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

Ben Macintyre

eBook - 2018

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The celebrated author of Double Cross and Rogue Heroes returns with 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 CARRÉNamed 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... more