This, I did not expect to enjoy as much as I did. A tale of two friends, one a Soviet spy and Stalin's head honcho in Spain during the civil war, the other a career FBI man who reveres J. Edgar Hoover, it comes wrapped in the standard "Fifth Man, blood-red, KGB/CIA-emblem-adorned, treachery-shrieking, shock horror with embossed capital letters" dustjacket much favoured by international publishing conglomerates. And I'm not going to tell you it is well-written, because I don't think it is. But there are real people here and I can work with that.
The story looks simple. Stalin sends Alexander Orlov, a KGB general, to Spain to help the republican side fight Franco with guerilla warfare - on the grounds that my enemy's enemies are my friends. Spain might burn and did, but as long as it kept Hitler preoccupied to the east, he could not do the USSR much harm.
However, back in Moscow the failure of farm collectivisation is leaving Uncle Joe exposed, and someone has to take the blame, so the show trials and purges begin. Eventually, Orlov is summoned to a meeting with his Soviet comrades which he knows he won't come out of, and he defects to Canada with his wife and daughter.
Not, however, before he has decided that Ernest Hemingway and the other supporters of the international brigade are the real villains of the Spanish tragedy. "There was no doubt in Orlov's mind that people like him (Hemingway) were the prime motivators (they) needlessly prolonged the war." Bit rich that, considering Orlov's paymaster's interest in prolonging the war. Orlov modestly takes credit for taking Hemingway to the Beninamet guerilla camp in 1937, a visit he believed inspired part of For Whom the Bell Tolls, published in 1940.
All this in the mouth of his friend Edward Gazur, a career FBI man whose job it was to "mind" Orlov in the last two years of his life as a defector in the USA. And it gets better.
In 1938, Orlov makes his way eventually to the United States, writes a letter to Stalin threatening to reveal uncomfortable truths to which he was privy. And with his wife and his young daughter, who dies during this period, manages to avoid the KGB and keep the American spooks at arm's-length until Stalin dies in 1953. Then, he breaks cover, bursting into print with the insider's account of Stalin's brutal regime. And hides again, to be found a sinecure job lecturing in a Michigan law faculty, with his salary being reimbursed to the college by the CIA. Whereupon the post-Stalin KGB finds him and offers him a return in triumph to Russia, medals, a luxury flat (in Kim Philby Mansions, perhaps?), but Orlov will have none of it.
The author, a man of faith who came to regard his charge as a member of his family and who, for example, saw his boss J. Edgar Hoover's crusade against homosexuality as simply upholding family values, was infuriated by the portrayal of Orlov in Deadly Illusions, a book by John Costello and John Tuareg which suggested the defection was not all it seemed. Other observers have also criticised their work, one noting that the KGB input into it made it "a KGB book serving KGB purposes". Costello and Tuareg's Orlov is a mastermind of the Cambridge spies, a thief, and a deceiver all his life.
And is this volume the truth, the whole truth etc? Certainly not the whole truth. I cannot believe that a senior KGB man such as Orlov could lose himself in North America for 15 years between 1938 and 1953 to the extent claimed here. And it stretches credulity to think that Stalin would be blackmailed into leaving him alone. The allocation of an FBI - rather than CIA - man to mind him in his latter years says something, too. The story has more holes in it than your average teenager's ear. But I'd read it long before I'd touch many of the weightier tomes on the topic.
And it ends well, with the surreptitious return of some of Orlov's ashes to Moscow, informally scattered by a friend in his beloved Gorky Park. Now that, I do believe.
Kieran Fagan is an Irish Times journalist