NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • 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.
“The best true spy story I have ever read.”—JOHN LE CARRÉ
Named a Best Book of the Year by The Economist • Shortlisted for the Bailie Giffords Prize in Nonfiction
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.
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