Spy story

In ‘The Spy and the Traitor,’ a tale of Cold War espionage that’s both thrilling and true

Like any great intelligence yarn, this one involves a central mystery: Why did a man betray the secrets of one country to protect another? How was his loyalty unthreaded, and then reattached? Macintrye takes us into the puzzle from the first paragraph of Chapter 1: “Oleg Gordievsky was born into the KGB: shaped by it, loved by it, twisted, damaged and very nearly destroyed by it.”

Spying can be a dirty business, and agents are often recruited by entrapment, blackmail, bribery and physical intimidation. In Gordievsky’s case, the motive wasn’t money or power but an epic vanity: He thought he could change the world. He grew to hate what the Soviet Union had become, and when the KGB posted him to Copenhagen in 1966, he began to move month by month toward the alternative pole of freedom. Gordievsky eventually saw his role as “nothing less than undermining the Soviet system,” Macintyre writes.