IN THE NAME OF CONSCIENCE

In April of 1954 Nikolai Khokhlov, former Soviet secret agent, announced his defection from the secret services at a press conference called by U.S. authorities in Bonn. Subtitled The Testament of a Soviet Scret Agent this is a record of his intelligence activities since 1941 when he was recalled from the front to the NKVD. He was prepared for partisan work behind German lines and was responsible for the liquidation of Kube, the Nazi ""Butcher"" of Byelorussia, the most spectacular feat of his wartime career. During eight years spent in Military Intelligence he posed at various times as a German, a Pole, later became a Rumanian citizen. When he returned to Moscow he was anxious to leave the service and, encouraged by his wife, began to refuse assignments. Finally ordered to Frankfort for the planned assassination of a Russian emigre revolutionary, the doubts he had always felt about the justice of the Soviet regime became convictions and he exposed the plot to Okolovich who put him in contact with the Americans. American agents at first found it difficult to accept his story it was too idealistic. But eventually they agreed to remove his wife and child to the American Embassy in Moscow in exchange for his publicized defection to the West. The Americans blundered after Khokhlov had already exposed his family and he ends his book on this desperate note. The author of this intriguing record has received wide publicity in numerous interviews, Saturday Evening Post and U.S. News and World Report.