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

by Ben Macintyre

In the corridors of Directorate S, Gordievsky was introduced to Konon Trofimovich Molody, alias “Gordon Lonsdale,” one of the most successful illegals in history. In 1943, the KGB had appropriated the identity of a dead Canadian child named Gordon Arnold Lonsdale and given it to Molody, who had been raised in North America and spoke faultless English.

similarly fabled figure was Vilyam Genrikhovich Fisher, alias Rudolf Abel, the illegal whose spying in the US had earned him a thirty-year sentence before he was exchanged for the downed U-2 pilot Gary Powers in 1962.

Early in 1968, more than thirty KGB illegals slipped into Czechoslovakia, with orders from the KGB’s chief, Yuri Andropov, to sabotage the Czech reform movement, infiltrate “reactionary” intellectual circles, and abduct prominent supporters of the Prague Spring.

On the night of August 20, 1968, 2,000 tanks and more than 200,000 troops, principally Soviet but with contingents from other Warsaw Pact countries, rolled across the Czechoslovakian frontiers.

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.”

One was Gert Petersen, leader of Denmark’s Socialist People’s Party and later a member of the European Parliament. Petersen, code-named ZEUS and categorized as a “confidential contact” by the KGB, passed on classified military information gleaned from Denmark’s Foreign Policy Committee.

would wait. Give the KGB time to forget the contact with Bromhead. In spying, as in love, a little distance, a little uncertainty, an apparent cooling on one side or the other can stimulate desire.

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

documents, but also drugs, weapons, and, conceivably, people. Opening a parcel marked as diplomatic luggage was technically a violation of the Vienna Convention. Libyan terrorists smuggled guns into Britain this way. The Soviets themselves had attempted to expand the definition of a diplomatic bag, by claiming that a nine-ton truck filled with crates and destined for Switzerland should be exempt from search. The Swiss refused.

Code words could even be used as a veiled insult. There was some snorting in Century House when a CIA cable accidentally revealed that the American code name for MI6 was UPTIGHT.

Agent BOOT was the Right Honorable Michael Foot, distinguished writer and orator, veteran left-wing MP, leader of the Labour Party, and the politician who, if Labour won the next election, would become prime minister of Britain. The Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition had been a paid KGB agent.

Lenin is often credited with coining the term “useful idiot,” poleznyi durak in Russian, meaning one who can be used to spread propaganda without being aware of it or subscribing to the goals intended by the manipulator.

Paranoia is born of propaganda, ignorance, secrecy, and fear. The KGB’s London station in 1982 was one of the most profoundly paranoid places on earth, an organization imbued with a siege mentality largely based on fantasy.

The KGB hunted high and low for evidence of the planned attack, but as MI5’s authorized history observes: “No such plans existed.”

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

The Kremlin, however, assuming that capitalism penetrated every aspect of Western life, believed that a “blood bank” was, in fact, a bank, where blood could be bought and sold.

In a craven and hierarchical organization, the only thing more dangerous than revealing your own ignorance is to draw attention to the stupidity of the boss.

In an intriguing harbinger of modern times, Moscow was prepared to use dirty tricks and hidden interference to swing a democratic election in favor of its chosen candidate.

Had Labour won, Gordievsky would have found himself in a truly bizarre position: passing KGB secrets to a government whose prime minister had once been the willing recipient of KGB cash. In the end, Michael Foot’s earlier incarnation as Agent BOOT remained a closely held secret; KGB efforts to swing the election had no impact whatever, and on June 9 Margaret Thatcher won by a landslide,

The pantheon of world-changing spies is small and select, and Oleg Gordievsky is in it: he opened up the inner workings of the KGB at a pivotal juncture in history, revealing not just what Soviet intelligence was doing (and not doing), but what the Kremlin was thinking and planning, and in so doing transformed the way the West thought about the Soviet Union. He risked his life to betray his country, and made the world a little safer. As a classified internal CIA review put it, the ABLE ARCHER scare was “the last paroxysm of the Cold War.”

On June 13, 1985, Aldrich Ames committed one of the most spectacular acts of treason in the history of espionage: he named no fewer than twenty-five individuals spying for Western intelligence against the Soviet Union.

William Shakespeare has an answer for most of life’s questions. In Hamlet, the greatest writer in the English language pondered the nature of fate and courage, when life’s challenges seem overwhelming. “When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.”

was so secret I later had a problem getting my expenses reimbursed.”)

Among those affected was Vladimir Putin, a product of the Leningrad KGB who saw most of his friends, colleagues, and patrons purged as a direct consequence of Gordievsky’s escape.

Ames spied for money; Gordievsky was driven by ideological conviction. Ames’s victims were rooted out by the KGB and, in most cases, killed; the people Gordievsky exposed, such as Bettaney and Treholt, were watched, intercepted, tried by due process, imprisoned, and eventually released back into society. Gordievsky risked his life for a cause; Ames wanted a bigger car.