In Stalin’s Romeo Spy, Emil Draitser tells the life story of yet another Great Illegal, Dmitri Bystrolyotov, the inventor of the modern “honey trap.” Bystrolyotov, the bastard son of a member of the aristocratic Tolstoy family (or so he claimed), was recruited by the nascent Soviet secret services while living abroad in the 1920s. Encouraged by his superiors in Moscow, he obtained a fake Greek passport from a crooked consul in Danzig, started a cloth-trading company in Poland, and then moved to Berlin, where he embarked on a career seducing secretaries, countesses, and diplomat’s wives. At one point he married his own wife off to a French intelligence officer in the hopes of obtaining even more information.
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