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The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War

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The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War Hardcover – September 18, 2018

by Ben Macintyre (Author)

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The celebrated author of Double Cross and Rogue Heroes returns with his greatest spy story yet, a thrilling Americans-era tale of Oleg Gordievsky, the Russian whose secret work helped hasten the end of the Cold War.

“The best true spy story I have ever read.”—JOHN LE CARRÉ

Named a Best Book of the Year by The Economist • Shortlisted for the Bailie Giffords Prize in Nonfiction

If anyone could be considered a Russian counterpart to the infamous British double-agent Kim Philby, it was Oleg Gordievsky. The son of two KGB agents and the product of the best Soviet institutions, the savvy, sophisticated Gordievsky grew to see his nation's communism as both criminal and philistine. He took his first posting for Russian intelligence in 1968 and eventually became the Soviet Union's top man in London, but from 1973 on he was secretly working for MI6. For nearly a decade, as the Cold War reached its twilight, Gordievsky helped the West turn the tables on the KGB, exposing Russian spies and helping to foil countless intelligence plots, as the Soviet leadership grew increasingly paranoid at the United States's nuclear first-strike capabilities and brought the world closer to the brink of war. Desperate to keep the circle of trust close, MI6 never revealed Gordievsky's name to its counterparts in the CIA, which in turn grew obsessed with figuring out the identity of Britain's obviously top-level source. Their obsession ultimately doomed Gordievsky: the CIA officer assigned to identify him was none other than Aldrich Ames, the man who would become infamous for secretly spying for the Soviets.

Unfolding the delicious three-way gamesmanship between America, Britain, and the Soviet Union, and culminating in the gripping cinematic beat-by-beat of Gordievsky's nail-biting escape from Moscow in 1985, Ben Macintyre's latest may be his best yet. Like the greatest novels of John le Carré, it brings readers deep into a world of treachery and betrayal, where the lines bleed between the personal and the professional, and one man's hatred of communism had the power to change the future of nations.

From the Publisher

The thrilling tale of Oleg Gordievsky, a Russian double agent whose secret work helped hasten...


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Editorial Reviews

Review

“Every bit as exciting as my favorite spy novels.”—Bill Gates, GatesNotes

“Readers seeking a page-turning spy story, look no further. The author of A Spy Among Friends and Agent Zigzag, among others, does it again, this time delivering a Cold War espionage story for the ages… another can’t miss account of intrigue and intelligence.” —Boston Globe

“The subtitle of Macintyre’s latest real-life spy thriller calls it ‘The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War.’ Like pretty much everything in this fine book, the description is accurate… Macintyre is fastidious about tradecraft details… [he] has become the preeminent popular chronicler of British intelligence history because he understands the essence of the business.” —Washington Post

“The Spy and the Traitor [is] a fast-paced and fascinating biography of Russian-spy-turned-British-asset Oleg Gordievsky… It’s nonfiction, but it reads like the best of thrillers… The toll spying takes on Gordievsky’s personal life is enthralling, and the details of how deep the effects of one KGB agent’s deception can go are, in these days of Russian election meddling, quite frightening.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Who was the most important spy of the Cold War era? Ben Macintyre convincingly nominates Oleg Gordievsky… Readers should rejoice in a very readable book by a skilled story-teller. Although an intelligence outsider, Mr. Macintyre enjoys the trust of MI6… Mr. Macintyre’s account of how the officer known as Bromhead recruited Mr. Gordievsky as a spy is a textbook study of intelligence reality; indeed, these pages alone are worth the price of the book… In terms of suspense, the flight through Russia is of thriller-quality.” —Washington Times

“Oleg Gordievsky was the most significant British agent of the cold war… The result is a dazzling non-fiction thriller and an intimate portrait of high-stakes espionage.” —The Guardian

“Even a reader not enamored of spy stories will have trouble putting this one down… [The story] unfolds with a pace and drama that recall the novels of John le Carré.” —Foreign Affairs

“[A] swift-moving tale of true espionage in the most desperate years of the Cold War... The closing pages of Macintyre’s fluent yarn find Gordievsky attempting to escape captivity and flee to the West in a scenario worthy of John le Carré... Oddly timely, given the return of Russian spying to the front pages, and a first-rate study of the mechanics and psychology of espionage.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“[A] captivating espionage tale... In a feat of real authorial dexterity, Macintyre accurately portrays the long-game banality of spycraft—the lead time and persistence in planning—with such clarity and propulsive verve that the book often feels like a thriller. The book has a startling relevancy to the news of the day... Macintyre has produced a timely and insightful page-turner.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Pick up any current true-crime spy book and you’ll probably see a version of this phrase on the cover: ‘The Greatest Spy Story Ever Told.’ Most of them don’t live up to the billing, but the latest by Ben Macintyre comes close…What makes this read propulsive is the way Macintyre tells the story almost as a character-driven novel… Macintyre’s way with details, as when he explains exactly how the KGB bugged apartments, or when he delves into KGB training, is utterly absorbing. The action is punctuated with plenty of heart-stopping near-discoveries, betrayals, and escapes. Fascinating, especially now.” —Booklist (starred review)

“Fans of narrative nonfiction, the Cold War, spy stories, foreign relations among the United States, England, and Russia, and Macintyre’s previous works will greatly enjoy this incredible true account.” —Library Journal (starred review)

About the Author

Ben Macintyre is a writer-at-large for The Times of London and the bestselling author of A Spy Among Friends, Double Cross, Operation Mincemeat, Agent Zigzag, and Rogue Heroes, among other books. Macintyre has also written and presented BBC documentaries of his work.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

The KGB

Oleg Gordievsky was born into the KGB: shaped by it, loved by it, twisted, damaged, and very nearly destroyed by it. The Soviet spy service was in his heart and in his blood. His father worked for the intelligence service all his life, and wore his KGB uniform every day, including weekends. The Gordievskys lived amid the spy fraternity in a designated apartment block, ate special food reserved for officers, and spent their free time socializing with other spy families. Gordievsky was a child of the KGB.

The KGB—the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, or committee of state security—was the most complex and far-reaching intelligence agency ever created. The direct successor of Stalin’s spy network, it combined the roles of foreign- and domestic-intelligence gathering, internal security enforcement, and state police. Oppressive, mysterious, and ubiquitous, the KGB penetrated and controlled every aspect of Soviet life. It rooted out internal dissent, guarded the Communist leadership, mounted espionage and counterintelligence operations against enemy powers, and cowed the peoples of the USSR into abject obedience. It recruited agents and planted spies worldwide, gathering, buying, and stealing military, political, and scientific secrets from anywhere and everywhere. At the height of its power, with more than one million officers, agents, and informants, the KGB shaped Soviet society more profoundly than any other institution.

To the West, the initials were a byword for internal terror and external aggression and subversion, shorthand for all the cruelty of a totalitarian regime run by a faceless official mafia. But the KGB was not regarded that way by those who lived under its stern rule. Certainly it inspired fear and obedience, but the KGB was also admired as a Praetorian guard, a bulwark against Western imperialist and capitalist aggression, and the guardian of Communism. Membership in this elite and privileged force was a source of admiration and pride. Those who joined the service did so for life. “There is no such thing as a former KGB man,” the former KGB officer Vladimir Putin once said. This was an exclusive club to join—and an impossible one to leave. Entering the ranks of the KGB was an honor and a duty to those with sufficient talent and ambition to do so.

Oleg Gordievsky never seriously contemplated doing anything else.

His father, Anton Lavrentyevich Gordievsky, the son of a railway worker, had been a teacher before the revolution of 1917 transformed him into a dedicated, unquestioning Communist, a rigid enforcer of ideological orthodoxy. “The Party was God,” his son later wrote, and the older Gordievsky never wavered in his devotion, even when his faith demanded that he take part in unspeakable crimes. In 1932, he helped enforce the “Sovietization” of Kazakhstan, organizing the expropriation of food from peasants to feed the Soviet armies and cities. Around 1.5 million people perished in the resulting famine. Anton saw state-induced starvation at close quarters. That year, he joined the office of state security, and then the NKVD, the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, Stalin’s secret police and the precursor of the KGB. An officer in the political directorate, he was responsible for political discipline and indoctrination. Anton married Olga Nikolayevna Gornova, a twenty-four-year-old statistician, and the couple moved into a Moscow apartment block reserved for the intelligence elite. A first child, Vasili, was born in 1932. The Gordievskys thrived under Stalin.

When Comrade Stalin announced that the revolution was facing a lethal threat from within, Anton Gordievsky stood ready to help remove the traitors. The Great Purge of 1936 to 1938 saw the wholesale liquidation of “enemies of the state”: suspected fifth columnists and hidden Trotskyists, terrorists and saboteurs, counterrevolutionary spies, Party and government officials, peasants, Jews, teachers, generals, members of the intelligentsia, Poles, Red Army soldiers, and many more. Most were entirely innocent. In Stalin’s paranoid police state, the safest way to ensure survival was to denounce someone else. “Better that ten innocent people should suffer than one spy get away,” said Nikolai Yezhov, chief of the NKVD. “When you chop wood, chips fly.” The informers whispered, the torturers and executioners set to work, and the Siberian gulags swelled to bursting. But as in every revolution, the enforcers themselves inevitably became suspect. The NKVD began to investigate and purge itself. At the height of the bloodletting, the Gordievskys” apartment block was raided more than a dozen times in a six-month period. The arrests came at night: the man of the family was led away first, and then the rest.

It seems probable that some of these enemies of the state were identified by Anton Gordievsky. “The NKVD is always right,” he said: a conclusion both wholly sensible, and entirely wrong.

A second son, Oleg Antonyevich Gordievsky, was born on October 10, 1938, just as the Great Terror was winding down and war was looming. To friends and neighbors, the Gordievskys appeared to be ideal Soviet citizens, ideologically pure, loyal to Party and state, and now the parents to two strapping boys. A daughter, Marina, was born seven years after Oleg. The Gordievskys were well fed, privileged, and secure.

But on closer examination there were fissures in the family façade, and layers of deception beneath the surface. Anton Gordievsky never spoke about what he had done during the famines, the purges, and the terror. The older Gordievsky was a prime example of the species Homo Sovieticus, an obedient state servant forged by Communist repression. But underneath he was fearful, horrified, and perhaps gnawed by guilt. Oleg later came to see his father as “a frightened man.”

Olga Gordievsky, Oleg’s mother, was made of less tractable material. She never joined the Party, and she did not believe that the NKVD was infallible. Her father had been dispossessed of his watermill by the Communists; her brother sent to the eastern Siberian gulag for criticizing collective agriculture; she had seen many friends dragged from their homes and marched away in the night. With a peasant’s ingrained common sense, she understood the caprice and vindictiveness of state terror, but kept her mouth shut.

Oleg and Vasili, separated in age by six years, grew up in wartime. One of Gordievsky’s earliest memories was of watching lines of bedraggled German prisoners being paraded through the streets of Moscow, “trapped, guarded, and led like animals.” Anton was frequently absent for long periods, lecturing the troops on Party ideology.

Oleg Gordievsky dutifully learned the tenets of Communist orthodoxy: he attended School 130, where he showed an early aptitude for history and languages; he learned about the heroes of Communism, at home and abroad. Despite the thick veil of disinformation surrounding the West, foreign countries fascinated him. At the age of six, he began reading British Ally, a propaganda sheet put out in Russian by the British embassy to encourage Anglo-Russian understanding. He studied German. As expected of all teenagers, he joined Komsomol, the Communist Youth League.

His father brought home three official newspapers and spouted the Communist propaganda they contained. The NKVD morphed into the KGB, and Anton Gordievsky obediently followed. Oleg’s mother exuded a quiet resistance that only occasionally revealed itself in waspish, half-whispered asides. Religious worship was illegal under Communism, and the boys were raised as atheists, but their maternal grandmother had Vasili secretly baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church, and would have christened Oleg too had their horrified father not found out and intervened.

Oleg Gordievsky grew up in a tight-knit, loving family suffused with duplicity. Anton Gordievsky venerated the Party and proclaimed himself a fearless upholder of communism, but inside was a small and terrified man who had witnessed terrible events. Olga Gordievsky, the ideal KGB wife, nursed a secret disdain for the system. Oleg’s grandmother secretly worshipped an illegal, outlawed God. None of the adults in the family revealed what they really felt—to one another, or anyone else. Amid the stifling conformity of Stalin’s Russia, it was possible to believe differently in secret but far too dangerous for honesty, even with members of your own family. From boyhood, Oleg saw that it was possible to live a double life, to love those around you while concealing your true inner self, to appear to be one person to the external world and quite another inside.

Oleg Gordievsky emerged from school with a silver medal, head of the Komsomol, a competent, intelligent, athletic, unquestioning, and unremarkable product of the Soviet system. But he had also learned to compartmentalize. In different ways, his father, mother, and grandmother were all people in disguise. The young Gordievsky grew up around secrets.

Stalin died in 1953. Three years later he was denounced, at the 20th Party Congress, by his successor, Nikita Khrushchev. Anton Gordievsky was staggered. The official condemnation of Stalin, his son believed, “went a long way towards destroying the ideological and philosophical foundations of his life.” He did not like the way Russia was changing. But his son did.

The “Khrushchev Thaw” was brief and restricted, but it was a period of genuine liberalization that saw the relaxation of censorship and the release of thousands of political prisoners. These were heady times to be young, Russian, and hopeful.

At the age of seventeen, Oleg enrolled at the prestigious Moscow State Institute of International Relations. There, exhilarated by the new atmosphere, he engaged in earnest discussions with his peers about how to bring about “socialism with a human face.” He went too far. Some of his mother’s nonconformity had seeped into him. One day, he wrote a speech, naïve in its defense of freedom and democracy, concepts he barely understood. He recorded it in the language laboratory, and played it to some fellow students. They were appalled. “You must destroy this at once, Oleg, and never mention these things again.” Suddenly fearful, he wondered if one of his classmates had informed the authorities of his “radical” opinions. The KGB had spies inside the institute.

The limits of Khrushchev’s reformism were brutally demonstrated in 1956 when the Soviet tanks rolled into Hungary to put down a nationwide uprising against Soviet rule. Despite the all-embracing Soviet censorship and propaganda, news of the crushed rebellion filtered back to Russia. “All warmth disappeared,” Oleg recalled of the ensuing clampdown. “An icy wind set in.”

The Institute of International Relations was the Soviet Union’s most elite university, described by Henry Kissinger as “the Harvard of Russia.” Run by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, it was the premier training ground for diplomats, scientists, economists, politicians—and spies. Gordievsky studied history, geography, economics, and international relations, all through the warping prism of Communist ideology. The institute provided instruction in fifty-six languages, more than any other university in the world. Language skills offered one clear pathway into the KGB and the foreign travel that he craved. Already fluent in German, he applied to study English, but the courses were oversubscribed. “Learn Swedish,” suggested his older brother, who had already joined the KGB. “It is the doorway to the rest of Scandinavia.” Gordievsky took his advice.

The institute library stocked some foreign newspapers and periodicals that, though heavily redacted, offered a glimpse of the wider world. These he began to read, discreetly, for showing overt interest in the West was itself grounds for suspicion. Sometimes at night he would secretly listen to the BBC World Service or the Voice of America, despite the radio-jamming system imposed by Soviet censors, and picked up “the first faint scent of truth.”

Like all human beings, in later life Gordievsky tended to see his past through the lens of experience, to imagine that he had always secretly harbored the seeds of insubordination, to believe his fate was somehow hardwired into his character. It was not. As a student, he was a keen Communist, anxious to serve the Soviet state in the KGB, like his father and brother. The Hungarian Uprising had caught his youthful imagination, but he was no revolutionary. “I was still within the system but my feelings of disillusionment were growing.” In this he was no different from many of his student contemporaries.

At the age of nineteen, Gordievsky took up cross-country running. Something about the solitary nature of the sport appealed to him, the rhythm of intense exertion over a long period, in private competition with himself, testing his own limits. Oleg could be gregarious, attractive to women, and flirtatious. His looks were bluntly handsome, with hair swept back from his forehead and open, rather soft features. In repose, his expression seemed stern, but when his eyes flashed with dark humor, his face lit up. In company he was often convivial and comradely, but there was something hard and hidden inside. He was not lonely, or a loner, but he was comfortable in his own company. He seldom revealed his feelings. Typically hungry for self-improvement, Oleg believed that cross-country running was “character building.” For hours he would run, through Moscow’s streets and parks, alone with his thoughts.

One of the few students he grew close to was Stanislaw Kaplan, a fellow runner on the university track team. “Standa” Kaplan was Czechoslovakian, and had already obtained a degree from Charles University in Prague by the time he arrived at the institute as one of several hundred gifted students from the Soviet bloc. Like others from countries only recently subjugated to Communism, Kaplan’s “individuality had not been stifled,” Gordievsky wrote, years later. A year older, he was studying to be a military translator. The two young men found they shared compatible ambitions and similar ideas. “He was liberal-minded and held strongly sceptical views about communism,” wrote Gordievsky, who found Kaplan’s forthright opinions exciting, and slightly alarming. With his dark good looks, Standa was a magnet to women. The two students became firm friends, running together, chasing girls, and eating in a Czech restaurant off Gorky Park.

An equally important influence was his idolized older brother, Vasili, who was now training to become an “illegal,” one of the Soviet Union’s vast global army of deep undercover agents.

The KGB ran two distinct species of spy in foreign countries. The first worked under formal cover, as a member of the Soviet diplomatic or consular staff, a cultural or military attaché, accredited journalist or trade representative. Diplomatic protection meant that these “legal” spies could not be prosecuted for espionage if their activities were uncovered, but only declared persona non grata, and expelled from the country. By contrast, an “illegal” spy (nelegal, in Russian) had no official status, usually traveled under a false name with fake papers, and simply blended invisibly into whatever country he or she was posted to. (In the West such spies are known as NOCs, standing for Non-Official Cover.) The KGB planted illegals all over the world, who posed as ordinary citizens, submerged and subversive. Like legal spies, they gathered information, recruited agents, and conducted various forms of espionage. Sometimes, as “sleepers,” they might remain hidden for long periods before being activated. These were also potential fifth columnists, poised to go into battle should war erupt between East and West. Illegals operated beneath the official radar and therefore could not be financed in ways that might be traced or communicate through secure diplomatic channels. But unlike spies accredited to an embassy, they left few traces for counterintelligence investigators to follow.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Crown; First Edition (September 18, 2018)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 368 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1101904194
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1101904190
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.44 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.4 x 1 x 9.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #126,320 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #85 in Espionage True Accounts
- #121 in Intelligence & Espionage History
- #186 in Political Intelligence

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Ben Macintyre is a writer-at-large for The Times of London and the bestselling author of A Spy Among Friends, Double Cross, Operation Mincemeat, Agent Zigzag, and Rogue Heroes, among other books. Macintyre has also written and presented BBC documentaries of his work.

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Charles Scott

Hot-property prospect keeps business executive up late at night.

Reviewed in the United States on December 28, 2018

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The Spy and the Traitor, by Ben Macintyre, published in 2018, is the definitive, highly informative, non-fictional account of the defection of a senior-level Soviet spy. He decided to go to the West in the summer of 1985 amidst a flurry of political instability and an uncertain future in the Kremlin. The book is jam-packed with significant historical events taking place on a massive global scale, many of which most of us have all but forgotten, if we knew about them at all. For example, Stalin's purge of 1936-38, the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the Soviet suppression of the Spring uprising in Czechoslovakia in 1968, and Britain's expulsion of 105 key Soviet intelligence officers in 1971.
Are we beginning to see a pattern here? Is history repeating itself? It's like looking at your reflection in a two-way mirror. You see life from "Both Sides, Now," as in the Joni Mitchell song from many moons ago.
Be that as it may, the book depicts interesting, biographical information about some of the most famous (or infamous) spies of the twentieth century from the U.K., the U.S., and the U.S.S.R. An excellent selection of photographs is included, which represents a virtual "Who's Who" gallery in high-resolution from the shadowy world of cloak and dagger. The book takes you on a virtual tour of the most conservative hot-beds of intrigue you can imagine from around the globe. Make no mistake about it. It's a no-holds-barred, kiss-and-tell book. You can hardly miss, skimming the pages of this book, if you're on a fact-finding mission concerning the secretive intelligence community operating with impunity in the 1960's to the 1990's. What formerly had been considered classified, closely guarded secrets has suddenly "come alive" and become common knowledge. Shocking! I shiver at the mere thought of another "cold war." To think that all of these events actually transpired before the advent of super-fast, high-volume storage, internet-accessible personal computers, thumb-drives, and the foggy cloud of securely triple-encrypted data is mind-boggling.
"Where is Ed Snowden, when you need him to reset a password?"
Most of all, the book provides keen insight into what it takes to make it to the top of the bureaucratic hierarchy in the corporate boardrooms of spy-craft. You are constantly reminded that longevity is never guaranteed in the spy trade. You find out the hard way that building a successful business career in "Her Majesty's" secret service is definitely no accident.
A good spy (and author) can fully describe, characterize, criticize, evaluate, and assess his subject within the space of two or three paragraphs, pointing out all of his flaws, failures, faults, weaknesses, shortcomings, and inadequacies in the process. He knows what he's up against. He reads his adversaries like a book. He knows their limits.
Good luck with that, James! There are ramifications for your actions. You're either on your way up or on your way out the door, when you mix and mingle with that sort of crowd.
R. Royce rode the beach cruiser in a northerly direction to the park proceeding at a pleasant, leisurely pace. He stopped and leaned the bike against the trunk of an old walnut tree, to walk alongside a clear running creek. Oftentimes, he enjoyed reveling in and communing with nature. The weather was warm and sunny, for a winter day. The winds were calm. He noticed the brown paper grocery bag through the branches of a tremendously large, towering maple tree, all camouflaged and concealed by an abundance of leaves. One principal branch had fallen into a great depression in the muddy embankment, due to a lightning strike. It too was covered over with leaves, and partially hidden from the view of prying eyes behind some dense undergrowth and the trunk of a fallen oak. He quickly retrieved the item, then walked back to the bike. He placed the lunch-sack size bag inside the water-proof, rip-stop fabric bike pack which had been velcro-ed on top of the bronze anodized-aluminum rack, affixed to the back of the bike. The metal rack had been firmly attached to the titanium frame with small stainless steel bolts, nuts, and washers, and fit stylishly over the rear wheel. The flat, broad surface of the rack thus placed in this manner had the added advantage of preventing water from spraying up his backside when he rode through water puddles on the sidewalks and in the roadway, much in the same way as a curved metal fender skirting would, but without the narrow space between the tire and the fender becoming clogged up with mud and debris, causing the bike to drag, and not roll as freely, almost effortlessly, as it should. He truly loved the technology, innovation, and ingenuity behind fine craftsmanship.
He climbed aboard the cruiser bike, thought about poor "Pee Wee Herman," and rolled away swiftly downhill. He was elated, and accelerated. It went faster than usual.
"Not bad for a day's work," said Royce, having returned to the apartment, well-exercised and exhilarated. He verified the contents of the bag, which might have contained sandwiches and cans of soda for an impromptu picnic. Except it didn't.
"Don't quit your day job," said Meghan, his constant traveling companion and business associate, seated on a flowery sofa in the living room.
"Some people would kill for a 'Pay-Day' like this," he said, taking a bite out of a warm portion of fruitcake, the shape of a candy bar. He began stacking bundles of $100 bills in two neat piles. The total added up precisely to a total of $65,000.
"One for me, one for you. One for you, two for me," she recited.
"Fair is fair," he said. "Who said money doesn't grow on trees?"
"As long as the assignment doesn't involve extortion, blackmail, or serious bodily injury, we can't lose," said Meghan.
"Simple arithmetic, security and surveillance are all important," said Royce. "Today's task reminds me of the country and western music we heard broadcasted over the public television station airwaves the other night. Two musicians were playing guitars, one acoustic, one electric."
"Their instrumentalist performance was flawless. They sounded absolutely fabulous. One of them sang a song, called 'The Walk of Life.' I don't think I'd exactly call it a recent hit. It sounded more like a popular Cajun tune of the 60's or 70's," said Meghan. "Sticks right in your brain."
Royce pulled out an old guitar case that was "stashed behind the couch," reminiscent of Glen Campbell, on his way to Arizona. He extracted an old wooden dulcimer and began to strum. She began to hum. She scraped a bottle cap over a corrugated, dull gray, galvanized metal wash-board. Ecstatic, they played their roles to the hilt.
"You don't think, they'll miss the money, do you?" he asked.
"Not really. There's plenty more where that came from." she replied, confidently. "Cornelius said he would help the 'Small-Fry' out with a safer, more lucrative part-time job. It's honest work, with incentive pay. The job satisfaction he gains will make it even more rewarding in the long run."
"You're suggesting that 'the Rascal' keeps his job and isn't incarcerated?" asked Royce.
"What are friends for if they can't bail you out, when you make a drastic error in judgement that has the serious consequences and far-reaching implications of an international incident?" asked Meghan. "Selling public information for the greater common good may not seem to be that big of a deal, in all fairness, when your loyalist customer has an obvious need to know and the means to pay big bucks for it. Yet, as we have learned from past experience, there are more important issues at work in the marketplace than the latest fashion trends."
"However convoluted your logic is, I have to admit that making a fashion statement should be a matter of personal taste and preference," said Royce, reflecting for a moment on the gravity of the situation. "The affected individual must ultimately, rationally, and creatively decide for himself which role he is to play. Others will judge him accordingly, however wisely, collectively and humanely."
"Finders, keepers," said Alexis Sue, having been briefed about the operation on the following day. "Losers, weepers!"
"Right," said Cornelius Korn, the most far-sighted and trustworthy member of the group of long-time business associates. "Except, we should have something to trade of equal value, for a win-win situation all the way around."
"They lost their investment capital in a volatile trading day on Wall Street. Our contact in Washington will square the deal. Shall we move on to new business?" asked Royce. He was growing impatient.
"Okay, done deal, said Korn. "By the way, do you know anything about the latest fighter jets?" he inquired, casually changing the subject.
"Not much," said Royce. "You'd need a squadron of military pilots to brief you."
"I can't help you in that department, either," said Meghan. "I've retired and lost my FAA certification."
"In that case, we should stick to strictly civilian pursuits," said Korn. "Keep a low profile and our feet firmly planted on solid ground."
"Agreed," said Royce. "I think we're running low on ammunition, anyway."
"We can always fall back and resume work on our mining interests," suggested Alexis Sue.
"Let's do it," said Meghan. "We're all out of hyper-sonic projectiles."
"We pull the plug on this operation, as of now," said Korn. "I'll notify Washington."
"See you back at the ranch," said Royce.

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Laurence R. Bachmann

Splendid history & a gripping read

Reviewed in the United States on October 14, 2018

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The Spy and The Traitor is touted in its subhead as "the greatest espionage story ever told." That isn't just publisher hype. The real events and the story of Oleg Gordievsky, KGB officer and diplomat reads like something from a John LeCarre or Robert Ludlum story...except it's true and marvelously documented. Raised by a father and older brother who both served devotedly and unquestioningly in the KGB (dad worked through Stalin's purges and survived in the KGB's precursor agency). Loyalty to the service then would seem to be a given--betraying the agency and its million members (you read that right) would be like sabotaging the family's business. Yet events and history continue to flummox human expectations.

First the invasion of Hungary, then the erection of the Berlin Wall (which Gordievsky was present to see) and finally the brutal crushing of the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia all drove this KGB officer further and further away from the party. Exposure to the West in Copenhagen and later in London provided a first hand taste of liberty and freedom. It served as the final push into the eager and eternally grateful arms of his M16 handlers. The double agent provided them with not merely a trove of concrete information but invaluable insight into the workings of the KGB and planning of the Soviet Leadership. It is no exaggeration to say Gordievsky was our Kim Philby. The details of these meetings, contacts, "drops", etc. and how spies operated from the end WWII until the dissolution of the Soviet empire is fascinating and novelistic in the telling. Gordievsky's escape or "exfiltration" from the USSR by M16 is nothing short of breathtaking--a Bourne Identity moment.

Best of all though is the historical and moral context that gives readers a perspective of events' meanings. Ben McIntyre is a masterful storyteller and detailed chronicler. He thoroughly but concisely points out the import and value of Grodievsky's insights--particularly warning the Brits and thereby the Americans that the Soviet leader Yuri Andropov genuinely believed the West was intent upon a first nuclear strike. Appreciating that paranoia can be as perilous as animus, first Thatcher and then Reagan worked to assuage Soviet fears. It was Gordievsky who prepped both sides for successful summits in the 80s and it was he who counseled wisely to neither disband nor include the USSR in the SDI or Star Wars initiative. Rather, ratchet up the pressure and they would go bankrupt trying to keep up, which is precisely what happened.

Gordievsky certainly didn't single handedly end the cold war--there were dozens of events and officials who played a significant role. But Oleg Gordievsky was surely in the first rank of those who made a valuable contribution earning the appreciation of Reagan, Thatcher, the CIA, M16 and yes, QEII (the monarch, not the ocean liner). Best of all, McIntryre doesn't put a patriotic gloss on his subject's behavior. What Gordievsky did was of enormous benefit to democracy and the West but it destroyed his marriage, implicated his wife and children as well as family and friends who all paid some price for his defection. In short, his actions both saved and ruined lives and the choices he made can be rightfully regarded as both morally defensible and appalling or enraging to those who knew him. Unsurprisingly, his marriage failed and most Russian friends regard him with disdain and disgust. In the western intelligence community he is a hero.

This is terrific, important history and a wonderfully well-told tale. Enjoy!

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MrBass

Well written and researched

Reviewed in the United States on December 26, 2023

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I enjoyed the writing and the dramatization (though the ending seems a bit drawn out with more redundancy than I care to read). I also enjoyed the post-script about the "players/characters" reactions to the book. Leads me to read more books by this author.

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Joseph Kaback

great read

Reviewed in Canada on September 19, 2023

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Loved this book. Most interesting and educational about spying at the top level of governments of Britain and Russia. The story moves at a quick pace especially the last third when it was impossible to put the book down. If you want to learn how a spy
operates, read this book.

Alexia

Intrigante

Reviewed in Mexico on May 16, 2023

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Excelente novela basada en una historia real. Increíble la intervención de la nteligencia de la Unión Soviética para crear ideologías extremas en varios países que afectan la política de desarrollo económico de libre mercado y las instituciones democráticas de las naciones. Interesante que aún en la actualidad sucede.

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Gustavo Andrés Lorenzi Mendez

Best book ive ever read, not including selfhelp books

Reviewed in Brazil on January 12, 2023

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very well written and detailed by the author / gives a whole overview about the Cold War / exciting and tense.

MR2020

Great book for all interested about Cold War

Reviewed in Poland on January 21, 2024

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What is incredible about this true-life spy story is that you can read it like a classic novel, as it never slows its pace. This captivating espionage tale is a real page-turner. What struck me most in this book is how likeable the main character really is.

Leiding Chen

top quality! it said like new, it is indeed like new!

Reviewed in Germany on December 12, 2023

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top quality! it said like new, it is indeed like new!

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The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War Hardcover – September 18, 2018

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