In 1972 Gordievsky went back to Denmark for a second tour. Asked if he knew anybody who might be of interest to western intelligence, Kaplan threw out a few names, including that of Gordievsky, who was a friend from the KGB academy, aware of the drawbacks of communism, and not so different from him, he said. A Czechoslovak spy, Standa Kaplan, had defected to Canada. Gordievsky’s double life started after a junior MI6 officer saw his name while leafing through a personnel file. Photograph: Rolls Press/Popperfoto/Getty Images May Day parade in Moscow, 1970, the year in which Gordievsky was singled out by MI6. The result is a dazzling non-fiction thriller and an intimate portrait of high-stakes espionage. He spoke extensively to Gordievsky, who is now 79 and living in the home counties – a remarkable figure, “proud, shrewd and irascible”. But he has interviewed all of the former officers involved in the case, who tell their stories for the first time. Macintrye had no access to MI6’s archives, which remain secret. Others were gifted working-class linguists recruited from Oxbridge. Some were upper-class cold war adventurers. Gordievsky’s British contacts were a colourful bunch. It reveals the dramatic role played by MI6 in recruiting and cultivating a serving KGB insider – and keeping him alive against the odds. It didn’t materialise.īen Macintyre’s wonderful The Spy and the Traitor complements and enhances Gordievsky’s first-person account. His first tentative step was to call his then wife Yelena from an embassy phone bugged by the Danes, and to declare: “They’ve done it! I just don’t know what to do.” He expected an approach from western intelligence. He resolved to fight the communist system from the inside. By this point Gordievsky was a junior spy abroad, working for the KGB’s first directorate, and living in Copenhagen. He arrived just as the Berlin Wall went up, and woke one morning to the sound of tanks rumbling past the Soviet embassy.īut it was the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia that propelled Gordievsky towards the west and, as he put it, determined “the course of my own life”. Then as a KGB trainee he spent six months in East Berlin. It charts his recruitment by the KGB, where his older brother Vasili served as a deep-cover “illegal”, and Gordievsky’s growing disillusionment with the grey totalitarian world of 1960s Moscow. Gordievsky has told the story of his own improbable survival in a gripping 1995 memoir, Next Stop Execution. It went some way towards exorcising the Cambridge spies, who a generation earlier had travelled in the opposite direction. It was the only time that the spooks managed to exfiltrate a penetration agent from the USSR, outwitting their Russian adversaries. Even more astounding was that in summer 1985 – after Gordievsky was hastily recalled from London to Moscow by his suspicious bosses – British intelligence officers helped him to escape. That he managed to deceive his KGB colleagues during this time was remarkable. O leg Gordievsky was the most significant British agent of the cold war.
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