As the Cold War drew to a close with the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, those at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, finally hoped to resolve many long-standing puzzles.
The most important of which was how officers in the field under diplomatic and deep cover stationed across the globe were readily identified by the KGB. As a consequence, covert operations had to be aborted as local agents were pinpointed and CIA personnel compromised or, indeed, had their lives thrown into jeopardy.
The problem dated from the mid-'70s, the very time that James Angleton, the paranoid head of agency counterintelligence, was at last ushered out of office, to the relief of conscientious officers hitherto cast under a dark cloud of suspicion, their promotion delayed or, worse still, denied, and in some cases entire careers wrecked.
But could Angleton have been right? Some consistently maintained so, notably the late Bruce Bagley. Their argument was simple. How could these disasters have happened with such regularity if the agency had not been penetrated by Soviet moles?
The problem with this line of thought was that it did not so much overestimate CIA security as underestimate the brainpower of their Russian counterparts.
A name soon emerged from the KGB undergrowth: that of Yuri Totrov, a veritable legend who soon became known with grim humor as the shadow director of personnel at CIA.
The Cold War over, a senior and very experienced officer was dispatched to Japan to seek out Totrov and offer him a vast sum of money for his "memoirs." Totrov's retort was typically blunt. "Have you not read what is on my file at Langley? It says, 'Not to be Pitched.'"
So how, exactly, did Totrov reconstitute CIA personnel listings without access to the files themselves or those who put them together?
...The difference between Totrov and his fellow citizens was that whereas others at home and abroad would assume the Soviet Union was somehow unique, he applied his understanding of his own society to a society that on the surface seemed unique, but which, in respect of how government worked, was not in fact that much different: the United States.