Keeping with the theme of cold war spy thrillers; The Spy and the Traitor. If you've read (or seen) Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John le Carre, you'll know exactly what's going on. The difference is that this time it's all real (and personal). The Spy and the Traitor is a spy thriller that also happens to be the real deal. Oleg Gordievsky is a KGB agent stationed in Copenhagen, who starts to have misgivings about his masters. As he rises in the communist ranks, he establishes an elaborate double agent routine with MI6 in the United Kingdom that comes to form the backbone of western intelligence on the Soviet Union for almost a decade. In a cruel twist of fate, he is undone by an alcoholic CIA agent with an expensive wife, who sells his identity to the KGB. In a frantic covert operation behind the iron curtain, MI6 tries to smuggle Gordievsky across the Finno-Russian border to save him from a certain death.
It is sometimes difficult to identify this as non-fiction, based solely on the story and characters. Macintyre does an excellent job of building a presentable cast of support characters. He's the Michael Lewis of spy thrillers and in some ways, this is Flash Boys but with spies. He has the same ability to make the most mundane details seem worthy of prolonged consideration as Mr. Lewis, and in his hands, a story that could be told dully, is suddenly gripping. The author's own excitement with the details is what really sells the story. Will a KGB informant see Gordievsky standing on a Moscow street corner and identify the Safeway plastic bag, his signal to British intelligence, and comprehend that it's not something an observant communist would sport? Did a nappy, conveniently soiled by the baby on board, distract the dogs at the Finland-Russia border crossing?
Macintyre's inquisitiveness also left me pondering the value of the global intelligence game. Most of what Gordievsky exposed relates to the KGB and their armada of spies. So what is gained from this massive machinery? Spies watching spies is just another variant of a dog chasing its own tail. Gordievsky ousts his own as lazy: they invent contacts and operatives and name government officials as informants when they are anything but. They gather data from regional newspapers and pass it off as insider intelligence. As the KGB was partly faking it, why should I assume that MI6 was not? Granted Gordievsky did genuinely help foreign relations by helping Margaret Thatcher understand the Soviet leadership, but even then it is hard to see the benefits outweighing the costs.
It is sometimes difficult to identify this as non-fiction, based solely on the story and characters. Macintyre does an excellent job of building a presentable cast of support characters. He's the Michael Lewis of spy thrillers and in some ways, this is Flash Boys but with spies. He has the same ability to make the most mundane details seem worthy of prolonged consideration as Mr. Lewis, and in his hands, a story that could be told dully, is suddenly gripping. The author's own excitement with the details is what really sells the story. Will a KGB informant see Gordievsky standing on a Moscow street corner and identify the Safeway plastic bag, his signal to British intelligence, and comprehend that it's not something an observant communist would sport? Did a nappy, conveniently soiled by the baby on board, distract the dogs at the Finland-Russia border crossing?
Macintyre's inquisitiveness also left me pondering the value of the global intelligence game. Most of what Gordievsky exposed relates to the KGB and their armada of spies. So what is gained from this massive machinery? Spies watching spies is just another variant of a dog chasing its own tail. Gordievsky ousts his own as lazy: they invent contacts and operatives and name government officials as informants when they are anything but. They gather data from regional newspapers and pass it off as insider intelligence. As the KGB was partly faking it, why should I assume that MI6 was not? Granted Gordievsky did genuinely help foreign relations by helping Margaret Thatcher understand the Soviet leadership, but even then it is hard to see the benefits outweighing the costs.