Defectors

by Joseph Kanon

First published 2017

Amazon

4.2(3,041)

Moscow, 1961. Twelve years after CIA officer Frank Weeks was exposed as a Communist spy and fled behind the Iron Curtain, he invites his younger brother Simon, a New York publisher, to Moscow to edit his officially approved memoirs. Simon enters the privileged but closely watched community of Western defectors, men who escaped prosecution in the West only to discover that the KGB never fully trusts them.

Frank’s manuscript is full of omissions, signals and possible disinformation, and Simon soon realises that his brother is still involved in intelligence work. Family loyalty becomes entangled with the rivalry between the CIA and Soviet security services as Frank draws him into a new operation whose purpose is deliberately obscured. The novel presents Khrushchev-era Moscow as a world in which old ideological commitments have hardened into surveillance, dependence and betrayal.