Spies in the Family: An American Spymaster, His Russian Crown Jewel, and the Friendship That Helped End the Cold War

For the first half of the book or so, you think this is just a family memoir from the daughter of a former spy--which is interesting enough. And it is that, but Dillon expands from there, detailing the contagious paranoia that practically crippled the CIA when the agency should have been doing its most important work, the heroic Russian "traitor" who betrayed his government in order to protect his nation, and the venal American turncoat who destroyed numerous lives in service of nothing but his own greed.

It's a very interesting read, lacking some of the tension and excitement of most spy books, but replacing it with a clear, expansive understanding of what spy work looks like when it's at home.

Spies in the Family is a memoir that intertwines the career of Dmitry Polyakov, a senior GRU officer and spy, with her own childhood as the daughter of Paul Dillon, the CIA case officer who managed key parts of Polyakov's career.

The memoir has a kind of sepia tinged romanticism, the privileged life of a child of American empire in Rome, Delhi, Berlin, and Mexico City. Dillon has a breezy attitude towards the world of espionage, which makes this approachable but also leads her to just brush past some astounding history, like that two presidents of Mexico were CIA assets (see LITEMPO for details).

Polyakov is by far the more interesting part of the book. By Dillon's telling, based on interviews with surviving CIA case officers and show more Polyakov's family, Polyakov was a war hero who was disgusted by Krushchev's erratic and brutal behavior, on top of the inefficiency and oppression of the Soviet system. He believed that accurate information would help the Americans, who in his estimation were decadent and unstrategic, avoid risky moves which could escalate the Cold War to a hot one.

At first, Polyakov's attempts to make contact were deflected by the paranoia of CIA counter-intelligence chief James Angleton who believed that every defector was part of a massive plot to feed the US fake intelligence. Once Angleton's iron grip was broken, Polyakov began producing massive amounts of valuable information. He was the CIA's crown jewel, until he retired, and was eventually betrayed by both Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames, and executed for treason.

This book is interesting, but I think the attempts to blend the memoir with the intelligence journalism weaken the story, which is strong enough to stand on its own. The Billion Dollar Spy is twisty and paranoid enough to be a le Carré thriller. The Moscow Rules is another breezy memoir, but one about spycraft by people who did it. Because as both Polyakov's career and death illustrate, intelligence work is about the people who keep the secrets, and what happens when they decide their ostensible cause is not the one they care for. show less

Interesting non-fiction written by the daughter of a CIA agent about United States and Russian spies during the Cold War. She focuses on her father, Paul Dillon, and Russian double agent Dmitri Polyakov. We gain insight into their private lives, along with the tools and methods they used to transfer information. It is filled with subterfuge, betrayal, and intrigue. It also serves as a bit of a travelogue due to Dillon’s transfers around the globe, including Germany, Mexico, Burma, India, and Italy. The book vividly depicts the challenges of life in Soviet Russia during the Cold War.

Overall, I enjoyed this reading experience and cared about what happened to these two men. My issues with it relate to the presentation, in the Kindle show more edition, more than the content (typo, not linking the index to the page referenced, back cover photo credit given, but not shown). I also found the synopsis and sub-title of the book somewhat misleading, as the friendship is a very small portion of the story and it is not written as a thriller. Attention to such details often separate the great from the good in my opinion.

If you enjoy spy stories, you can’t beat the real thing! show less

"Spies in the Family" is a very insightful book, written by the daughter of a CIA agent whose cover was that he worked for the US State Department. While his children grew up having some occasional suspicions about what their father did, it was some years before they received a definitive answer as to his true occupation.

This book is not just a story about her father and life in the family of a spy. Eva Dillon's writing gives us insights into the world of international espionage and Cold War politics, including the tragic, sometimes deadly, results when someone like Kim Philby (British Intelligence MI-6) or Aldrich Ames (CIA) betrays others to the enemy.

Particularly notable is the professional relationship, as well as personal show more friendship, that develops between her father, Paul Dillon, and the Soviet GRU agent Dmitri Polyakov who became dissatisfied with the Soviet system. We two adversaries whose interactions change them and almost certainly changed the course of world history.

I give it a solid five stars! show less