Double agents, people who betray their country, are the subject of many, many spy novels – I am thinking particularly of those by John Le Carre. The Spy and the Traitor by Ben Macintyre is a true story that reads like fiction. It has the same level of excitement and peril and the author writes it in such a way that you are totally engaged with the characters.
Oleg Gordievsky was a KGB agent in the Soviet Union during the Cold War. He passed information to the British because he was unhappy with the Soviet regime and its ideology. This book shows us how he was recruited, how he communicated and the cost to him of being continually under suspicion, knowing that to be caught was to face torture and death.
In 1985 it looked like Gordievsky had been discovered by the Soviet authorities and he decided to trigger an escape plan which had been put in place in case of this eventuality. The problem was that this was untried and had little chance of success. A large part of this book is about the events of that escape and how it was undertaken – it is tense and exciting writing.
The author tells this story with a good level of detail and also by placing it in context to show how the West benefited by the information passed to them and how important this was.
I found this a gripping account and it is quite difficult to believe that this sort of activity took place so recently. This is a book that reminds us of the humanity of those we might see as our enemies but also of the exceptional courage that individuals can show in difficult situations. This is an excellent read and was one of my favourite non-fiction books of 2025 – see here for the list of all of them.
Anne Is Reading 