SPECIAL TASKS - The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness - A Soviet Spymaster

Boston: Little, Brown. Fine in Fine dust jacket. 1994. First Edition; First Printing. Hardcover. Clean and secure in original binding in very nice dustjacket. This secret policeman's memoir contains explosive material. The atomic bomb secrets were betrayed not by the Rosenbergs but by none other than Robert Oppenheimer and Enrico Fermi. The motivations of octogenarian Sudoplatov, who managed the Soviet nuclear intelligence effort, in choosing to divulge this information now are less important than the news about the services he performed for Stalin and the damage he inflicted on the West. A skilled operative and admitted murderer--whose assassination in 1938 of a Ukrainian nationalist was rewarded by Stalin with his personal summons and then his direct order to liquidate Trotsky--Sudoplatov coldly records killing as a method of rule. The Kremlin intrigues he details will inspire major historical revision, damning, particularly, Khrushchev (here fingered on a few homicides) and, yet again, Beria. Sudoplatov's insights into the Kremlin's intrigues of the 1940s and 1950s, combined with the inevitable reappraisal of the Oppenheimer cause celebre (when the physicist was branded a security risk), are astonishing evidence of secret influences in the domestic politics of both the U.S. and the USSR. Espionage buffs and historians mulling recent NKVD/KGB disclosures (e.g., Tsarev and Costello's Deadly Illusions ) here have their most sensational allegations to date. Gilbert Taylor .