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

Shortlisted for the 2018 Baillie Gifford Prize, and for the Pushkin House Prize 2019! A thrilling Cold War story about a KGB double agent, by one of Britain's greatest historians - now with a new afterword! - In 1965 Oleg Gordijevskij was stationed in Copenhagen as a Soviet diplomat. Secretly working for the KGB, he was supposed to recruit spies for the Russian intelligence services. However, in 1974 he himself was hired by the MI6 as a double agent, working from his base in Denmark and, almost a decade later, in London. A senior KGB officer, for more than a decade he supplied his British spymasters with a stream of priceless secrets from deep within the Soviet intelligence machine, leading to the exposure of, among others, Arne Treholt in Norway and Stig Bergling in Sweden. Gordijevskij was finally exposed in 1985 and had to stage a spectacular escape from his captors in Moscow; never before had any spy done so much to damage the KGB. In The Spy and the Traitor Ben Macintyre reveals a tale of betrayal, duplicity and raw courage that changed the course of the Cold War forever.