Book Review | Treason: How a Russian Spy Led an American Journalist to a U.S. Double Agent

CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence

Studies in Intelligence

Treason: How a Russian Spy Led an American Journalist to a U.S. Double Agent

By Bill Powell. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2002. 208 pages.

Reviewed by Hayden B. Peake, curator of the CIA's Historical Intelligence Collection

In August 1992, GRU Col. Vyacheslav Baranov was arrested at Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow as he attempted to leave Russia to make contact with the CIA. Recruited while based in Dhaka, Bangladesh, sometime in the 1980s—the book is not precise about this period of his life—he had been an agent, not a double agent as the subtitle states, for several years. Convicted of betraying the motherland, Baranov was sentenced to six years and sent to Perm 35, a labor camp, in March 1994. In April 1997, under the Yeltsin regime’s new laws, he was paroled.

From the moment of his arrest, Baranov tried to figure out how he had been caught. He concluded that the CIA was penetrated. At one point, Aldrich Ames appeared to be the culprit. But as he went over every detail of his CIA relationship, Baranov began to doubt; the dates were not right.

After his release from prison, he wanted to contact the CIA for two reasons: first, to get the resettlement help he had been promised, and, second, to tell them of his doubts that Ames was the one who exposed him. There must be another mole, he concluded.

Suspecting that he was under surveillance by Russian intelligence, Baranov decided to contact an American with access to the Embassy, and thus the CIA, in Moscow. He chose Bill Powell, Newsweek’s Moscow bureau chief.

Powell tells the story of how he came to believe Baranov and then convinced the FBI and CIA that they should talk to him and make things right. While in the process of doing just that, Robert Hanssen was arrested. Baranov wondered if he could be his betrayer. If so, how could he have known about a CIA case? Hanssen said he could not recall Baranov’s name and was not sure about his pseudonym Agent Tony.

From the time that Powell became involved, he made clear to all the players that he would eventually write a story about the case. This book is the result. As background, he tells of Baranov’s early life, his career at a pilot in the Soviet Air Force, his recruitment and training by the GRU, a little of his work overseas, and his experiences in Perm 35. It is all interesting, but one is left wishing for more detail about the GRU. In the end, Baranov and his family make it to the United States, thanks to the CIA. The reader is left wondering whose list of betrayed agents should grow by one, Ames’s or Hanssen’s; or maybe a mole yet to be exposed.