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

Ben Macintyre has established a niche in well-researched, narratively driven spy history, and The Spy and the Traitor is his best. Oleg Gordievsky was a senior KGB officer who began passing intelligence to MI6 in the 1970s because he’d lost faith in the Soviet system. He rose to become the KGB’s London station chief while secretly feeding British and American intelligence services a stream of information that affected the course of the Cold War. When a CIA leak exposed him, the plan to get him out of Moscow was one of the most dangerous extraction operations in intelligence history. Macintyre draws on Gordievsky’s own account and on declassified documents from both sides to reconstruct events. The result reads like a thriller that happens to be true—genuinely suspenseful, historically significant, and a precise portrait of the strange double life required to sustain a deception for a decade.