File TRIGON · CIA · Declassified
He was Aleksandr Ogorodnik. Codename TRIGON. A Soviet diplomat who spied for the CIA from inside the Kremlin's Foreign Ministry, and who bit down on a cyanide capsule rather than give up the people he worked with. He never knew he had a daughter.
PrologueMartha Peterson, the CIA officer who ran TRIGON in Moscow
PublisherEdiciones B, Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial
Screen rightsSeries in development at El Estudio, Madrid
Part twoTrigon's memoirs, published in full for the first time
The two worlds
Every answer Alejandra Suárez was given as a child had a counterpart in an archive she was not allowed to see. Here they are, side by side.
Sources: declassified CIA material on the TRIGON case, KGB archive documents, and the memoir of Martha Peterson, the case officer who serviced his dead drops in Moscow.
The evidence
Everything in this book rests on things you can hold: a business card, a letter from Langley, a pencil map of a hiding place in a Moscow park. All of it is reproduced in the book.
Exhibit 01
She was a teenager. Her mother was out. She and her boyfriend opened the old desk her mother guarded as if it held everything she owned, and found business cards with foreign names on them.
Then one more card, in a separate envelope, together with photographs and handwritten notes signed your Sacha.
Alexander Ogorodnik. Third secretary of the embassy of the USSR. Doctor of economic sciences.
It was the first time in her life she had seen her father's surname.
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The book
My Father, the Spy is a memoir and a primary historical source at the same time. The first half is Alejandra Suárez reconstructing a father who was erased from her life. The second half is that father speaking for himself, in a manuscript no publisher had ever seen.
How a woman in Madrid found out, piece by piece, that the man in the leather picture frame was not a German mathematician but a Soviet diplomat working for the CIA, and that her own birth had been one of the best kept secrets of the Cold War. It ends with the email she sent to the officer who had run him: I am Alejandra Ogorodnik, Trigon's daughter.
Her father's own manuscript, in full, for the first time. He traces his path from what he calls the innocent idealist of 1939 through Cuba, Colombia and the corridors of the Soviet Foreign Ministry, to the conclusion that the system he served was built on a lie. It is a first-hand portrait of the Soviet Union written by a man who knew it would probably kill him.
“I can't imagine the strength that man had to kill himself there while everyone was watching.”Martha Peterson, CIA case officer, Moscow 1975 to 1977
The case
Aleksandr Ogorodnik arrives in Colombia at thirty-one to take up the post of third secretary at the Soviet embassy in Bogotá.
He begins seeing a Spanish businesswoman living in the city. American officers pick it up on a wiretap of the Soviet embassy and conclude that a man who breaks one rule may break others.
He meets a CIA officer in the steam room of the Bogotá Hilton. Both wear only towels, so neither can record the other. He leaves as an agent of the United States, codename TRIGON.
He is assigned to the Foreign Ministry's economic affairs directorate, which puts the cable traffic of Soviet embassies worldwide on his desk. He photographs it with a camera hidden in a pen.
He is never told. The file is compartmentalised so thoroughly that not even his handler knows the child exists.
Martha Peterson lands in Moscow, thirty years old and recently widowed, as the first female CIA case officer posted to the city. She services his drops at night for two years. They never meet.
Pages arrive incomplete or illegible. It is the classic sign that an agent is no longer working alone. In Washington, a Czechoslovak double agent has been reading the traffic.
Arrested and taken to Lubyanka, he offers to write a full confession and asks for the pen he always carried. He bites it. Officers try to force his mouth open with a metal ruler. He keeps it shut.
Martha Peterson is seized loading a drop for an agent who has been dead a month. She is taken to Lubyanka, then expelled from the Soviet Union.
Langley confirms in writing that it holds records on Aleksandr D. Ogorodnik, aka Trigon. Seven questions about her father are still open. She is still asking them.
Personal file
TRIGON was the CIA codename for Aleksandr Dmitrievich Ogorodnik, a Soviet diplomat recruited in Bogotá in 1974 and run inside Moscow until 1977. He photographed classified diplomatic cables in the Soviet Foreign Ministry and passed them to the CIA through dead drops. He was betrayed from inside the CIA itself.
Not for money, according to everyone who handled the case. His memoirs describe a slow collapse of belief: a committed young communist who watched the system lie about Hungary, about Cuba, about its own economy, and concluded that it could only be changed from inside. James Olson, former head of CIA counterintelligence, put it plainly: “Ideologically, he was on our side.”
Her mother was a Spanish businesswoman living in Bogotá. It was that relationship, picked up on a wiretap of the Soviet embassy, that first told the CIA their target might be recruitable. Alejandra was born in Madrid in 1975, while her father was already operating in Moscow. Her existence was never entered into the file.
Because the memoirs are a first-hand account of how an authoritarian state manufactures consent, written by someone who administered it. And because, as Suárez puts it, the Cold War never actually ended: “it has carried on, submerged, like an iceberg.” Read the full case file on who Aleksandr Ogorodnik was.
The author
Alejandra Suárez was born in Madrid in 1975 and worked for years in the medical field before the story of her own family became her subject. She spent three decades assembling it: from a mother who gave her invented names, from a nanny and a grandmother who had known him and were not allowed to speak, from declassified CIA files, from KGB documents, and finally from Martha Peterson, the officer who had serviced her father's dead drops in Moscow and who agreed to meet her four months after the first email.
She writes and speaks in Spanish and English about Cold War espionage, the human cost of intelligence work, and what it does to a family when a state decides a person should not officially exist. Her research continues: several questions at the end of the book are still open, and she is still asking for help with them.
“I am aware of the risk I am taking, but my parents deserve to have me tell what I know.”El Español, February 2023
In the press
From the announcement of the book in 2022 to the sale of the screen rights in 2024, here is where Alejandra Suárez has told it in her own words.
“Putin never forgets and never forgives a traitor.”
Todoliteratura“The Cold War has not ended yet. It carried on, submerged, like an iceberg.”
Spycraft 101 · Episode 67“TRIGON: The Hero Who Betrayed the Soviet Union.”
ABC“The Spanish woman who defies Putin.”
Audiovisual451El Estudio acquires the adaptation rights. A series goes into development.
RTVE · Las Tardes de RNEAlejandra Suárez on the father she never met.
Get the book
A prologue by the CIA officer who ran him. Her thirty-year search. And the memoirs he wrote knowing they would probably cost him his life, printed in full for the first time.
Paperback Ebook Spanish edition ISBN 978-84-666-7336-5
Prefer your local bookshop? Any bookseller can order it with the ISBN above.
Reading in English? The English edition is in preparation. Join the list and you will have the date before anyone else.
Read it first
One email. You get the opening chapter of My Father, the Spy, and a note the day the English edition is published. Nothing else, ever.
Questions
TRIGON was the CIA codename for Aleksandr Dmitrievich Ogorodnik, a Soviet diplomat recruited in Bogotá in 1974. Posted afterwards to the Soviet Foreign Ministry in Moscow, he photographed classified diplomatic cables and passed them to the CIA. He was betrayed by a Czechoslovak double agent working as a CIA translator, arrested by the KGB, and died on 22 June 1977 after taking a cyanide capsule concealed in a pen.
Yes. It is written by Ogorodnik's daughter and built on declassified CIA material, KGB archive documents, her father's own unpublished manuscript, and years of conversations with Martha Peterson, the CIA officer who ran him in Moscow. Peterson wrote the prologue.
The Spanish edition is available now from Amazon, Casa del Libro, Fnac and Penguin Libros, and any bookshop can order it with ISBN 978-84-666-7336-5. See all the options.
Not yet. It is published in Spanish as Mi padre, un espía ruso by Ediciones B, part of Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial. An English edition titled My Father, the Spy: Caught Between Two Worlds is in preparation. Join the list and you will get the opening chapter in English now and the publication date when it is set.
Martha Peterson was the first female CIA case officer posted to Moscow, and TRIGON's handler from 1975 until his arrest. They exchanged packages through dead drops on bridges and in parks and never once met. She was arrested by the KGB in July 1977 at a drop site and expelled. Decades later Alejandra Suárez wrote to her: I am Alejandra Ogorodnik, Trigon's daughter. They met four months after that email.
Her father wrote a full memoir of his life inside the Soviet system, tracing his turn from committed young communist to dissident. He intended it to do for the Soviet Union what The Gulag Archipelago did. The manuscript sat in a bank vault for decades. It forms the second half of the book and is published in full for the first time.
Yes. In January 2024 the Madrid production company El Estudio, led by Pablo Cruz and Enrique López Lavigne, acquired the adaptation rights and announced a series in development.
Through the press page, which holds the press kit, high-resolution images, the full interview archive and direct contact details for media, speaking and translation rights enquiries.