Refusenik's Son is an extraordinary story of family, courage, and betrayal during the Cold War. Against the broader political history of the period, Alex Goldfarb weaves his personal story as one of the players in an intricate cat-and-mouse game of deception and survival. Goldfarb's was a fraught world populated by KGB and CIA agents, informers and traitors, foreign correspondents and politicians, artists and dissidents, some of whom risked their lives.
Refusenik's Son begins in the early 1970s, when Goldfarb, a young science student from a privileged Jewish family in Moscow, joins the dissident movement. His circle includes writers, avant-garde artists, Western journalists, and Soviet scientists. Some are loyal to the system, others secretly dream of emigration. Eventually, Goldfarb receives permission to leave, but the authorities continue to deny an exit visa for his father, a prominent microbiologist. Decades later, through a former KGB officer, Goldfarb discovers the identities of informers among colleagues and friends in the details of the case against his father whom the KGB had wrongly suspected of passing secrets of the Soviet germ warfare program to the CIA. The revelation includes the haunting tale of an anonymous Soviet scientist who provided invaluable data to the CIA and was never unmasked or caught.
Ultimately, Goldfarb's father was released in a complex spy swap that required high-level negotiations and the personal involvement of Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev. The reunion of father and son in New York City closes a saga that marks a symbolic chapter at the end of the Cold War.