Michael Pullara > Quotes

“They bought and sold in the black market—and thereby became willingly complicit in officially illegal activity. As a result of this lifestyle of defiance, any generalized sense of civic responsibility atrophied and any basic respect for the rule of law was compromised.”
― Michael Pullara, The Spy Who Was Left Behind: Russia, the United States, and the True Story of the Betrayal and Assassination of a CIA Agent

“Criminal investigator versus intelligence officer: different goals, different rules, different cultures. And in the absence of truly extraordinary circumstances,”
― Michael Pullara, The Spy Who Was Left Behind: Russia, the United States, and the True Story of the Betrayal and Assassination of a CIA Agent

“thief in law was a practical dissident and a proto-capitalist. His violations of the colonizer’s criminal code were secretly cheered as acts of civil disobedience and patriotic resistance. He was celebrated as a nationalist hero—a kind of racketeering Robin Hood with a merry band of psychopaths.”
― Michael Pullara, The Spy Who Was Left Behind: Russia, the United States, and the True Story of the Betrayal and Assassination of a CIA Agent