Deadly Illusions: The KGB Orlov Dossier Reveals Stalin's Master Spy

By Oleg Tsarev and John Edmond Costello

Book Overview

American

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0517588501
• ISBN13: 9780517588505
• Release Date: August 1970
• Publisher: Crown Publishing Group, The
• Length: 512 Pages
• Weight: 2.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.7" x 6.3" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

Absolutely First Rate; Scholarly and Absorbing

I dont know much about John Costello but two of his books, Mask of Treachery and Deadly Illusions, are absolute gems. As well as being exciting to read, they are valuable resources on the underside of the cold war, the real business of espionage. The most exciting thing is how he takes us back through the mists of time to the beginning of the century to reveal how the Soviet espionage effort developed practically simultaneously witherh Russina Revolution. It has been fashionable for years to lampoon the communist witchhunts and McCarthyism of the early cold war but there was a massive sophisticated and implacably determined Soviet penetration effort throughout the world and it much it began long before WWII. The Cheka, the Comintern, the NKVD, the Rote Kapelle, the Spanish Civil War(which seems to have been the most affecting event, more than WWII, for a whole generation on both sides of the Atlantic), the Cambridge Spys, the forth man, the fifth man, the Rosenbergs, the mole-hunts that debilitated Western counter-intelligence services, it was a seamless continuum, real but hidden, that the world was and is still largely ignorant. Costello's bravura scholarship plus his relationship with former Soviet intelligence players make a valuable resource for all who would know how things really did occur in the defining political struggle of this century.