Undercover Lives

KGB agents reveal for the 1st time their lives under cover in the cities of the world, including London, Paris, Rome, New York, Bangkok, and Cairo. There are many heavy tomes on the KGB either written by western intelligence experts or Russian defectors, but this is the 1st time that loyal agents have spoken about what it was really like to work for the Lubyanka. Their memories of their postings to Paris, Rome, London, Cairo, New York, Mexico and Bangkok are full of fascinating tales of how they recruited foreigners, avoided the local counter intelligence, argued with Moscow centre and managed to have a good time on shoe string budgets. Each chapter hasa particular theme so that the agents accounts do not become repetitive. For example, Mikhail Brazelonov, the man in Paris, writesabout spying as adultery. He was sent to France to meet an American traitor called Mary. To make his cover as a tourist more convincing he takes his wife along. The chapter is a French farce in which the spy makes various attempts to meet Mary without Tanya finding out what is going on. The sting in the tail is that Tanya's father was 1 of Stalin's bodyguards.
This means that the wife is almost certainly a KGB agent herself. Not a fool, but a spy spying on a spy. Mikhail Lyubimov, expelled from Britain in the 1960's after 2 MI6 men set him up in a pub, is allowed to return to London for a visit. He mixes memories of the profumo era with impressions of 1990's London overrun by vulgar new Russians. He trained himself to stop drinking vodka and switched to whiskey in order to pass himself as an englishman. Another agent recounts how the KGB stage a car crash in which a man was killed. The KGB told the agent's wife that her husband had died in the car crash so that he could be sent off to a different country with a completely new identity.