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

by Ben Macintyre

Gordievsky later claimed that he was primed and waiting for a tap on the shoulder from the opposition, but the reality was more complicated than memory, as it almost always is.

In spying, as in love, a little distance, a little uncertainty, an apparent cooling on one side or the other can stimulate desire.

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

But all spies crave undetected influence, that secret compensation: the ruthless exercise of private power. A degree of intellectual snobbery is common to most, the secret sense of knowing important things unknown to the person standing next to you at the bus stop. In part, spying is an act of the imagination.

He had been brought up in a world of unquestioning obedience to a dogma. Once he had rejected that ideology, he became committed to attacking it with all the fervor of the convert, as deeply and irreversibly opposed to Communism as his father, brother, and contemporaries were committed to it.

There has never been a successful spy who did not feel that the connection with his handler was something more profound than a marriage of convenience, politics, or profit: a true, enduring communion, amid the lies and deception.

The Norwegian connection illustrated a central challenge of the Gordievsky case, and a conundrum of spying in general: how to make use of high-grade intelligence without compromising its source. An agent deep inside the enemy camp may unmask spies in your own camp. But if you arrest and neutralize them all, then you alert the other side to the spy within their own camp, and you endanger your source. How could British intelligence take advantage of what Gordievsky was revealing without burning him?

Love often begins with an outpouring of naked truth, a passionate baring of the soul.

Ames learned that morality can be malleable; the laws of the United States overrode those of other countries; and a greedy spy was worth more than an ideological one, because “once you had the money hooks in, it was easier to hold them and play them.”

Agent recruitment, Ames came to believe, depended on “the ability to assess a person’s vulnerability.” Once you knew a man’s weakness, you could snare and manipulate him. Disloyalty was not a sin, but an operational tool. “The essence of espionage is betrayal of trust,” Ames declared. He was wrong: the essence of successful agent running is the maintenance of trust, the supplanting of one allegiance by another, higher, loyalty.

“Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”

Ames chose to sell out America to the KGB in order to buy the American Dream he felt he deserved. Gordievsky had never been interested in the money. Ames was interested in nothing else.