The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War - Ben Macintyre

Written by Ben Macintyre
Read by JohnLee
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
Release date: September 18, 2018
Duration: 13:20:14

Espionage is out of my sphere of understanding so I will let a reviewer walk you through it.

The celebrated author of Double Cross and Rogue Heroes returns with his greatest spy story yet, a thrilling Americans-era tale of Oleg Gordievsky, the Russian whose secret work helped hasten the end of the Cold War.

If anyone could be considered a Russian counterpart to the infamous British double agent Kim Philby, it was Oleg Gordievsky. The son of two KGB agents and the product of the best Soviet institutions, the savvy, sophisticated Gordievsky grew to see his nation’s communism as both criminal and philistine. He took his first posting for Russian intelligence in 1968 and eventually became the Soviet Union’s top man in London, but from 1973 on he was secretly working for MI6. For nearly a decade, as the Cold War reached its twilight, Gordievsky helped the West turn the tables on the KGB, exposing Russian spies and helping to foil countless intelligence plots, as the Soviet leadership grew increasingly paranoid at the United States’s nuclear first-strike capabilities and brought the world closer to the brink of war. Desperate to keep the circle of trust close, MI6 never revealed Gordievsky’s name to its counterparts in the CIA, which in turn grew obsessed with figuring out the identity of Britain’s obviously top-level source. Their obsession ultimately doomed Gordievsky: the CIA officer assigned to identify him was none other than Aldrich Ames, the man who would become infamous for secretly spying for the Soviets.

Unfolding the delicious 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 latest may be his best yet. Like the greatest novels of John le Carré, it brings readers deep into a world of treachery and betrayal, where the lines bleed between the personal and the professional, and one man’s hatred of communism had the power to change the future of nations.

Secret messages in train stations, radioactive dust sprinkled on shoes–these sound like props in a spy novel, but they’re part of the genuine spy craft that forms the backdrop of this masterful tale of a real-life double agent. It doesn’t hurt that narrator John Lee’s voice recalls Sean Connery in the classic James Bond movies as he introduces Oleg Gordievsky, a high-ranking officer in the KGB who landed a job in London in the 1980s so he could pass intelligence to Britain. You’ll want to make time to listen to the final section in one sitting, as Lee will have you biting your nails during the account of Gordievsky’s harrowing escape from the Soviet Union. D.B. � AudioFile 2018