The Spy and the Traitor

An engaging read about a KGB agent who fed secrets to the British for over a decade. I like how a lot of this is both thrilling and rather mundane compared to a Hollywood “spy” story and the details of things like how the British were able to use the information he gave them without giving him away and things like how little miscommunications or inconveniences can derail a plan are really interesting.

I believe this author has written a few other real-life spy books so I'll probably check another one out in the near future.

A gripping account of Cold War rivalries

Oleg Gordievsky, the subject of this dazzling non-fiction thriller. He was the most significant British agent of the Cold War era. For 11 years, between 1974 and 1985. he passed Russian seems to MI6 while working for the KGB, first in Copenhagen and later in London.

Even more remarkably, he became the only British agent ever to be exfiltrated out of Russia. This was after his KGB bosses had grown suspicious and recalled him to Moscow. Gordievsky story has been told before, not least in his own gripping 1995 memoir. In this meticulously researched book Ben Macintrye's complements and enhances that account. He does this by focusing on the most thought-provoking aspects of each story. Macintrye bases the narrative on interviews with its subject who is now 79 and lives in the Home Counties. He is still under sentence of death. The story is also enhanced with details from the MI6 officer involved in the case too.

Gordievsky, the son of an NKVD colonel, was at first an enthusiastic recruit to the KGB. Doubts only began to surface after he was posted to Copenhagen in the mid-1960s. The Danish capital was so much richer than Moscow, while his love of books and classical music opened his mind to new ideas. Gordievsky took his first step towards defecting after the Red Army had crushed the Prague Spring of 1968. He vented his fury to his wife, over a phone line that he knew to be bugged by Danish intelligence. Over time, the message got through to MI6, and a tall, friendly Englishman recruited him over a lunch.

During his active years, Gordievsky provided unimaginable value to the UK. He revealed, for instance that in the 1980s the paranoid Soviet leadership was planning a preemptive nuclear strike on the West. He also exposed various Soviet agents of influence, such as Labour's Michael Foot. Foot allegedly dined with, and took cash payments from, the KGB.

Gordievsky's career culminated with a plot twist so implausible that it could happen only in real life. He realised that the authorities were onto him, and triggered a long-prepared escape plan. An MI6 agent smuggled him out of Russia in the boot of a family car, and he was brought back to London for a hero's welcome.

At a time when the machinations of Russian intelligence dominates the news, this exciting book offers a refreshing reversal. In this story, it's the Russians who get turned inside out by a British mole.

Secrets secrets are no fun. Secret secrets hurt someone