The Spy Who Saved the World: How a Soviet Colonel Changed the Course of the Cold War.

• Author: Weiner, Tim

KGB defector Oleg Penkovsky was dying to give America the Soviets' deepest secrets. So bow did the CIA lose him?

The Central Intelligence Agency knew little of value about the Soviet Union in the summer of 1960, when presidential candidate John F. Kennedy was terrifying voters with the fraudulent but powerful image of a missile gap. The fear of Soviet nuclear superiority was founded in ignorance. In 1960, there was no CIA station chief in Moscow and no station to speak of, no CIA officer who spoke Russian, no way to penetrate the steely Soviet shield no one, in short, to listen when Oleg Penkovsky, a deeply disgruntled colonel in Soviet military intelligence who knew the truth about Soviet missilery, tried to deliver himself unto America.

In the first of Penkovsky's four attempts, he surreptitiously handed off a package to two wary American students. They took the goods to the embassy in Moscow and received a stem lecture from a security officer. The package made its way to Washington via a diplomatic pouch. Penkovsky waited. Nothing. He approached two British businessmen who delivered Penkovsky's business card and home telephone number to M16. The British foreign intelligence service passed on the number to its American cousin. Penkovsky stared at his phone for months. Nothing. He gave a large envelope containing drawings of Soviet ballistic missiles to a Canadian diplomat and begged him to take it to the CIA. Nothing.

At CIA headquarters, the agency's best Soviet officers read through the contents of Penkovsky's first package with the ardor of Keats looking into Chapman's Homer-"like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken." It was like nothing they had ever seen: actual inside information from an active-duty Soviet intelligence officer. Unfortunately, the CIA sent an incompetent to Moscow to make contact with Penkovsky-an inexperienced, alcoholic officer code-named COMPASS. Drunk, the CIA man called the Soviet officer an hour past the appointed time and babbled senselessly to him in broken Russian.

In the meantime, Penkovsky had been assigned to the State Committee on Science and Technology, limiting his freedom to travel abroad. Eight months after he first tried to contact the CIA, he met Greville Wynne, a British businessman in Moscow who worked for M16, and turned over yet another packet of secrets. An assignation was set. On April 20, the day Fidel Castro declared victory at the Bay of Pigs, Penkovsky landed in...