Review: CIA’s Most Valuable Spy

By John Sipher

John Sipher worked for the CIA’s clandestine service for 28 years. He is now a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and a co-founder of Spycraft Entertainment. John served multiple overseas tours as Chief of Station and Deputy Chief of Station in Europe, Asia, and in high-threat environments. He is the recipient of CIA’s Distinguished Career Intelligence Medal.

For years, when I was asked to describe the intensity of the relationship between a CIA handler and his/her foreign sources, I would often refer to a seminal spy case handled on the streets of Moscow in the early 1980s.  I told the story of an agent whose efforts to steal documents for passage to the CIA had become so dangerous that he would place a CIA issued suicide pill into his mouth, between his cheek and gums, every time he was called into the office of his Soviet boss, for fear that he might be exposed and ambushed by the KGB.  Following the meeting, he would take it back out and hide it away while he continued his spying. 

Now David Hoffman has written a book about that heroic spy, Adolf Tolkachev. 

Access all of The Cipher Brief’s national security-focused expert insight by becoming a Cipher Brief Subscriber+ Member.

Sign Up Log In


Related Articles

Search

Close