NEW hardcover

Stalins Romeo Spy: The Remarkable Rise and Fall of the KGBs Most Daring Operative Draitser, Emil and Kern, Gary

Sailor, painter, doctor, lawyer, polyglot, and writer, Dmitri Bystrolyotov 190175 led a life that might seem farfetched for a spy novel, yet here the truth is stranger than fiction The result of a thirtyfiveyear journey that started with a private meeting between the author and Bystrolyotov in 1973 Moscow and continued through the authors subsequent research in international archives, Stalins Romeo Spy: The Remarkable Rise and Fall of the KGBs Most Daring Operative pieces together a life lived in the shadows of the twentieth centurys biggest events One of the Great Illegals, a team of outstanding Soviet spies operating in Western countries between the world wars, Bystrolyotov was mthe response to Sidney Reilly, the British prototype for James Bond A dashing man, his modus operandi was the seduction of womenamong them a French embassy employee, a German countess, the wife of a British official, and a Gestapo officerwhich enabled Stalin to look into diplomatic pouches of many European countries Risking his life, Bystrolyotov also stole military secrets from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy A man of extraordinary physical courage, he twice crossed the Sahara Desert and the jungles of Congo But his success as a spy didnt save him from Stalins purges, at the height of which he was arrested and tortured until he falsely confessed to selling out to the enemy Sentenced to twenty years of hard labor in the Gulag, Bystrolyotov risked more severe punishment by documenting the regimes crimes against humanity in unpublished and suppressed memoirs that rival those of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn The first fulllength biography in any language, at once a reallife spy thriller, a drama of desire, and a prison memoir, Stalins Romeo Spy is the true account of a flawed yet extraordinary man