A retired spy gets back into the game to solve a perplexing case—and reconcile with his daughter, a CIA officer who married into the very family that derailed his own CIA career—in this true-life tale of vindication and redemption from the New York Times bestselling author of The Last Goodnight.
On Sept. 25, 1978, an unmanned sailboat ran aground on the shore of the Chesapeake Bay...The cabin was in disarray, and papers marked 'Top Secret' were found, along with a phone directory filled with 351-prefix numbers, a classified CIA exchange...As veteran investigative reporter Howard Blum tells it in his intriguing new book, The Spy Who Knew Too Much: An Ex-CIA Officer’s Quest Through a Legacy of Betrayal, things then moved quickly...The boat’s owner turned out to be John Arthur Paisley, later described by the agency as a 'low-level analyst'...A week later a corpse was discovered floating in the bay, identified by the chief medical examiner as Paisley...Cause of death: suicide...Never mind that the examiner’s office did not receive the corpse until the day after his report...the real pleasure of this book is not the solution but the puzzle...By going back and forth in time, Blum cleverly makes his pieces part of agency folklore, terrific stories in their own right...This is the Cold War at high noon, missiles loaded, when spies were the front-line troops...If you have even a passing interest in the period, the book will be catnip...It’s all here: the dead drops, the surveillance, the honey traps, the disillusioned Joes, the office politics, the martinis...The period details are so atmospheric and rich that it would be no surprise to see Kim Philby make a guest appearance.
Prolific author and reporter Blum tells a striking story...Blum’s central character is Tennent Bagley of the CIA’s elite Soviet Bloc division...He was working in Switzerland in 1962 when KGB agent Yuri Nosenko offered his services...After interviewing him, Bagley was convinced that Nosenko was precisely who he claimed to be...Promising to deliver secrets, Nosenko returned to Moscow and Bagley to Washington, D.C., where James Angleton, head of CIA counterintelligence, suggested that he read the file of Anatoly Golitsyn, another KGB agent who had defected in 1961...The plot thickened when Nosenko defected...Flown to the U.S., he responded to Bagley’s questioning with a mixture of boasting, self-promotion, contradictions, and lies, but he insisted that his defection was genuine...Unconvinced and certain he was the victim of self-serving CIA politics, Bagley retired only to be galvanized years later by the apparent death of a CIA official, unconvincingly described as a suicide...Although he was barred from CIA archives, he launched an exhaustive search and ultimately concluded that the purported victim, John Paisley, was the mole...Blum admits that nearly everyone involved, Bagley included, was dead when he began his research...While many passages are pure speculation, tolerant readers will enjoy a largely entertaining spy story full of cutthroat CIA infighting and the occasional cut throat.
Did the KGB have a mole with access to some of the CIA’s most sensitive information who was never caught?...That tantalizing question is at the heart of this nail-biting account from former New York Times investigative reporter Blum...Starting in 1950, Pete Bagley was the deputy head of the CIA’s Soviet Bloc division and came to suspect that Yuri Nosenko, a KGB officer who defected to the U.S. soon after President Kennedy’s assassination, was a plant, but was unable to persuade his superiors of that conclusion...Instead, Bagley himself came under suspicion of providing intelligence to the Soviets...Bagley searched for the real mole and continued his hunt even after leaving the CIA in 1972...Blum’s access to Bagley’s writings and a myriad of other sources enables him to craft a page-turning narrative...This reads like a John le Carré novel come to life.
