Attention valued damn interesting customers.

Right now on aisle 42, you can find The Spy Who Loved Nothing by Gustav Hildebrand.

That's right now on aisle 42. The meeting had not gone well.

The meeting had not gone well.

The man gloomily reflected as he was driven out of East Berlin.

His head was still heavy after a few too many sniffers of cognac. The American's

ambitious scheme to build a life and career in Moscow had sputtered to an unforeseen halt,

not unlike a Trabant's two-stroke engine. The only concession the Russians had made was to invite

him back for another meeting in two weeks' time. The three KGB representatives

he had talked to didn't seem very enthusiastic about his offer to defect from the U.S. Army.

The date was the 22nd of February, 1953. It was George Washington's birthday, a holiday for all

American troops stationed in Berlin.

The drunken man being shuffled out of East Berlin in a Soviet car was Robert Lee Johnson,

a 31-year-old sergeant in the United States Army.

Most competent intelligence services would have considered the army clerk useless, dismissing him as an

embittered bureaucrat with a grossly inflated sense of self-worth.

Nine years later, he would, through a combination of luck and circumstance, become one of the

most destructive spies the KGB had ever implanted into the U.S. military.

Unlike others who would find themselves pushed into the shady world of espionage,

Johnson wasn't motivated by idealism, greed or fear, but rather by vengeance against the U.S. Army, which, in his view,

had squandered his considerable talents by sticking him behind a desk.

He was a high school dropout who joined the army at a young age, finding himself stationed in Berlin during the height of the Cold War.

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