The book begins at a diplomatic conference in Moscow attended by Jack Ryan, a rising CIA analyst and part of the American delegation to the Soviet Union. It is revealed that the CIA’s most highly-placed agent, codenamed CARDINAL, is none other than one Colonel Mikhail Semyonovich Filitov: the personal aide to the Soviet Minister of Defense and a national war hero. (This persona may have been based on Ryszard Kukliński, a Polish agent for the CIA, or on Dmitri Polyakov, a Russian CIA spy executed in 1988 following betrayal by Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames.) Filitov had won three Hero of the Soviet Union medals over the course of his career, most notably at the Battle of Stalingrad. He was recruited by GRU (Soviet Military Intelligence) Colonel Oleg Penkovskiy, a British agent; he offered his services to the CIA after his wife and two sons died. The two sons died as a result of service in the Red Army, the youngest in a training accident, and the eldest during the Hungarian Uprising. As a result, Filitov began passing political, technical, and military intelligence for the CIA; This operation continued for over thirty years until the start of the book.
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