He and SVR cronies share the illicit multimillion-dollar proceeds. Putin and associates are conned into purchasing German-made equipment for the new facility at an inflated price. He is blackmailed into revealing plans for an advanced nuclear facility. An Iranian nuclear scientist is caught on film in a sexual tryst with a Soviet woman, an encounter engineered by Dominka. In another operation, CIA exploits Putin’s material greed in crippling Iran’s nuclear ambitions. That she does so while en route to a house party at one of Putin’s many residences squashes SVR suspicions about her loyalty.

When his exposure seemed imminent, Dominka helps engineer his defection via a submarine off St. The dissident is a high-level Red Army general disgusted with the false and unfulfilled promises of communism. ” Keen-eyed for pretty women, Putin takes an interest in Dominika, to the distress of jealous SVR superiors.Ī particularly fascinating riff deals with the CIA tradecraft involved in protecting an in-place defector - i.e., a Soviet who willingly reveals top-secret materials, but does not want to leave Russia. Matthews’ description is of a technique that is a generation or so dated.)ĭominka is motivated by her disgust with the “successors to the sclerotic Soviet Politburo - the cashiered KGB hustlers, and the thirsty oligarchs, and the crime lords, and the poker-faced president with his trademark sidelong glance. (Does the CIA actually have such equipment? I surmise that Mr. Imagine a hand-sized sensor that can be buried a few inches within line-of-sight of a busy highway. He tutors Dominika in how to employ communications equipment that can be loaded and unloaded from a distance. Matthews offers intriguing hints as to how the Moscow station manages contacts with covert operatives.

And his book has an authenticity seldom encountered in spy fiction.Īmong his many references to CIA tradecraft, Mr. Jason Matthews was CIA chief in Moscow during a career spent mainly in the so-called “denied areas” subservient to the old Soviet Union. One little secret about Langley is that our spies love trafficking in salacious gossip about foreign leaders that would not be out of place in the New York Post’s Page Six column.

Enough insider information is contained about the corrupt court of Putin - is it heresy to term him Vlad the Terrible? - to make one suspect that much of the material is based on reports from the agency’s Moscow station. One minor disappointment: Putin is on the verge of seducing a beautiful Russian counterintelligence officer who is also a CIA penetration agent, but must desist at the very last minute. Given the superb credentials of the author - a top CIA operative for 33 years - one is tempted (and with justification) to read this novel as a roman a clef, and especially in its depiction of the Russian criminal state assembled by President Vladimir Putin.

Palace of treason book