Former Vice President Dick Cheney has taken to many stumps lately to proclaim that the CIA's "enhanced interrogation techniques" saved the United States from another terrorist attack.

That leaves the question of what prevented another terrorist attack after the torture, as some call it, of terrorist suspects stopped.

A former CIA Soviet expert says that one of the agency's top Russian spies in the Cold War was a double agent under the control of Moscow.

Benjamin  Fischer, who sued the agency for ruining his career because of his beliefs, argues that Adolf Tolkachev, a Soviet electronics technician at a classified military research facility, was working for Moscow when he offered himself to the CIA as a spy in the 1980s and stayed under their control for the six years he worked for U.S. intelligence.

The CIA considered Tolkachev its greatest prize in the 1980s, "a worthy successor"  to Oleg Penkovsky, the infamous Soviet colonel two decades earlier who provided the U.S. with Russian secrets during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, in the words of an internal CIA paper.