Bearden, Milt and Risen, James. The Main Enemy: The Inside Story of the CIA's Final Showdown with the KGB. New York: Ballantine Books, 2004. 561 pages.

James Risen, a New York Times reporter who covers national security, and Milt Bearden, a thirty-year veteran of CIA operations in the USSR and Pakistan, have teamed up to produce this history of cold war espionage that sets a new standard for the genre. Readers who have consumed a great deal of espionage nonfiction will find it refreshingly different. Earlier books that disclosed as much as this one were usually written by ex-insiders who became anti-CIA. Bearden is not anti-CIA, and Risen is about as straight-laced and pro-Establishment as a journalist can get. Nevertheless, this book has lots of names, and it doesn't paint the KGB as all bad, nor the CIA as all good.

The time frame for this showdown is 1985-1991. Despite the diary format, it's not only Bearden's experiences that are chronicled. Bearden is referred to in the first person even in those sections that were written by Risen, and the book is based on hundreds of interviews conducted with dozens of CIA and KGB officers over the course of three years. This literary technique is not one that a historian would use. Nevertheless, it makes for easier reading, and it presents a little bit of continuity across various diverse topics, such as the CIA's hunt for suspected moles, various KGB spies and defectors, and the CIA's war in Afghanistan beginning in 1986.
ISBN 0-345-47250-0

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