifty-seven years, which "CTs" have taken their toll on our body politic by not only dumbing us down and making many of us apathetic, but by making us so vulnerable to fake news and social media memes as to have either voted for Donald Trump, or, more likely, to have not voted at all.
