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398 pages, Hardcover
Published May 27, 2021
Four years and nine months after it had given him asylum and the promise of a new life in America, the United States government abandoned any responsibility for its most celebrated agent. The best spy the West had ever known was pushed, firmly and irrevocably, back out into the cold.The Spy Who Was Left Out in the Cold is, at its core, one in a long list of meticulous accounts of the CIA not being fit for purpose—and that's taking the moralising completely out of it. Michel Goleniewski is just one of innumerable victims to the CIA's incompetence—victims usually far more nameless and faceless than Goleniewski, and in Goleniewski's case its not for lack of trying: its only through the Freedom of Information Act, bypassing the decades the CIA spent suppressing information about him, that we have a better understanding of Goleniewski.
The truth about Michal Goleniewski is not binary. He played the role of both victim and villain in his own tragedy, a confused and confusing mixture of the good and the bad. He was a courageous anti-communist agent for the West, whose information led to the exposure of some of the most damaging Soviet spies of the Cold War, and a genuine defector, who risked his life to betray his country from principle, rather than for financial benefit. Yet he was also—and simultaneously—an arrogant, greedy fantasist, who could, and did, play fast and loose with the truth.With the tensions between the West and Russia currently simmering further by the year, its a tragic and timely tale that celebrates an unsung Cold War spy with the harsh light of day.