“They say that every
malicious act is ultimately avenged. So it was with [Ivan] Serov, head of the
KGB. A man without honour or conscience, sadistic and unprincipled.” Ilya
Dzhirkvelov, Secret Servant, 1987
“The committee
believes that President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result
of a conspiracy...”
“Its suspicions
notwithstanding, the committee was led to believe, on the basis of the
available evidence, that the Soviet government was not involved in the
assassination...”
“The committee
concluded, however, that it is highly probable that the Soviet government
possessed information on [Lee Harvey] Oswald that it has not provided to the US
government.”
Report of the Select Committee on Assassinations of the US
House of Representatives, 29 March 1979
The arms race between the Soviet Union and the USA was the
most dangerous confrontation in the history of the world. Soviet leader Nikita
Khrushchev’s decision to place nuclear missiles in Cuba, and US President John
F. Kennedy’s willingness to call his bluff, brought the Soviet Union and the
West to the edge of a cataclysmic nuclear war. Now, on the fiftieth anniversary
of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Robert Holmes, a British diplomat in Moscow during
the early 1960s, provides an answer to one of the greatest mysteries of the
Cold War.
Kennedy’s confidence in his brinkmanship hung on the
evidence provided by Oleg Penkovsky, the MI6/CIA agent inside Soviet military
intelligence. While working on A Spy Like
No Other, Holmes set out to tell Penkovsky’s story. But, in doing so, he
stumbled upon an astonishing chain of intrigue, betrayal and revenge that
suggested a group of maverick Soviet intelligence officers had plotted the crime
of the century.
When Penkovsky’s treachery was discovered, in the middle of
the Missile Crisis, he was executed and his boss, General Ivan Serov (the head
of Soviet military intelligence and a former head of the KGB), was subsequently
dismissed.
The Soviet propaganda machine then thoroughly discredited Serov and consigned
him to obscurity.
In this extraordinary new study, Holmes suggests Serov’s
anger at the West’s ‘victory’ in Cuba and his resentment at the treachery of
his protégé and his own downfall turned into an obsessive determination to gain
revenge – and reveals the opportunity he had to do so by working with KGB rogue
officers to enlist a young American loner, Lee Harvey Oswald, to assassinate
the President.
The book is out now and is available for a special price of £14.99.
Released today: A Spy Like No Other
- October 15, 2012 09:35
- Holly Smith