Lieutenant General Leonid Vladimirovich Shebarshin for 29 years of service went from an operative to the head of the Soviet foreign intelligence service. He was an eyewitness to the disastrous "perestroika".This book was the result of a long, thoughtful reflection on the features of the intelligence profession in general and the Soviet one in particular, on the essence of intelligence as such, not today and not yesterday. The book was written by the author all his life. It contains diary entries, sketches from travel notebooks about Pakistan, India, Iran, and Afghanistan. A number of chapters tell about the interaction of Soviet intelligence with similar services of former fraternal countries: the GDR, Bulgaria, Cuba. The story of the August putsch, which changed in the author's mind the idea of many values that were accepted to be worshipped from childhood, is imbued with truthfulness and genuine pain…