Bromhead knew that Gordievsky was a KGB agent but knew nothing of his growing antipathy toward the Soviet Union.

“My soul was aching.” He began to question all the Soviet dogma that he had been learning since birth.įive years later, an undercover officer in MI6-Britain’s equivalent of the CIA-named Richard Bromhead met Gordievsky at an art exhibit in Copenhagen. “This brutal attack on innocent people made me hate ,” he later wrote. Gordievsky was bright, athletic, and adept at learning foreign languages, all of which helped him get into the prestigious Moscow State Institute of International Relations, sometimes called “the Russian Harvard.” Even before graduation, he was recruited into the KGB and began his rise up the hierarchy.īut something snapped inside Gordievsky when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia, in 1968. His father, Anton, was a devoted Communist Party member and KGB agent who took part in Stalin’s paranoid purges of “enemies of the state.” As a result of his father’s position in the KGB, Gordievsky grew up “well fed, privileged, and secure” in a Moscow apartment block “reserved for the intelligence elite,” according to Macintyre. Gordievsky was raised from birth to be a top KGB spy. Macintyre makes it clear the two men could not have been more different. You may be wondering why Macintyre applies the label “spy” to the double agent Gordievsky while applying “traitor” to the double agent Ames. The book is every bit as exciting as my favorite spy novels. Macintyre’s dramatic retelling of their stories comes not only from Western sources (including Gordievsky himself, who is now 82 and living under witness protection in the UK) but also from the Russian perspective. The book focuses on Oleg Gordievsky, the double agent who helped prevent nuclear war, and Aldrich Ames, the American turncoat who likely betrayed him. I learned about this episode from British journalist Ben Macintyre’s newest book, The Spy and the Traitor. Without disclosing the source of the intelligence, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was able to convince Reagan to soften his tone and halt further escalation. And now we know why: A double agent embedded high in the KGB’s outpost in London got word to his British handlers that the Soviets had mistaken NATO’s war games as war preparation. The Soviets, convinced that NATO was getting ready for a surprise nuclear attack, prepared for nuclear war.īut then, without explanation, the West pulled back from the brink. And then in November, NATO conducted a massive military simulation involving 40,000 troops.

In the first half of that year, President Ronald Reagan dramatically ratcheted up rhetoric, military spending, and psychological operations against the Soviets. This year has been brutal on so many levels.

The spy and the traitor book