"Year of the Spy" -- The 1985 Moscow Spy Wars by One Who Lived It

I’m still introducing myself here on Substack — and this is an important piece of it. The insights that I bring to this Substack grow out of 30 years spent first as a CIA Operations Officer, and later (until now) as a Criminal Defense and Civil Rights Investigator. This means I will bring an investigative mindset to this Substack and will apply the rigor of intelligence and investigation to all of the writing I do here. It also means I’ll try to explore what I know and can share about the life and the work of being a spy and investigator.

As an introduction — I offer above the book trailer for Year of the Spy, my upcoming non-fiction book on the CIA-KGB espionage war of 1985, where I was a participant on the streets of Moscow. The book has been provisionally approved by CIA for publication, and is now in the final stages of CIA review. In the meantime, the provisional approval gives me some flexibility in being able to write about some of the topics in the book—and other espionage topics of interest, which I’ll be doing here.

A word about the book — it’s the full story of the events of 1985, when the CIA in Moscow went from riding high on a series of great successes, to a series of devastating setbacks — Soviet agents turning up dead, and we didn’t know why. Eventually we would learn that most of what happened was attributable first to CIA defector Ed Howard, and second to CIA mole Aldrich Ames. But some of it remains a mystery to this day — was there an additional penetration of CIA? Or some other source of compromise.

I was part of the CIA team on the ground in Moscow that lived through this period, and the book represents both a memoir and a piece of investigative journalism, in which I interviewed every member of 1985 Moscow Station, and also obtained inputs from all of the key KGB officers who were on the other side of the equation. The result is the first book on this topic that has “boots on the ground” authenticity from both the CIA and KGB side. Other books that have addressed the same epic

Thanks for taking a look.