Washington Station: My Life as a KGB Spy in America.

• Author: Corn, David

The portrait is of a spy service packed with bureaucratic boobs worrying more about turf than espionage, tailoring intelligence to fit the political biases of superiors, overlooking failures, and deceiving themselves about what they dare term successes. The Central Intelligence Agency? No, this is the dreaded KGB, courtesy of one of its own.

In the mid-eighties, Yuri Shvets was a junior case officer in the KGB's station in Washington. He fled the service in 1990, disillusioned, he claims, with the incompetence of practically all around him and upset that his KGB had been a drag on Gorbachev's perestroika campaign. After he resigned, Shvets gave an interview to The Washington Post and soon procured a lucrative book contract from Simon and Schuster. The result is this tell-all memoir of life in the KGB that is fascinating and entertaining, but hardly credible.

This book is difficult to evaluate, because its trenchant events rest upon the word of a former intelligence officer trained in duplicity and whose accuracy on key points is weak. Still, Shvets offers a useful message: Large intelligence bureaucracies are bound to fail; they simply cannot practice the difficult craft of espionage without botching the job more often than not. Ultimately, the true accomplishment of Washington Station is that it supports Shvets's case--albeit unwittingly--through its own faults.

Shvets arrived in Washington in 1985, posing as a reporter for Tass, the official Soviet news agency. His real job was to recruit Americans as spies. Before leaving for the States, he was advised by a fellow trainee in Moscow that "Nobody needs your undercover agents. An operative's career is shaped exclusively by his relationship to his superiors. You'd be better off thinking how to suck up to your boss." But not our hero. Shvets realized that his KGB--far from that ubiquitous and cunning institution portrayed in the Western media--was mostly a gigantic paper mill, churning out millions of reports of no practical value. Shvets resolved to be different from his comrades, to show initiative. That meant bagging an American agent--even if, as he himself puts it, he had as much chance as "an airline pilot had of flying to the moon."

Shvets thinks he hit the jackpot in an operative he calls "Socrates." The story of how Shvets recruited and used Socrates makes up the heart of his memoir. But while aiming to blow the lid off a sensational story, Shvets declines to name this superagent...