A thin line between fact and fiction
The Spy and the Traitor by Ben Macintyre, Penguin Random House, $40. Reviewed by Ken Strongman.
The Spy and the Traitor is a scarcely believable story. In fact, were it not for the extensive, appended references and the descriptions of the many years of interviewing carried out by the author, it would have seemed too far-fetched for credibility.
It makes a nonsense of the James Bond adventures (enjoyable though they might be), and makes John le Carre’s first-rate writing seem at least as much fact as fiction.
Oleg Gordievsky was the most famed true-life spy of the Cold War during the 1970s and 1980s. He was a KGB officer, excellent at his job, who was then married to another KGB employee, and who was gradually rising through the ranks. He spent some time in Scandinavia, and later England, and gradually became disenchanted with Russian ideology and more attracted to what the West stood for. Thus he became a double agent, bright and duplicitous enough to appear to do well for his Russian masters while carefully bringing increasing amounts of secret information to the British authorities.
Eventually, Gordievsky was in charge of the London branch of the KGB and yet those to whom he was passing information in Britain managed to keep knowledge of his identity restricted to a very few, including Margaret Thatcher. Behind the scenes, Gordievsky and the senior members of MI5 knew that he would eventually be discovered, so they had in place a complex plan to ‘‘exfiltrate’’ him from Moscow from where they were certain he would be recalled when suspicion increased.
This plan, which was eventually executed, could easily have been a Bond plot. It involved high ranking British officials driving from Moscow to Finland, picking up Gordievsky from a layby a few kilometres from the border, hiding him under paraphernalia in the boot of the car, and so on. Amazingly, it worked, although not without difficult moments.
So, Gordievsky was brought back to England, de-briefed at inordinate length and given a new identity.
This was in the 1980s when, after his debriefing, he then went on various lecture tours in his new identity, even meeting Ronald Reagan. Amazingly, for much of the time until his defection, MI5 managed to keep his identity from their close espionage neighbours, the Americans.
Interestingly, during this same period, the Americans had one of their own defect in the other direction in a British intelligence agent Kim Philby-like manner.
Gordievsky now lives in London, alone. Both of his marriages, not surprisingly, ended. However he went about it, a life as duplicitous as his had to be, is not good for marriage.
As Macintyre cleverly lets Gordievsky’s life unfold, one can feel the tension. This tension is interwoven with a very thorough analysis of the British, American and Russian systems of espionage. This appears to be a mixture of impressive sophistication, socially and technologically, and an immature, almost gameplaying style not far removed from the class room, at least among the men. Posturing, ambitious trickery, envious bombast, all fuelled by alcohol and expressed in braying drawls are there in England. Macintyre portrays the Americans as smoother and the Russians, with a few dangerous exceptions, as more crude.
The surprise of The Spy and the Traitor is that many of the characters who ran this world during the Cold War are as unbelievably two-dimensional as they have sometimes been portrayed in fiction.
Fortunately, though, some were not and, it is to be hoped the latter rule the day now, assuming that all of this is still going on. After all, something has to keep us safe in our beds.
If all of this seems unbelievable, there are records to show that, in 2007, the Queen honoured Oleg Gordievsky, under whatever is his name these days, with a CMG. This was for ‘‘Services to the security of the UK’’. That this book is factual is beyond doubt, but it does make one question the whereabouts of the line between fact and fiction. Perhaps in the modern world, the distinction is no longer relevant.