The intriguing tale of Vitaly Yurchenko, a KGB colonel who returned to the Soviet Union barely three months after having defected to the US, giving his on-again, off-again masters a considerable propaganda victory. Drawing on deep-throat sources in the intelligence community and interviews with the disaffected principal, Kessler (The Spy in the Russian Club, 1990; Spy Versus Spy, 1988, etc.) offers a tellingly detailed account of the stranger-than-fiction case. On August 1, 1985, Yurchenko, a globe-trotting security officer who had a tour of duty at the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C., during the mid-1970's, turned himself over to the resident CIA agent in Rome. Spirited back to the States, he furnished debriefers with a wealth of information of KGB penetrations of Western intelligence services. Among others, the apostate exposed Edward Lee Howard (a former CIA operative) and Ronald W. Pelton (a sometime employee of the National Security Agency). While spilling the beans about traitors and KGB methods, however, Yurchenko apparently became disenchanted with his putative hosts. At any rate, on Nov. 2, 1985, he walked out of a Georgetown restaurant—and into the nearby Soviet embassy. From this haven, Yurchenko denied ever having defected, telling the press he had been drugged and kidnapped by the CIA. Although some slight doubt remains as to whether Yurchenko was a KGB plant, Kessler argues persuasively that he was a genuine turncoat who slipped through the hands of American agents largely for lack of empathetic handling. Despite having promised him a comfortable lifetime income, the author points out, the CIA (traditionally contemptuous of defectors) alienated Yurchenko in large as well as small ways, e.g., by failing to provide Russian-speaking interrogators, dismissing his complaints of digestion problems as the whining of a hypochondriac, and breaking a pledge to keep the case out of the media. A fascinating and painstakingly documented footnote to the history of cold-war espionage. (Eight pages of photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: May 6, 1991
ISBN: 0-671-72664-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.
Known for her often contentious perspectives, New York Times opinion writer Weiss battles societal Jewish intolerance through lucid prose and a linear playbook of remedies.
While she was vividly aware of anti-Semitism throughout her life, the reality of the problem hit home when an active shooter stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue where her family regularly met for morning services and where she became a bat mitzvah years earlier. The massacre that ensued there further spurred her outrage and passionate activism. She writes that European Jews face a three-pronged threat in contemporary society, where physical, moral, and political fears of mounting violence are putting their general safety in jeopardy. She believes that Americans live in an era when “the lunatic fringe has gone mainstream” and Jews have been forced to become “a people apart.” With palpable frustration, she adroitly assesses the origins of anti-Semitism and how its prevalence is increasing through more discreet portals such as internet self-radicalization. Furthermore, the erosion of civility and tolerance and the demonization of minorities continue via the “casual racism” of political figures like Donald Trump. Following densely political discourses on Zionism and radical Islam, the author offers a list of bullet-point solutions focused on using behavioral and personal action items—individual accountability, active involvement, building community, loving neighbors, etc.—to help stem the tide of anti-Semitism. Weiss sounds a clarion call to Jewish readers who share her growing angst as well as non-Jewish Americans who wish to arm themselves with the knowledge and intellectual tools to combat marginalization and defuse and disavow trends of dehumanizing behavior. “Call it out,” she writes. “Especially when it’s hard.” At the core of the text is the author’s concern for the health and safety of American citizens, and she encourages anyone “who loves freedom and seeks to protect it” to join with her in vigorous activism.
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13605-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
