Vladimir Efimovich Semichastny, party and statesman, chairman of the KGB in 1961–1967, was one of the “young reformers” who declared themselves during the “thaw” and were displaced from the political Olympus during the era of “stagnation.” The first of the KGB leaders who regularly met with valuable agents of Soviet foreign intelligence and the only one who spoke in detail about the work of illegal intelligence officers in his memoirs. And also about how it was possible to avoid the transformation of the Cuban missile crisis into the Third World War and what role Soviet foreign intelligence played in this. Assessing the work of the intelligence services that opposed each other at the height of the Cold War, he not only compares their professional effectiveness, but also asks deeper questions - about whether espionage is moral at all, and what the state and the individual have to pay for penetrating into other people's secrets.