Assigned back to Moscow following that tour, MacIntyre details Gordievsky’s clever and manipulative strategy that eventually gets him reassigned back to Denmark in 1972. We follow Gordievsky’s progress as he moves from a boring KGB headquarters assignment doing administrative work for Soviet illegals, to his first posting in Copenhagen in 1966, where he is exposed first hand to the freedoms, culture and lifestyle that will become the basis for his treachery against the USSR.

MacIntyre takes us through Gordievsky’s political and social maturation process in great and colorful detail, painting a picture of a young man of privilege who slowly and skillfully worked his way up the KGB bureaucracy, which the author describes as bloated, inefficient and, at times, downright incompetent. The problem was Gordievsky was also an idealist, a sponge when it came to Western classical music and the arts, Western literature, and Western political thinking and philosophy. Gordievsky grew up in a family of KGB officers, attended the best schools the Soviet Union had to offer, was a gifted athlete, had a sharp and inquiring mind, and had a career path into the Soviet intelligence apparatus that promised a life of privilege and prestige. Ben MacIntyre, a writer-at-large for The Times of London, has written a masterful and thoroughly readable story of Oleg Gordievsky, a man who by all accounts, had it all. Such is the case of one of the UK’s most important and heralded spies of the 20th century. What most experienced intelligence officers will tell you is that defector stories rarely end well.

In The Spy and the Traitor Ben Macintyre reveals a tale of betrayal, duplicity and raw courage that changed the course of the Cold War forever.THE SPY AND THE TRAITOR: THE GREATEST ESPIONAGE STORY OF THE COLD WAR by Ben MacIntyre, Crown, New York, 2018

So began one of the boldest and most extraordinary episodes in the history of espionage. The Safeway bag was a signal: to activate his escape plan to be smuggled out of Soviet Russia. A senior KGB officer, for more than a decade he had supplied his British spymasters with a stream of priceless secrets from deep within the Soviet intelligence machine. The bag alone was mildly conspicuous, printed with the red logo of Safeway, the British supermarket. In his grey suit and tie, he looked like any other Soviet citizen. On a warm July evening in 1985, a middle-aged man stood on the pavement of a busy avenue in the heart of Moscow, holding a plastic carrier bag. Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize 2018Ī thrilling Cold War story about a KGB double agent, by one of Britain's greatest historians Shortlisted for the Pushkin House Russian Book Prize 2019 Winner of the CWA Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction Award 2019

The spy and the traitor book