That sets up the book’s final third, which describes his interrogation by his colleagues and MI6’s improbably complex plan to rescue him, codenamed Operation Pimlico.

He was exposed thanks to another spy – Aldrich Ames, a CIA analyst who betrayed his country for money – and summoned back to Moscow. He remains here, ‘somewhere in the suburbs’. “The pantheon of world-changing spies is small and select and Oleg Gordievsky is in it,” writes Macintyre. It simply hadn’t occurred to western politicians that their Soviet counterparts thought they were planning a nuclear attack but, thanks to Gordievsky, they were able to dial down their rhetoric in order to calm fears in the Kremlin. A complex mating dance ensued, until he signed up to work for MI6, with one of his conditions being that he would not take payment.įrom the first, he was an exceptional agent who helped to expose spies working for the KGB, as well as to help MI6 understand its rivals’ methods. Gordievsky was on his first foreign posting at the time – in Stockholm, where he was so bewildered by the freedom of everyday life that he bought homosexual pornography just because he could – and he felt he could no longer support the Soviet government. Partly, he was appalled by the Berlin Wall, but mainly he was radicalised by the crushing of the democratic uprising in Czechoslovakia in 1968. Whereas Philby was ideologically committed to communism before he joined MI6, and infiltrated the spy agency so as to betray it, Gordievsky became enamoured of the west when he was already on the inside.

It is tempting to see him as a sort of mirror image of Philby, but there is one crucial difference. Bright and studious, he won a place at the prestigious Moscow State Institute of International Relations – the “Soviet Harvard” – and it was almost inevitable that he would end up in the Soviet Union’s most elite corps: the first chief directorate, the KGB division responsible for spying on foreigners, rather than harassing Jews, Baptists and free thinkers at home. Born in 1938, just as the great terror was winding down, his father was a secret policeman and his older brother became one too. In fact, it feels a little like he has been waiting all the time to tell us about Gordievsky, since this story is so much bigger than those he has told before.

Those books were good, but this one’s better. Over the past decade, from his breakout success with Agent Zigzag to his biography of Kim Philby, A Spy Among Friends, Macintyre has built an entirely justified reputation for his true spy thrillers. His story has been told before, not least by himself in the autobiography he wrote in retirement in Britain, but it has found its ideal chronicler in this exceptionally rewarding book by Ben Macintyre.

The spy and the traitor book