The Spy And The Traitor

 

Ben Macintyre, “The Spy And The Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War ,” Random House (Large Print paperback), 2018, 407 pp..

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - The author of Double Cross and Rogue Heroes returns with a thrilling Americans-era true 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, Gordievsky grew to see his nation's communism as criminal.  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.  The story includes Gordievsky's escape from Moscow in 1985.

My Notes:

Pg. 21:  By 1961, some 3.5 million East Germans, roughly 20 percent of the entire population, had exited from Communist rule. Watching this exodus which caused the building of the Berlin Wall was the first element leading Oleg Gordievsky to question the Russian system.

Pg. 133:  In 1977 the Soviet Union was in effect an enormous prison, incarcerating more than 280 million people behind heavily guarded borders, with over a million KGB officers and informants acting as their jailers.  The population was under constant surveillance, and no segment of society was more closely watched than the KGB itself.

Pg. 183:  Lenin is credited with coining the term ‘useful idiot,’ polezni durak in Russian, meaning one who can be used to spread propaganda without being aware of it or subscribing to the goals intended by the manipulator.

Pg. 192:  The revelation that Richard Nixon had used the CIA to try to obstruct a federal investigation into the Watergate burglary in 1972 triggered a crisis within the agency and a series of investigations into its activities over the preceding twenty years.  The resulting reports, known as the ‘Family Jewels,” identified a damning litany of illegal actions far outside the CIS’s charter, including wiretapping of journalists, burglaries, assassination plots, experimentation on humans, collusion with the Mafia, and systematic domestic surveillance of civilians. 

Pg. 218:  In May 1981, Yuri Andropov, chairman of the KGB, gathered his senior officers in a secret conclave to issue a startling announcement: America was planning to launch a nuclear first strike.  In line with Andropov’s paranoia, he tasked the KGB to find signs that this attack might be imminent and provide early warning, so that the Soviet Union was not taken by surprise.  So the Soviet operation RYAN was born.  Andropov was further convinced when on 23 March 1983, Ronald Reagan announced development of the Strategic Defense Initiative, by then, Andropov had succeeded Brezhnev as the Soviet leader in 1982. The Soviet government felt that the purpose of SDI technology was to render the US invulnerable to Soviet attack, thereby allowing the US to launch missiles against the USSR without fear of retaliation.

Pg. 272f:  In the latter half of 1983, East and West seemed to be heading into armed and perhaps terminal conflict, propelled by a ‘potentially lethal combination of Reaganite rhetoric and Soviet paranoia.”  Speaking to the Houses of Parliament, Regan promised to leave Marxism-Leninism o  the ash heap of history.”  Then in the early hours of September 1, 1983, a Soviet interceptor aircraft shot down a Korean Air Lines 747 that had strayed into Soviet airspace, killing all 269 passengers and crew of flight 007.

Pg. 280f:  ABLE ARCHER marked a turning point.  Able Archer was an annual NATO military exercise that involved thousands of military personnel and equipment. The goal of the exercise was to simulate an escalation in a conflict between NATO countries and the USSR, culminating in a coordinated nuclear attack. 

In 1983, the annual ABLE ARCHER exercise almost triggered the outbreak of war between NATO and the Soviet Union, when miscommunication led the Soviet government to believe the West was in fact mounting an invasion   After this close call, the Reagan administration began to moderate its anti-Soviet rhetoric.  Thatcher resolved to reach out to Moscow.  Gordievsky was partly responsible for this thaw.  The information he provided convinced Reagan and Thatcher that the Soviet Union really did believe the West intended a first strike on them and Reagan and Thatcher then began to moderate their behavior accordingly.

Pg. 375:  On June 13, 1985, Aldrich Ames committed one of the most spectacular acts of treason in the history of espionage: he named no fewer than twenty-five individuals spying for Western intelligence against the Soviet Union, Gordievsky among them.  Ames had arrived at a brutally logical conclusion.  Any of the CIA’s numerous spies inside Soviet intelligence could get wind of what he was up to and expose him.  The only way to protect himself, therefore, was to reveal to the KGB and every asset who could betray him, so the Russians could sweep them up and execute the lot. 

Pg. 479f:  Bill Casey, head of the CIA, questioned Gordievsky about how Reagan could best approach Gorbachev.  Reagan was going to propose to Gorbachev that the West would share the SDI technology.  Gordievsky responded that the Soviet’s would not accept as they were too paranoid and would not trust that the West was not holding something back.  Instead the West should not budge on its insistence to develop SDI as the Russians could not afford that competition: this is the route that Reagan took in his meeting with Gorbachev.

Pg. 500:  Finally, after a six year separation from his family, Gordievsky’s wife and two daughters landed at Heathrow on September 6, 1991.  Sadly, the daughters hardly knew their father and Gordievsky’s wife soon divorced him.

Pg. 506;  Ames earned a grand total of $4.6 million from the Soviets.  By 1993 Amess lavish lifestyle had finally attracted attention and he was placed under surveillance.  He was arrested on February 21, 1994.