From the capture of Sidney Reilly, the Ace of Spies, by Lenin's Bolsheviks in 1925 to the deportation from the U.S. of Anna Chapman, the Redhead Under the Bed, in 2010, Kremlin and Western spymasters have battled for supremacy for nearly a century. Edward Lucas persuasively demonstrates that for most of the past decades, the Kremlin's spymasters have run rings around their Western adversaries -and continue to do so well after the Cold War ended. Lucas reveals unkwn triumphs and disasters of Western intelligence, providing the background for the new world of industrial and political espionage. Once the threat from Moscow was international communism; w it comes from the siloviki, Russia's ruthless men of power.The outcome, argues Lucas, will determine whether the West brings Russia toward its standards of liberty, legality, and cooperation, or whether Russia will shape the West's future as we accommodate (or even adopt) the authoritarian crony capitalism that is the Moscow regime's hallmark.
Edward Lucas is a senior editor at the Economist. He has been covering Eastern Europe since 1986, with postings in Berlin, Moscow, Prague, Vienna, and the Baltic states. He is married to the columnist Cristina Odone. He is the author of The New Cold War (2008), which has been published in more than 15 languages. He lives in London.