



Treason
-
- $12.99
-
- $12.99
Publisher Description
A high-level Russian spy secretly working for the CIA is betrayed and arrested in Moscow. In Washington, counterintelligence agents search for a traitor in the upper reaches of the CIA. In the middle of it all is an American reporter whose chance encounter leads to the discovery of a double agent in the very heart of the American intelligence community. Treason is award-winning reporter Bill Powell's dramatic account of how he became involved in one of the highest-profile U.S. mole hunts of recent decades.
Vyacheslav Baranov had just been released from a prison camp in Siberia when he walked into Newsweek bureau chief Bill Powell's office in Moscow in the summer of 1998. A former colonel in the GRU, the Soviet Union's once-feared military intelligence agency, Baranov had also been one of the highest-ranking spies on the CIA's payroll when he was arrested six years earlier. Baranov was convinced he had been betrayed, and the question that obsessed him -- and that would thrust Powell into the spying game -- was, by whom?
Treason begins on the day Baranov walked into Powell's office, unannounced, saying he had a story Powell would find interesting. Powell was skeptical of Baranov's tale of spying for the CIA and being mishandled by the agency, but he was intrigued and agreed to see Baranov again. Over the course of several weeks, then months, as it became clear to him that Baranov was credible, Powell realized that he might have an extraordinary news story. Little did he know that his meetings with Baranov would put him in the middle of a top-secret mole hunt.
The CIA had assumed that Baranov was one of more than a dozen Soviet double agents who had been betrayed by Aldrich Ames, a former counterintelligence officer in the agency's directorate of operations, who himself had been arrested by the FBI for spying for Moscow. Baranov had another theory about who had betrayed him, and through Powell -- his only means of communicating with the U.S. government -- he managed to pass crucial information to the FBI that convinced its mole hunters that he was right.
A story of intrigue and furtive meetings with secret agents in Moscow, New York, Crete, Moldova, and Bangladesh, Treason recounts how Baranov was first recruited to spy for the GRU, and then by the CIA to spy for the United States. It describes the murky and dangerous world of spies and counterspies -- a world in which it is never clear whom you can trust -- as well as the lonely life of a double agent. It is also an eye-opening account of how the United States handles -- and sometimes mishandles -- its double agents. And it is a vivid firsthand account of what can happen when the worlds of journalism and espionage collide.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The spy game is a messy business--and it's also a game the CIA doesn't always seem to play so well. As Newsweek Moscow bureau chief in the late 90s, Powell met Vyacheslav Baranov, an ex-spy with a remarkable story to tell. An up-and-coming operative in the GRU (the Russian military intelligence unit), Baranov had been sent to pose as a businessman in Bangladesh while monitoring illegal weapons movements. Unhappy with the corrupt Soviet regime, he agreed to become a double agent after being approached by an American operative. He passed along little information, however, as the CIA consistently bungled its communications. Arrested by the KGB in 1992 for espionage, he was sent to a Siberian work camp for five years; after his release, he set out to discover who fingered him to the authorities. Russian moles Aldridge Ames and Robert Hanssen were quickly ruled out as whistle blowers--which suggested that a high-profile Russian agent remained at work in the American intelligence community. A speedy, gripping read, the book nevertheless leaves many unanswered questions. How could the CIA ignore a former GRU operative who wanted to give up the goods? How could men like Ames and Hanssen have operated so successfully for so long without being caught? Who betrayed Baranov? Is the mole still at large? Powell and Baranov tirelessly sought the answers to these questions, but unfortunately, they were stonewalled at every turn. 8 pages b&w photos.