Spies without Cloaks

This book offers a compelling and comprehensive account of what happened to the KGB when the Soviet Union collapsed and the world’s most powerful and dangerous secret police organization was uncloaked. As Amy Knight shows, the KGB was renamed and reorganized several times after it was officially disbanded in December 1991–but it was not reformed. During the heated 1995 parliamentary elections, when President Yeltsin needed the support of the secret services, these agencies seemed, to many observers, to have acquired more power than the old KGB. “Amy Knight has provided us with another invaluable and scholarly contribution to modern espionage history. I was greatly stimulated and enlightened by this book.”–John le Carr “This is easily the best book on the former KGB to appear since the end of the cold war. Knight is a formidable researcher with an excellent reputation, which this work … does everything to confirm. For those who believe the Russian bear has been slain, this is a welcome reality check.”–James Adams, The (London) Sunday Times “A careful, detailed and grimly pessimistic account of the fate of the KGB since the Soviet empire collapsed in 1991. Despite changes of name, organization, and personnel, Knight contends that, in the absence of solid democratic traditions, the essence of the KGB continues as before.”–Leonard Bushkoff, The Christian Science Monitor