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    Farewell: The Greatest Spy Story of the Twentieth Century
    Farewell: The Greatest Spy Story of the Twentieth Century
    Farewell: The Greatest Spy Story of the Twentieth Century
    Audiobook15 hours

    Farewell: The Greatest Spy Story of the Twentieth Century

    Written by Sergei Kostin, Eric Raynaud and Richard V. Allen

    Narrated by Arthur Morey

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    1981. Ronald Reagan and François Mitterrand are sworn in as presidents of the Unites States and France, respectively. The tension due to Mitterrand’s French Communist support, however, is immediately defused when he gives Reagan the Farewell Dossier, a file he would later call “one of the greatest spy cases of the twentieth century.”

    Vladimir Ippolitovitch Vetrov, a promising technical student, joins the KGB to work as a spy. Following a couple of murky incidents, however, Vetrov is removed from the field and placed at a desk as an analyst. Soon, burdened by a troubled marriage and frustrated at a flailing career, Vetrov turns to alcohol. Desperate and needing redemption, he offers his services to the DST. Thus Agent Farewell is born. He uses his post within the KGB to steal and photocopy files of the USSR’s plans for the West—all under Brezhnev’s nose.

    Probing further into Vetrov’s psychological profile than ever before, Kostin and Raynaud provide groundbreaking insight into the man whose life helped hasten the fall of the Communist Soviet Regime.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Translator Catherine Cauvin-Higgins
    Release dateDec 11, 2012
    ISBN9781469243177
    Farewell: The Greatest Spy Story of the Twentieth Century
    Author

    Sergei Kostin

    Sergei Kostin is a Russian documentary maker and writer living in Moscow. He is author of four nonfiction books, mainly about secret services, translated into eight languages, including The Man Behind the Rosenbergs and of four spy novels published in Russia, the USA (Paris Weekend), Bulgaria, and Serbia. First published in France in 1997 under the title Bonjour Farewell, Farewell was the fruit of two years of painstaking investigation in Moscow and Paris interviewing the key players and witnesses to this amazing adventure.

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    Reviews for Farewell

    4/5

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    • 5/5
      Well written and narrated story with good balance and without jingoism or hype. Bonus: Incredible deep dive into life in the late Soviet times.
    • 4/5
      A fascinating look behind the Soviet spy machine and how personal dynamics play a part in the damage or an organization
    • 3/5
      26) Farewell - the greatest Spy story of the C20th - Sergei Kostin. (6/10) About a KGB office who gave a load of secrets to the French secret service, murdered someone when trying to bump off his mistress, got caught & was shot. It's very interesting, but the author's investigative style meant he left virtually nothing out. And by being so utterly indiscriminate he paradoxically says very little. It's far too long, but I persevered because I wanted to know how it ended.
    • 5/5
      This book is different. It is an attempt to reconstruct the life of a real Russian traitor from the 80s from his birth to his execution. Enormous efforts have gone into this. More efforts, I think than ever went into examining the lives of the "Cambridge traitors," a group of British communists who created a lot of devastation to the intelligence community in the 40is and 50ies. Burgess, Maclean and Philby defected to the USSR. Although these spies remained in the news for the next fifty years (even more so because there were two more who were not discovered), there is no comparable study of them.One of the authors, probably Kostin, is fond of playing chess: a lot of reasoning in the book is similar to chess playing: is this hypothesis correct? What about this one? Or maybe a third one? That unnerved some readers, it amused me. But when the authors do not want to emphasize point, they just make it disappear: discussion suddenly is absent or is brushed in half a page. It amused me too. The interplay between what the authors say,what they know, what they guess and what they don't want you to know makes the book really interesting.As a comparison: what I hated in Philby self-righteousness is that he never considered or cared that his treason did cost lives. What about Vetrov's treason? Did it cost Russian lives? The answer to this is brushed under the rug, the authors suggesting that the spies in Western countries are never killed, they are just expelled. It is a slightly naive view of the west.The greatest DST (French counter-espionage) success is shown as it probably was: a piece of luck in the middle of an incredibly poorly handled situation by amateurs. It amused me too: it certainly makes the book worth reading. The reason that makes traitors successful is usually the sloppiness of their own agency. Why would any KGB agent be allowed to take papers home? Not just sloppiness, the tendency to underestimate the adversary. There are many examples of that, in France and in the US. The British did that in WW 2 with the Cicero Affair in Turkey (this became a good but not accurate movie with James Mason (5 Fingers.)In the end, Vetrov appears to me very close to any real traitor I ever heard of: he was not a very interesting man. Burgess - the American traitors Aldrich Ames (dvd NIGHTLINE), John Walker(dvd Family of Spies) and FBI special agent Robert Philip Hanssen (dvd Breach) or Vetrov (this book): they are all the same: self-centered jerks who think that they are superior to all of us. No distinguished psychoanalytical analysis changed my opinion about it.Vetrov has one amusing characteristic though, when he is in jail for an unrelated crime of murder, he compares himself to Christ. I found this very telling, because I happen to remember that Oscar Wilde did the exact same thing.As for the translation, I loved it: it must have been hard enough to navigate between the Russian mind and the French style.