Reviews and Comments

It's mostly about the characters who surrounded Worth, and the painting that was Worth's greatest heist.

I was expecting to see what made Worth smarter or better organized than the other criminals - in other words, what made him like Moriarty - but there are only a couple of pages about his heydey operations. The book tells us that he assigned leads or jobs to various lower thieves, then took a cut of the earnings and sometimes fenced the stolen goods; but it doesn't "show" us how it worked or how big the syndicate was.

In hindsight, that's to be expected. Not only was he a careful criminal who would never leave a paper trail for historians to follow, but it was all over 100 years ago and there's nobody alive to be interviewed. So the author probably did as well as could be done.

The cover and subtitle are a little misleading as to the actual content, then, but it is interesting and well-researched.

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.