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

by Ben Macintyre

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.

Gordievsky did not seek to join the KGB; this was not a club you applied to. It chose you.

Why did he join an organization enforcing an ideology he had already started to question? KGB work was glamorous, offering the promise of foreign travel. Secrecy is seductive. He was also ambitious. The KGB might change. He might change. Russia might change. And the pay and privileges were good.

(A KGB dentist had drilled several unnecessary holes in his teeth before he left Moscow, which meant Molody could simply open his mouth and point out the KGB-made cavities to confirm his identity to other Soviet spies.)

The KGB took an intrusive interest in the domestic arrangements of its employees, for no life was private in the Soviet Union. Officers were expected to get married, have children, and stay married. There was calculation as well as control in this: a married KGB officer was considered less likely to defect while abroad, since his wife and family could be held as hostages.

He took up badminton and found that he loved the game, particularly relishing the game’s deceptive element. “The shuttlecock, slowing down in the final few seconds of flight, gives a player a chance to use his wits and change his shot at the last moment.” The last-minute change of shot was a skill he would perfect.

A married Russian intelligence officer with a taste for gay porn is vulnerable, a man with secrets who might be blackmailed.

Oleg might be open to many of the new influences in Western society, but he drew the line at women’s liberation; what he called Yelena’s “anti-domestic tendencies” became a source of increasing frustration.

Witnessing the building of the Berlin Wall had been shocking enough, but the invasion of Czechoslovakia offered even more blatant proof of the true nature of the regime he served. Alienation from the Communist system turned, very swiftly, to loathing: “This brutal attack on innocent people made me hate it with a burning, passionate hatred.”

as stiff and brittle as an oatcake.