The First Directorate: My 32 Years in Intelligence and Espionage Against the West

An experienced KGB agent who broke with the Communist Party to advocate democratic reform, chronicles his career in espionage, offering a candid look into the inner workings of the Soviet spy machine

In this credible and compelling memoir written with Montaigne, former head of the Philadelphia Inquirer 's Moscow bureau, Kalugin recalls how, in 1958, while a Fulbright exchange student in America, he recruited his first spy--a coup for a KGB novice. Later, in Washington, with a cover job as Soviet press attache, he cultivated "moles" and other intelligence assets, and helped handle American spy John Walker ("a huge catch"). Stationed in Moscow, Kalugin became a protege of KGB chief Yuri Andropov and eventually was appointed head of the Foreign Counterintelligence Directorate. His detailed account of the use of sexual entrapment includes the revelation that the KGB virtually controlled the Russian Orthodox Church through the blackmail of its many gay priests. By 1990, concluding that the organization he helped to build was "rotten beyond salvation," Kalugin threw in his lot with the democratic reformers. He is the highest-ranking KGB officer to expose its inner workings. Photos.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The First Directorate was the KGB section in charge of foreign espionage. Kalugin first spied against the United States as a student at the Columbia School of Journalism in 1959, when he helped recruit a rocket scientist. He eventually rose to be head of Foreign Counter-Intelligence for the KGB before running afoul of bureaucratic infighting, which stopped his career in 1979. (Dumped from the KGB, he became a member of Soviet Parliament.) Kalugin worked with John Walker and the legendary Kim Philby, and he helped plan the famous poison-pellet-in-the-umbrella assassination of Georgi Markov in London. Noting that it was not easy to recruit spies in the American government, he comments that the best people simply walked in off the streets; money was their main desire, since the USSR had long since lost its ideological attraction by 1969. This is an interesting and easy-to-read story of intelligence operations during the Cold War. Recommended for the espionage collections of public and academic libraries. (Photos and index not seen.)-Daniel K. Blewett, Loyola Univ. Lib., Ill.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

After he had been cashiered from the KGB in 1990, Kalugin blazed into prominence as a critic of the pervasive spy empire. But oddly enough, he remains a professional loyal to the spook's ethos: tell no tales out of school. Although frank about generalities, he ventures few blockbusting specifics that haven't popped up elsewhere in the post-cold war wave of espionage books, but this memoir of a stellar career in the secret service is, nonetheless, engrossing for aficionados. In the 1960s Kalugin worked in New York and Washington and handled some devastating turncoats, such as the notorious John Walker; in the 1970s he headed counterintelligence from Moscow. On the fast track, a prot‚g‚ of Andropov, he then fell victim to a bureaucratic intrigue of Vladimir Kryuchkov--a coup leader in 1991--and was put to pasture chasing nonexistent spies in Leningrad. There Kalugin finally became disillusioned by the corruption and cronyism that infested "mature socialism." Filled with anecdotes linked by personal journey from Stalinist true believer to champion democrat, Kalugin's account of life in the secret world will haul in all spy buffs--a number to be augmented by a full-press publicity push. Gilbert Taylor