The perfect spy

Last year’s sensational headlines about the attempted murder of former Soviet spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia added a twist to the tumultuous post-Cold War relations between Europe and Russia. Mr Skripal, who inadvertently inhaled near lethal quantities of a nerve agent called Novichok planted in his home by Russian agents, had been a Russian military intelligence officer who had spied for the British intelligence services in the nineties. Arrested in Russia, he was given asylum in the UK following a spy swap in the 2010.

In the murk of Russian interference in the US elections, and much else, Vladimir Putin’s motives for this act remain unclear. Mr Skripal, who blew the cover of several hundred Russian agents during his career, apparently lived in blameless retirement. If anything, Russia’s dirty tricks brigade appeared to have focused on a far smaller fish than a former agent who lives under 24X7 surveillance under an assumed name in a nondescript suburban street. This is Oleg Gordievsky, the protagonist of Ben Macintyre’s marvellous new book The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War.

Mr Gordievsky was a KGB star who spied for Britain between 1974 and 1985, passing on invaluable secrets about the Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal and its decaying leadership before making an astonishing escape to the West after his cover was blown. But “Putin and his people have not forgotten,” Mr Macintyre comments wryly. In 2018, a former KGB bodyguard accused of murdering the defector Alexander Litvinenko in 2006 by poisoning his tea with the radioactive Polonium 210, offered what Macintyre describes as an “intriguing response” when asked about the Skripal poisoning. “If we had to kill anyone, Gordievsky was the one. He was smuggled out of the country, and sentenced here [in Russia] to death in absentia,” he said.

Gordievsky, in fact, remains a legend. As Mr Macintyre writes, “For Western intelligence services, the Gordievsky case became a textbook example of how to recruit and run a spy… and how, in the most dramatic circumstances, a spy in peril could be saved.” Unlike others, including Aldrich Ames, the American double agent who unmasked him to the Soviets (to cover the costs of a young and expensive wife), Mr Gordievsky was not in it for the money. His motives were grounded in a slow disenchantment with Communist ideology.

Ironically, Mr Gordievsky came from a model Soviet family. His father, Anton, was an officer in the NKVD (the KGB precursor), who unquestioningly implemented Josef Stalin’s murderous dekulakization and deportation polices in Kazakhstan in the 1930s, a process that killed some 1.3 million people. He enjoyed the fruits of his position as an establishment stalwart with a comfortable apartment, and access to adequate food and consumer goods that few in Soviet Russia could take for granted.

The younger Gordievsky’s faith was first joggled when he witnessed the Berlin Wall go up but he remained Homo Sovieticus for all that. Having gained admission to the elite Institute of International Affairs, he was talent spotted for the KGB, which he joined in 1963, training at the Red Banner Academy outside Moscow (which included lectures by the legendary Kim Philby on spycraft). His older brother, Vasily, had joined the KGB as an “illegal,” operating undercover in Western Europe and Africa, a job sufficiently stressful to drive him to drink and death at age 39. Oleg worked in the same directorate, preparing documentation for other illegals — “creating people who did not exist” — but was not permitted to follow in his brother’s footsteps on grounds that having two family members overseas might encourage them to defect.

The world beyond the Iron Curtain beckoned but the KGB preferred to post married agents overseas. Mr Gordievsky obligingly found a wife, a German-language expert who shared his ambition to travel abroad. The marriage of convenience proved handy when a slot opened for a posting running illegals in Denmark. That first exposure to life in the West altered Gordievsky’s outlook. The story of how he became a British spy has a Keystone Cops aura about it. The Prague Spring of 1968 was his epiphany. To try and attract the attention of the western intelligence services, he indiscreetly criticised the Soviet actions on an open line to his wife at home, hoping that the eavesdroppers would pick up on his dissatisfaction. Nothing happened. In fact, it was almost five years before the British identified and approached him as a possible asset.

Mr Macintyre, author of such classics of intelligence history as Operation Mincemeat, Double Crossand Agent ZigZag, recreates the story of Oleg Gordievsky’s career with his customary flair. To relate the details of Mr Gordievsky’s recruitment and defection would be to give away the plot of a gripping book.

THE SPY AND THE TRAITOR:

The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War Ben Macintyre Viking, 368 pages, ~899