The Essential Enemy: The Inside Story of the CIA’s Remaining Showdown with the KGB

A landmark collaboration between a thirty-year veteran of the CIA and a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, The Essential Enemy is the dramatic inside story of the CIA-KGB spy wars, advised by the actions of the boys who fought them.

Based mostly on a whole lot of interviews with operatives from each side, The Essential Enemy places us contained in the heads of CIA officers as they dodge surveillance and stroll into violent ambushes in Moscow. That is the story of the era of spies who got here of age within the shadow of the Cuban missile disaster and rose by the ranks to run the CIA and KGB within the final days of the Chilly Warfare. The clandestine operations they masterminded took them from the sewers of Moscow to the again streets of Baghdad, from Cairo and Havana to Prague and Berlin, however the motion facilities on Washington, beginning within the notorious “12 months of the Spy”–when, one after the other, the CIA’s brokers in Moscow started to be killed, up by to the final man.

Behind the scenes with the CIA’s covert operations in Afghanistan, Milt Bearden led America to victory within the secret struggle in opposition to the Soviets, and for the primary time he reveals right here what he did and whom America backed, and why. Bearden was referred to as again to Washington after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan and was made chief of the Soviet/East European Division—simply in time to witness the autumn of the Berlin Wall, the revolutions that swept throughout Jap Europe, and the implosion of the Soviet Union.

Laced with startling revelations–about fail-safe top-secret again channels between the CIA and KGB, double and triple brokers, covert operations in Berlin and Prague, and the fateful autumn of 1989–The Essential Enemy is historical past at its action-packed finest.