The thrilling story of two Cold War spies, CIA case officer Jack Platt
and KGB agent Gennady Vasilenko -- improbable friends at a time when
they should have been anything but.
In 1978, CIA maverick Jack Platt and KGB agent Gennady Vasilenko were
new arrivals on the Washington, DC intelligence scene, with Jack working
out of the CIA's counterintelligence office and Gennady out of the
Soviet Embassy. Both men, already notorious iconoclasts within their
respective agencies, were assigned to seduce the other into betraying
his country in the urgent final days of the Cold War, but instead the
men ended up becoming the best of friends-blood brothers. Theirs is a
friendship that never should have happened, and their story is chock
full of treachery, darkly comic misunderstandings, bureaucratic inanity,
the Russian Mafia, and landmark intelligence breakthroughs of the past
half century.
In Best of Enemies, two espionage cowboys reveal how they became key
behind-the-scenes players in solving some of the most celebrated spy
stories of the twentieth century, including the crucial discovery of the
Soviet mole Robert Hanssen, the 2010 Spy Swap which freed Gennady from
Soviet imprisonment, and how Robert De Niro played a real-life role in
helping Gennady stay alive during his incarceration in Russia after
being falsely accused of spying for the Americans. Through their eyes,
we see the distinctions between the Russian and American methods of
conducting espionage and the painful birth of the new Russia, whose
leader, Vladimir Putin, dreams he can roll back to the ideals of the old
USSR.
