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

“The finest true spy story I’ve ever learn.”—JOHN LE CARRÉ

If anybody might be thought-about a Russian counterpart to the notorious British double-agent Kim Philby, it was Oleg Gordievsky. The son of two KGB brokers and the product of the finest Soviet establishments, the savvy, subtle Gordievsky grew to see his nation's communism as each felony and philistine. He took his first posting for Russian intelligence in 1968 and ultimately grew to become the Soviet Union's prime man in London, however from 1973 on he was secretly working for MI6. For practically a decade, as the Cold War reached its twilight, Gordievsky helped the West flip the tables on the KGB, exposing Russian spies and serving to to foil numerous intelligence plots, as the Soviet management grew more and more paranoid at the United States's nuclear first-strike capabilities and introduced the world nearer to the brink of struggle. Desperate to maintain the circle of belief shut, MI6 by no means revealed Gordievsky's identify to its counterparts in the CIA, which in flip grew obsessive about determining the identification of Britain's clearly top-level supply. Their obsession in the end doomed Gordievsky: the CIA officer assigned to determine him was none aside from Aldrich Ames, the man who would turn out to be notorious for secretly spying for the Soviets. 

Unfolding the scrumptious three-way gamesmanship between America, Britain, and the Soviet Union, and culminating in the gripping cinematic beat-by-beat of Gordievsky's nail-biting escape from Moscow in 1985, Ben Macintyre's newest could also be his finest but. Like the best novels of John le Carré, it brings readers deep right into a world of treachery and betrayal, the place the strains bleed between the private and the skilled, and one man's hatred of communism had the energy to vary the future of nations.