The "broad spectrum of problems" in which Soviet intelligence officers Pavel Sudoplatov and Leonid Eitingon were engaged was truly extraordinary: kidnapping and assassination; sabotage and guerrilla warfare during World War II; the establishment of illegal networks in the United States and Western Europe; and, most crucially, atomic espionage in the United States, Great Britain, and Canada.

Special Tasks, the astonishing memoir of Pavel Sudoplatov, is a singular historical document. Among its revelations: How Western scientists Oppenheimer, Fermi, Szilard, Gamow, and Pontecorvo provided, or knowingly allowed transfer of, scientific information essential to the USSR's atom bomb project; how on Stalin's direct orders Sudoplatov organized Trotsky's assassination; the Rosenbergs' real role in Soviet atomic espionage; how Raoul Wallenberg died; how Sudoplatov planted a mole to feed disinformation to the German high command; why Stalin invented the Doctor's Plot and Zionist conspiracy, how he destroyed Soviet Jewry; how Stalin created the Berlin crisis to keep Truman from using nuclear weapons against the imminent Chinese Communist victory; and how Khrushchev and his colleagues engineered Beria's arrest and execution to whitewash their own complicity in Stalin's crimes.