Thrilling true spy tale

My friend Andrew Meier was Time magazine's Moscow correspondent in the 1990s. Based upon his reporting there he wrote an acclaimed book about post-Soviet Russia, "Black Earth."

Needless to say, I had high expectations earlier this year when he asked me to read the manuscript of his forthcoming book, "The Lost Spy." I found it to be an absolutely absorbing - and surprising - true spy tale about an American citizen named Isaiah (Cy) Oggins who went to work for the Soviet Union before being executed under Stalin's orders in the gulag. 

I am not steeped in these matters but almost every account I've read of such espionage involved Americans who had betrayed our country. Oggins did his spying aboard – from Europe to China. The absence of treason made it easier to focus on the misplaced idealism that led so many passionate people in the 1920s and 30s to work for (or support) the communist regime. That said, Andrew does not idealize his subject or his cause. 

He writes: 

For half a century, Oggins's life remained a mystery without an investigator. In exploring it, I discovered a man of astonishing faith and innocence, and a story of desire and dedication nearly impossible to imagine today. As I searched across three continents, the discoveries began to accrete. In time, curiosity bred a quest. After six years, the research filled a dozen large boxes; interviews, State Department dispatches and memos, declassified files from the KGB and the FBI, survivors' memoirs, and even postage stamps revealed a remarkable journey.

Both an Everyman and a singular exception, Oggins was born into the proverbial American Dream. He attained success early in life, only to abandon it. Oggins sought to climb higher, daring to believe that he could remake the world. He envisioned a utopia on earth, a realm of harmony and justice, not a world ruled, as he and his comrades saw it, by the lust for profit and violence. He imagined himself an American Robin Hood among the Bolsheviks, and he risked all for the good fight. In doing so, however, he crossed a line, and in the end fell prey to his own blind faith.

Isaiah Oggins belonged to the generation of intellectuals betrayed by "the God that failed." He forsook everything, only to find himself forsaken. In the light of history, some may forgive him. Others may not. Now, at least, his story, obscured for so long both by his own design.

I believe my friend has written a fine book that offers rigorous historical detail and a gripping detective story. The Washington Post's review of "The Lost Spy" noted that Oggins' peripatetic life and Russia's refusal to release on its files on him leaves some gaps in his story. To his credit Andrew faces these obstacles head-on; he tells you what he knows and what he doesn't. The result is, as Jessa Crispin argued in her National Public Radio review, a book that "thrills to the end."