Fall from Grace

...It does not mention the Big Boss at all...

...Although Vogel went on to represent a fair number of spooks, he was contemptuous of them...

...Orlov, by the way, claimed to have met him at NKVD headquarters...

...They also persuaded themselves that this was an effective way to deal with criticism...

...East Germany forced persons departing its territories to sell their privately owned land at nominal fixed prices...

...Yet even Costello and Tsarev, notwithstanding their desire to proclaim the value of Orlov's achievements, must admit that accurate intelligence is frequently useless: The United States and the USSR had excellent information regarding the enemy's intentions in 1941, but ignored it because it was buried in an avalanche of data...

...Several other NKVD defectors were hunted down and murdered...

...But the criminal accusations brought against him after German unification in connection with his role in the human commerce are unjust...

...Orlov called these charges "absolute invention...

...How important is spying...

...Eventually, he became East Germany' s chief link to West Germany and to the West in general...

...In his Handbook of Intelligence and Guerrilla Warfare (1962), Orlov wrote that the new approach was proposed early in the 1930s by "one of the chiefs of the NKVD" (as the agency was then called), who reasoned'' not only as an intelligence man but as a sociologist...

...if he collaborated with evil, so, in exactly the same way, did the government proposing to try him, since West Germany was Vogel's partner in all the undertakings that led to his indictment...

...eke Orlov, Wolfgang Vogel—an East German lawyer who often represented the Communists in negotiations to free captured spies and political prisoners—clearly carried a lot of dubious moral baggage...

...In short, Vogel was no hero...

...Often, too, the triumphs of spies merely cancel one another out: In World War II we broke the Nazi codes, and they broke ours...

...Their book, the first to use documents in the Soviet security archives, demonstrates that Orlov told the FBI and the CIA very little of what he had learned while prowling the corridors of the Lubyanka and effecting its mischief abroad...

...From the time he was eight, in 1933, Vogel has seen himself as a victim of circumstances...

...For the great truths of the world are not secrets, and secrecy is at times an obstacle to their understanding...

...Late in 1953 his Stasi contacts, wanting to expand their knowledge of West Berlin's court system, encouraged him to start a private practice in Potsdam and to solicit Western clients...

...In the aftermath of reunification, writes Craig Whitney of the New York Times, the author of Spy Trader (Times Books, 375 pp., $25), "East Germans no longer saw him as an angel of deliverance from the Stasi [their country's espionage and secret-police force...

...Vogel spent the bulk of his time as the GDR's spokesman in talks that over several decades permitted almost 250,000 East Germans—political prisoners and family members—to leave their homeland in exchange for West German money...

...Fearing the worst he fled to America, where foreigners are inconspicuous, and went underground...

...On this question each book reflects the role of its subject...

...Whitney is not uncritical of his subject, but he does present Vogel in the best possible light—as a man who genuinely deluded himself into imagining that he could represent both the regime and the legions of its enemies whose release he facilitated...

...No such letter has been discovered in the archives, but Tsarev did come across a message to the director of the NKVD...

...It is not irrelevant, I would guess, that these bits of property are currently worth vastly more than they were in Communist times...

...Among the important secrets he kept was the existence of the Cambridge spy ring of Kim Philby, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess, whose recruitment he had directed...

...I would say that there was another, possibly more fundamental, side to Vogel's slippery character—that the deal, and dealmaking, were the ultimate objects of his loyalty: When he thought the Communists he represented were behaving unreasonably, he would sometimes advise his opposite number to resist...

...Orlov, the practitioner and theorist of espionage, took the profession more seriously...

...How did Orlov manage to survive...

...After he took a job as an assistant to a high Communist bureaucrat in the East German Ministry of Justice, his boss absconded to West Germany and sent a note encouraging him to do the same...

...as the authors show, the allegations "can now be corroborated from his actual reports...

...Some wanted Vogel to arrange the sale, and a few of them now call him an extortionist, essentially because he did what they plainly asked him to do...

...None of the evidence suggests that Orlov had conscientious objections to the part he played in Spain...

...In July 1938 he himself received a telegram summoning him to a conference aboard a Soviet boat at Antwerp...

...By his subsequent admission to the FBI, he was "the top Soviet official" there during the Civil War...

...I'm sure it would have been fascinating...

...In 1934 he arrived in London to head the spy station there, bringing with him a novel strategy for infiltrating British ministries...

...Orlov was born in the town of Bobruysk in 1895...

...For although his apostasy made him a hero to anti-Communists, anyone who spent 17 years in that netherworld simply had to be something of a monster, even if a reformed one...

...The "human commerce" generated income that gave the East German authorities an essential economic interest in jailing the opposition...

...In the 1950s, having emerged in the public light as the author of the best-selling Secret History of Stalin's Crimes (1952), he claimed that shortly after his flight he dispatched a letter to Stalin threatening to expose unspecified information...

...Whitney, for his part, is less impressed by organizations like the Stasi and the KGB, which, he notes, failed to save their respective regimes...

...The main charge, extortion, stems from the workings of an East German law for which Vogel was not responsible...

...His real name turns out to have been William Henry Fisher...

...Writers & Writing FALL FROM GRACE BY ROGER DRAPER Alexander Orlov, the highest-ranking officer ever to defect from the Soviet intelligence service, has always been a problematical character...

...Then, in 1945, he was kicked out of his hometown in Silesia, which was absorbed by Poland, and deported to East Germany...

...Spain, where Orlov was posted in 1936, was his final assignment...

...Even if Orlov was correct in thinking that they were better at espionage than their Western rivals, in the end their skills were irrelevant...

...I wish that Deadly Illusions, whose central narrative is so interesting, were better crafted: Costello and Tsarev go off on too many digressions about such subjects as the post-Orlov activities of the members of the Cambridge group...

...Vogel's formidable diligence, charm and brains made him ever more important...

...Could it be that the authors really wanted to write a general survey of Soviet intelligence...

...Under all of them, it—unlike its Western counterparts—combined two missions: foreign espionage and domestic political repression...

...Orlov started reaching out to well-connected young Leftists like Philby and his friends, who were encouraged to enter the bureaucracy...

...now he was an agent of Stasi repression...

...Leiba Lazarevich Feldbin, as his parents had called him, became a Bolshevik following the October Revolution...

...The part of Vogel's career emphasized by Whitney's title, though not typical, was real enough...

...In 1937 and 1938, at the height of the purges, the NKVD turned on itself, and a number of agents he knew were liquidated...

...Orlov was involved solely in spying...

...Meanwhile, through the fees paid to him by West Germany, Vogel amassed considerable wealth?every penny," as Whitney remarks, the result of "his connections with a system that was growing more arbitrary and corrupt...

...Before Orlov's death in 1973, the matter was quite commonly ignored...

...he was a murderer, not a mass murderer...

...He defected to save his skin...

...Like Orlov, too, he nonetheless struck many people as a sort of hero: Helmut Schmidt compared him to the men and women who attempted to alleviate the evils of Nazism, and his protracted campaign to liberate the Soviet Jewish dissident Anatoly Shcharansky inspired a member of Israel's Knesset to nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize...

...But today Vogel, again like Orlov, has fallen from grace...

...Finally, he promised—but only "if you leave me alone"—that he would never "utter a word which may harm the Party...

...the Stasi intercepted it and forced Vogel to become an informer in the ministry...

...The Soviets did not molest him, and he kept his vow, inspired possibly by residual Marxism-Leninism, as Costello and Tsarev think, or by fears that if he didn't he would be killed...

...He got into the spy trading business when the Soviets indirectly engaged him to negotiate on behalf of someone calling himself Rudolph Ivano-vich Abel, who had been convicted of espionage in 1957 by an American jury...

...Following several pages devoted to protestations of loyalty, Orlov cited the code names of the most important agents he knew...

...He was lying...

...Walter Krivit-sky, another NKVD defector of the 1930s, later accused him of having directed a policy of systematically eliminating anti-Communist radicals in Spain...

...As Whitney insists, Vogel is clearly a "scapegoat...

...Until then, the Soviets had relied on low-level informers...

...Alas, Deadly Illusions(Crov/n, 538 pp., $25) —by John Costello, a British popular historian, and Oleg Tsarev, until recently an official of the KGB—has made it impossible to go on doing so...

...In 1920, after serving with distinction in the Red Army, he was invited to join the Cheka, the first of the many names used by the Soviet intelligence apparatus...

...His family disliked Hitler...