Oleg Gordievsky
Power Lines
Near and Distant Neighbours: A New History of Soviet Intelligence
By Jonathan Haslam
Oxford University Press 366pp £20 order from our bookshop
I should advise readers at the outset that this important monograph gets off to a bad start. A list of Russian intelligence jargon contains at least half a dozen disconcerting mistakes of one sort or another. The text was obviously completed in too much of a hurry, with little regard for consistency. An additional problem is that Jonathan Haslam seems to treat all the sources he uses as equally reliable, including books written by ‘former’ KGB operatives, sometimes with Western coauthors who lack the essential language skills. This is particularly relevant because, despite the blurb, Haslam has disappointingly little to say about the massive Soviet and post-1991 disinformation operations that are currently becoming almost as aggressive and dangerous as they were during the Cold War.
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