Best of Enemies: The Last Great Spy Story of the Cold War by Gus Russo

Best of Enemies: The Last Great Spy Story of the Cold War Reviews

• 
  Erik Graff

  This account of the relationship between Jack Platt of the CIA and Gennady Vasilenko of the KGB begins in the late 70s and ends, shortly after Platt's death, with the beginning of the Trump administration. In telling the story of the deepening friendship between these two counter-intelligence operators the authors also tell of the two most successful moles of the period, Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen, and how Platt and Vasilenko contributed to their capture.
  
  A quick read, but not particularly well written, this book was, for me, rather upsetting. Like 'Charlie Wilson's War', the main subjects are deeply flawed individuals who reflect poorly on the institutions they serve. The authors, however, seem to find some of such behaviors cute and/or funny.
• 
  Melisende

  The thrilling story of two Cold War spies, CIA case officer Jack Platt and KGB agent Gennady Vasilenko -- improbable friends at a time when they should have been anything but.
  
  Two dedicated agents of opposing counter-intelligence agencies who become friends - a buddy story. Whilst obviously written for the mass market, I found this to be a conflicting read for me. I was interested to know how the two men - Jack Platt and Gennady Vasilenko - managed to become close friends, and yet both men come off as arrogant, self-absorbed, renegades, whose respective agencies seemingly put up with despite going totally against the grain, that I felt no empathy with either of them.
  
  For me, the striking thing to come out of all of this was how one-sided this friendship seemed to be. Valisenko seems to be taking all the risks and makes all the overtures (after Platt's initial contact), and appears to have come out of it all extremely worse for wear - used even by Platt.
  
  There's a lot of school boy hi-jinks and very little espionage - except for the revealing of two spies, but by this stage both men were actually no longer members of their respective agencies but still, somehow, managed to stay in the game.
  
  The more I read this book, the more I wanted to slap Vasilenko across the head with it or throw it at Platt that is how much both men infuriated me. Either that, or it was the writing style of both authors that failed to convey any sense the personal to attract me to wanting to know more of their stories beyond what was written here.
  
  If you are interested in this genre, you will no doubt pick it up and read at some stage.
• 
  Denise

  The fascinating story of the unlikely friendship that arose between CIA officer Jack Platt and his KGB counterpart Gennady Vasilenko during the Cold War and lasted until the Platt's death -surviving all manner of espionage shenanigans, betrayals, mole hunts, imprisonment and torture. While I had heard of this (almost) incredible relationship in broad strokes, the full story proved to be every bit as intriguing and engrossing as one might expect.
• 
  ManOfLaBook.com

  For more reviews and bookish posts please visit:
  http://www.ManOfLaBook.com
  
  Best of Enemies: The Last Great Spy Story of the Cold War by Gus Russo and Eric Dezenhall is a non-fiction book which narrates the relationship between KGB officer Gennady Semyovich Vasilenko and legendary CIA officer Jack Platt. Both Mr. Russo and Mr. Dezenhall are published writers with numerous works under their belts.
  
  I love a good spy novel, a great one is even better, and a great non-fiction book which reads like a great spy novel is the best. Best of Enemies: The Last Great Spy Story of the Cold War by Gus Russo and Eric Dezenhall reads like the last one, an approachable and readable book about a complex relationship, geo-political goals, and true friendship.
  
  The authors use extensive interviews of the Mr. Platt and Mr. Vasilenko, as well as unclassified information to tell the stories. The main narrative, besides a long lasting unlikely friendship, is the hunt for an American mole in the intelligence community which has caused untold amount of damage. Mr. Platt was instrumental in finding that mole, Robert Hanssen, unfortunately, Mr. Vasilenko was arrested and wrongfully imprisoned and tortured for years as a result.
  
  Reading about the brutal imprisonment in modern Russia seems like an extension of the old gulag system. Trying to break a person to get unreliable, yet career making, information or a confession, a false one most likely.
  
  The picture the authors paint of the ex-CIA, ex-KGB operators is that of two fun loving, strong and clever men who share much in common (most notably alcohol and shooting). Men who love their respective countries and will do anything out of pure patriotism despite the large personal cost they pay or their ideological disagreements with the current regime. The authors also touch on the difficult price operatives’ families pay, wives and children take second place to country and its needs.
  
  Each person in the book is conveyed with great respect, but does not shy away from revealing some of their flaws which in my opinion makes this book about humans instead of fictional super-spies. Even actor Robert De Niro, who met the two while researching his 2006 movie The Good Shepard, became an admirer and a lifelong friend (he even wanted the charming and charismatic Mr. Vasilenko to star next to him).
  
  The book contains relevant detail to the story the authors are trying to tell. It is not bogged down by details which will slow down the story, even if they might be somewhat relevant – after all, recapping 40 years of two very dangerous lives, lived by two exciting people is not an easy task to accomplish in 336 pages.
• 
  Sheri Maxey-Wilson

  Yet another special snowflake with an inability to follow rules. Quick, let me write a book.
• 
  Gabi

  Mi-a plăcut la nebunie! Mi-a stârnit curiozitatea și mai mult despre viața spionilor. Also, side note, Ghenadie ngl, a very hot man
• 
  Liam Haines

  Could have been trimmed a little, but was a compelling read about a real bromance.
• 
  S.L. Berry

  Russo and Dezenhall's Best of Enemies is an amazing account of the development of Cold War spying and what life was like for those based in the USSR, what life was like for Russian agents based in the U.S., how each nation developed (or in most cases failed to) assets from the other side as well as spectacular failures of U.S. intelligence agencies such as Ames, Hanssen and others. Best of Enemies is also a goldmine of information on the USSR and Russia after the breakup of the USSR up to and including to some extent the Putin regime. It is like having a backstage pass to the greatest show on earth -- U.S. vs. USSR. And, the best thing is that the writing is not dry nor so overly factual.. There is a coherent thread that has a narrative feel that is employed by the best thriller writers to keep the pace up. Although there are a lot of individuals and organizations mentioned, the authors include a list at the beginning of the book and develop the narrative thread around four or five individuals primarily. One caution for more sensitive readers -- there are vivid descriptions of what suspected turncoats faced during interrogation in the USSR.
• 
  Adam Steinberg

  Thoroughly enjoyed this book. It was a quick read and gave incredible insight into the Cold War. I tend to like books with first person accounts and this book had a lot as the authors spent a lot of time with both Jack Platt and Gennady Vasilenko, but verified all information by double and triple checking against credible third party sources. The way they delved into the investigations and arrests of both Aldrich Ames and Robert Hansen were fascinating and highlighted the way some through investigations can get stalled by by bureaucratic BS as well as agency bias to avoid embarrassment. At its heart, though, the book is a tale of two men who became friends precisely because they were able to look past those same biases.
• 
  Amanda Forry-Fino

  This book I shall treasure close to my heart! HAT'S OFF to Best of Enemies: The Last Great Spy Story of the Cold War by Eric Dezenhall and Gus Russo!!! ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5 starts!
  
  *I'm Ronald Fino's daughter
• 
  Proforma

  This book could as easily be titled: A Few Good Men. N.B. Plot differs.
  
  This might be the origin of the word 'frenemies'. The book is well researched and offers the reader good insights to the relatively new history of the Cold War and the period of American history from the '70's to early in the new millennium.
  
  It deals, in part with the treason of several American spies (now languishing in prison) and several Russian spies. Those who betrayed Russia (or the USSR) as it was known then were paid well and are living on their ill gotten gains somewhere. Those who got caught by the Russians are now dead.
  
  The Best Of Enemies certainly left me with a few points to ponder:
  
  - Today drones, satellites and computers do the spying, these objects either get the Intel or they don't, it is a largely unemotional, un-human exercise. It cannot be compared to human spying, I cannot imagine going up to someone and trying to convince them to betray their country. I cannot imagine betraying my country.
  
  - Traitor. It depends on which window you look through. Those who betray their country for you or yours are traitors to their country but assets to you. I imagine this works visa versa globally, our traitors are assets to other countries.
  
  - There is a world which we largely ignore, a world where people kill and are killed and we do need men (and women) with guns standing on the wall between us and that world. We need them. We need them to do dirty work we don't want to talk about but we also want them to be transparent and accountable. I think we want our bread buttered on both sides if that is the case. This is not a go ahead to do whatever they want, this is me appreciating the freedom I have. Freedom I would not have if good men did not do the dirty work.
  
  - Patriot, how we throw that word around... It is possible to be a patriot to your country and oppose the ruling party in it. We love to celebrate the 4th of July but how many of us will pick up a gun and defend a position that the government instructs us to, domestic or foreign? Regardless of our own opinion of whether the position or the fight is just or not. We call ourselves patriots but we also want to draw the line as fits our own morality or ideology - not the government's.
  
  As mentioned earlier, the book gives an insight to the Cold War as an event in the background, the story is about the American Cowboys and the Russian Cowboy, and it is a great human interest interest story.
  
  How they ever managed to keep their friendship going in such trying times is a wonder and a tribute to the human spirit, underneath all the layers we seek out our sister and brother souls and we do actually want to be friends, not enemies. This must be our greatest human flaw or our greatest human virtue. I'm going with virtue.
  
  Last but not least, the world at large has chastised the CIA for its incompetence at the end of the war. To quote from the movie, The Siege, the notorious, infamous General William Devereux says: The CIA didn't know the Berlin Wall was coming down until bricks started hitting them in the head.
  
  Apparently those bricks hit the big four at the same time. MI6 had no idea and the authors kindly included chapters relating how the Stasi and the KGB were also wounded in the same fall. The Stasi trying ineffectively to burn files before being overrun by East German citizens and the KGB huddled in the Lubyanka building watching in terror as 'Iron Felix' was garrotted and torn down.
  
  I rate this book 4 stars and advise readers to know your classics, from Kafka to McCarthy, comparisons and quotes are thrown in enriching the pages greatly.
• 
  Mark

  If you ever listen at all to conservative talk radio (guilty), you'll hear advertisements for books like Best of Enemies all the time. It's an old-fashioned spy yarn, too unbelievable to be anything but true, about the good old days when men were men, commies were the enemy, you could buy any kind of gun you wanted so long as you had a government job, and murder, torture, and betrayal were all just another day at the office. Just because hundreds of these books roll off the presses to be given as Grandfathers' Day presents and sit on study bookshelves unread each year doesn't mean some of them aren't really good. Best of Enemies is a great story, and it's extremely well-written, scrupulously fact-based and entirely free of distracting rhetorical flourishes. Russo and Dezenhall have two incredible subjects in CIA man "Cowboy" Jack Platt and his KGB opposite number Gennady Vasilenko, who tried for a few years in the late seventies to turn one another and then gave up and became best friends instead. The story takes several wild twists and turns over the ensuing decades, encompassing the fall of Soviet Union, the arrest of American moles Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen, the "spy swap" that occurred between Russia and America during Obama's brief "reset" period, and amusingly, a couple of lesser Robert De Niro movies. The authors are both filled with admiration for these men and honest about their faults. The few fanciful elements in the closely reported narrative are in the characters' voices and not the authors'. Vasilenko is a true Russian original, a patriot who nonetheless loved America, a volleyball star from deepest Siberia who had a secret second family, a guy who stubbornly wore an FBI sweatshirt while he was being tortured in prison and survived to claim a walk-on part in Silver Linings Playbook. If the authors have right-wing sympathies they're not trying to drive them home. Rather they're making the bipartisan point that no matter what your job is, lasting relationships matter the most, and doing so rather touchingly.
• 
  Nick

  Russo does a more-than-adequate job of telling the story of Platt and Vasilenko as it weaves through several eras and generations of US and Soviet/Russia relations. Russo connects the key events of US/Russian spying from the Moscow rules of the Cold War to the capture of Ames and Hanssen, to Ghost Stories and Vasilenko's final trip to the US. With several books focusing on narrow aspects of one of these cases or of one person's career, Russo finds a good balance between telling the Platt/Vasilenko story and the major events their relationship touched on.
  
  There are a few issues that Russo could have followed up on. As fascinating as the relationship between Platt and Vasilenko is, Russo could have spent more time looking at the bureaucratic resistance, on both sides, to their meetings. Should the CIA have let Platt continue his friendship? How would doing so have looked to other officers who followed the rules regarding "close and continuing" relationships with foreigners? It is hard to imagine a CIA or FBI that allows a relationship like Platt/Vasilenko to continue while staying nimble enough to capture people like Ames and Hanssen. In the end, the Platt/Vasilenko relationship continued and the CIA and FBI were not keen enough to identify the traitors in their midst without outside help. Regarding Vasilenko, he should have escaped to the US long before he ended up imprisoned for the second time having already been exposed to the deep corruption of the Russian state.
  
  There is more than enough in this book to engage people interested in US/Russian spying from the Cold War into the 2010s.
• 
  Julie Totsch

  Best Cold War Book
  
  I have read quite a few books on the Cold War, CIA, and KGB. This is by far the best of the lot. In this book, you will read a tale that sounds more like a movie than a true story. The friendship between Marine/CIA man Jack "Cowboy" Platt and his KGB counterpart, Gennady Vasilenko, form a friendship that we wish we could have with someone, much less someone who is on the other side of the Cold War. Toss in an unlikely friendship with an amazing American actor and a cast of real people from the FBI, CIA, and KGB and this is a can't put down book. On another note, this book reminds you that there are real people involved in protecting our country and traitors to our country, such as Hassen, Ames, and Snowden are truly the worse of the worse.
  One note: this book touches on the true stories written in other books I've read, such as "The Main Enemy" by Milt Bearden & James Risen. The bibliography at the end lists books that, if you haven't read, you should.
• 
  Danny Toma

  This is a fast-paced, page-turning spy yarn that reads quickly and is highly enjoyable. It is the unlikely story of two secret agents, one CIA and one KGB, who became the best of friends during the Cold War despite remaining loyal to their own missions. And what missions these were! Covering some of the biggest cases of the 1980s and beyond, their careers were intertwined with the biggest headlines in espionage. The only flaw to the book (and the reason I give it four stars instead of five), is the author's occasional anti-religious animus, which flares up, for example, when they describe the organization, Opus Dei, as a "cult-like offshoot of Catholicism," rather than a group (a "personal prelature") within the Church, founded by a man (St. Josemaria Escriva') later canonized by Pope John Paul II. Fortunately, the number of times this bias shows up can literally be counted on the fingers of one hand, but it is the only thing keeping this from being a near perfect book.
• 
  Miriam

  This history of the unusual friendship between CIA maverick Jack (Cowboy) Platt, based in DC, and KGB agent Gennady Vasilenko, based in the Soviet Embassy is long and torturous (in many senses of the word). Slowly, slowly, readers learn about the life and times of two spies, their dirty tricks, methods of interrogation and torture, and other deadly aspects of spy-craft from the Cold War into the twenty-first century.
  
  Perfect for fans of spy stories and exposés, the casual listener might prefer an abridged version.
  
  Look for a review of the performance at AudioFile Magazine
  http://www.audiofilemagazine.com
  
• 
  Ethan

  Best of Enemies follows a long story that started out in the middle of the Cold War and ended far after it. A truly touching and at times riveting story, it was great to read about two very similar people born in two vastly different systems. I’m a big fan of Cold War non-fiction and this is another great example of it. Although I share the sentiments of several reviewers that the relationship was fairly one-sided, I believe that the feelings and experiences certainly seem genuine. The book also dives deep into CIA/FBI vs. KGB storylines and operating differences. Fully recommend to anyone interested in learning more about clandestine operations during the Cold War.
• 
  Ernest Spoon

  A fascinating and topical book. "Cowboy" Jack Platt and Gennady Vasilenko were assigned by their respective espionage agencies, the CIA and the KGB, to "turn" one another, ie turn traitor. But they never did. Both remained loyal citizens and spies of their respective nations. Yet both became fast friends.
  
  The events of this book are to incredible to be fictionalized. However, I can envision a television mini-series.
• 
  North Landesman

  Fun. A story of two spies sent to recruit each other that mostly seem to make friends and have the CIA pay for them to party and shoot guns in the woods. The friendship and spycraft never gets boring, the characters are great, and frankly, I wish the book were longer. Highly recommend this for anyone who likes spy books. I think that Cowboy sold out his buddy and tricked him and deserves full blame for what happened here.
• 
  Steve Wegman

  The unlikely friendship of CIA operative Jack Piatt & KGB’s Genady Vasilenko who became friends during Vasilenko’s first assignment to the US and eventually saved each other’s lives. They first met in the 1970s and remained close through the breakup of the Soviet Union and through Vasilenko's being imprisoned twice by the KGB (and post-Soviet FSB) until Piatt's death in 2017.