The spy who saved the world

The Spy Who Saved the World tells, for the first time, the complete story of the life and legendary career of the greatest spy of the Cold War, Oleg Penkovsky, the highest-ranking Soviet military official ever to cooperate with the West. At the height of the Cold War, during 1961 and 1962. Oleg Penkovsky provided the CIA and MI6, the British Intelligence Service, with unusually reliable data on Soviet military intentions and nuclear strength. This information, channeled. directly to President John E Kennedy on a regular basis, was instrumental in assuring U.S. victory during the Cuban missile crisis. The authors base their startling and historic reappraisal of Oleg Penkovsky's career on thousands of pages of government documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. Never before has the tradecraft of spying been revealed with such dramatic force. Penkovsky offered himself to the West as a soldier of freedom. His own career in. the Soviet military had been stalled by the fact that his father had fought against the Bolsheviks during the 1917 Revolution, and he was obsessed by this legacy, which made him suspect in the U.S.S.R. For the CIA and MI6, Penkovsky was the ultimate