A study of American covert operations, and an exhibit in a prosecution. The first four chapters are a survey of American covert action assembled almost entirely from American public sources, and that survey is broadly sound. Yakovlev quotes the 1948 Policy Planning Staff paper drafted under George Kennan on keeping the Soviet Union weak relative to forces outside its control, and works through the record of the postwar decades from the published American literature, the Congressional investigations and the memoir material. What makes the book a document of a different kind is its second half. Roughly a quarter of the text is given over to the personal histories, prison records, finances and alleged criminal associations of about a dozen named Soviet citizens. When the English edition appeared, Yuri Orlov was serving seven years in a labour camp and Anatoly Shcharansky thirteen; Alexander Ginzburg had been expelled to the United States and stripped of his citizenship; Tatyana Velikanova had been sentenced in August 1980; and Andrei Sakharov had been seized in January 1980 and deposited without trial in a closed city. Of these people the book says that Soviet courts exposed them as paid agents and that justice prevailed. It is not a work of interpretation to be weighed against other interpretations. It is a state's case against its own citizens, translated for export, and has to be read as one. The Russian edition appeared in 1979; the English carries material to autumn 1980 and no further. New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.
