Fun enough for the nuts and bolts of espionage, disguise, and misdirection in Moscow in the '70s and '80s. Light reading about cool tradecraft.

It's not a memoir, and it doesn't really present an argument, other than that the CIA employed some extremely clever people (which no one would dispute).

The Mendezes are fascinating people and knew the Agency thoroughly from their decades of loyal service. But for that same reason, there's no critical or outsider perspective; very few connections are drawn to shifting world politics, or the arms race, or the influence of Reagan.

Even if they wanted to keep the focus narrowly on espionage tactics vs. the KGB - why not then include some material from or about the KGB side, available post-Cold War? How did the other side perceive what was going on? What were their strengths and weaknesses? (Based on the book, you would think that the infamous and horribly effective KGB somehow never figured out anything except what American traitors told them.) Among the dozens of sources in the bibliography, I saw only three that were primarily about the Soviets - pretty strange for a book that is primarily set in Moscow.