ALEXANDER ORLOV

Glimpses of the shadow world of the KGB, mired in a dense narrative that reads like an FBI file.

That’s no surprise, given that first-time author Gazur is a retired FBI agent specializing in counterintelligence and espionage. He first came into contact with his subject, Alexander Orlov, in 1971, while keeping tabs on KGB defectors; Orlov was the biggest fish in the pond, having held the rank of full general, though his information was a little stale, particularly since he’d been living in the US since 1938. Gazur recounts Orlov’s career, from his rapid rise as a secret police officer and diplomat to his eventual disenchantment with Stalin’s government and his flight to the US, where he avoided contact with both the KGB and the FBI until the early 1950s. Gazur provides several useful footnotes to the history of the Stalinist era, including some tantalizing material on the mysterious death of Leon Trotsky’s young son Sedov, apparently at the hands of a doctor who was also a KGB agent; Orlov’s role in the development of modern techniques of guerrilla warfare, perfected during the Spanish Civil War while Orlov served as “the Kremlin’s key man in Spain”; and the KGB’s infiltration of such American institutions as Time magazine and Harvard University. Along the way, Gazur disputes the charge that J. Edgar Hoover was homosexual, writing that “had this been the case, the substance of the breach would have spread like wildfire throughout the field.” However interesting—and sometimes bizarre—these highlights, Gazur’s narrative is mostly a chore to read; far too long, it suffers from the author’s commitment to recording the smallest detail and from his legalistic approach to the study of the cloak-and-dagger world. A nice payoff comes at the end, though, when the author looks into an apparently simple case of burglary at Orlov’s Cleveland home and comes to some unsettling conclusions about spying on the part of post-Soviet Russia.

A mixed bag, of some interest to serious students of intelligence issues and modern Russian history.