This is the true story behind General Alexander Orlov, the man who never was, now revealed in full for the first time: Stalinist henchman, Soviet spy, celebrated defector to the West, and central character in the greatest KGB deception ever.
"A cracking good read" and a chilling true story of Russia's assassination program that began over a century ago and continues today (Tennent H. Bagley, former CIA chief of Soviet Bloc counterintelligence). In late November 2006, Alexander Litvinenko, a former lieutenant colonel of the Russian Federal Security Service, was assassinated in London through radiation poisoning. This shocking murder marked the most notorious crime by Russian intelligence on foreign soil in over thirty years. Boris Volodarsky, a former Russian military intelligence officer and expert in special operations, provides a startling narrative of the history of covert assassination by poisoning within Russian security services. Starting in 1917 with Lenin and the Cheka secret police, these services have carried out numerous killings both domestically and internationally. Volodarsky reveals that Litvinenko's poisoning—allegedly ordered by Vladimir Putin—is just one incident in a long history of murders. Some assassinations are already known, while others are disclosed for the first time. With keen insight, Volodarsky takes readers into the assassinations of twenty individuals killed by Kremlin orders in a compelling account that "will fascinate students as well as general readers interested in international espionage" (Library Journal).