Book Beginnings: The Billion Dollar Spy by David E. Hoffman

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Nov 24

Not only does Gilion host the European Reading Challenge and TBR 23 in 23 Challenge on her Rose City Reader blog but also Book Beginnings on Friday . While I'm no stranger to her European Reading Challenge, last year I decided to finally participate in Book Beginnings on Friday. This week I'm back with another post.

For Book Beginnings on Friday Gilion asks us to simply "share the opening sentence (or so) of the book you are reading this week, or just a book that caught your fancy and you want to highlight."

MY BOOK BEGINNING

The spy had vanished. He was the most successful and valued agent the United States had run inside the Soviet Union in two decades. His documents and drawings had unlocked the secrets of Soviet radar and revealed sensitive plans for research on weapons systems a decade into the future.

Last week I featured Pieter Aspe's 2013 crime novel The Midas Murders. The week before it was Philip Kerr's 2018 historical thriller Greeks Bearing Gifts. This week it's David E. Hoffman's 2015 The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal.

I was in the mood for a little Cold War-era espionage stuff so I borrowed an ebook of The Billion Dollar Spy since it's been on my to read list for almost 10 years. Once I dived in the cloak and dagger stories of battling the Soviet KGB began sounding familiar, then I remembered I'd heard some of the same participants interviewed on the Spy Talk podcast. So far it's shaping up to be a great book. Here's what Amazon has to say about David E. Hoffman's The Billion Dollar Spy.

While driving out of the American embassy in Moscow on the evening of February 16, 1978, the chief of the CIA's Moscow station heard a knock on his car window. A man on the curb handed him an envelope whose contents stunned U.S. intelligence: details of top-secret Soviet research and developments in military technology that were totally unknown to the United States. In the years that followed, the man, Adolf Tolkachev, an engineer in a Soviet military design bureau, used his high-level access to hand over tens of thousands of pages of technical secrets. His revelations allowed America to reshape its weapons systems to defeat Soviet radar on the ground and in the air, giving the United States near total superiority in the skies over Europe.