1993 hardcover with dust jacket and 538 pages in good condition.

This is the first published book to be based on the archives of the KGB. Drawing on the actual operational case files, Soviet cryptographic traffic and debriefings of agents such as Kim Philby, Deadly Illusions offers direct insight into the reality behind some of the most famous Soviet intelligence operations of the century. The product of an unprecedented collaboration between a KGB officer and a veteran historian, this remarkable book reaches deep into the still-secret former First Chief Directorate archives inherited by the Russian Intelligence Service. Deadly Illusions lays bare - from the contemporary Soviet intelligence files - the astonishing secrets of the career of Alexander Orlov. He stands revealed as the true eminence grise of the Cambridge and Oxford spy rings, before he fled from Spain to escape the assassination squads of Stalin. Orlov's is the remarkable story of one of the legendary figures of Soviet intelligence whose active service spanned the tumultuous founding years of what became the KGB. It documents the origination of the brilliantly successful penetration networks whose "moles" provided Stalin with the stolen intelligence that helped the U.S.S.R. defeat Hitler, obtain the atomic bomb, and steal a march on the West during the opening years of the Cold War. Orlov - until now - has been regarded in the West as the highest-ranking Soviet intelligence defector. But Deadly Illusions opens the secrets contained in his seventeen-volume dossier that reveals how the KGB tracked him down in the United States in the late sixties to invite him to return to Moscow as a hero. It documents how Orlov saved his life by blackmailing Stalin with the threat of the exposure of Philby and sixty other Soviet agents. He did not betray a single one of them. Nor did he ever yield any important intelligence secrets to the Americans during years of interrogation by the FBI and CIA after he surfaced in 1953 with a sensational denunciation of Stalin's crimes. Orlov, in subsequent testimony before the U.S. Senate and in secret debriefings with the CIA, sustained the illusion of his defection for twenty-one years. He was eulogized in the Congressional Record on his death in 1973, but Deadly Illusions documents from both KGB and FBI investigatory records how Alexander Orlov remained a dedicated communist and a master of deception to the very end of his days.