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

by Ben Macintyre

Richard Bromhead was one of those Englishmen who put a great deal of effort into appearing to be a lot stupider than they really are. He was a formidable intelligence officer.

Danes are almost too nice to be spies, too honest to be subversive, and too polite to say so.

For many years, the KGB used the acronym MICE to identify the four mainsprings of spying: Money, Ideology, Coercion, and Ego.

Here lay the essence of Gordievsky’s rebellion: to find out as much as he could about the system he loathed, the better to destroy it.

In launching Operation RYAN, Andropov broke the first rule of intelligence: never ask for confirmation of something you already believe.

He gave lectures, listened to music, and wrote books with the historian Christopher Andrew, works of detailed scholarship that still stand as the most comprehensive accounts of Soviet intelligence to date.