title: Washington Station: My Life as a KGB Spy in America
author: Yuri Shvets
description: Under cover as a TASS reporter, Shvets was stationed in Washington, D.C., from 1985 to 1987 as a KGB operative whose primary mission was to recruit Americans who could provide classified information. Much of the narrative deals with his limited success in "developing" a former White House adviser and his journalist wife. Neither one is identified. We're only told that the adviser's code name was Socrates, that he was a former Harvard professor and worked for the Carter administration. Shvets's dealings with these two are less interesting than the account of his elaborate countersurveillance measures to thwart the FBI agents keeping tabs on him and the story of his growing disgust with the bureaucratic paranoia of the KGB. His shallow, inflated, clunkily translated memoir is worth reading if only for its exposure of obtuse and counterproductive KGB policies and of the schemes that led Shvets to resign in 1990 and seek asylum in the U.S. The most arresting aspect of the book is his argument-regrettably undeveloped-that spying in general is a waste of effort and that the profession should be eliminated. "Certainly in this age of technological sophistication," he concludes, "it is difficult to justify human intelligence." <br />Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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  U.S.
  $23.00
  Can.
  $30.00
  Unprecedented in
  its candor, Washington
  Station
  is a compelling expose of Soviet
  spying in America and
  is as electrifying
  as any spy
  thriller—except that
  it
  is
  all
  true.
  In the spring of 1985, Yuri B. Shvets,
  an idealistic young KGB officer, reported
  to the Soviet embassy in Washington,
  D.C., home of the KGB's Washington
  station.
  His mission:
  to try to recruit
  Americans with access to important polit-
  ical offices, including the White House,
  the Pentagon, and the CIA. It was no easy
  task, and many of Shvets's KGB col-
  leagues never even made the effort.
  Nonetheless, under cover as a reporter for
  TASS, the Soviet news agency, Shvets
  managed to recruit a journalist and for-
  mer White House advisor—code-named
  "Socrates"—whose story has never been
  told before.
  In Washington Station,
  his riveting
  account of his experiences spying against
  the United States, Yuri Shvets describes
  in fascinating detail what only a real
  KGB officer could know: the daily activi-
  ties o