Yuri B. Shvets. Washington Station. 1994.

In Al Martin’s book about the book he wants to write, Martin mentioned Washington Station, so I read it (as often happens, I was the first person to check this book out of the University of Illinois bookstacks). This is a memoir of a KGB agent in the 1980s. Its conclusion is that intelligence agencies should be abolished. His anecdotes about the KGB support this, and, during the time period he writes about, the Iran-Contra scandal was unfolding, which doesn’t hurt his thesis any. I found it highly readable, to the point of being addictive, save for my need to write down the names of the players as they were introduced due to my poor faculty for distinguishing Russian names. The author attempted to do good intelligence work, despite the danger involved, and despite the Soviet bureaucracy. It was a failed struggle against enemy and ally alike: James Bond meets Dilbert.

The translation is impeccable. Formally, there is nothing of interest here, it is simply a focused and well-wrought memoir. Politically, there are no revelations, except perhaps the realization that the Soviet threat I grew up under was greatly exaggerated, and that both US and Soviet intelligence services had a tendency to exaggerate the danger of the opposing superpower, in order to justify the continuing existence of those very intelligence services.