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

by Ben Macintyre

face masks and sprinkled radioactive dust on the clothes and shoes in the closet, sufficiently low in concentration to avoid poisoning, but enough to enable the KGB’s Geiger counters

Colonel Oleg Antonyevich Gordievsky of the KGB was at the pinnacle of his career. A prodigy of the Soviet intelligence service, he had diligently risen through the ranks, serving in Scandinavia, Moscow and Britain with hardly a blemish on his record.

Gordievsky’s appointment as KGB rezident (the Russian term for a KGB head of station, known as a rezidentura)

The spy was being spied upon by his fellow spies.

Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti or committee of state security,

To the West, the initials were a byword for internal terror and external aggression and subversion, shorthand for all the cruelty of a totalitarian regime run by a faceless official mafia. But the KGB was not regarded that way by those who lived under its stern rule. Certainly it inspired fear and obedience, but the KGB was also admired as a Praetorian Guard, a bulwark against Western imperialist and capitalist aggression, and the guardian of communism.

‘There is no such thing as a former KGB man,’

Stalin version of KGB

to become an ‘illegal’, one of the Soviet Union’s vast global army of deep undercover agents.

The first worked under formal cover,

a cultural or militar...

‘legal’ spies could not be prosecuted for espionage if their activities were uncovered, but only declared persona non gra...

Non-Official Cover.)

rezidentura,

(head of station in MI6 parlance, or station chief to the CIA).

Berlin Wall

Fascist Protection Wall’

Questioning someone

He realised that he is being tested

StB, Czechoslovakia’s formidable intelligence service.

Pravda with Yevtushenko’s poem

a direct attack on Stalinism by one of Russia’s most outspoken and influential poets.

‘By the past, I mean the neglect of the people’s welfare, false charges, the jailing of the innocent … “Why care?” some say, but I can’t remain inactive. / While Stalin’s heirs walk this earth.’

‘Red Banner’

‘black’.

dry-cleaned.

‘signal site’,

‘brush contact’,

‘dead-letter drop’,

orange peel under a specific park bench, this meant: ‘I am in danger’, whereas an apple core indicated: ‘I am leaving the country tomorrow.’

Oleg left a bent nail on a windowsill in a public toilet to indicate to an illegal that he should pick up cash at a predetermined dead-drop site. The answering signal from the undercover agent, acknowledging that the message had been received, was a beer bottle cap left in the same place. On returning to the spot, Oleg found the cap from a bottle of ginger beer.

Interesting sentence........................ .

Mike Stokes, a senior officer who had been the case officer to Oleg Penkovsky,

with impressive accuracy, every directorate, department and sub-department of the sprawling, complex bureaucracy inside Moscow Centre. Some of this Hawkins already knew; a great deal he did not: names, functions, techniques, training methods, even rivalries and internal disputes, promotions and demotions.

‘SUNBEAM was the real thing,’

the activities of Directorate S, the illegals section where he had worked for a decade before moving to the political wing: how Moscow planted its spies, disguised as ordinary civilians, all over the world, including ‘the immense and highly sophisticated operation to create false identities’: forging documents, manipulating registration records, burying moles, and the complex methodology for contacting, controlling and financing the army of Soviet illegals.

‘I was much easier in my mind,’

gave a point to my existence.’

setting up spy operations with one hand, and then unpicking them with the other, by informing Hawkins of every move; keeping his eyes and ears open for useful information and gossip, without seeming too inquisitive.

‘A spy has to deceive even his nearest and dearest,’

The Soviets themselves had attempted to expand the definition of a diplomatic bag, by claiming that a nine-tonne truck filled with crates and destined for Switzerland should be exempt from search.