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The Spy who was left out in the Cold: The Secret History of Agent Goleniewski

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Spring 1958: a mysterious individual believed to be high up in the Polish secret service began passing Soviet secrets to the West.

His name was Michal Goleniewski and he remains one of the most important, yet least known and most misunderstood spies of the Cold War. Even his death is shrouded in mystery and he has been written out of the history of Cold War espionage - until now.

Tim Tate draws on a wealth of previously-unpublished primary source documents to tell the dramatic true story of the best spy the west ever lost - of how Goleniewski exposed hundreds of KGB agents operating undercover in the West; from George Blake and the 'Portland Spy Ring', to a senior Swedish Air Force and NATO officer and a traitor inside the Israeli government. The information he produced devastated intelligence services on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

Bringing together love and loyalty, courage and treachery, betrayal, greed and, ultimately, insanity, here is the extraordinary true story of one of the most significant but little known spies of the Cold War.

Acclaim for The Spy Who Was Left Out in the Cold :
'Totally gripping . . . a masterpiece. Tate lifts the lid on one of the most important and complex spies of the Cold War, who passed secrets to the West and finally unmasked traitor George Blake.'
HELEN FRY, author of A History of the Secret Service for Escape and Evasion in World War Two

'A wonderful and at times mind-boggling account of a bizarre and almost forgotten spy - right up to the time when he's living undercover in Queens, New York and claiming to be the last of the Romanoffs.'
SIMON KUPER, author of The Happy Traitor

'A highly readable and thoroughly researched account of one of the Cold War's most intriguing and tragic spy stories.' OWEN MATTHEWS, author of An Impeccable Spy

398 pages, Hardcover

Published May 27, 2021

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About the author

Tim Tate

25 books67 followers
Tim Tate is a multiple award-winning British documentary film-maker and bestselling author.

His films - mostly investigative, always campaigning - have been honoured by Amnesty International, the Royal Television Society, UNESCO, The Association for International Broadcasting, The International Documentary Association, the New York Festivals and the US National Academy of Cable Programming. He often speaks at international conferences and university seminars.

He is also the author of fifteen published non-fiction books. These include the best-selling "Slave Girl" which told the true story of a young British woman sex-trafficked to Amsterdam; "Girls With Balls" which uncovered the secret history of women's football; "Hitler's Forgotten Children", which tells the extraordinary and harrowing story of a woman who was part of the Nazi Lebensborn programme to create an Aryan master race; and "Yorkshire Ripper - The Secret Murders" which reveals long-suppressed evidence showing that Peter Sutcliffe killed 23 more victims.

His 2017, "Pride", tells the extraordinary true story behind the hit movie of the same name. In 1984,in the depths of the bitterly-fought miners' strike, a group of very cosmopolitan London gay men and women made common cause with the very traditional communities of a remote south Wales valley - and helped keep its mining families alive at at a time when the British government was trying to starve them into submission.

His latest book - The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy: Crime, Conspiracy and Cover-Up (Thistle Publishing) is the result of 25 years investigation by Tim and his co-author, former CNN journalist Brad Johnson. It presents detailed forensic, ballistic and eyewitness testimony showing that the convicted assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, could not have shot Kennedy. It reveals that Los Angeles Police disregarded and then suppressed clear evidence of a conspiracy behind the assassination and makes a compelling case for a new official inquiry.

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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
Profile Image for Melissa.
320 reviews26 followers
November 10, 2023
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.

From its inception, Goleniewski's relationship with the US was deceptive and manipulative. He'd directed his correspondence to the FBI and the CIA intercepted it, despite the vehement warnings from Goleniewski that the agency had been compromised. And even then, the CIA did absolutely nothing to staunch the flow of information within their agency, endangering his life for petty interagency rivalries. His information was invaluable to the security of the United States, but poor leadership led the floundering agency to champion another defector without an ounce of credibility—due to confirmation bias from one individual. The result of this was the US government abandoning all of its assurances to Goleniewski, cutting him off from financial assistance, and, most importantly for them, irreparably damaging their ability to act as an effective counterintelligence agency for years to come.

In turn, Goleniewski concocted an outrageous story about being the last surviving Romanoff in an unhinged effort to attain absolute financial security for himself, his wife and his child. There's no reason to believe that Goleniweski wouldn't have happily lived on governmental stipends; financial insecurity and having to be the strangest of strangers in a strange land due to the government's abandonment were the true catalysts for such an embarrassing scandal.
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.

One of my favourite stories of incompetency is the damningly belated discovery of Harry Houghton as a Soviet spy. His behaviour in Poland is illegal, violent and erratic—and he only gets sent back to Britain because of his poor clerical work. And then there's the fact his wife reported her fears that he was a spy, and their response, despite corroborative evidence, was that it was more than likely just the ramblings of a jealous wife.

Not the best look for an intelligence agency.
Profile Image for Paul.
2,230 reviews
September 26, 2022
When the cold war was taking place after World War II, the Allies and the Soviet Bloc were all vying for information and intelligence. The stories of the Cambridge spy ring and others are well known, but apart from the odd one or two Soviet spies, like, Oleg Tsarev not much is known about those that chose to betray their home nations. One of those who almost nothing is known about is Michal Goleniewski.

By those in the world of smoke and mirrors, he was considered to be one of the most important spies of the Cold War. He has been written out of the official histories of this time, but Tim Tate thought that there was a story in there that still needed to be told.

In this fascinating book, he has drawn on a ream of documents that until now had not been published. These documents show how this unknown individual began passing Soviet and Polish secrets to the west in 1958. The intelligence that he provided exposed hundreds of agents working in the West. He exposed the Portland Spy ring, and numerous others, including a NATO office and agents working in the States. His information was gold dust, As their agents were blown, the KGB was starting to follow the trail of secrets. He knew that he didn’t have long and made the decision to defect.

The plan to extract him was put into place but was complicated by him wanting to bring his mistress, but it worked and he was soon to set foot in America, but wouldn’t be a free man for a while yet. He brought with him vast quantities of documents that he had snaffled just before he left, and the CIA poured over these. He was given a new identity and effectively disappeared from the clutches of the KGB and their goons. But the Americans squandered their asset and his expert knowledge was overlooked in favour of another defector whose material was mostly fiction.

Tim Tate has written a fine book about Michal Goleniewski and this is a tribute to the work he did. The writing is good, it feels like the research has been painstakingly undertaken and he tries not to sensationalise the man, but rather looks at him with a considered view. He also shows just how misguided the CIA were that they would not trust this guy who had provided vast quantities of material that could be verified and yet trusted this other defector. If you want to learn about a spy who is very little known about then this is a great book to read.
Profile Image for Marin.
204 reviews12 followers
November 29, 2022
Most real spies’ stories are shrouded in mystery, but the one of Michał Goleniewski, probably the most important spy of the early Cold War, was also deeply buried for more than sixty years and distorted by a toxic combination of misinformation and official secrecy, mostly used to cover the incredible failings of the CIA and MI5 in that period, and his own bogus or exaggerated claims.

Tim Tate very well-researched book uncovers many aspects of Goleniewski’s case and how his actions affected and were affected by the inner turmoil and the mistakes made by the CIA at the time.
In order to put Goleniewski’s story in context, the book also summarises the actions of other defectors, soviet spies, and double agents.

For almost three years, Goleniewski risked his life to smuggle thousands of top-secret intelligence and military documents, as well as numerous rolls of microfilm, out from behind the Iron Curtain.
Realising KGB was getting too close to identifying him as a mole, he defected to the USA in January 1961.

“He had provided the names and details of 1,693 intelligence personalities, including officers, co-opted workers, and agents – an unparalleled haul that has never been matched.
Among them, there were George Blake, the KGB’s mole inside MI6; the five members of the ‘Portland Spy Ring’ which betrayed British military secrets to Moscow; the deputy head of West Germany’s foreign intelligence service; a senior Swedish Air Force and NATO officer; and a traitor at the highest reaches of the Israeli government.

The CIA called him ‘one of the West’s most valuable counterintelligence sources’ and ‘the best defector the CIA ever had’. It sponsored legislation in Congress to grant him US citizenship, rewarded him with a generously paid contract, and installed him in a succession of safe houses.
But, in late 1963, the United States government abandoned Michał Goleniewski. The CIA reneged on its agreements to pay and protect him and blocked him from testifying to Senate committees. It harassed him and starved him of money, and secretly briefed Congress and friendly journalists that its former star defector had ‘lost his mind’.”

Unfortunately, the reality is that he had a troubled paranoic personality, with a fatal combination of arrogance, hubris, and personal greed – flaws which were exacerbated by the way the CIA handled him.

The author's main argument is that the CIA's mistrust and bad handling drove him so far down the rabbit hole of intelligence and counter-espionage that he ultimately became mentally unsound.
It is true that James Jesus Angleton’s, the CIA’s counterintelligence chief, fixation on moles and total trust in Golitsyn, one of the defectors, damaged the lives and livelihoods of individual officers and stopped any effective efforts against Moscow’s very real spies in the most dangerous years of the Cold War.
“Ultimately, according to the CIA’s chief in-house historian, ‘forty Agency officers were put on the suspect list and fourteen were thoroughly investigated. Although innocent, they had their careers damaged by the “security stigma”.’
Over a ten-year period, almost two dozen spy hunters searched obsessively for traitors hidden in their midst, and three separate internal inquiries investigated whether Britain’s most senior intelligence officials were KGB agents; these mole hunts led to what MI5 itself terms one of ‘the most traumatic episodes in the Cold War history of the Security Service’."

The incredible story of Nosenko’s illegal incarceration is proof of how an agency can
spiral out of control but in the case of Michał Goleniewski, it seems that the agency couldn’t handle his erratic psychopathic behavior and descent into lunacy.
He ended up claiming he has the Grand Duke Aleksei Romanoff, heir to the Russian throne.
Finally, not only the CIA and MI5 viewed him as an irrelevance – in 1983 even the polish secret service decided to shut down the operation of following his family in Poland, and three years later a Polish military court formally rescinded his death sentence.

A human tragedy of a brave man who descended into madness and a tale of the frightening ineptitude of the western secret services.
Profile Image for Denise.
7,502 reviews137 followers
August 23, 2022
Goleniewski's tale is a strange and fascinating one. Cold War espionage always makes for an intriguing topic, and I knew a bit about Goleniewski's work as a spy, his defection, and his subsequent abandonment by the US government - but the thoroughly bizarre twist to his story after that I was not yet familiar with. Quite an interesting read.
3,545 reviews185 followers
February 24, 2025
There is at least one if not two other biographies of Goleniewski available at the moment and I can't see myself reading another - I think Mr. Tate has managed to capture all the essentials of this fascinating and in someway tragic, if also absurd, individual.

I first heard of Goleniewski via the books of Guy Richard who played a large part in promoting conspiracy theories about the the last tsar and his family escaping the massacre in Ekaterinburg all in support of a defector from communist Poland, Goleniewski, who claimed to be the tsarevich Alexei. He wasn't, but he was a bona fide defector who had supplied and brought with him when he defected lots of useful information. Unfortunately Goleniewski fell foul of the neurotic paranoia of James Jesus Angleton at the CIA who decided he was one of many deep Soviet plants and thus not trustworthy. I won't go into the whole story, but it is well worth reading - primarily because when his name was first revealed back in the early 1970s the amount that was known about what was going on in the world of spooks and spies in the UK and USA was tiny compared to now and it would be years before the idiocy of Angleton's views was made clear to everyone - though how the greatest and most expensive spy service in the world had as their Soviet expert a man who neither spoke nor read Russian or any East European language and had no real knowledge of the countries history, literature, politics, etc. is now, incomprehensible - but it does explain, in part, why the CIA is a spy service which is actually very poor at gathering information. It should be remembered (though it can't be blamed on Angleton who was long forcibly retired by that point) that the CIA was taken totally by surprise by the collapse of the Soviet Union - not a whisper, hint or imagining that there was anything wrong with the whole edifice - not a very smart spy service.

Anyway this is a fascinating addition to the whole cold war spy story and a fascinating lacuna to the question of was the Tsar and all his family murdered in 1918 or maybe only some members of his family were murdered but others escaped story - a curious but amusing delusion that still holds some people in its sway.
Profile Image for Tomasz.
940 reviews38 followers
January 6, 2023
Rounded up to four stars. An interesting and fairly well researched look into the Goleniewski case, albeit marred somewhat - for instance, by presenting Yuri Nosenko as a bona-fide defector without addressing any of the doubts as to his veracity, or through persistent misspellings of names of certain Polish intelligence officers, or indeed referring to Polish intelligence service as UB even into the 1980s. Still, one wonders why no Polish writer took up the subject by now, considering that most of the sources are in Warsaw, and Goleniewski's descendents presumably live there, too.
Profile Image for Rob.
44 reviews15 followers
March 14, 2023
Michal Goleniewski is seen as one of the Cold War’s most significant double-agents, yet his name, his exploits and his three-years of sneaking incredibly valuable secrets to the West is less often spoken of by the mainstream.

An officer, the deputy head of military counterintelligence, in the Polish Intelligence Service, he gained access to archived records and was pivotal in exposing many KGB agents operating in the West, George Blake and the Portland Spy Ring.

This is well-researched, well-written and taught in its telling.

An enjoyable and thrilling tale.
Profile Image for Mike.
101 reviews
June 1, 2021
I very much enjoyed reading this book, it moves along at a good pace and was difficult to put down. I was aware of Goleniewski’s defection and of some of the information he provided, particularly regarding George Blake and the Portland spies, I was not aware of how badly he was treated by the CIA. The question that remains is how much more useful he could have been if James Angleton had taken him more seriously?
Profile Image for Zoë Routh.
Author 13 books72 followers
August 11, 2022
Fantastic! Absolutely fascinating insight into global espionage and the humans who do the work. Who can you trust when your profession is all about lying? And who can trust you? Then you start to believe your ownB.S.

Intriguing, well-written and well-researched. Loved it!
4 reviews
August 9, 2021
Interesting

A great deal of detail with a mix of spice. The idea this all happened is both fascinating and shocking.
Profile Image for Gareth-Stuart Ogg.
17 reviews
April 10, 2024
A good book but leaves more to explore. How did Angleton get away with his behaviour. Why did Goleniewski get ignored. Very good read but does leave you wanting more
549 reviews2 followers
July 26, 2024
Given that this is at least 100 pages too long it is odd that the author acknowledges the editors.
There is a good story in here, but Tate really goes out of his way to hide it.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews

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