The Recruiter: The True Story of the Legendary Illegal Agent Bystrolyotov

Ivan Prosvetov is a historian by training and a journalist; since 2008, he has been an editor at Forbes. He is the author of biography-investigations “The Godfather of Stierlitz” and “Ten Lives of Vasily Yan.” The biography of the legendary illegal intelligence agent Dmitry Bystroletov reads like a high-paced movie. An illegitimate son of a count from the Tolstoy family, who emigrated with the White Guard sailors, in longing for his homeland later accepted Soviet power and voluntarily became its agent in Europe. With astonishing dexterity, brazenness, and luck, changing his identities (a Russian student, a Greek merchant, a Hungarian count, an English lord, a Japanese intelligence agent), he carried out dozens of operations in different countries—from industrial espionage and obtaining cipher codes from foreign intelligence services to recruiting informants and intercepting correspondence between Hitler and Mussolini (for the latter, he had to marry off—his own wife—to an Italian colonel…). Every day, risking his life for a distant but native country, he lived under masks for more than 10 years— and when he returned home, he was run over by the machinery of 1938 and spent the next 16 years in prisons and camps… A dramatic novel author with such a plot would likely be accused of excessive fantasy and implausibility: “that doesn’t happen.”