Review: The Billion Dollar Spy by David E. Hoffman

A fun read on how the CIA conducted espionage in the Soviet Union during the Cold War. It’s mostly written in a historical / documentary format, though some parts of the story are written more like a thriller spy novel. Of course, this is based on real events, so don’t expect James Bond or Jason Bourne. Still, it’s educational, entertaining, and makes you realize how crazy spy stories get even in the real world.

A few of my favorite takeaways:

• The Soviet secret police had thousands of agents following everyone, everywhere, all the time—especially any foreigners. As a result, the CIA and its informers had to expend a monumental effort every time they wanted lose their tails, sneaking out of office windows or the back of movie theaters, spending hours navigating streets and subways, dipping in and out of stores, and even intentionally trying to provoke the secret police as a way to check if they still had a tail or not.

• One method for losing a tail really stuck out to me: the “Jack in the Box.” You’d head out in a car with 3 or 4 people, and the person in the front seat would have a cake in their lap. The secret police, as always, would have a car tailing you a few blocks behind—enough to see how many people are in your car, but not any real details. To lose this tail, the person in the front seat would first change into a disguise, and then you’d make a 90 degree turn on some street, so for a few seconds, the car tailing you couldn’t see what’s happening. During this brief window, you slow your car down a bit, and the person in the front seat hops out onto the street, but leaves the cake sitting in the front seat. But this is no ordinary cake: it’s a special cake devised by the CIA, where with the push of a button, a cardboard cut out of a person pops up (this is the “Jack in the Box”), so it looks like there is still someone sitting in the front seat. Your car speeds up again, and at this point, the tail has made the turn onto the same street, and what they see is your car, with the same number of people in it, plus some stranger walking down the street.

• The number of tools, techniques, and spy gadgets was pretty wild. They provided spies with tiny cameras that worked in low light; one-time pads to encrypt messages; invisible ink so you could fill one side of a letter with an innocuous message, and the other side with secrets that would only be visible to someone who knew how to chemically treat the paper; and even pens filled with cyanide in case you were caught.

Rating: 4 stars